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Last night, from 7:18 to 7:23 was MOB #4. This is a strange event that gathers a large crowd at a specific location, for no apparent reason, and then just as quickly disbands. This fourth version introduced one step of misdirection as the last MOB (#3) ran into some paranoia from law enforcement types. So rather than preannouce the location you had to gather first at one of three local bars where the final destination was revealed only moments before the event. Last night this turned out to be the shoe store Tootsie Plohound on Lafayette and Prince. Several hundred techno hipsters descended on the store, camera phones and other gadgets flashing, for the alloted five minutes, and then just as quickly disappeared (well, that's the idea at least, but people weren't actually as good about leaving promptly since everyone was having fun.) Store personal were perplexed, to say the least. The crowd spilled out into the street. Passerbys were scratching their heads trying to figure out what was going on. And of course, nothing was going on. "But what's the point?" someone asked me. "No point, it's just a MOB."
So I've been playing a bit with a copy of OS X 10.3 (Panther) which will be released sometime before the end of the year. Hopefully in September at Macworld Paris. Not sure what to report. Other sites have posted exhaustive screen shots, so I won't bother. If anyone has any specific questions I'd be happy to try to answer them.
My brief summary is that this is a very nice update. Lots and lots of minor changes that add up to a greatly improved interface. The Finder (the file system interface) is morphing into the two column view Apple has been using in iTunes and iPhoto. I had thought about this possibility before - and they've done a great job of implementing it. I think new users will find this very intuitive. Open and Save dialogue boxes are much improved as well. And the new feature Exposé is very cool. You can assign it to any key combination, and then activating it reveals every open window at once by shrinking each window as much as necessary so they all fit on the screen. Then you can click on any window you want and everything zooms back to full size, with the one you selected on top. For finding a particular window on a very cluttered desktop this is so much better than window shades (from OS 9) that it is not even funny. Great time saver if you work with lots of open documents. I think Exposé alone will make the switch to X worth it for MB and H.
Other than Apple, Sony is the only company to produce consistently good, and good looking, consumer electronics. (Okay, that's a pretty broad statement, but I'm sticking to it...) Their Clie line of PDAs are particularly attractive (and again, like Apple products, very expensive.) For instance, here is the flagship NR70V. But check out this low res shot of a new Clie expected to be announced on Friday. Nice! Supposedly that has wireless (of some sort, probably 802.11b) and a built in camera. Very cool.
EVill Net: free wireless internet access from "most" rooftops in the East Village (btw A & B, from 2nd to 10th.)
The ability to take pictures is one key to our dream mobile device. I think camera phones will be one of the most interesting consumer electronics product over the next year. In anecdotal evidence, a camera phone is the first geek gadget my friend MB has shown interest in (and don't think she doesn't hear breathless recounts of every type of gadget that comes along.)
I think the days of stand alone cameras are numbered. I don't mean for professional photographers - but for everyone else. Still, there are some interesting things going on with digital cameras. Sanyo has a prototype of a WiFi enabled camera. This camera from Concord (who?) is supposedly shipping now, with Bluetooth wireless bulit in. And Ricoh tops them both with the Caplio G3 which can have WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS capabilities added with expansion cards (although it's unclear to me if you can have more than one of these options at the same time.)
I think this sort of product will lose to mobile phones with bulit in cameras, but it is interesting none the less. The urgent need to to collapse the cycle of steps now needed to take pictures, download them to a computer, and then upload them to the internet. The goal is to have one step: from snapping the picture to posting it on the internet. These cameras are not there, but they show that people are thinking about how to do this.
In general, we can no longer think about the taking of pictures as seperate from the sharing of those pictures. These now seperate tasks need to become one action.
Convergence. That's the dream. I only want to carry one computer device, so it has to do everything. The perfect product does not yet exist, but we are quickly closing in on it.
I've had the T-Mobile Sidekick (which is the rebranded Danger Hiptop) since it's introduction on October 1, 2002. I have been wildly happy with this device. It is a mobile phone, with a qwerty thumb board for entering text. It does email, AOL instant messenger, and basic web surfing. For me email is king, and I use it constantly. It also comes with a plug in camera attachment, but the photos are so small as to be basically unusable.
A new color (screen) version has just come out. And with a much better camera, although it sill lags seriously behind other camera phones on the market.
I might upgrade to the new version, but I think I will probably end up with the soon to be released Handspring Treo 600 instead. I liked the original Treo (pictured for comparison on that page,) but it was just a little too big. The 600 solves that problem. It has the thumb board which I like (over stylus entry like a palm pilot, or like the Sony Ericsson P800 uber phone.) I guess this is personal, but I've got to have the keyboard. And it has a built in camera which will hopefully have decent resolution.
But this is still just an approximation at best. But getting closer. Hopefully it will be out by October first.
This weekend was perfect here in NYC. Spent Saturday in Central Park under beautiful blue skies. Hot, but with a breeze in the air. Very nice.
I'm going to try to return to blogging more regularly. I didn't exactly intend to take this long break, but that's what happened. Went through some difficult things, but also some nice things that just aren't possible to write about here. Both have made me a little stronger. My energy feels very focused now, although to what exact end I am still unsure.
I love NYC, in case I haven't said that recently. Summer absolutely kicks ass.
I'm still going to write some about my personal life here (I don't really think it is a blog if you don't provide this sort of real life context for your other posts,) but my rather vague plan is to otherwise tighten the focus a bit. I'm still overly interested in Apple, but only to the extent that I see them as having the best chance of building the mobile computing device that I am really interested in. This yet to be realized product will be the axis around which most future posting will revolve.
Bet you can't wait, huh? Well, hopefully it will be better than nothing.
From the Python Dev mailing list:
...At EuroPython I was cornered by the key Macpython developers with exciting news: Apple's next release of Mac OSX, code-named Panther, uses Python and Apple is planning to include Python 2.3 in that release. (Apple already ships Mac OSX with Python 2.2 included in the developer tools, but Panther will actually use Python for some essential functionality.)I wonder what "essential functionality" refers to?
Apple's schedule is such that August 1st is about the latest release date for Python 2.3 that will make this possible. I appreciate everybody's help with keeping this schedule!
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
Oh my god, what a bunch of dorks. I'm at the SOHO Apple store now waiting for the WWDC (World Wide Develolper Conference) satellite feed. There is a theatre on the second floor that is showing it. I figured there would be a few people here, but it is absolutely packed. The whole second floor is filled. I've never seen so many gadgets in one crowd at a time. Weird. It's like a Grateful Dead show for computer geeks. I feel strangely at home. Play by play in the thread below if it is possible for me.
Doing some spring cleaning today. I found my old blogger.com username and password and decided to give it a shot. Amazingly, my old stuff is still on their server! Here's my first blogger post:
[10/21/1999 11:01:13 AM | jim b]Maybe I'll dig the rest out and put them into my archives here. My blogger account is 5515. Does that mean I was the 5515th blog? I actually expected this number to be lower.
O.K., yes, back at it again. Things have been really busy for me, but thanks to blogger and their amazing site, I can now post updates right from the web. Hopefully this will cut down on the amount of time this page requires. If you're thinking about the web, definitely check out blogger.