...more recent posts
New, much longer video of Jeff Han demonstrating his giant multitouch interface. I blogged about Han and multitouch back in February of last year. It's all very Minority Report-ish. Obviously, since the iPhone debut, this stuff seems much more mainstream. And it is really cool - but only for certain data sets. For instance, it's hard to see how this augments any text based work. But for manipulating photos it's incredible.
My guess is that Apple is taking this very seriously. Adding coverflow (stolen from iTunes) to the Finder in Leopard makes it hard to think that multitouch isn't coming to all Macs. I expect the next round of laptops to have some sort of multitouch track pad.
And, while not specifically multitouch related, this Apple patent application for keystroke tacility arrangement on a smooth touch surface might offer a glimpse at the solution for touch screen keyboards. I hadn't thought of that route. Could you really deform a screen into something like a keyboard? That would be incredible and would solve the biggest issue with the iPhone. Sounds a little too sci-fi for me to believe it's anywhere near production though.
Interesting, although I'm not sure very useful, interactive CSS generator for styling text. I guess this idea could maybe be folded into a blogging/CMS system.
Longtime Apple appreciator and WSJ columnist Walt Mossberg likes OS X 10.4 Leopard:
On Friday evening, Apple will release yet another new version of OS X, called Leopard, to replace the current version, known as Tiger. I've been testing Leopard, and while it is an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, release, I believe it builds on Apple's quality advantage over Windows. In my view, Leopard is better and faster than Vista, with a set of new features that make Macs even easier to use.Evolutionary, not revolutionary, sounds right to me. Still there's nothing wrong with a little evolution, and there are some cool new features, plus some long standing annoyances have been worked out. Definitely worth the upgrade, but I won't be standing in line on Friday night or anything.
Gmail gets IMAP support. Very cool. Only having POP access was an annoyance, especially on b.'s iPhone.
IMAP allows you to keep your mail account in sync even when you are using multiple clients. So now mail read, say, on the iPhone will show up as read when you later check from your desktop. And mail sent from your desktop will show up in the sent mail folder on your phone.
Apple reported some very high fourth quarter earnings yesterday after the market closed, and, uh, Wall St. liked what they heard. I swear I saw it rise 10% in less than an hour. Apple now has a larger market cap than Intel and IBM. What a world.
The iPhone "is a game-changing product," said Stephen Coleman, chief investment officer at Daedalus Capital LLC.But I think it was really Mac sales that drove the stock up. They were incredibly strong. Over 2 million Macs sold - 400,000 more than in any previous quarter. And that's in a quarter immediately preceding a huge OS release (often people put off computer purchases until a new OS is released since you get it free with a new computer.) Apple is now the number three computer retailer in the U.S. (behind Dell and HP who, sure, sell a lot more but on *much* lower margins.)
Based on income from the iPhone alone, he said, "I expect Apple's earnings to continually grow materially at 50 percent a year, for the next three years."
I think they are at the tipping point, especially with their laptop sales. They can easily gobble up market share percentage points from here. 10% of the global market doesn't seem out of reach. And then, yeah, there's that whole iPod thing. Still, I don't trust the market in general right now and I think I'm going to sell my rather tiny holdings. It's been a very fun ride.
Sensible rules for dealing with broadband congestion and QOS. "So there's your solution."
It just occurred to me that I should record distinct useragents who request robots.txt in the database, and then I could run the referrer logs against this list and come up with, I think, sort of okay human traffic numbers. Maybe filter the robot inserts through a black list of real browser useragents to cut down on the chances incorrect robot identifications.
Would any real robots obeying the robots.txt provision identify themselves with actual broser useragent strings? And how many robots don't request robots.txt? And how many human browsers do? (Hackers seeing where you don't want robots to look? noob web developers looking for examples? Can't amount to much.)
Blacklist (of known human browser useragent) could be compiled similarly by inserting distinct useragents of account holders into the database.
Probably not worth it, but as another barier against false robot id you could check if new identified-as-robot useragent subsequently request javascript files, as probably robots don't request those.
And while I'm thinking about this, distinct IP total numbers might be improved by having distinct IP plus distinct useragents within the same IP. So, for instance, a page requested from the same IP by 2 different useragents should probably be counted as 2 people, not 1 as the "by distinct IP" view would give it. This might be wrong, as I could use Safari today and FireFox tomorrow while still being one person, but I think it's at least as possible that I actually am two people behind a NAT. Distinct IP really gives something more akin to number of households (or businesses) requesting, not number of people.
Javascript implementation of the Tiny Encryption Algorithm. Just need a reference to this for an upcoming project.
Really interesting early HTML 5 client side SQL storage work going on in WebKit. There's an example application page, but you need to be running the latest nightly to use it. I can't wait to play around with this. I keep saying it, but javascript is going to rule the world. Not sure I'm completely happy about that but it sure seems true.
External SATA hard drive dock. Genius.