Apple Tablet

Ok, so we have been getting a zillion rumors about the upcoming Apple Tablet along with a bunch of specs about size, connectivity, whatever.

But the report that Apple was talking to a number of high profile publishers about generating content for this device got me thinking about what it would take to make a device like this successful especially given all the naysayers about tablet computing in general. And yes there have been many failures, but there have been notable successes like the Kindle for example and I hear that the Fujitsu and Toshiba tablets have both been getting some traction in the health care industry.

What made the iPod a success was the music store, this is key. The integrated experience of buying, downloading and playing music is also very important but would be useless a music store with depth to it.

What made the iPhone popular (it is not yet a success) was the app store, again this is key. The iPhone really broke out of it’s niche market once people were able to get applications that were outside Apple’s stable.

The same will be true for the Apple tablet, and I think one of the key features will be the ability to get good content from high profile publishers. The Kindle proves that model to a large degree but it is a single task device and that limits it.

What I would like from a tablet computer is access to the web, weblogs, news, books, music, photos, etc… For me it would be first and foremost a device with which I access and read content on the go, and that makes it different from an iPhone or a laptop for that matter.

Light Peak

I came across Light Peak this morning on Engadget and MacRumors.

To me the really interesting thing is that this has the potential to replace all the connections on the computer, connections to external (and internal) drives, mouse, displays, whatever with a single cable and connector type, which would be really neat. No reason why you should not be able to replace network connections either.

I think this has real potential, can’t wait to see how this develops.

Snow Leopard Bugs

I have run into three really irritating Snow Leopard bugs and one feature change which is only mildly irritating.

The three really irritating bugs are as follows:

• The main display (I have three attached to my computer) will go black for no apparent reason, at least it did until I decided to do a clean install. This is a documented problem and seems to have gone away since I did a clean install but we shall see. If it does start up again I will back down to 10.5.8
• Sometimes the video on the main display will “wobble” when it comes back on after being turned off for a while, not a show stopper because it only lasts 10-15 seconds but still.
• The main display will “forget” its color calibration profile after being off for a certain period of time, this is probably linked with the “wobbly” display bug mentioned above.

Finally the mildly irritating feature change is that Snow Leopard now does not respect the creator code when opening a documents, it only respects the file name extension.

New iPods

Well the new iPod line-up is underwhelming, the shuffle got colors, the nano got new colors, a new finish (meh), a video camera (meh), an FM radio (double meh), I would have preferred more storage, and the touch got, well nothing except for more storage.

iTunes 9

I upgraded to iTunes 9 recently and was initially quite disappointed by the new column based interface before realizing that you could manage which columns were displayed and whether they were displayed on the left hand side or across the top. It did take me three days and reading the MacWorld review to figure it out.

Recovering Deleted Photos from a Memory Card

Yesterday I was asked if I could recover deleted photos from a memory card, some searching turned up Lexar Image Rescue 3 which works on both Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista.

I also came across this TidBITS review titled “Recover Erased Photos from a Memory Card“.

Sitting with AT&T

A few weeks ago I was on a plane playing some games on my iPhone and when we landed the person next to me asked how I liked my iPhone. I said that I loved it but that I did not like AT&T. He asked why and I trotted out the usual things, lack of MMS, lack of tethering, poor 3G speeds, dropped calls, poor coverage, calls and voice mail coming in late (up to 12 hours late for me). He sniffed and told me that he worked for AT&T and ask if I had any idea how much they were subsidizing the iPhone. I guessed a number which I suspect was not far off the truth. I got the impression that he felt AT&T was doing us iPhone owners a favor with that and that criticism was not warranted. The conversation pretty much died there because it was time to get off the plane.

But there were a few other things that I should have said. I bought the original iPhone for $600 so I was not that subsidized, and I am now out of contract which means that my monthly payment includes whatever payback on the subsidy as a free money for AT&T. AT&T is in business to make money, if did not feel it could not make money from the iPhone then it should not carry it, I am sure other carriers would love to get their hands on the iPhone. AT&T had its best sales day ever when the iPhone 3GS was launched and will get payments for those phones for the duration of the contract.

Customer Service You Say

Had an interesting interaction with the customer service department of an online store. I won’t divulge the name to protect the innocent.

On Safari you can’t add anything to the cart thus making it impossible to buy anything. I only tested Safari on the Mac. The site does work with Firefox on the Mac, I was able to purchase the item I wanted.

I flagged the issue to the customer service department and they told me that they knew about the issue but were waiting for Apple to provide a patch. They suggested calling the toll free number to place the order.

Two things are wrong with this picture, the first is that I am sure Apple is not losing any sleep over this one so a patch is highly unlikely, second the idea of having an online store is to shift the cost to the customer, calling to place the order causes the company to incur a much higher cost of sale.

Every other store I have access using Safari allows me to buy stuff, so what makes the user interaction on this one so special that they can’t support Safari?

The correct thing to do of course is to make sure the site works with all browsers, there are some very good javascript libraries out there which mask developers from browser vagaries (JQuery and YUI to name but two.)

Failing that, the site should detect which browser I am using (easy to do) and offer a slightly degraded experience which still allows me to buy stuff, or informs me that the site currently does not work with Safari and that I should try Firefox.

Personally I would patch the CTO with the “could do a better job” patch.

Snow Leopard

I have been running Snow Leopard on my laptop for three weeks now and I have to say that I am very happy with it. It is fully stable by any stretch, the mouse cursor disappears from time to time, but the guts of it are stable enough.

I like the UI changes a lot, basically the same as Leopard but with the rough spots ironed out.

Interestingly I find myself missing Snow Leopard’s features when I work on my MacPro.

Snow Leopard 10A380

I spent some time this morning installing Snow Leopard 10A380 on my laptop, it handled doing an update over an existing installation of Leopard 10.5.7 but failed when running the software updater (Apple released a 700MB+ update to Snow Leopard 10A380.) I tried the install again migrating a TimeMachine backup of Leopard, same failure as before. The trick was to do a clean install of Snow Leopard, install the update and then use the migration assistant to migrate the TimeMachine backup.

All in all Snow Leopard is looking pretty slick, I plan to test it out some more in the next few days.