I didn’t exactly “get it” with the iPhone but this week’s release of the iPod touch has me convinced: when the much-rumored, ever-coveted “tablet Mac” comes, it’s going to be an iPod. It’s going to be a big iPod (form-factor-wise, x- and y- but not z-axis-wise) with some extra, even fancy features — but it’s going to be an iPod in heart and soul. It just sort of hit me on the walk home today.
If Apple is going to give us some kind of “tablet” offering1, it’s not going to be like every other tablet PC out there. The gnarly form factors, the easily-lost styli2, the 6 lb. box that still gets hot in your hands? It all adds up to something very un-Apple. No, I would think that they’ll give us something that much more closely resembles the iPhone and its new cousin the iPod touch in both form factor, relative size, and certainly in interface.
Why reinvent the tablet PC when you already have a proven interface? When you already have a proven strategy? Create a small3, thin4, lightweight device that you can dock or sync over WiFi and you’re off and running. Right? I’ll grant that I’m glossing over some significant technical and engineering hurdles here5 but I don’t necessarily think that it’s completely out of reach. There’s already some pretty incredible stuff being done with the iPhone and (from the looks of it) the iPod touch. And we’re — what? — just over two months into the iPhone’s tenure.
Of course, given the length of said walk home, my imagination started to run wild:
…perhaps it’d be more of a “MacBook touch” with the screen being the touch screen tablet and it docks to the base and when you’re ready to use it you sort of “eject” the screen like you would with a CD or DVD and the screen’s interface does a little transition kind of like when it goes into Front Row and your UI environment transitions over after syncing up the docs that you wanted and…
Yeah, I got annoyed with myself, too. That would be too complicated. And clunky. And we’re right back to the very un-Apple remark. And so I’m sticking with my “iPod touch (or some such sibling) is the tablet Mac…”
Now what I’m suggesting isn’t exactly new. The “touch screen tablet” patent was granted over two years ago; and folks have been speculating about such a thing for much longer than that. Jobs’ comments be damned! The speculation is fun and (in my modest opinion) probably not all that far off — if you think of these “tablet Macs” as next generation, glorified iPod touches. And apparently, I’m not the only one that thinks so.
Via DF: Garrett Murray on the new Apple keyboard:
The wired keyboard now has up to F19, and no dedicated volume controls. Instead, it moves the volume controls to special functions on F10, F11 and F12. You might remember those as two Expose keys and the Dashboard key. Well, not anymore. In fact, F9, the other default Expose key, is now fast-forward/next track. And the eject key, which is nearly always been the last key in the upper right of the keyboard is next to F12. Not on the end in the wired version. But it gets even strange…
I found myself thinking many of the same thoughts when I first saw the “leaked” images appear in a discussion in the Macintosh group on Flickr. The discussion cited leaked images on Gizmodo and (naturally) everyone was speculating that it was the new Apple keyboard. Most participants cited the lacking “open Apple” as evidence that it was not actually an Apple-designed keyboard. I thought to myself: if anything, the evidence is the sudden and inexplicable movement of the Dashboard and Expose keys… Not that it particularly matters. I’ll be sticking to my Logitechs, thank you very much.
Held off all week on commenting about Leopard at all because…
…but that said, I felt compelled anyway. Not much to add that hasn’t been thoroughly reviewed and/or lambasted just about everywhere. The short version:
I have no doubt I’ll be upgrading (but I doubt I’ll be rushing to do so, either).
My most favoritest of browsers on the Mac has been updated!
Camino arrives at version 1.5 today. Download it here. An upgraded rendering engine, integration with the Mac’s spellchecking services, better/tighter integration with Keychain, and (one of my favorites) RSS detection and badging in the address bar a la Firefox.
As if you didn’t already have every good reason to be on Camino… Well, now there is simply no excuse.
currently playing: Josh Wink “Back In Tha’ Day”
If you didn’t already hear: version 3 of Smultron (Peter Borg’s fabulous open source text editor) has been released.
With each release it becomes a stronger and stronger competitor to paid-for apps like TextMate. I use this thing every day and I seldom want for any features1. If you’re on a Mac and you don’t want to shell out for TextMate, there’s nothing quite as powerful (and yet elegant) as Smultron.
(Now you’re probably wondering about the screenshot of the preferences… Yeah, about that: I thought that the “Really Advanced” tab was freakin’ hysterical. I love it.)
The video of the lunar transit? Pretty damn cool.
Tantek’s Thoughts — 2007 February
via DF: three theories on human interface design
11 Ways to Optimize Your Mac’s Performance
via TUAW: strategies for optimizing an older machine (or “How to squeeze five more years out of that G3 iBook…”)
via MacDevCenter
Revisiting last year’s list to make this the 2007 edition… It’s the Top 10 “it should have been in the box” applications for OS X. And in some cases, they are in the box; but in most cases they are not. That said, the top 10 “can’t live without ‘em” applications for the OS X desktop environment.
On browsers: Last year’s list posited Camino as one of the essential ten. As browser preferences are their own nerdy jihad, let’s just work our through this with the following. To date, Camino has given me the best browser experience on the Mac desktop. Wrapping the Gecko rendering engine in a Cocoa-based browser keeps the UI consistent with the rest of the OS while giving what many have argued is the best overall in-browser experience (in terms of functionality, features, consistent rendering, etc.) For most casual browsers, this should be more than enough. But casual browsers are likely stick with what is pre-loaded (i.e., Safari). That said, Safari is a great browser in and of itself and has (arguably) some outstanding and perhaps even unique features as far as color is concerns (if you’re into that sort of thing). But Safari doesn’t play nice with certain web-forms (as we’ve mentioned before) and the recent talk of Safari’s memory usage are both concerns. As for non-casual, webdev types… Well, some things make Firefox untouchable.
currently playing: Voxtrot “The Warmest Part Of The Winter”
“Consensus” “Essential” Mac OS X Applications
via The Apple Blog: great collection of apps (fair distribution of freeware and payware) for OS X