There's no way the tablet will be as hot as the iPhone
Market projections are a black art. How big is the market for an as yet unreleased product? Marketing departments always have to do the research and focus groups and test marketing to see what the projections are. But even these can be wrong or misleading. Based on this article one Wall Street analyst firm bases their projections on the market for the Apple TV a niche product if there ever was one. In the first year of it’s production the Apple TV sold 1.2million units. Given the appeal of the iPhone and iPod Touch, the projections are the Mac Tablet will sell far better than the 1.2 million units of the Apple TV. And with a list price of ~$600 US then the revenue generated would be approximately 3% of total revenue. This is all pad on paper estimates based on the up take of a somewhat less successful product, so it could be way off the mark. I’m hoping there’s something new, something nobody has guessed at so far that Apple will include in this device that will help really, really differentiate it. It should be unlike other tablets, and unlike its little brother the iPod Touch.
We believe an Apple tablet would be priced 30%-50% below the $999 MacBook, and would offer best in class web, email, and media software,” the report reads. “In other words, we believe Apple’s tablet would compete well in the netbook category even though it would not be a netbook.”
It’s interesting to see how the whole iTunes U structure works. I’ve been reading documentation about the ‘web services’ enabled within iTunes U. It completely replicates the GUI functions but through a semi-automated interface. Reminds me a little of how you can change the underlying LDAP directory structure using LDIF commands or LDIF files with all the changes embedded within it. In iTunes U, you do an HTTP PUT securely with a signed token, and the iTunes U Web service sucks that up and executes all the commands embedded within your XML file that you put. Very powerful, but very scary too as these changes are made to your production environment. So there’s no real easy way to test the results of your commands without just taking a big risk, leaping in and seeing what happens. This is like SQL commands where you DROP TABLE, not a fun thing to do. DROP TABLE is a big black whole that makes your data disappear in an unrecoverable way. iTunes U has similar functions where you delete the structure AND the data at the same time. You may restore the structure (by backing up your data tree in XML format), but the data embedded within the tree, well that’s gone. So restoring stuff is going to be impossible if you get the syntax wrong in your XML file. The only real benefit to me now is the ability to get a listing of the whole site structure using the Tree command and then forcing an update to any groups that are of the type RSS Feed. The update will be necessary if anyone adds files to a podcast being hosted on servers within our institution.
I discovered or re-discovered a tool called Woolamaloo which was introduced to me during the Apple iTunes training. University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana created it to allow you to use a GUI to control the Web services from a desktop OS. This is good as I was at a loss to adapt the sample code into anything like a reliable generator of tokens to send to iTunes U web services. I couldn’t figure out what parts of the java example to comment out and recompile. Starting this Monday I’m going to put Woolmaloo through it’s paces. If I can force the RSS feeds to update on demand when somebody has a problem updating their Podcast feeds, I can at least speed things up. But I’m still very leery of deleting or merging any section. I will copy so I can make a course appear in more than one place without using the iTunes multi-click interface. But I will not delete or merge.
And just today I also discovered there are Apple Automator scripts readily available that add a graphical layer on top of all the web services goodness. So now I can integrate a bunch of steps from uploading bunches of files, forcing RSS feeds to update to merging/rename whole sections all from Automator. I’m going to test it and se how good it really works.
It appears Apple is on board for fully pushing through the whole Augmented Reality capability of the iPhone. Follow the link below:
Apple promises that its upcoming iPhone 3.1 release will be the first to officially support augmented reality apps that support the iPhone 3GS’ camera. Also, a new seed of Mac OS X Snow Leopard has been handed to developers.
True to form, Apple is keeping a tight lid on their Mac Tablet. But all rumors are pointing to a release early in 2010. The announcement of the device may come in September of this year at the point where new iPod products are announced. Other scuttle-butt indicates Verizon may be providing it’s Fourth Generation (4G) network for the new device so that it can stay connected to the Internet wherever Verizon cell phone towers are available. It will be interesting to see how the market might fracture between cell phone and tablet users. I would guess this whole project may turn into an Macintosh Cube experience where Jobs reach exceeded his grasp.
This is how big the 10" tablet might be
However, the past six months have reportedly seen the critical pieces fall into place. Jobs, who’s been overseeing the project from his home, office and hospital beds, has finally achieved that much-sought aura of satisfaction. He’s since cemented the device in the company’s 2010 roadmap, where it’s being positioned for a first quarter launch, according to people well-respected by AppleInsider for their striking accuracy in Apple’s internal affairs.
I wonder if there are any readers out there they may have experience using these web applications for doing work or even for recreational computing purposes? You see some people just want to have fun and kill time on their computers.
Jing – screenshot, or short movie maker – mini version of camtasia mostly used for desktop recording. You record yourself performing some action on the computer and Jing will capture video frames of where you go, what you select and what you type in to accomplish those steps within the application. Then it dumps that out to a movie file you can link to on the Internet, for all to see.
Picnik – online photo editing through a web page. It can link up to a photosharing account you may already have like Flickr. There are lots of special effects filters and tools for cropping and adjusting the color balance and exposure of your pictures. You can add text or change captions for the pictures you have on a photosharing website.
Dvolver – animation maker, but not just any animation. This is the kind of junk you see at Hallmark dot com for making greeting cards or birthday cards to send to people in email. I’m not terribly impressed, but I’m sure it will absolutely knock the socks of my co-workers.
Gabbly – chat tool to use on web sites, or better yet, Simply type gabbly.com/ in front of a webpages URL, you will be able to chat with anyone visiting the page at the same time! For example, to chat on CNN.com, just visit ‘gabbly.com/cnn.com‘ in your browser. Youll see the CNN website with the Gabbly Chat window floating on top.
The days I spent watching educational programs on PBS I think gave me an interesting way of seeing the world. And I am not alone:
Exposure to Samuel Beckett, art-appreciation documentaries, “Masterpiece Theatre,” and grade Z film gave me the rudiments of an aesthetic education. And a good thing, too, because nobody in the local school system would have used the expression “aesthetic education,” or considered it worth offering.
Those were golden halcyon days watching the weird shows fly by. I remember seeing Firing Line briefly and Steve Allen’s program and Dick Cavett’s program. I’m not saying I ‘watched’ them, but I would see them in passing hoping to find a repeat of Sesame Street. My parents would watch Masterpiece Theatre religiously, which I hated because I wanted to watch what else was on Sunday nights. Usually it was NBC’s Police Story or some other violent, low-brow entertainment.
Now all that old TV “content” can be recycled to the public airwaves of the Interwebs. All that was old is new again. Which means I should try tracking down all those old episodes of Omnibus that made the transition from BBC to PBS. Sometimes I think PBS and BBC should have formed up a single International Media conglomerate and shared more costs in preparation for the large scale media consolidation of the ’80s. And certainly they could have hedged their enterprises somewhat against the proliferation of Satellite and Cable TV networks.
Oh, if I could just get the BBC for several hours in the evening or even during the day. I would watch Emmerdale or Eastenders, I would even watch Tesco commercials. Doesn’t matter to me. Too much of what we watch locally on TV is a kind of bubble like prison, meant to reinforce, nay indoctrinate one in the predominant culture. And more choices hasn’t helped as the media owners don’t let the media flow freely cross international borders.
I was raised on the most successful initiatives from Public Television, or ETV as it was previously known (E standing for Educational of course). Sesame Street, 3-2-1 Contact, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Reading Rainbow were my bread and butter as a kid. And yet while those educational programs were major successes, television’s promise of bringing education and instruction to a wide audience was left largely unfulfilled in the United States. Proponents of educational TV faced the harsh realities of the large amounts of funding required to create and maintain television programing placed upon them. The need to satisfy the large …
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As a kid I watched PBS a lot. One reason being in the 1970s funding for PBS kids shows and educational programs was better than it is now. As kids we would watch hours of programming and then we would be rewarded, REWARDED with a fund-raising drive once a year. The reason I say rewarded is PBS went out of its way to entertain and bring in new viewers. They would air special programs especially for the fund-raising drive. I remember one year they aired Woodstock as the centerpiece of one year’s fund-raising campaign. That was the cool part, you never knew what they would pull out to reward us when they were asking for money. And what did we get in return?
WGBH, the Boston superstation for PBS and WNET 13 in New York would crank out the jams. Some of it was experimental, some of it was just downright good. There was Sesame Street, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Electric Company, Zoom and eventually 3-2-1 Contact. And even in school our teacher’s would fire up the TV in the days before the VCR to show us certain science programs different times of the week. Sometimes it would be a reading program, or a science program. At one point during the Carter Administration, all the kids were encouraged to learn the Metric System. So for about one year we watched a program once a week to teach us the metric system. Turns out we didn’t go metric.
After school was good too. We had a TV show produced by a “local” TV station in Sioux Falls, SD. It was hosted by the weatherman on KELO-TV. It was called Captain 11. I knew kids who had gone down to Sioux Falls and gotten on the TV show. And there was also a drawing for a prize on each episode. It was a giant plastic tootsie roll with tootsie roll lollipop candies inside. I never saw any of my friends on that show. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. I saw every Hanna-Barbera cartoon, and a few Our Gang short films along the way. Why I spent more time watching TV than I can even add up. It’s a lot that’s for sure.
I’m beginning to think the iPod touch is not an end-of-life product that should be ignored. Oh, I did at one time due to the torrid pace at which Apple was releasing new iPhone products. Seemed like the old iPod was absolutlely superfluous. As the iPhone models increased their storage and speed, the iPod touch tagged along, but not too closely. Currently the iPod touch is consider a second generation device (2G) versus the iPhone in its 3G and now 3GS forms.
Like most of you who may not own an I phone, I have felt the pressure of seeing all my friends of Facebook buying iPhones and cross-posting from Twitter to Facebook via their iPhone. So caving into peer pressure, I’m considering buying an iPhone maybe in October when I reach the 3 year mark as a customer with AT&T. I have some things working in my favor though. I lucked out with being a Cingular customer before they combined with AT&T and before the exclusive distribution deal for the iPhone. But do I really need to buy an iPhone to get all the benefits of the App Store? Do I need to pay for the big hefty data plan?
Maybe not. Just this past week Mark Sigal @ O’Reillycom followed up all the rumors and speculation about Apple entering the netbook market with a Tablet PC. He claimed then Apple was already making a netbook and it was called the iPod touch:
But, perhaps the real story with respect to the forthcoming Apple Tablet Device is that Apple has already released a tablet computing device.
It’s called the iPod touch, and because it’s often overshadowed by its noisier sibling, the iPhone, we sometimes forget that it has already sold 15M+ units.
Today J.P. Morgan is also saying, Apple is already in the netbook market. They have a device called the iPod touch.
The J.P. Morgan report views the iPod touch as Apple’s netbook, of sorts. At least, the analysis says, until Apple officially enters the netbook market – something the firm expects the Mac maker to do.
Given the confidence level of reading these two articles I am more willing to consider an iPod touch. It seems like a more frugal choice without the burden of un-ending data plan fees. True the cost is not susidzied by AT&T, but that one time shot of money is about what I was willing to spend on a netbook anyways. So maybe an iPod touch is the better option if you want to save a little cash by not purchasing a huge data plan from AT&T.
Intel is finally going to ramp up it’s newest production lines to include Flash memory chips, thereby shrinking the design rules down to 34nm. Density of the new Flash memory chips is going to allow even larger Solid State Drives (SSD) and in some cases the prices may be less for the newer drives than the equivalent preceeding generation of SSDs. Price points quoted in the article are projected to be around $276 possibly as low as $261 for the 80GB/34nm based SSD from Intel. The closer to $200 the better, that’s the point at which you can buy some of the higher capacity traditional HDD’s from Seagate, and Western Digital. The day of the $200 Flash Drive is coming soon.
A Canadian RedFlagDeals technology website expects an announcement within a week and says there will be 80GB, 160GB and 320GB models.
I can think of a hundred different pre-cursors to the golden Nirvana of Augmented Reality. Howard Rheingold set the bar pretty high in his catalog of the state of the art called “Virtual Reality”. Everyone from the pre-history of VR to the then present day had their say of what the future should look like. Enter now, the future as it is. Cell Phones! That’s what we got, so that’s what we’re going to use right? Sure enough if you know your own coordinates using the GPS chip in a cell phone and you know the orientation of the camera in that cell phone, you can overlay data one what ‘should be’ in the field of view in that camera viewfinder, right? Well sometimes good is not the enemy of perfect and a company in Amsterdam has created a smartphone app that combines these required features to present a ‘good’ version of augmented reality. As this article in the NYTimes below states it’s called Layar.
Previously in the field of Virtual Reality everyone attempted to provide near perfect reality. Using magnetic trackers from Polhemus to be calibrated up to some kind of goggles or head mounted visual display. At MIT’s Media Lab the project called “Put That There” was originally for commanders in the Navy trying to assess and react to battle conditions on the seas.
The next revision came in the early 1990s at Boeing where they tried using headmounted computer displays. The display with fit over one eye leaving the other eye open to focus on work being done within the fuselage of an airliner being built. The worker could see displayed in realtime information about what they were touching and moving wires and cabling through. Access to information like that without having to stop, look at blueprints, read computer documentation or find spec books would save inordinate amounts of time and prevent mistakes in the routing of wires and cables. Fast forward to today and now you have the ubiquitious cell phone, with camera and GPS chip and a little bit of mathematics and algorithms. A programmer can determine the field of view from the GPS coordinates, get the cell phone’s orientation, map out what should be in the field of view and overlay that information on the LCD viewfinder as you point the cell phone in all directions. It may not be smooth or realtime, but it may be ‘good enough’.
Personally I think GPS should also be paired with a laser range finder so that the field of view can be further refined. That way when you point the camera at a building or a river, you can ascertain the GPS coordinates of the thing at which you are pointing. Once the solution is calculated you look it up in your points of interest database, voila, that’s so and so church, that’s so and so river. That quickly. Some have decried this tendency in usage of navigation devices. Once you fully empower the autonomy and self-sufficiency of a stranger in strange land, you rob him of the benefit of ‘local knowledge’. In that sense Augmented Reality will make us all dumber the more technology enables us to find out own way or learn landmarks without interacting with people. I say to those people I respond with this flip remark: “Bring it on!” If it means being stupid, losing local knowledge, alienating myself from my surrounds then by all means I would rather have that autonomy and self sufficiency wherever I travel. That’s the kind of guy I am.
Augmented reality courtesy a smartphone
Augmented reality will “reinvent” many industries, including health care and training, Mr. Inbar predicted. Already, researchers at the Technical University of Munich are looking at ways to display X-ray and ultrasound readings directly on a patient’s body. A research project at BMW is exploring how an augmented-reality view under the hood might help auto mechanics with diagnostic and repair work.
Considering the evolution of email and the Internet it’s a wonder we cling to it so tenaciously. The original Internet was slow, unreliable, and had a small number of actual users. Email was a messaging mechanism allowed communication to occur asynchronously over a slow unreliable network. And the mechanims used to transport it prior to the ever popular SMTP server was something called Unix to Unix Copy Protocol. Your messages to people would get copied over the network as files to another Unix computer. Eventually they would get routed to the mail spool on a machine your recipient had an account on. He could then read the message and reply to it. Kind of like telegrams back and forth. So what if you got a telegram with no subject line? Or a telegram with all kinds of tasks for different projects all wrapped up into a single message?
Dan Dube @ dandube.com complains that Filing Cabinets which approximates the desktop computing metaphor are not good. The extra work required to make the Filing Cabinet work outweighs the benefit of the activity the email is helping take place.
Each email is a file, so each email needs an informative, relevant title. Look in your inbox — I would guess there are almost no emails that fit that bill.
Nobody uses subject lines. I get blank subject lines from people. Or they put the vaguest subjects in the subject line.
Emails don’t happen in a vacuum, people reply to them, are added and subtracted from the distribution list, change the content, etc. Yet we still treat each email as a singular file.
That’s the truth, especially for group projects, or worse committee projects where people come and go. You don’t know sometimes where a requirement or task ever came from because you don’t have the original text in an email from the person that proposed it. There’s no trail or flight data recorder for what transpired in that email message.
Emails don’t always categorize nicely. If they fit in more than one “folder”, the filing cabinet metaphor will fail.
I couldn’t agree more. If you have a boss who starts using ‘bullet points’ in the email you know you will need to file that thing in more than one spot. I have a boss that does this often and it takes a few minutes to parse out the tasks that are expected to be accomplished. Once that’s done, which “project” do you file that email message into?
Emails are extraordinarily redundant, with the original message copied hundreds of times in long conversations.
Oh the insanity of quote all. And worse yet I think Outlook turns it on by default. Occasionally I will go back through that really long message and delete everything except my own contributions so the email is physically shorter in length and easier to read.
Files can be emailed, which immediately forks the original file and makes any further edits a synching problem.
This happens all the time rather than copy and paste the text of another file into the medium of the email message, the immediacy of ‘attaching’ just makes it too appealing. Someone is ‘dumping’ the task off on you with the minimum effort necessary, and that means they attach the file that has the exact same text they could have included in the email. Worse yet, sometimes those attachments are PDFs! Useless,useless,useless. Try keeping track of that mix of files.
All of these gripes apply to the file system of the computer, too. Regular files (mp3, doc, html, etc) all have the same shortcomings.
Again it’s hard to associate files in a wide range of ways that make sense for a variety of projects. None of us are limited to one file type in all the projects we do. We might have pictures, audio, video, text, etc.
Now Dan mentions Google Waves. And I wrote a quick blurb about Google Waves about week after the Google demo in San Francisco. Waves is by design, very different from email. It’s not copying files from one server to another over an unreliable slow network. It is meant to give you realtime text based communication in whatever collaborative style you prefer. And it keeps a record of everything, so you can step back through a document at each version or stage of editing.
It’s kind of like chat too. You just start a connection with one other person, start inviting in participants as you go. And as part of the record of the ‘Wave’ or wavelength, you have buddy icons of all the participants. And everything is a reference to that original wave. So file it wherever you want, open it from wherever you want, it all points back to the original and will edit that original file for you AND all the participants. Because like I said, there is but one original, one index everyone’s client points to that same EXACT REFERENCE. That’s the genius of the wave format of communication and collaboration. Waves is a giant shared workspace, nobody really keeps private copies and edits them. They always edit the shared copy no matter what. And so the mailbox/cabinet metaphor is broken at last.
So if it’s not a filing cabinet we’re looking for, but Google Waves, what’s the metaphor? Instead of a filing cabinet in my office, I now use a big giant bulletin board that sits in the hallway in my building. And everyone posts there and edits there and nobody keeps copies of anything anywhere on the bulletin board. The original bulletin is there with all it’s edits recorded, all the participants in the document are recorded for all to see. Scary isn’t it?
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 