Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

The bell curve is a graph that shows distribution with a result that looks a lot like — you guessed it — a bell.

I think it was in WW2 when the US government asked for helmets for its new soldiers. A study was done of hat sizes; thousands of heads were measured and the result was the famous bell curve. It showed that the vast majority of Americans had heads of a fairly standard size (the meaty part of a bell in profile), while about five percent (the lip of the rim on the left) had unusually small heads, and about five percent (the lip of the rim on the right) had unusually big heads.

It turns out that this pattern of distribution turns up everywhere — about five percent of movies are remarkably bad and five percent are remarkably good; about five percent of employees are inept and five percent are exceptional…

So, getting back to Apple.

Their hold of the personal computer market world-wide is around five percent, and their pricing, build and packaging are at the high end. If the distribution of the makeup of computer buyers results in a bell curve as well, then Apple probably owns that top five percent.

In other words, they aren’t struggling against Dell and HP — they actually totally dominate their target audience…

I just discovered a great service for shortening URLs.

http://notlong.com

Other services like tiny URL will generate short address as well but the tend to have rather cryptic names; the beauty of Notlong is that you can prepend your own name to the shortened address. It’s like having your own domain name, only with .notlong.com instead of simply .com and, It’s Free!

It took me all of five seconds to get mactipslog.notlong.com as a shortened URL for this site (so much easier to remember).

In the past when rumors have started circulating regarding upcoming Apple keynotes, or uncovered patent applications, I’ve made a point of taking a stab at what it all means.

This time I’m taking a stab at the latest Apple patents. The ones that talk of a display that includes integrated photo sensor lenses, and a tablet-style computer that recognizes fingertip gestures, such as grabbing and moving objects about the screen and operating a virtual scroll wheel.

Here’s my prediction: The screen that’s a camera is not some kind of scanner. It is not an eyesight camera; the resolution will be far too low for that. The screen that’s also a camera will be focused one inch above the screen itself. It will see fuzzy blobs out to four inches or so, resolving into actual fingers and fingertips as you move your hand into that one inch sweet spot. It won’t read your fingerprints, or know if your hands are dirty; that doesn’t matter. It just needs to be good enough to guess that those are fingers coming into focus, and those fingers are expecting responses.

So you’ll cradle the Mac Tablet in one hand and manipulate the interface with the other, without ever touching the screen itself — it won’t have a pressure sensitive screen as in a Pocket PC (requiring actual physical contact, causing smudging, and not technically viable at the size required for a true tablet), and it won’t have a Wacom-style screen that would require a special pen and only one point of interface at a time.

With the screen that’s a camera you could use one finger in focus to point, click and drag; two fingers in focus to scroll, zoom and manipulate; and all ten fingures to type — yes, actually viably type.

No scratches. No smudges. No buttons — just pure intuition.

That’s the killer app in all this.