Is it just me, or has The Unofficial Apple Weblog (http://www.tuaw.com) become the slowest loading site on the web?
…And the number one reason why it’s so freaking slow? All those embedded You Tube feeds! Grrr!
When the Newton was introduced, it was a great device that lacked a supporting infrastructure. It couldn’t really communicate or share files or information; there weren’t a whole lot of uses for it…
After John Sculley’s demo I thought “I’ve got to get me one of these. I hope it also does this — I hope it also does that.” It didn’t quite; but it eventually got close.
Now there’s the internet, cellular communications, web standards, MP3, MP4 etc. All waiting for a single device that’s ridiculously intuitive to use, and sexy. The iPhone appears to be all of those things.
What does Apple’s iPhone have in common with the failed Apple Newton of more than a decade ago? Nothing. Yet.
But I was reminded of the Newton lately and how, despite its current hot streak, Apple doesn’t have an unblemished record when it comes to introducing innovative new devices. And the company may well be making some of the same mistakes now as it made in 1993 when it introduced Newton.
Newton was the first serious attempt in the industry at a PDA. I took my old Newton out of the box recently and, while it’s very large by today’s standards, it also remains very powerful — by today’s standards. It was an excellent device…
Hey, Apple: Remember the Newton before releasing iPhone - Computerworld Blogs
A nice summary of what it is that makes us want to hug our Macs…
This will never happen. A trojan horse by any other name…
Carl Howe (Blackfriars Communications) submits: I love Robert X. Cringely’s musings, if for no other reason than the fact that he has made some amazingly prescient predictions. I’m particularly reminded of his story about the Google (GOOG) datacenter in a box, which preceded Sun’s announcement by nearly six months. Well, he’s back again, this time analyzing the odd feature set contained in the Apple (AAPL) TV device. His insight? Did anyone else notice that it’s an always-on device with a 40 GByte disk? If it is for watching TV, why does it always have to be on?
Apple TV: Peer-to-Peer Networking’s Trojan Horse - SeekingAlpha
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SpotInside uses similar technologies to Spotlight to find files and display results, but it also shows the queries within those results. Also, it waits until you finish and submit your query before firing off suggestions…
There’s an application on the iPhone called “Notes.” Right now the icon just links to a placeholder. Let’s assume that the Notes app is some kind of a metaphor for a notepad, where we can use the keyboard to type in snippets on the go. Big deal, right?
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But it could be much more than that. Evidently Leopard — the next major release of OSX — will have some kind of a Notes capability attached to Mail, and other apps; select some text and paste to a new note…
Now, fast forward a little and imagine you’re reading a lengthy online article in Safari; you don’t have time just now so you select the unread text and save it as a new note. The note automatically picks up the web-page’s title as its own.
That’s all you do. The next time you charge your iPhone, it syncs and picks up all new notes on your Mac; there’s your article, ready to read in bed; on the bus; whatever…
It gets better: jump out of the Notes app to make a call, or listen to music, and when you go back to it — Notes has remembered your place in the long article.
Right now I use a Dell Axim VGA-screen PDA. On it I have an app called Haali Reader. It displays text files full screen, and it remembers where I’m up to in those files. With a pixel density of 220 per inch the fonts are, essentially, perfectly rendered, without the need for font smoothing to cure the jaggies.
This setup works so well that I can read from the small screen for hours at a time — without any eye strain. The only hassle is saving text on the Mac (in its current OS version) as named text files, and then copying them manually to the PDA’s SD card. If the iPhone can do the same thing — albeit not quite at the same pixel density — and with virtually no effort required to sync the files, this will be huge.
It doesn’t sound like much of a feature, but once you’ve tried Docs on the run, presented in such a ridiculously straight-forward interface — there’s really no looking back.
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iStat Pro is the famous Dashboard Widget that gives you a beautiful display that shows all sorts of information about the current status of your Mac. This iStat is a stand-alone application that does essentially the same thing…
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Pipette is a handy little utility for sampling pixels and retrieving a corresponding HTML hex code…
