Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Ok. Apple special event time again tomorrow morning. Here are my hunches/predictions:

1. iTunes will have a major revamp and it will be renamed iMedia or some such thing, to reflect the fact that it’s just as much about movies and iPhone apps as it is about music.

2. There will be a music subscription service where for $15 a month you can download all the music you want, but when you stop paying, that music disappears.

3. A new iPod nano, like the generation 2 model, but with the wheel at the bottom and the rest of the front taken up with a vertical screen. Flip it sideways for screening movies and the new orientation of the wheel is reflected by a virtual wheel that appears on the screen whenever you touch the real one.

4. Announcement that 10 million iPhones have now been sold. Thanks for coming. Goodbye. Event ends with some hip band playing live.

I’m always a little nervous when it comes to OS updates. On the one hand it’s always nice to be up to date, but on the other, why risk breaking something that’s so stable in its current state.

When I looked at the specs of the 10.4.11 update the list of fixes looked very arcane, and not particularly exciting or relevant to my situation. But there also was included the final and supposedly stable version of Safari 3; and this was the only way to get a hold of it. I bit the bullet, induced by the prospect of exploring the new Safari.

I installed the upgrade and had no problems at all with the OS side of things; it was Safari itself that caused what grief I had. None of my SIMBL driven hacks liked it; several keyboard shortcuts had been changed — screwing up some of my Butler macros, and to me, it seems slower. Worse still, it was now here to stay (shades of the whole Microsoft IE embedded into the Windows OS brouhaha, but that’s another story).

This is the price one pays for tinkering, I guess. I don’t mean tinkering as in doing the upgrade; I mean tinkering as in having a pimped Safari to be upgraded. When I think back on all the software platforms I’ve used, PC, Mac and handheld, there was always some third party add-on that made each one “just so.”

Speaking of upgrades, have you noticed that Apple is more and more in the habit of adding some gift with each one? All of the iPhone and Touch updates, and the latest revisions to iTunes, have been primarily designed to stomp the latest hack, but they all add some new cool functionality that (probably) should have been there all along.

Funny thing about rounded corners. You either love them or you hate them; I’m quite schizophrenic on the subject. When I first built the Andrew’s Mac Tips site everything had rounded corners.
 

 
Lots of people liked them and wanted to know how I did it. I liked them too, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble; but eventually I decided that they didn’t really serve any purpose, and they looked a little too “whimsical.”

Then I went all sharp edged and simple and square.

Mac OS windows have rounded top corners as a rule and I can understand that; there’s a lot of history to them, and they — in a subliminal way — suggest that if you want to resize a window: don’t look here, do it at the bottom-right corner.

As for the menu-bar: I was a little peeved — when I first saw Macs — that it too was rounded, but I came around. When Panther gave way to Tiger they went for a shiny title-bar, but it looked (and still looks) more like a smudge than a sheen to me.

Now Leopard has a new title-bar; all the focus has been on the fact that it’s semi-transparent. But look! No more rounded corners!
 

 
The Mac OS just lost its trademark. If the new title-bar reminds me of anything, it’s the title-bar of the iPhone. Are we slowly transitioning to the iPhone paradigm — one notch at a time?

I suddenly like the idea of an iPod Touch at my side. I think it would make the coolest notepad, ever.

I hate paper. Whatever I write on paper it gets transcribed to my Mac at some stage anyway so why not write once and let automation do its thing? I’ve tried so called hipster PDAs, and plain old paper pads, but they are so last century.

Right now I am writing this on my Dell Pocket PC and that’s fine and good, but even after years and years of using a stylus on a soft plastic screen, there’s always that nagging fear at the back of my mind that a particle of grit is going to find its way onto the screen and get dragged by the nib — leaving a scratch. It’s a real shiver down the spine feeling that once experienced you never want to repeat.

The screen of the Dell is flawless, but there’s always that fear. So, turning our attention to the iPod Touch, it has a glass screen and the input method is my squishy thumbs. I could hammer away for hours, during a dust storm if need be.

This is huge.

Yes, I know there is no Notes app on the Touch. It does have Contacts though, and new contacts can be created and synced back to the Address Book on the Mac. Those contacts have a Notes field and that’s where the “Think outside the box” killer app resides. I will of course need to try out this theory on a demo Touch to see if it all actually works as hoped. If it does then hello ultimate notepad. Oh, and it also includes music, movies and Safari…

YouTube - Create an offline To-Do list on your iTouch

An impressive looking site from an ex Apple employee discussing some of the secrets behind their marketing successes. Be sure to download the free e-book. It’s a great example of how good a PDF document can look.

Now, back to actually reading the content…

Secrets of Apple-style Marketing

When you are within an iPhone application at a particular screen that you use a lot, you should be able to touch and hold on the title bar for options. The icon of the parent application will pop up with four arrows overlaid, representing up, down, left and right.

Say you’re in Mail, in your Gmail inbox. Touching and holding the title bar brings up the Mail icon. Touch the left arrow. The next time you want to check your Gmail account, you go to the Home screen and touch and swipe to the left on the Mail icon to go straight there.

Home and Swipe for:

• Add New Event
• One of four favorite web pages
• Countdown timer
• A particular photo album…

When I listen to Mac Break Weekly, or Mac Notables — particularly after product announcements — there’s often a lot of speculation in their discussions about “When are they going to make something geared more towards the enterprise market?” Or, “When will there be one-button Upload to Flickr?”

Probably never.

I think the simple answer to these questions, and others covering features that aren’t there, is that Steve speaks the truth when he says they design products that they themselves would love to own.

Take the iPhone. I bet that during its development, Steve was, among other roles, the “Battery Czar.” Whenever anyone suggested a new feature the first thing he would ask is: “Will it still go a whole day on a single charge?” If the answer was no then that was the end of it.

Flickr is a great service and has solid community-based features, but Steve looks at it and sees something as ugly as hell; end of story. It’s the same with Google: he loves what their back end can do, but hates how it’s presented on the web.

Copy and paste would be great on the iPhone, but it’s just too many steps away from just “whipping it out and using it.” Same with the idea of multiple selections. On the one hand you could have extra capabilities that are invoked through clever but sometimes hard to remember combinations of buttons and gestures (the sort of features that might require another trip to the handbook), and on the other hand you have fewer (sometimes quite cumbersome in the number of taps) capabilities, that are at the same time — always obvious.

The best scenario to please advanced users would be a set of basic obvious features with a more advanced subset underlying them. The trick would be to make those advanced features available to those who hold the “magic key” (hold this while tapping that, or whatever) while making it impossible for the casual user to accidently stumble across them and get lost within them.

For now such a scenario isn’t worth the effort. It’s all too new — just like the original Mac with its deliberately arrow key-less keyboard.

To summarize: they are leaning towards features that can be explained in a sentence, rather than a paragraph; look at Boot Camp as an example: “With Boot Camp — you reboot and you’re running a Windows machine with no sign of the Mac. Then you reboot and you’re back to your Mac, with no sign of Windows.” Simple.

Now try to explain the other Windows virtualisation options such as Parallels in a sentence without getting an: “Eh? Say that again” reaction.

It’s the old three plus four thing: There’s an urban myth that says that phone numbers are broken up three plus four (555-1234) because people can easily remember or digest three things; somewhat easily remember four things; and have no hope at all of remembering five or more.

The iPhone is three devices in one; those three devices do four things really well. When those things are automatic and ubiquitous is when the really cool second-level stuff arrives.

What a beautiful thing it is. That annoying little black square (the camera and mic) that marred the front has gone at last. Still the same classic shape, only refined to within an inch of its life. Brilliant!

I was more than a little afraid that like some other formally respected brands, Apple might use this iMac to suddenly veer off into some wierd new design language. But no, this is the most elegant and elemental Mac ever.

So, where was the One More Thing?

Two hours were set aside for the presentation which only took 75 minutes. If what we saw today was really all there was, then by following the pattern of past presentations, the iMac would have come at the end.

The end (the tablet, married perfectly to the new bluetooth keyboard (which also pairs to the iPhone?)) was left out at the last minute because there wasn’t enough flash memory available in the World to put it into full production.

Kidding aside, I’m really impressed with the new iMac; it’s “evolutionary,” fresh and desirable, but not so desirable that I instantly stop loving my current model.

Recently, Apple released Safari for Windows to broaden their user base, and that of standards compliant browsers in general. At about the same time they released the guidelines for creating web pages that could be optimized for the iPhone.

They stressed the concept of conformance to web standards and the use of the simplier forms of enhancements, like javascript and CSS, rather than full blown Java or Flash applets. So, theoretically, we would have pages that are viewable on any modern browser and platform, including the iPhone.

For a long time there were articles complaining about the number of websites that could only be viewed properly using Microsoft Internet Explorer; while Firefox and Safari followed the rules, they couldn’t always display pages tested only for the cludgy Microsoft browser.

Now there is no excuse for lazy web developers who use IE as their primary browser not to at least see how their new pages would look in Safari, and then fix them so that they’ll look as good and be as functional — in any browser.

All fine and good — and yet… Now we are seeing lots of sites that look great in iPhone, and are geared towards the iPhone user, but try to look at them with the gold standard of compliance, namely Safari, and you get kicked right off.

What went wrong here?

Imagine a single device that combines a display (17 to 30 inches), speakers, and network connectivity (wifi and fast ethernet). Several of these “iScreens” could be placed throughout your home, connecting back to your main Mac hub.

You walk into any room in your house that has an iScreen and you access and control it using your iPhone. On the phone’s main screen is an AV icon. When you tap that icon the AV controls appear and the phone sends a signal to the iScreen that turns it on and resumes whatever you were watching or listening to the last time you were in that room.

For argument’s sake, let’s say that the last time you were watching Tv channel 2 — that channel comes up on the screen and the phone shows the Tv controls. At the top of the phone screen are two buttons: one for Sources that causes the media-type chooser to slide into view, and one called Settings . Between them is a slide button to turn off the iScreen. Immediately below the two buttons is a roller displaying all the available TV channels (emanating from the Mac, which is interfaced to your cable box/satellite receiver/whatever), as well as un-watched recorded shows — with the current channel selected.

Rolling to another channel causes a pop up to show live TV from that channel or recording on the phone, not on the iScreen. Tapping the pop up, or pressing the right arrow on the roller changes the channel on the iScreen. You can also step through the channels by feel, using the volume switch on the phone. Below Channels is a Mute button and a volume slider.

The last item is a Record button that, when pressed, turns into an Unlock slider. When unlocked, recording begins and a pop up asks the recording duration, input for an optional name, and Done and Cancel buttons. The recording function also works with channels being previewed, so you can spot a show and start recording without disturbing others in the room who are watching channel 2. As you move the recording duration roller it displays remaining minutes and hours, as well as corresponding end-times (for example: 90 minutes — 10:30 p.m.).

The Settings view for Tv would include sliders for brightness, contrast etc., along with a scheduler for time shifting that shows the next seven days of shows; just click a show to highlight it for recording. More elaborate settings would be handled on the Mac.

Remember: The shows are coming from, or being recorded to the Mac; the iScreen is just the viewer and the phone is just the controller.

As well as TV, the other sources would include: Movies, Music (and Podcasts), and Radio.

Movies would be handled pretty much the same way they are handled using iTunes on the phone; only this time the actual movies are stored on the Mac and viewed on the iScreen. If you quit a movie before it ends you are asked if you want the remainder transfered to the phone for private viewing the next time you physically sync.

iScreen music is handled just like movies — accessing the files stored on the Mac; only this time you have the option to sleep the iScreen’s display and just use its loudspeakers.

Radio includes internet radio (from the Mac’s iTunes), Satellite radio (if attached), and broadcast (if attached). All of the different radio sources can be subjectively tagged and grouped into a common seamless Favorites list. Recording functions, like those for TV, could also be included.

So, say you’re watching Pirates of the Caribbean, “Did someone say: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?…” At the same time that the others in the room are continuing to watch the film, you are choosing the other one on the phone’s display. You voice your suggestion and if they agree — you tap to commit and the iScreen serenely fades to black and then up comes the new movie, or show, or song; what have you. Right there and then. No more special moments ruined by on-screen displays and channel flipping when you’re not the guy with the remote.