Very cool, but I’m not sure how easy this would be to use day-to-day.
I guess we’ll know tomorrow.
Category: Design
‘We Have to be Really Clear’
Steve Jobs, in this video linked to by All Thing D’s John Paczkowski:
This is a very complicated world. This is a very noisy world and we’re not going to get a chance … to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.
Dieter Rams
On Sleep Indicators
John Gruber linked to this article on Flood Lite today:
In July 2002, Apple filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.”
The average respiratory rate for adults is 12-20 breaths per minute, which is the rate that the sleep-indicator light fades in and out on most Apple laptops. Older models such as the Macintosh PowerBook, however, use a blinking LED indicator, with discrete pulses in one-second intervals.
Apple to Host Music Event Sept. 1
The Future of Textbooks
Textbooks don’t have to be text. They don’t have to be books.
Stunning. The future of textbooks aren’t in dead trees.
Clunky
I love the simplicity of the MacBook Air — when I have to use someone else’s MacBook Pro, it feels heavy and clunky. Don’t get me started on how it feels to use someone else’s Window machine. It would be nice if my Air lasted for 20 years.
I agree. The Air is a piece of art. While it doesn’t meet my day-to-day needs, I really wish it did.
Many Features Do Not a Good Program Make
The new Mac Office 2011, currently in development, will easily best iWork ’09, and with every feature update demonstrates just how far behind iWork has fallen.
I’ll take iWork over Office any day of the week.
Analog Computing
The Apple Graphics Tablet
There’s no doubt that Apple’s iPad is a revolutionary computing device that’s ushering in a new era of tablet computing.
But in 1979, an earlier generation of Apple users used a different kind of Apple tablet, back when the word meant something else entirely.
The Apple Graphics Tablet was designed by Summagraphics and sold by Apple Computer Inc. for the Apple II personal microcomputer. (Summagraphics also marketed the device for other platforms as the BitPad.) To be clear, this tablet was not a stand-alone computing device like the iPad. Instead, it was an input device for creating images on the Apple II’s screen, and it predated the Apple II’s mouse by six years.
Apps vs. the Web
Craig Hockenberry, for A List Apart:
With such great tools available and talented developers that know how to exploit them, the iPhone should be overflowing with web applications, right? Actually, the opposite is true: there are over 100,000 titles on iTunes and only a handful of popular applications have been created with web standards.
Apple has promoted both the App Store and web browser as ways for developers to get their creations into the hands of customers. They even gave the web a year-long head start before beginning to sell apps in the store. Clearly there’s more at play here: what attracts developers to iTunes instead of the web?
The MacBook Air Project
This here is a little blog to follow what I have termed the MacBook Air project. An attempt to turn a busted Apple MacBook Air into a computer in a keyboard.
While it is still a little rough, this is pretty sweet.