512 Pixels

Really, really impressive. Who needs the home button anymore?

Update 1: Hot damn.

Verizon’s Lowell McAdam, to BusinessWeek:

We probably worked six or nine months on the technical side of this and saw we could make this work. Then we did the commercial side. The commercial deal took us a day.

[via Mac Stories]

Michael Ciarlo:

Network neutrality is the idea that your cellular, cable, or phone internet connection should treat all websites and services the same. Big companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast want to treat them differently so they can charge you more depending on what you use.

This is a great way to explain net neutrality to the non-geeky people in your life.

[via Ian P. Hines]

A guy I work with bought a Magic Trackpad a few weeks ago, and has been raving about it. Since I haven’t used one outside of a quick demo at the Apple Store — and don’t use the trackpad on my MacBook Pro much — I thought it would be interesting to use one for a solid 24 hours.

I’ll be updating this post throughout the day, into tomorrow morning. Be sure to stay tuned…

Wednesday — Morning

• Setup wasn’t as easy I was hoping. My MacBook Pro wouldn’t connect to it. My guess is that it was an issue with the Trackpad having been setup with his machine. After a quick trip to the user guide online, it was paired and ready to go.
• It is weird to use a trackpad off-center from my screen. I currently have it to the right of my Apple Extended II keyboard at my office.
• I don’t use gestures often, being a Magic Mouse guy. But the 4-fingered one for Expose (All Windows) is pretty sweet.
• Even though my MacBook Pro has one of the fancy no-button trackpads, I still hover my thumb and use it to click. Doing that on the slightly-raised Magic Trackpad is already making my thumb hurt. God, I’m wimpy.
• The Magic Trackpad seems to have assumed the settings I had set for the internal trackpad. Related: I hate “Tap to Click.”

Wednesday — Afternoon

• When I got back from lunch, the trackpad woke the machine up as quickly as the Magic Mouse does. Not surprising, but nice.
• After a few hours, I’m finally used to clicking with my fingers, not my thumb.
• I’m working in Photoshop and QuarkXPress¹ this afternoon. I feel way less precise with the Magic Trackpad than I do with a mouse.
• Quark just crashed. But I don’t blame the Magic Trackpad.
• I’m really craving some green tea. Also not the Magic Trackpad’s fault.
• Safari just comes alive with gestures, but the trackpad doesn’t offer any more magic than the mouse.
• My friend Katie weighs in on the Magic Trackpad and being left-handed. I’ll have to see if my wife agrees.
• The size of this thing is impressive. Gestures and scrolling are super easy on the seemingly-never-ending surface. My fingers haven’t fallen off the edge a single time.
• The Magic Trackpad is over half the size of the keyboard on an Asus EeePC 900HA.

Wednesday — Evening

• It won’t sync with my Clamshell iBook, since Bluetooth hadn’t been invented yet in 1999. A forgivable flaw.
• It feels more natural to use it right next to the MacBook Pro when its open, rather than with an external keyboard and display. I’ll pair it with my 27" iMac in a bit.
• I knew the four-finger horizontal swipe would bring up the App Switcher (like CMD+Tab), but I didn’t realize that swiping horizontally with just two fingers would move the selector across the App Switcher. Apparently my MacBook Pro does it, too. Whoops — I guess I spend too much time on the keyboard.
• I had some cooked spinach and noodles with white sauce for dinner. So good.
• The Magic Trackpad has to be the most minimal piece of hardware I’ve ever seen. I really like the looks of it.
• I’m drinking a beer while being on the DadCast. The Magic Trackpad wouldn’t make a good coaster, due to the pitch of the surface itself. I like the trackpad a lot more in this type of situation — laid back, with just a few Safari tabs and Skype open.
• The feet-do-the-clicking thing is pretty neat, but it seems to be louder than the Magic Mouse when its depressed. Again, I say: I hate Tap to Click.
• Headed to bed. If I dream about the Magic Trackpad, I’ll post it here in the morning.

Thursday — Morning

• Got the trackpad setup with the new iMac. Turned Tap to Click on, to be objective, and since several readers asked me to.
• Having gestures on a desktop computer is pretty cool. I think the Magic Trackpad adds a lot more to the iMac experience than it does the MacBook Pro.
• Using the Magic Trackpad for actual work continues to be annoying. While gestures are nice, they aren’t worth losing the fine control I can achieve with a mouse.

Conclusion: I hate the Magic Trackpad

All in all, the Magic Trackpad is a pretty simple device. But at the same time, it is quite complex. Using the built-in trackpad on a notebook makes sense, but using one with a desktop just doesn’t do it for me. It just seems to add another layer of abstraction between me and the computer in a way that isn’t present on a notebook.

I’ve tolerated it for casual² computing like surfing and checking email. Having notebook-style gestures on the desktop is a lot of fun. I’d imagine its just about perfect to use on the couch with a computer hooked up to a television.

However, I struggled to maintain the speed and accuracy I can achieve with my Magic Mouse in programs like Photoshop, Illustrator and QuarkXPress. Gestures don’t add any value to these apps, so the trade-off just doesn’t add up. The Magic Trackpad has slowed me down in several key applications in my workflow.

Maybe more time would help me adapt, but I don’t like adapting to tools, especially if I already have a superior one at hand.

In short, I won’t be replacing my Magic Mouse with it. The Magic Trackpad is just too casual. Excuse while I go apologize to my Magic Mouse for making it live in a drawer for 24 hours.

Apple’s Phil Schiller, via Ars Technica:

We want the experience to be the same for every iPhone user. So there are no special Verizon Apps preinstalled. AT&T offers customers some apps via the App Store. I’ll let Verizon comment if they are working on anything for that.

I told you Apple wasn’t going to take crap from the wireless carrier. Even the Mobile Hotspot is in the Settings app.

A week ago, I announced I am donating my 25th birthday to Charity: water.

I’m happy to announce that $100 has been donated to the cause — 25% of my modest $400 goal. That is enough for 5 people to have clean water. Amazing.

I’d love to meet the pledge before my birthday on January 28, so please consider donating to a great cause.

I’ll update the total weekly, so don’t worry, I’ll bug you at least two more times.

Google’s Mike Jazayeri, Product Manager for Chromium:

We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 video support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

That’s a ballsy move. Its unclear if a H.264 extension would make up for this.

[via DF]

So the Verizon iPhone is going to use CDMA, like most other smartphones the carrier options. Sadly, CDMA has a major flaw — data and voice can’t co-exsist. If you’re on a call, you can’t surf. If you’re surfing, data gets interrupted, or the call goes to voicemail. I’ve seen both.

Of course, AT&T’s 3G doesn’t suffer from this flaw. AT&T is sure to make that point to consumers over and over from now on.

But the Verizon iPhone is coming with Mobile Hotspot, that allows users to use the network’s 3G on up to 5 devices. That’s possible on AT&T iPhones, but not without a jailbreak.

I used it on my Droid, and its awesome. I’m sure it will be awesome when AT&T gets around to adding it in the future, making this whole thing moot.

Of course, there is always Volumebuttongate. That’s going to be a fun one.

Boom.

I spent my evening setting up an original Blueberry-colored iBook “Clamshell” G3. You remember this machine, right? It was the very first iBook, introduced in 1999. It has a damn handle, for crying out loud. The photo above is of my machine, leaning up against a “Blue & White” PowerMac G3 I used to have.

Now, I love old tech. I really do. But tonight’s adventure in time travel had a purpose, believe it or not.

Last week, AppleCare agreed to replace my 24-inch iMac with a new 27-inch model after the machine had numerous major repairs. Since the boss likes me to have my work-supplied MacBook Pro with me when I’m at work, I couldn’t leave it at home for my wife to use.

The Clamshell has been in the hall closet for a while now. In fact, I had forgotten it was running OS 9 last time I had it out. So, after finding the charger and my OS X 10.3 CDs, I settled down to install Panther on the 12-year-old laptop.

Hardware

The entire Clamshell iBook line is striking in person. It looks pretty dated, but seen from the beige box-based design philosophy of 1999 when it was introduced, its mind-blowing. The colored rubber slices the machine in half, covering most of the bottom and a good bit of the lid. Sadly, the Apple logo is upside down, like on many other older models. The rubber and translucent lid lets a little light in through the case around the LCD, which can be distracting.

My model used to belong to a local school district, so the lid has a branded logo pressed into the rubber. Other than that, its in great shape.

Which isn’t surprising, since Apple designed these things to be basically indestructible.

Like modern machines, there are no latches to hold the LCD shut when the unit is closed. It’s curious that Apple added those back to later models of the iBook G3 and G4. The Clamshell also has a power adaptor that turns from orange to green when the battery is charged and a sleep indicator light. Instead of white, though, this light is a bright green and its situated on the hinge, so it can be seen if the lid is opened or closed. Old-school, for sure.

The keyboard is similar to those that shipped on the Pismo — which may be my favorite notebook laptop ever. Sadly, the typing surface is a little mushy, but the keys are firm and clicky. My big peeve here is that the right-side Command key is an Enter key.

The trackpad works well, and is small enough to not get in the way too badly, which is nice, since OS X 10.3 can’t ignore “accidental input” from the trackpad.

The screen — while praised by Steve Jobs in the aforelinked keynote — isn’t great. I can forgive the fact that its just 800 x 600, but the color is pretty bad. The panel blows out the highlights.

After a full charge, the battery meter has almost 5 hours on it. If the battery is as good as it was last time I played around with it, I think it will reach that without any problem. This unit has an Apple battery in it, but not the factory original.

This model came with a tiny hard drive, but at some point down the line got upgraded to a spacious 20 GB hard drive. Fancy. There’s no Bluetooth, though. And just the original Airport card. And a CD-ROM drive.

Panther

Panther — OS X 10.3 — is what I would consider the first version of OS X really ready for the average user. Its small — the base install of version 10.3.2 requires only 932 MB of hard drive space. On this machine it boots quickly and is fairly responsive. I ran several rounds of updates with no issue.

Panther introduced Exposé, which is a little slow on the iBook. iChat works without issue, as does Mail.

Panther featured the Brushed Metal UI. Everywhere. I had forgotten how much there was. Windows are clunky and everything has rounded-corners.

The big problem with older OSs is having to use older browsers. There are few ways around this. I used to like Firefox more on older systems (Ironic, since I hate it everywhere else.) Sadly, Firefox 3.6 requires 10.4, so I opted to put Camino 1.6 on the iBook. Camino is built on the same foundation as Firefox, but runs a lot lighter, if that makes sense. In Camino 1.6, Gmail fully loads — a huge factor for many users, including my iMac-less wife.

This machine won’t run Tiger, since it doesn’t have a FireWire port. However, later model Clamshell iBooks are equipped with one, offering a better experience in a Snow Leopard world.

Its startling how little OS X has changed since 10.3 Sure, the UI is refined, but things basically work the same in Panther as they do in Snow Leopard.

End of the Rope

As cool (Is that the right word?) as this iBook is, its not a valid machine anymore unless you need a netbook-class machine. Even then, the screen resolution and the lack of a modern browser are troublesome. At best, this notebook is a hobby. Which is sad, since I love it, despite its quirky appearance. And the handle. When I went to Cupertino in 2007 for Genius training, I took this machine, since my PowerBook was in the shop. I got some looks on Apple’s campus.

300 Mhz doesn’t go as far as it used to. But this little iBook has a little fight left in it yet.

Jay Yarow at Business Insider:

After we wrote about Verizon’s plan to offer unlimited data plans, AT&T PR boss Larry Solomon reached out with a statement: “The iPhone is built for speed, but that’s not what you get with a CDMA phone. I’m not sure iPhone users are ready for life in the slow lane.”

He says AT&T’s GSM technology is faster than Verizon’s CDMA technology.

Stay classy, AT&T.

Joe Wilcox, on the Verizon iPhone announcement:

Verizon isn’t AT&T. The United States’ largest cellular carrier isn’t accustomed to taking crap from handset manufacturers. Verizon controls everything on its network and is quick to customize handsets with its software and services. AT&T is different, or was when Apple launched the original iPhone in June 2007. AT&T made lots of concessions to get iPhone, such as granting Apple control over the software and updates.

Wilcox is a moron if he thinks Apple gave up its control over the iPhone to have it on Verizon. In reality, I’m sure Verizon is more than happy to make concessions to Apple to be able to sell the iPhone.

[via DF]