512 Pixels

MSNBC:

A little over a year after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett began hatching a plan over dinner to persuade America’s wealthiest people to give most of their fortunes to charity, more than three-dozen individuals and families have agreed to take part, campaign organizers announced Wednesday.

[…]

The pledge is a moral commitment to give, not a legal contract. It does not involve pooling money or supporting one cause or organization. It’s up to each person who signs the pledge how to divvy up their wealth.

Say what you will about Bill Gates and Microsoft, but this is completely awesome. This is the kind of hero the 21st century needs.

Randy Rodriguez, designer of the Nissan 370Z, in an interview with Autoblog:

My very first car was a Datsun Z. My dad had a gas station and got this Z somehow. My older brother begged him for it and got it from him when I was 11. We worked on that when we were kids and then I wanted one badly. I was 14 when I got my car.

[…]

That’s why I decided to work with Nissan: because I have such a strong connection with the Z, and I think that car kind of made me want to be a designer. It’s the first car that I fell in love with, and I think that gave me an advantage when it came to designing the 370 because I knew so much about the car’s history.

Google’s Urs Hölzle:

We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Not surprising. At least Google knows when to pull the plug on failed projects.

Michael Robertson:

Quietly mentioned in the release note of version 1.2 is the ability to play music files from remote storage in the background. I say “quietly” because this capability is not among the bullet list of features.

What this means is that for any music files such as MP3 or Apple’s AAC files stored in your iDisk account you can play them on your devices while you use your device for other operations. This makes streaming practical from Apple’s online storage. This new release brings this capability to iPhone, iTouch and iPad. You can stream music to multiple devices simultaneously.

My dogcow tattoo is on the list!

Wired:

Motorola Droid users better not get too excited by Android 2.2, also known as “Froyo.” While Verizon Wireless is set to push out the latest version of the Android operating system to Droid users starting this week, two key features will be missing: tethering and Wi-Fi hot spot capability.

Verizon says the Droid won’t get these two features, which are built into the Android 2.2 OS, because the device’s hardware isn’t capable of supporting it.

Weird, as my rooted Droid serves as a great mobile hotspot. The popular USB tethering app PDANet doesn’t even require root access.

Shame on you, Verizon.

Chris Michel created an Apple aluminum keyboard out of nothing but CSS and HTML5:

I began with the function keys and thought I would just leave the icons out, just using the “F1”, “F2”, to keep it simple. But once I got that row done, I just had to take a crack at creating the little icons with some beautiful CSS. I started with the sound-off icon, and successfully rendered it close enough for what I was going for. That little icon started a monster, because some of these icons were quite tedious to design. I spent a couple hours just on the function row icons, after that things started to speed up. I mainly focused on Safari and Chrome for this, so those will render the keyboard most accurately.

Pretty slick.

[ via Macgasm]

Rentzsch:

OK, the iPad’s screen is 1024x768 @ 130dpi. Physical dimensions work out to 7.88”x5.91”.

Those same dimensions at 326 ppi would result in 2568x1926 pixels — more than my current 30” Cinema Display (2560x1600).

I can see Apple bumping the resolution on future iPad models, but not that high. I’m not sure anyone would really want the company to do that, even.

Nilay Patel at Engadget:

All in all, the Core i3 and Radeon HD 4670 more than lived up to their billing here – they provide a noticeable performance boost over the familiar Core 2 Duo / 9400m setup that was Apple’s standard kit for so long, and we doubt the average iMac buyer will run up against any performance limitations. In fact, if you’re considering a Core i7 MacBook Pro and you can live without portability, an iMac might even be the better bet.

Indeed, the low-end iMac is a great value. Apple’s giving users more bang for their buck here than anywhere else in the product line.

Think SMS meets chat room. Seems like a great low-tech way to keep in touch as a group.

Joshua Topolsky, in his review of Apple’s latest peripheral:

There isn’t anything truly magical, revolutionary, or groundbreaking about the Magic Trackpad. It’s not the first of its kind, and it doesn’t turn our current computing paradigms on their ear. It’s an excellent device for those who prefer touch input to mouse or trackball, and it’s a solidly built piece of gear that will compliment the uncluttered workspaces of lots of geeks out there. But it’s not a game changer or the death knell for our modern day method of interacting with our PCs as some have speculated.

The “some” he refers to includes Gizmodo, where Jesus Diaz posted an article named “ Apple Magic Trackpad: The Beginning of the End for Mac OS X.” Here’s an excerpt:

After the success of the iPhone, the iPod touch, and the iPad, Apple has realized that the consumer market is ready for a new user interface paradigm, centered around multitouch and the idea of fully database-driven modal operating system. The death of the desktop metaphor—that overcomplicated and stinking mass of hurt made out of a zillion folders and files—as we know it. It was good when the world ran on floppies and small hard drives, but it’s time to move on.

[…]

But not only the keyboard and the trackpad will merge. Mac OS X and iOS—which is a customized subset of Apple’s desktop operating system—will merge.

That doesn’t mean that your iMac will run like today’s iPad, but its interface will change completely. It will be a lot simpler, and multitouch based. Gone will be the Finder, gone will be the windows. The traditional computer desktop will be replaced into something streamlined, but not less powerful. Perhaps for some pro users, there will be a mosaic view to watch several apps at the same time, but eventually Apple will move everyone to a modal-based interface.

It is probably inevitable that iOS and Mac OS X will start to merge in some way. Actually, the two are already closely related, as the former borrows heavily from the underpinnings of the latter.

Diaz suggests that iOS will swallow Mac OS X, leaving the desktop in some sort of weird, modal-based world that looks a lot like the iPad.

I’m not sure he’s right. Apple understands that the desktop and the mobile device are different in not only form-factor, but in the way people use them. It would be impossible to use two apps at the same time on an iPhone due to screen size, and running one app at a time on a desktop would feel insulting. The iPad, somewhere in the middle, has the most to gain or lose with a radical UI shift.

I do think the day is coming when iOS apps can be run on Mac OS X. It would give iPhone and iPad customers a strong tie to the Mac, and could increase the halo effect. I wrote this back in December, and while I was wrong about what the iPad ended up being, the theory is still a good one, I think:

Maybe the strongest option would be a hybrid between the Mac and iPhone OS. I imagine this as a device running Mac OS X, but also having the ability to run apps purchased from the App Store in some type of environment like OS X’s Dashboard. That way, the tablet is both the most portable Mac and the largest iPod touch on the market.

As it stands today, Mac OS X isn’t ready for touch. It has lots of small targets. I can’t imagine trying to enter Time Machine from the menubar with my index finger. It’s just awkward. Additionally, reaching up and touching a display all day to interact with it is troublesome and tiring.

Besides the software question, the obvious problem with all of this is hardware. iOS apps are designed to work via touch, not with a mouse or trackpad (no matter how magical it may be). There isn’t even a cursor in iOS. Using an iOS app with a mouse could prove tricky, but with the addition of things like inertia scrolling to its MacBook line, Apple seems to be slowly wearing that boundary down. But an overhaul to iOS apps would probably be needed.

So, will the iMac of tomorrow look and work like a big iPad of today? No. Does the Magic Trackpad indicate where Apple is heading in the future? Maybe. It seems like an obvious evolution in Apple’s peripheral line, but it’s hard to draw any longterm conclusions from it, at least at this point.

Very slick. I think Apple sees Firewire as the only high-speed connection users need, but it would be nice to have some options.