DIRTY MODERN .rss

(not porn)

(but also not living)

According to my own highly regarded sources from within Apple, they are close to releasing an iPhone Shuffle which does away with the touch screen display and all other buttons. “Just whisper into the mouthpiece on the headphones and it makes the call for you,” he says. When asked how such a device could possible work in day to day usage, he declined to comment. He did, however, say that they were working with top App Store developers to make sure their iPhone Apps could run on the inputless and screenless device.

(Will this bullshit get me top coverage on news.google.com?)

stevenf: The Cost Of Lost. Interesting rundown comparing cost of Lost seasons 1-4 on DVD, Blu-Ray DVD, iTunes Standard Def, and iTunes High Def.

And oh shit! Lost is on right now!

I’m trying to spend less time in front of the TV in the evenings. I spent Tuesday Night on the patio reading Bill Moyers’ book “Moyers on Democracy” while smoking a cigar, drinking pale ales, and munching on excellent spanish peanuts picked up at the farmer’s market.

Last night, I had planned to work on music, but ended up spending the evening upgrading my Native Instruments apps/plug-ins. These updates came out in March when I wasn’t paying attention. So I slipped in my plans a little bit and watched “Da Vinci’s Inquest” while waiting for everything to download.

Tonight I plan on being back out on the patio with my MPC500. I’m still learning my way around that machine and would like to use it in one or both of next month’s shows.

I’m a bit excited about Mac OS X “Snow Leopard”. Few user-visible changes, with a focus on fine-tuning and giving developers better access to capabilities of modern hardware. It appears that Apple’s experience in making a lightweight Mac OS X “Core OS” for the iPhone will also drive this release.

One of my favorite operating system releases was OS/2 “Warp” (OS/2 3.0). OS/2 2.0 was a fascinating creature - completely divorced from Microsoft, OS/2 2.0 delivered an aggressively object-oriented runtime built on SOM (a desktop implementation of some of CORBA 1.x, I believe). It was radically different from Window 3.x. It’s hardware requirements were a bit high for the times, but it was a solid OS.

What impressed me about OS/2 3.0 “Warp” was that it’s system requirements were in some cases significantly LESS than OS/2 2.0, while performing better. I don’t know of any majoro user-visible adjustments (this was before operating system releases became the giant dog’n’pony shows that have been expected since both Windows 95 and Mac OS X).

I think that even though desktop and laptop hardware continue to get better, the rapid growth rates seen between 1995 and 2005 are slowing down. Now the pressure is on connectivity, portability, and storage storage storage for all of those mp3s and movies and photos. I think both Windows XP and Vista, along with Mac OS X 10.4 and particularly 10.5 have been a bit cavalier about their usage / expectation of resource availability without doing a good job of cleaning up afterwards. Removing a ‘TemporaryFiles’ folder used by Apple’s “Soundtrack Pro” program gave me back 25 GB of disk space. 25GB! I expect that when doing lossless audio work, I’m going to leave a lot of turds behind. But not that many. That’s an accumulation over only a few months. Now some of that may have been due to crashes brought on by the instability in Mac OS X 10.5.2’s audio subsystem (particularly in relation to some USB audio devices). But still - 25 gig! Over the course of just a couple of months!

I think that Apple is at a good place to do this. Good housekeeping is required - otherwise you end up with situations like Mac OS ‘Classic’ or even Windows Vista, where there is so much old baggage, bad hacks, outdated mentalities, etc, all in play; it makes it difficult to move the platform forward. Some companies and developers have always been mindful of this, electing to keep their products lean and fast, always (see Ableton Live - hands down, the most impressive audio application out there). Other companies don’t support that philosophy for whatever reason - backwards compatibility, rush to market, a combination of the two, etc.

This far into the Mac OS X life cycle, there’s not many new dog’n’pony features to add. The API’s have stabalized, the developer tools offer more than they ever have (Interface Builder 3 is a terrific update), the Finder and Spotlight are actually fast and usable; applications and utilities from both inside and outside of Apple are going to really shine on Mac OS X 10.5 with all that it offers to developers. A new age of PDA’s are upon us, whether it’s a device like an iPhone, an ultra-mobile Asus Eee-PC style portable, or even the Macbook Air: secondary and tertiary devices are really taking off.

I think that a secret part of the ‘Snow Leopard’ plan is to allow such devices, made by Apple (naturally), to proliferate. I was suprised, initially, when it was announced that the iPhone was built on Mac OS X - Mac OS X has been a pretty wasteful OS - or at least, one that would consume more resources than realized (often for caching, interestingly enough). To take the fine tuning and resource management ideas from the iPhone variation of OS X into the main system is what I think will allow for Apple to finally make the Eee PC style portable that everyone wanted the Macbook Air to be.

I’m putting my money on some kind of small device, priced around $600-$800, coming out at or around the same time as Snow Leopard. Combined with Mobile Me and Snow Leopard Server’s increasingly Exchange-like feature set (but better priced and more understandable for small organizations), the ubiquitous-data-access capability is there.

Today’s full-featured laptops (MacBooks, Inspirons, whatever) are their own entities; my aging iBook gets used rarely as I just don’t have as much data or software set up on it, and it’s sometimes too big of a pain to keep in sync.

The XO and Eee-PCs (or whatever they’re called) are also separate from the rest of one’s life; useful as a fun or educational toy, or as a geeks favorite gadget to see what they can get running on such a little device.

The Macbook Air is deliberately designed as a complementary computer, using the master’s optical drive even. While sexy, I think the Macbook Air misses the mark on a few items. But I think it’s an indication of things to come - laptops deliberately designed to complement your main machine. Smaller devices, from the Palm to the iPhone, have done this. And they’ll also be designed to work with your (or your company’s) data, which the Blackberry has done (and the iPhone will do when its new ‘enterprise’ support rolls out). Getting this onto other devices, without being constrained to an enterprisey system like Notes or Outlook, is where things really appear to be headed. It’s certainly something that I’d like to have. And the more I look at Snow Leopard, the more I believe that Apple is sneaking ahead of the crowd into delivering this into the hands of consumers. They’re skating to where the puck is going to be.