Gone Pro
After much deliberation, and the need to be actually be able to playback and edit the HD video I’m now shooting for Dear Toronto, I took the leap and upgraded my couple-year-old white 13″ MacBook to a 15″ MacBook Pro. A fella named Shawn Blanc wrote a great review of it and all of its features (via TUAW) that I pretty much agree with (although I’m still not entirely sold on the necessity of using multi-touch on the trackpad).
It’s been a really treat to use so far, and takes me back to the days where I had my 12″ PowerBook and it was a joy to use. The MacBook, while a worthwhile upgrade in terms of performance and under-the-hood improvements, was a step back in hardware design. There’s really something special about being able to work on a fully aluminum surface, and the look-and-feel of it just feels nice, and the design really tends to stand the test of time much better than plastic. It’s all about the experience, inside and out of the computer.
Thin is In
With the introduction of the MacBook Air, it looks like Apple has kickstarted the trend of microcomputing all over again. Turns out, Lenovo had been building a near identical computer for the past two years, and Apple totally sidelined them within weeks of their launch announcement.
Anyway, it’s good to see that Lenovo has really invested in good design and usability of its products with their new slim power adapter. Say goodbye to those klunky bricks you have to lug around with your laptop - this stuff is gold for frequent travelers.
(As a sidenote to Geek.com linked in the above article - welcome to the 21st century, guys. Stop finding ways of preventing people from saving your images and invest that energy in developing content).
New iPods this Wednesday?
There’s a ton of rumours floating around that a press event Apple is holding Wednesday will see the introduction of a new line of iPods. I say it’s about time. Though I haven’t even had my 30 GB black one for a year now, the design of this one dates back about two years and is starting to look a little stale next to the iPhone. Then there’s the issue of storage; I don’t have a problem with hard drive-based media players from a capacity standpoint (though mine is almost completely full, as shown above), but the performance on the full-sized iPod compared to the Nano (which uses flash storage) is just awful.
The iPod uses some pretty aggressive power saving mechanism that spins down the hard drive fairly often. While this is great for battery life, this also means that when I hit the next button, there’s a delay of sometimes one up to sometimes four seconds before the track changes, and even then, the album artwork takes a couple extra seconds to refresh. This is a lousy user experience. The Nano changes songs without skipping a beat, so I’d like to see them move to flash storage across all platforms.
Words of Clarke
Here’s another quote I’m fond of that I discovered in this month’s dwell magazine, surprisingly enough as part of an ad. The origin of this quote is Arthur C. Clarke, but author Larry Niven later claimed the inverse in reference to sci-fi, “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”
Recycle Can for your PC
The Tempo is a concept storage device that will copy any file you delete from your PC or Mac and hold on to it until you choose to purge it. A ring of LEDs along the side light up to indicate the capacity, negating the need for a software interface of any kind, and it comes shaped like a small trash can.
I love this because it’s one of those things that would have yielded zero attention if it weren’t for its clever design and user experience. [via Engadget]
Ridiculous Data Plans from Rogers (and others) Keep iPhone out of Canada
Fresh off the wire over at AppleInsider is speculation from Michael Geist, quoted in the National Post saying that it’s not contract negotiations keeping the iPhone out of Canada, but instead our completely obscene and unreasonable mobile data plans. I don’t doubt it for a second.
Geist compares the $60 AT&T plan in the USA with 450 minute and unlimited data to how much you’d pay for a similar setup in Canada, and it ends up being about $300 here. Even then, you don’t get truly unlimited data (Rogers doesn’t even offer this at all!), you just get 500MB.
I worried a while back that my initial usage of my BlackBerry Pearl would rack me up a steep bill, and boy was I right to worry. My first few days of usage with Rogers, using only 1.5MB of data, I went 1MB over my 500KB plan and ended up with close to a $300 bill in the mail. After this, I immediately deactivated all e-mail accounts and stopped Web browsing on the phone, which essentially eliminates any of the functionality the BlackBerry has over a regular phone beyond the keypad.
So how’s an iPhone any good to you if all you can do is place calls and send text messages? Maybe a more important question; How much longer are Canadians willing to tolerate our worse-than-third-world-country wireless data plans?
Terminal Zero One Touches Down at Pearson
I visited the Terminal Zero One digital arts exhibition during its launch on Canada Day yesterday, and had a chance to speak to some of the artists about the works they had put together. There’s a wide variety of takes on air travel from international security and human rights to the many icons and symbols we see throughout the airport.
Shimmy on over to blogTO for the full scoop.
The (in)feasibility of Cover Flow
It’s been a while since I’ve talked tech on here, and there’s a number of reasons for that, which I won’t get into here, but I wanted to touch a bit on Cover Flow, a relatively new user interface that Apple is heavily promoting for both the iPhone and its next OS, Leopard (branded as Quick Look).
With Cover Flow, as Apple describes it, “you can flip through your digital music and video collection the same way you flip through CDs or DVDs” and it “displays all the album art in your music collection in one easy-to-navigate interface that mimics a CD collection or jukebox selection.”
Designing a user interface as a metaphor to the real world is always risky business, and in this case I don’t know that it’s at all relevant. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t own a single music CD (well, that is beyond my “I’m cool and listen to music” stage of 12 years-old when I picked up Dance Mix 95 and many other rather embarrassing albums). So right away, the metaphor is lost on me. I have never, and I don’t anticipate ever flipping through CDs or DVDs. I’m also smack dab in the middle of the target demographic for both the iPhone and Mac, so what gives?
Microsoft Expression Suite and Launch
Last night I was at the Microsoft Expression Suite launch, and I suppose, since they fed me free beer and mini hamburgers, I should say a few words about what I thought about the event. Other companies, take note! All you need to do to get me to write about your product is to provide free beer and miniature foodstuffs (kidding, of course, all you need to give me is beer).
This is where I’m going to explicitly link to my disclaimer before I go on to describe the product and my opinion. I’m also going to say that I was in no way paid or compensated to write this whole thing up.
Keep reading for my thoughts on the event and product suite.
Rogers to Canadians: No iPhone for you!
I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they’re “waiting for the iPhone” or ask me if I’m getting one. I heard around the beginning of the year that Rogers was having problems negotiating a contract with Apple to bring them to Canada, and it looks like that’s actually the case now. Rogers is saying:
“The truth is we aren’t very far with Apple,” Bill Linton, Rogers’ chief financial officer, told a conference last month. “They’re concentrating on this launch and the U.S., and when they decide to turn their mind to other markets, we’ll be in line.”
Slightly disappointing for those who have been waiting around for the device, but c’est la vie for living in Canada. We’ve always been last in line to pick up any mobile device, and the iPhone is apparently no exception.
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Adam is a User Experience Specialist at IBM in Toronto and also produces content of all kinds around the Web.
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