10.2: Flattening the Internet Hierarchy

The new version of of OSX should be called "Velcro" rather than Jag-wire: it has more hooks than a square metre of that stuff, and the intentions, possibilities and theoretical implications point in as many directions as the quills on a hedgehog. What's more, the unique ingenuity of the Apple mode of thinking is beginning to take over, now that the dreary slog of rebuilding NeXTStep and extending BSD Unix is coming to an end. It's not lateral or parallel thinking (de Bono, move over!); it's fractal in nature.

Enough of the blarney - what am I on about? Well, take RendezVouz (they don't seem to be able to agree on the capitalization of that in the Mothership): it's another of those Appl'ic renamings of an open technology, developed to be a general standard by a forum of major industry players; Apple hasn't even taken part in the working out of this standard. But they are the first to take it on board, and in his presentation Jobs used an example that I at first thought was rather fickle but which now seems to be precisely that: fractal by nature

What he did was to point out the implications of the combination of RendezVous, iTunes3 and AirPort. Say you enter a room, with your trusty iPortable open and running iTunes and a local (intra-) AirPort-net, and there's someone else there, with another trusty iPortable on the go (both running 10.2, selbstverständlich!). Now, it's someone you have met before: s/he is in your eCard database (the Address Book - another open standard) and has been given permission to read your MP3 files. Automatically, a list of your MP3 files shows up in in hirs (hm - not easy, this gender equality) iTunes program and hirs in yours. The point is that you can run hir music files and listen to them (and vice versa) WITHOUT transfering them - there's no violation of copyrights (why you shouldn't copy them at the same time is an open question, however).

Banal, perhaps. And who walks around with an open iBook in hirs arms? iPod isn't wired for wireless transmission - maybe there's a shadow of "things to come" in Jobs' example?

But the point is that it is an example of that synergy effect achievable with diverse technologies which only fractal thinking can open up to.

And this is P2P connectivity - the Pyramids have been torn down, to quote a World Famous (in Scandinavia, at least) former CEO... Okay, technically there is one computer (the guy starting up the intranet) that acts as a server, but only for the connections, not for the transfers. And for the user, there is no Big Leader you have to haggle with.

This is expressed in a number of the new technologies. Sherlock3, for instance, PRESENTS you with basic, up-to-the-minute (ideally, at least) data, rather than you having to go out and find them on a number of different locations - the joy of XML technology. PC harddisks on the intranet just show up on your Desktop, no fuss or anything (given the necessary privileges, etc). When you want to calculate the value of foreign currency into your own, you don't have to look up yesterday's exchange rates in the newspaper: the calculator gets it for you, via the Internet, up-to-the-minute (there it was again!). Interpersonal connectivity is unified: iChat shows who is accessible in realtime and gives you the choice between online messages, file transfering, URL sharing, or leaving a message for reading at that person's convenience: as a message, or as an email. Plus, you can get all the info about them - it's stored in your own computer's Address Book. It's in YOUR face - or in front of it, rather - not "out there". iSync keeps your collections of basic data uniform - decentralized - over a number of platforms: computers, iPod, cell phones, ...???

The new, upcoming features in .Mac moves on in the same direction: Calendar publishing lets you and your family decentralise calendar coordination and consultation - anywhere with an Internet connection handy (with Bluetooth and a growing number of Bluetooth-aware cell phones available, that will mean ANYWHERE).

Another feature - seemingly silly - is the possibility of giving others access to using your .Mac photos as a background slide show. In other words, your parents can continuously enjoy new views of their dear, little ones (you, or your children). If you want to surprise them (the parents, that is), just upload the latest bunch of holiday slides, and when they open their beloved iMac in the morning, whoops: their sugarplums in the background, cutely kicking down garden dwarfs (or something similarly endearing). iDisk becomes like a shelf, for others to pick up things from you: the new DAVE routines make it actually usable! (and I wonder if weblogs won't become part of the .Mac bundle soon?)

On a more intense level, you can easily stream video to your family or friends - to them, it's like opening the television and seeing it AT THEIR HOME! This is what I'm saying: the user EXPERIENCE is that of doing it HERE - not finding it somewhere out there - of having control and OWNING the data. It's about accessing your OWN data anywhere (don't think M$ at this point). It's about GIVING your data to others in a way so they experience your data in THEIR home, on THEIR screen.

The Pyramids have vanished. The Nile valley has opened up. Now wait for the flood!



(Enough of all this rhetorical crap - where's me cookies?)

From the Pen, not the Well

In a recent discussion thread on AI, someone mentioned a digital pen as a possible input device for use with InkWell. Given that earlier suggestions on the thread had been pens that somehow uses the touchpad on Power- and iBooks (and other inane suggestions that I won't bother to divulge here), a digital pen for use on normal paper, leaving normal ink traces which were then wirelessly transferred to the Mac (and thus to InkWell (why not iNkwell?)) sounded like an almost feasible idea. Technically advanced, yes. But feasible. And ergonomic in use, too.

The device actually exists, as the man said (forgot his Nick): Anoto. But with a modification...

It's actually a whole system, encompassing a SonyEricsson Chatpen, a specific SonyEricsson GPRS cell phone, and Anoto digital paper. The primary functionality is the ability to send emails without using a computer or a PDA - hence the cell phone - but the webpage hints at a possible direct connection from pen to a (Bluetooth-enabled) computer.

In practice, you take the digital paper (actually just paper with a special pattern lightly printed on, and set boxes for the email address and the "Send email" command), check the box saying "New email", write/draw what you want on the paper, fill in the boxes for the address (or leave them empty and find the email address in your database in the cellphone), and check the box saying "Send email".

What happens is: a tiny camera inside the pen recognizes its position on the paper via the unique patterning. It recognizes the "New email" box and that you check it (not the movement but the positioning of the pen). Then, as you draw and write, it stores the positioning and the strokes in its built-in memory. When you fill in the boxes for the email address (one box per letter, each letter written in a special way - a la Palm), it recognizes the pattern of each letter and translates it into a coherent address. Then, when you check the "Send email" box, it recognizes that action (as with the "New email" box) and begins sending the picture of the email via Bluetooth to the cell phone. The cell phone is registered to a special service at the provider where the email addresses (and copies of the emails, if so desired) are stored for later recall. The provider then forwards the email image by the means indicated in the Preferences - Internet (the receipient may be someone else or yourself) or fax.

The webpage, as I said, doesn't really discuss connecting directly to a computer - which software, which protocol (though I believe there IS an image transfer protocol as part of GPRS), and there is no hint as to whether the rechargeable battery inside the pen (where it resides, together with a "specially developed ARM ASIC") is charged through some kind of holder, or it has to be taken out and placed in a charger.

What's the upshot of all this? Well, somehow it's easier to transport a pad of paper, a pen and a laptop than a penpad (Wacom, for instance) and a laptop (don't ask, it's probably something from my childhood...). And it's certainly easier to write something on paper and be able to follow the result directly on the paper, than it is to ghost around with a pen on a penpad, constantly looking at the screen to see what's going on. There's greater flexibility, too - provided you can afford the special cell phone (I'm told that the price for all three components will be in the vicinity of $1,000 - in Denmark) and the GPRS service. That enables you to mail without having to open the laptop, although in that case it will be a picture rather than a string of words you are sending. With a laptop (or a desktop computer) around, you can either store the result there (processed or unprocessed) or send it on via Bluetooth, AirPort, modem or Ethernet.

Given the recent technologies incorporated into OSX 10.2 - Bluetooth support, InkWell, rendezVous, iSync -, ChatPen and Anoto stands a good chance of being demonstrated at a future Keynote speech, the more so if the next generation of Macs has built-in Bluetooth. It has all the elegance lacking in the many other solutions suggested on any Mac forum you might care to mention.

It also has weaknesses: you have to pay for special paper (which you can NEVER find when you need it), Bluetooth transfer might be too slow (it's not synchronous with the pen, at least not in its present incarnation), there is the matter of recharging... But the ink cartridge is made according to ISO standards, at least.

Would it be sensible for Apple to support this? Depends a lot on how much it will be supported by other major players in the Bluetooth/cell phone field - but SonyEricsson is a beginning.... hmm, wasn't it a SonyEricsson cell phone Jobs used during his latest Keynote? Handwriting input has great limitations and takes a lot of processing power; for drawing, however, pen input is the only possible way (people that can use a mouse to draw anything that is remotely recognisable astound me; it must be supernatural). Aside from keyboard input, dictation is the only viable option for text. That, again, demands processing power and better algorithms than exist at present, but there you are...

Will Apple do it? Who has EVER been able to predict what Apple will do?

Brilliant - even though it is sound!

This is a great piece of writing - published on OS Opinion and not just worth a read: it's worth poring over, digesting, and debating.

The basic suggestion is this: if Apple is to make another iGadget, it should use voice recognition as its primary input method. InkWell or no InkWell, handwriting is a clumsy, slow way of inputting data; you need two hands and a firm, plain surface if you are to input more than two, three words. On top of that, a touch-sensitive screen needs to be part of the hardware, and that's not cheap if you want a screen of at least SOME quality (and colors).

I have a fairly old cell phone (trying to be USA friendly, here) - the first Motorola Timeport to come out - and it includes voice recognition. Okay, it's not voice-to-writing recognition; it's only just advanced enough to figure out that THIS bunch of aerial vibrations means that THAT phone number should be called. But given the by now fairly reliable performance of IBM's ViaVoice, it is less far fetched to see dictation as the main mode of input than it seems at first.

It shouldn't be the only mode of textual input, of course: the Mac's keyboard is still where it's at for serious purposes. Pen input might also be a useful secondary tool - for sketches, diagrams and quick jotting-downs - but here the price argument rears its ugly head again. And something else, which I want to discuss more indepth some other time: ergonomics. If an iThing gets much wider than iPod, it becomes far less practical and handy (DON'T say the word "cell phone" here... oh, well!). On the other hand (not easy, if you are taking notes on your Palm right now!), you really don't want a screen smaller than the surface of an iPod, if you are to use normal, flowing handwriting (not caps) and be able to make little drawings. It's what they call a quandary.

Both voice and pen input needs to be able to store the input data in two ways: as the raw input (sounds and pictures) and as post-conversion text. That way, a noisy environment or an uncomfortable position won't ruin the input: when you come home to your Mac, you just listen to the iGadget as if it is a dictaphone, or look at the pictures on its screen, while you tap-tap-tap! And load the final data back into iGadget at the end of it, using iSync.

Actually, the OS Opinion article has a number of other interesting suggestions which I might discuss some other time. For now, it's bedtime. And then I'll write something about the positive ability of limiting. Convergence, right - to a point. Why don't people carry their money in a built-in pouch in their Time Manager, rather than in a separate wallet? Wouldn't that be a natural consequence of convergence and simplification?

- - - - -
Btw. I'm not just RIPping the OSO article off - these are thoughts I have had for some time. I just didn't feel unlazy enough to put it down in any form except a couple of notes in my iOrganize ... but with the format of MacBloqs I finally felt ready to BURN it...

No Apple cell phone - it's the bite!

New York Times' article contains at least one major logical flaw: it is intermingling three different OS'es: OSX, Pixo's OS (in iPod), and PalmOS.

The features in 10.2 which are mentioned as indicators that OSX is prepared for a cell phone, may or may not be suitable for such a device - but they are part of OSX.

How on earth would you make OSX run on a cell phone? (or any PDA, for that matter - in spite of the "movies" of a rebuilt Palm booting up with a nice X on its screen) There's neither the hardware nor the battery life necessary to make that happen. And it would be like killing sparrows with steamrollers!

Could the services mentioned be transferred to a suitable 3G cell phone OS? Possibly - but why then introduce something like InkWell in OSX in the first place?

To my mind, Jobs is doing the smart thing: letting the dedicated cell phone companies (well, plus Motorola...) do the risky stuff, and guiding the future of that industry by taking active part in establishing public standards (and building them into Macs before any other computers have them, to push their acceptance a la USB).

It's all about interfaces! Apple builds in all the interfaces and protocols necessary to let the two next cell phone generations feel more at home with a Mac than anywhere else; when they are there, the cell phone companies adopt them because they are smart! Apple breaks the chicken-n-egg deadlock that way.

Apple is about interfaces - about taking the bite rather than pocketing the fruit.

"Switch" - to the Oldies Golden Delicious!

At MacOsRumors, a bucketload of vague rumors about Apple's hardware situation over the next "12-18 months" are being spilled over the unwary.

The main message seems to be: "Apple's Switch campaign will increase in intensity over the next months, and Apple will have the hardware to lure customers to Do The Switch". Hello? Anything wrong with this picture?

For instance, if they spend a LOT of money now on getting people to switch to Mac, won't it be A LITTLE late for them to introduce compelling hardware as much as a year later?

Talk about bad timing!

There's little doubt that it's no longer just the Mac afficionados that are intensely frustrated by the basic inadequacies of Mac hardware - increasingly, Apple has lost sales to professional customers because of it. Notice, that this is different from the problems PC hardware producers have had getting people to buy the "latest and greatest": the average PC user has little incentive to buy anything faster than 1.5 GHz, partly because the normal needs are more than covered by that, and partly because PC hardware architecture in general offers more speed.

No? It may be that Intel (and, to some extent, AMD) processors are slow compared to G4s (or rather, their AltiVec units) at similar clock frequencies, but everything else is faster: the bus speed, the AGP bus, the memory, the graphics card... not to mention that PC's have far superior sound capabilities. All in all, the PC architecture is better balanced than a PowerMac's.

Back to the bitching about Apple's difficulties with offering compelling software: PC vendors have problems selling to common users - Apple has problems selling to POWER users, which are not only their most important (and loyal) customers, but also where they pick up their bread-and-butter: the margins, the margins.

Apple is in trouble, at least on the PowerMac side. DDR RAM counts little (as shown by www.barefeats.com ) when the MPX bus is slow transporting data between the CPU and the RAM. Not to mention the perception of GHz: 2 x 1.25 GHz in the latest and greatest - Intel offers 2.6 GHz processors (or faster; I didn't check the PC news today). The updating cycle of Intel/AMD processors is much shorter than that of Motorola/IBM ones.

And then there is the iMac saga. But that's for later.

Apple is in trouble.

As an ex of mine said: "The timing really sucks. "