waffle

I have it on good authority that in the first half of 2009 (and likely during Macworld San Francisco 2009), Apple will present a tablet device with a 10″ screen — approximate — that runs the full Mac OS X. (Which doesn’t mean it won’t be tailored to touch — but it won’t be iPhone OS either. You now know why Snow Leopard put Mac OS X on a diet.)

Additionally, during MWSF, the iPhone will adopt a new manufacturing process; there will also be new models of the Mac mini, iMac, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro 17″ before February is over, and at least two of those will feature in the MWSF keynote. I only say February here because I’ve never seen Apple launch all these things in January, which is what the source information triangulates to.

I know there are a lot of tablet rumors, because there’s always been tablet rumors. However, I’ve never personally bought into them. I am reporting this because of my trust in the source, not because I necessarily secretly wish for a tablet.

In other words: this post in particular is not me wishing “gee, wouldn’t it be great”, nor is it speculating, when-an-analyst-flaps-his-lips–like, that “because the release cycle stars converge, it’d make sense for the Mac mini to adopt a Mini DisplayPort, Blu-Ray and a tasteful and timely Obama sticker”. This is me reporting that I’ve heard from believable sources that all this is coming on roughly this timetable, and I don’t believe them to be speculating.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.

John Gruber is “unconvinced that ‘netbooks’ are an actual new category” of computers.

What is the difference between a “netbook” and a “really cheap laptop that runs something other than Vista”?

Dell’s been making the latter for a few years, and Asus has been making the former for a shorter while. A netbook is a laptop that’s really extraordinarily small (subnotebook form factor and definitely not a full size keyboard), sells for around $300-$400 and is more solidly built than similarly priced craptops because they’re designed to be small and computationally weak from the start. Most netbooks in Sweden are sold with subsidies when you buy a 3G modem, which is the hook — a) a laptop that’s not a traditional laptop, b) for people who don’t usually buy laptops, c) that you can access the web with from anywhere.

The MacBook Air disappointed a lot of people early this year because they wanted it to be a subnotebook that didn’t suck. The difference between the traditional subnotebook and the netbook is that the subnotebook’s cramped, slow and expensive — but small — while the netbook is cramped, slow and small — but cheap. Air was just a slow MacBook on a diet.

I don’t think we’ll see a subnotebook from Apple soon because there’s no way around doing a subnotebook that’s not cramped. The MacBook Air proves for the immediate future that if Apple ships something with a physical keyboard, this is how small it gets. Take the Air and you could perhaps carve off the edge around the keyboard, but the edge is there to make the outside edge thickness taper more dramatically. This happens in the screen housing too — it’s why the display bezel is actually bigger on the new MacBook Pros than the old. So they can make it thinner.

But that is if Apple ships something with a keyboard. Recall that iPhone’s genesis was as a bigger device, titled… Safari Pad.

I am reminded of the portion from the start of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, where telescopes are chronicled to completely miss the Vogon ships about to come down — “which was a pity because it was exactly the sort of thing they’d been looking for all these years“…

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.

Problem: Some people turn off antialiasing, such as ClearType, in Windows, or make a big stink about antialiasing that doesn’t snap text to the pixel grid, among which are Mac OS X’s antialiasing (which “looks fat”) or WPF’s ClearType implementation (which admittedly looks inaccurate and wispy).

Why? They believe it makes the text look blurry.
Why? Smooth text looks better and is more legible, but the resolution doesn’t allow for text that is smooth on its own.
Why? Text that’s smooth on its own is smooth because of a higher resolution (c.f. printers, even crappy ones, but also high pixel pitch devices like the iPhone), and if you bumped up the resolution everything else would be smaller.
Why? Icons and window layouts have mostly been designed for the same resolution for over twenty years and look like crap when scaled up.
Why? Process inertia enabled by the same kind of people that, oh, say, spend their day complaining about blurry text.

Oh man. Toyota were on to something.

I kid, but only mostly. My second thought about the new taskbar in Windows 7 — and I guess you can figure out my first thought — was “You’re going to put alpha transparent icons down there? Above 16×16 in size? Really?” Many Windows programs are notoriously bad at providing new things like this. And many Windows programs overall are notoriously bad at providing anything new beyond what was in Windows 98. I’m speaking outside of my stereotype as a Mac owner, here; I’m speaking in my stereotype as a regular Windows user for the past 20 years, and a current Windows user and developer. The fact that it’s simply impossible to assemble an alpha transparent Windows icon with just the supplied image editor hacksaw in Visual Studio should tell you something.

The best thing that could happen to Windows would be a sea change. And I don’t mean that we all ape the Ribbon this week because it looks modern. I mean that this shit starts becoming important; at least important enough that you could actually begin to bearably use high DPI settings. And yes, I also do want a pony. I don’t have any illusions that this shit matters to even 20% of the Windows developers out there, even the serious ones. But I know what’s been going on on the Cupertino side of the fence for all these years. A high standard has been set and approaching something less than that is met with criticism, jeers and a bad reputation. This phenomenon has been reserved for the extreme and high-profile freaks in the Windows world, like Lotus Notes.

I’m hopeful, but for this to start happening, some people should stop asking themselves why they’d want to run in the direction of those freaks who want to make their text blurry and start looking at the bigger picture. Literally.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.

Stephen Fry, voice of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in same, friend of House and world-renowned gadgethead has made quite a stir with a well-reasoned though (as is usual) lengthy and wandering bit on why the hell manufacturers of mobile phones are so fucking clueless.

Perhaps the best rhetorical question in the entire piece is this:

How could the major players have left a gap in the market so wide that a complete novice in mobile telephony [Apple] could so instantly shame them?

I can think of a few good reasons.

• Mobile phones today are cheap, because they’re made to sell in volume and last for 18 months. The components included are the minimum number people will do with, and the processor isn’t clocked a hertz higher than necessary unless you can make a selling point out of it. It’s a good strategy in that it conserves battery life, and it’s a bad strategy in that it wildly tears away at the life quality of the user.

  You can say what you want about the iPhone, but there’s an extra graphics chip in there to make the transitions run above 4 choppy FPS (yes, hello Sony Ericsson X1, how wonderful of you to drop by), and there’s an extra media decoder chip. The capacity is a few more notches above acceptable, and if there’s an effect in there, you can reasonably expect it to exceed flip-book quality. It feels drastically less cheap.

• Mobile phones today use small screens and keypads. Some phones use bigger screens, but since screens make the device bigger and people want small phones, the only way to make them bigger without making the phone bigger is to either hide away the keypad or make the screen the pointing device. (Clamshell phones mostly have only marginally larger screens.) The two are often combined, but for the longest time these phones would be unbearably thick, which lead to the keypad being left out a lot.

  Pointing can be done with the finger or with a stylus. Pointing demands precision, and a few years back, high-density LCD displays were hard to make, expensive, bad, or all three, so most phones used the stylus, which afforded the necessary precision. On the other hand, using a stylus feels much more legitimate with a user interface that looks a lot more like PC interfaces than the regular soft key-based mobile phone menus. Since people would find regular phones with a stylus interface a chore to use with no particular upside, the decision was made to attack the problem head on and provide software that took advantage of the big screen and the high precision, like better contacts, tasks, calendars and office applications.

  I can recall one phone that took advantage of using a finger instead of a stylus to drive a great interface before 2007, and that was 2003’s N1 from the Swedish player Neonode. N1 took a long time to get to market and only arrived with limited firmware support, with some major features arriving piecemeal afterwards. By this time, the N1 had gotten a reputation for being slow and unstable and was a hard choice to justify. N2 was released in 2007 to little fanfare, and indeed Neonode recently filed for bankruptcy in Sweden.

  I can’t fault the manufacturers for sticking with styluses this long since it seemed to be such a good parlay off of desktop computers. With the concept of windows abstracted away mostly, you could nevertheless reuse your PC knowledge. Radio buttons were still radio buttons. The iPhone has proven to me that using a finger really works if you just start over and design a new interface for it, and that’s what it takes. It’s just that you don’t ever start over or learn from your mistakes in the field of mobile interfaces or OSes, you just tack on a few more modern techniques, more knickknacks and upgrade the CPU and hope it holds together.

The short version of all this is that Apple started by jotting down what a mobile phone should accomplish and what a UI for fingers would feel and look like, built a platform that had enough horsepower to make it enjoyable and spent precious development time not trying to carbon copy the menu structure of every Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung within earshot, but actually building a model that worked for each of the things you do on your phone — well, most, anyway.

The old guard is too afraid of what they’ll find to stop pumping out their 40 variants of their handful of phones to do some introspection, and too blissfully clueless and lost in growth numbers and if-it-ain’t-broke mindsets to realize it. And many of us are too busy going wow at the blinkenlights on one of the new model variants to care. Our fate lies now solely in the hands of bright and awakened in-house mobile phone UI designers taking the boardroom by storm with a two-by-four, Fry’s printed pillars of truth stapled to one end. I will not mourn any casualties in this particular fight.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.