Blue Sky On Mars

I’m an Apple fanboy. Not for any religious reasons, mind you. I’m a fanboy because they’ve been doing an amazing job of design these past few years.

Yesterday was the latest of Steve Jobs’ signature keynote addresses. I didn’t watch it, but I saw the play-by-play from MacRumors. I need not go into the details of what was announced, given that Apple gets millions in cheap publicity whenever Steve does one of these keynotes. As usual, the products look great, more revenue, profit and marketshare coming, yadda yadda.

I was disappointed, though, that Apple didn’t ship anything yesterday. It’s very hard to get your product plan to line up with a specific event like WWDC, and I’d be surprised if early product roadmaps pointed to a release at WWDC. In this case, there was the added complexity of the iPhone 3G requiring the iPhone 2.0 software and that it didn’t make sense to launch MobileMe without the iPhone 2.0 software. And the iPhone 2.0 software can’t launch until the AppStore is ready. That’s a lot of dependencies.

As a user of their products, I still would like to have had the iPhone 2.0 software now, though. The Apple of a couple years ago more often than not seemed to ship products on the day they were announced.

“Apple Keyboard Kit” (Apple Computer)

I’m fixing up my home office a bit, and I was using a dirt cheap eMachines keyboard with my MacBook Pro. That keyboard had a PS/2 connector which I ran to a KVM switch (I did have two computers hooked up at one point). So, the first problem was that that keyboard was contributing the my overall cabling mess because of the KVM switch. The other problem was that my current desk, which I bought a few months back, has a much smaller keyboard tray and I’d have to peer under the edge of the desk to see the function keys. It’s also kind of annoying having the wrong meta key arrangement… I’ve been a Mac user for years now, and it would be nice to use a keyboard with Mac keys.

So, I went out and bought an Apple keyboard. It obviously fits much better on my desk. I have no problem seeing all of the keys on this little guy. Additionally, I’ve got to say that I really like the feel. I wasn’t sure that I would, but the keys of this keyboard have a nice tactile response while still requiring very little key pressure or finger travel.

Of course, the Apple keyboard is still a conventional layout keyboard, rather than an ergonomic one. I might be better off with an ergonomic keyboard layout, but for a standard layout keyboard I’m much happier with the feel of this one.

This past weekend, Best Buy offered free electronic waste recycling. The amount of junk people brought out was amazing:

Seeing all of that stuff there and knowing that this is just the Ann Arbor Best Buy really brings it home about just how much of this stuff we all collect and trash. The good thing, though, is that it all ended up here. It will be recycle or at least disposed of properly so that the mercury, lead, etc. don’t wind up in the ground.

For those people who read my blog and happen to live around Ann Arbor, there are two free electronic waste recycling opportunities coming up.

• Tomorrow (April 28, 2008) from 10am to 4pm at the Best Buy on Lohr Road
• Saturday May 10 from 9am to 2pm at Pioneer High School

Keep that mercury, lead and other nasty stuff out of our landfills by taking your electronic junk to one of these places. It’s finally time to get rid of that 14″ CRT and the 486.

Based on having looked at and purchased previous MacUpdate and MacHeist bundles, it doesn’t seem like the current MacUpdate bundle is doing quite as well. Maybe it’s because they broke the magic price barrier (charging $64.99 rather than $49.99). It’s funny how prices work that way. It could also be that people aren’t as interested in the software that’s in the bundle. Things might take off once Parallels is unlocked, though.

Now that I’ve bought the bundle and actually used a couple of the programs, I just wanted to specifically mention Leap. Leap is a great reimagining of the Finder. It gives you a simple way to slice through your files based on when you last modified them, what kind of file it is, and any tags you apply to the file. Mountains of files become easily manageable this way, and it’s a far better and easier-to-maintain system than having tons of folders.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see Apple crush Leap in Mac OS 10.6 by releasing a Finder that does much the same thing. It’s about time that Finder had this kind of work done to it.

This Wednesday, I’ll be at the Refresh Detroit meeting for “demo night”. I’ll be showing off the Dojo and Python-powered user interface for SitePen’s Support service. Hope to see you there!

It’s kind of a weird thing to want to do, but I’d like to be able to “flip” the screen image on one of my displays on my Mac, in real time. The Mac lets you rotate the image (in 90 degree increments), but there is no way to make it like an image seen in a mirror. Does anyone know of software that lets you do that?

Surprise!

“Our feeling is that D.R.M. is not actually doing anything to prevent piracy,” said Ms. McIntosh of Random House Audio. [From Publishers Phase Out Piracy Protection on Audio Books - New York Times]

What’s funny about the music industry and now the publishing industry taking these steps away from DRM is that this has all been done before! You don’t need to look any further than what happened with copy protected software… and things that you really want to take with you (like music, audiobooks and now movies) are even more likely to suffer from the problems people disliked about copy protected software.

Music, now audiobooks and even many ebooks are going DRM-free. How long will it take for movies to do the same?

I haven’t been there yet (it just opened today), but Borders has just opened their first new “concept” store right around the corner from my house. Eighteen months in development, this store is out to change Borders’ future prospects and help stop the losses.

At this point, it’s unclear to me what bookstores will look like in 10 years. The Kindle, while certainly not perfect, is a glimpse of a more paperless future that I think will come to pass at some point. In the meantime, though, something like this new Borders sounds like the right idea. They’re looking to blend their traditional book and music selling business with how people are actually making use of the content. They’ve got kiosks where you can buy prints of photos or custom burned CDs. You can also load up your MP3 player… except…

The only glitch so far: The digital services don’t work with Apple’s iPod, something Borders says it’s working on. [From Borders offers preview of new concept store - Latest from the Ann Arbor News - MLive.com]

It’s hard to say who’s at fault for this, be it the record labels or Apple, but Borders’ inability to sell music that can be loaded directly onto iPods eliminates 70% of the digital music players out there. Just as online sellers have been battling these past 10 years to sell content in convenient electronic forms online, brick and mortar stores like Borders are going to have a challenge creating interesting and useful physical destinations in an age of electronic content.

Taking advantage of the fact that bookmarklets can be just about any length, the new version of 1Password can now fill in forms with your login information on your iPhone. This is in addition to 1Password’s previous mechanism for passing along your 1Password data in a secure bookmarklet.

For the security minded out there, 1Password stores your passwords in encrypted form in the bookmarklet. The decryption code is written in JavaScript that runs on the phone and you have to type in an access code that you set up. Unless someone has your access code, they won’t be able to use your stored passwords.

Over the past 3 weeks, 1Password has potentially picked up about 44,000 new users from MacHeist. For those of you with iPhones, go check out this update!