No, it’s not the one to the right.

Headsets, headphones, and handsfree devices have sucked through the ages and it’s high time someone did it properly. It appears that in this age of Bluetooth and A2DP, we are stuck with the following bad ideas:

The Bluetooth headset

This seems the most ubiquitous. It’s the type that attaches to one ear, is small, convenient, sounds terrible and makes you look like a prick. They aren’t too bad I SUPPOSE, but they are so dorky, somewhat unstable, and are useless for music. A headset should do voice AND music. So it’s out.

Sorry, Jawbone. There’s more, though:

A2DP “Street Style” retardophones

A few years ago someone smart introduced a new Bluetooth profile that could transmit decent audio. It has been gaining prominence, but nobody has been able to produce a decent set of headphones based on the idea. And not all of them have microphones! They tend to look like the picture above, and are uncomfortable, offer poor sound quality, are hard to pocket, and make you look almost as stupid as a Bluetooth headset does.

It’s an obvious form factor, but it doesn’t work. It’s not surprising that designers faced with the problem of integrating a battery, aerial, two speakers seem to settle on this design.. after all, why bother with earbuds, isn’t the point to be wireless? They’re kind of right, but they’re still stupid and not worth using. Do you know anyone who actually owns these? Exactly.

On the other hand, someone might own the above variation of the same idea and actually leave the house wearing it:

Clearly, this is no solution for anyone but douches.

The wired handsfree headset

Nokia bundles these with everything now, and Apple perfected it with the iPhone headset. These have the amazing property of not making you look like a douche, and the sound quality is passable. While wires are a bit of a pain, there’s no charging and they’re easily pocketable.

These are a pretty good solution, but we don’t need the wires and everything needs to be in-ear now. With noise cancellation. These don’t offer that.

Me, personally?

I use a convoluted system of some Sony MDR-NC32X headphones plus a cheap headphone adaptor with a mic and a button. The adaptor takes care of the microphone bit, and provide the iPhone’s wonderful headset button (for those who don’t know - click to play, pause or hang up, double click to skip song.) The NC32NX headphones are the fanciest of Sony’s current crop of in-ear noise cancellation headphones, and provide the intriguing combination of a necklace\lanyard thing, a battery pack that sits on your neck, and very nice in-ear earbuds.

It’s not perfect - it’s wiry and confusing sometimes, I have to replace the AAA battery every month, the microphone hangs down near my chest and needs to be held or clipped to my shirt collar if I want to speak using it, and while it doesn’t look stupid when under my shirt, if I neglect to tuck it in I look like a confused electrician in the middle of a job.

On the other hand, it sounds great, the noise cancellation is indispensable on trains, planes and busy roads I walk by, and it’s very normal looking (under the shirt, I mean.) Invisible except for the earbuds coming from my collar.

The perfect headphones

Ok, so now we reviewed all that, what can we do to achieve nirvana? I think Sony’s necklace is the right idea. Bluetooth headsets are super convenient and futuristic, but make you look like a cyborg. A2DP is the future for portable music, but street style headphones suck. The NC32NX are nice headphones, but awkward as a wired headset.

Here’s my idea for the ultimate solution. It’s designed as an iPhone headset, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done by Sony or Creative or Motorola for all A2DP devices. Bear with me if you’re not a fellow iPhonefag. Here goes:

Okay, so it’s a necklace, with in-ear earbuds, a battery pack behind the neck, running on A2DP, non-removable battery, chargeable by a dock connector, with minimal buttons. The earbuds have microphones on them for the noise canceling system, and it uses the same type of button\mic the wired iPhone headset uses. All the circuitry is in the battery pack, and apart from this it’s extremely simple, clean and lightweight. Let me talk more about the design:

I think it should have an unusual method of switching it on and off. The segment at the front of the necklace should be magnetised, and when clasped, the headset would activate and connect to your phone. When disconnected, it’d just turn off. Controls for volume and enabling\disabling noise cancellation should go on the iPhone itself, which would also communicate its battery level.

As another idea I think it should be both retractable (so that you press a button and the cords are sucked into the battery pack) and adjustable in length (as the Sony ones I have hang way too far down on my chest, but I can imagine some would prefer that. I put in controls for this on the back of the battery pack in the mockup here, but as this would be a very mechanical thing to do I’m sure it may look different. Forgive the plain round rectangle.. it would be angled in a way that the dock connector part would rest on your skin and the big length adjuster lever would be partially visible, if you can imagine that.

It’d come with two cords. One USB dock connector charger cable, the other a dock connector that goes to a 3.5mm plug, so the headset is usable on wired devices. The dock connector should have a button on it to enable or disable noise cancellation, which isn’t always preferable as it drains battery and adds white noise. I guess it’d be a little weird to have the cord lead to the back of your neck, but I think it’d be manageable. As it’s plausible that a person might also have a laptop, or a handheld game console, or other item they will use the headphones with, it’s important to offer this feature.

Oh, and the cords should be thin, clear and completely inconspicuous. Wouldn’t it be cool if the battery pack and earbuds came in colours, though? That could be done. But beyond the little aluminium clasp, the flat battery pack, and the earbuds, the rest of the headset should be invisible. I think it’d be neat if the battery pack vibrated on a message or call, and if they could make sure the removable rubber ear plug bits never fall off, I’d appreciate it.

With this, I think it’d be ideal for many people (not everyone.) It’d be perfect for wearing all day long, would sound fantastic as a headset and headphones, not look dumb, be relatively pocketable (if you must) and provide the same convenience and control the wired iPhone headset offers. Plus the non-removable battery could offer long talk times and convenient charging.

I long for this type of thing to be made. Even if Apple just puts A2DP on their phone and makes a retarded street style one to go with it, I wouldn’t mind if this design was from another company - they’d just need to add a battery level indicator and inbuilt switch for the noise cancellation stuff to it, which is clutter I could live with.

This is a short recap article on how in only about 7 or 8 months Sony have actually done a lot of the things I wanted them to do in my little article about the ideal PS3 media centre, written in March. In the last month or two, a lot of these ideas have come to fruition, amazingly!

I believe that right now, the PS3 is the best thing anyone with a HDTV could buy. It provides all your viewable and listenable content, except TV (but as we’ll see, there’s something for that too!) I think Sony are doing a good job positioning the PS3 as a media playing device, and I wish they would market this with more panache, as currently nobody really cares about it.

It can get content from your real media library (the PC)!

This is important, because nobody will ever use their PS3 as their primary point of photo\video\music storage, yet in many cases the PC has this role - with individual folders and apps like iTunes and Windows Media Player as the databases. Nullriver MediaLink has provided this functionality in combination with Sony’s implementation of DLNA (golly, an open standard!) It puts all your photos, movies and music from the computer in the PS3 XMB, streaming them over WiFi from computers it automatically searches out. All you need is something like MediaLink running on your computer, and you get everything - complete with album art, full XMB functionality and support for DivX and WMV files that works remarkably well on animu and all sorts of other files you probably have. It’s amazing!

But it’s not perfect. I envisioned Sony creating a little background app like MediaLink for free, and encouraging PS3 owners to put it on all their computers with media. I hope they still do, as paying $20 for MediaLink kinda sucks. (I’m also not sure if there’s a comparable Windows app, probably not.) I also think the UI should be done as more of a “pool” of content rather than the current system where you have to select the specific “Media Server”. But these are easily fixed, and the hard technical work has been done, almost precisely as I wanted it to be done.

You can use it as a DVR!

Something called “PlayTV” is going to be released, and it’s suspiciously like my idea for an external tuner box that turns the PS3 into your source for ALL content, recorded, playable as well as TV broadcasts.

“The new box will feature two 1080p tuners, which utilize the European Digital Video Broadcasting system (DVB-T) — which should dash any US hopes for the time being. The system will allow you to store recorded broadcasts on your PS3 drive, and also transcode and transfer the saved files to your PSP. Additionally, you’ll be able to use the PSP’s “Remote Play” feature to program and watch your PlayTV away from home.”

So you get full HD TV content on the PS3, for around £70. Content which you can pause, rewind, record, keep and re-watch. This means that if all the broadcast TV you view is terrestrial digital TV, you need never switch away from the PS3 on your TV again. Unless you have another console or something. Plus you get the equivalent of a Slingbox or Locationfree TV in it, because the PS3 streams TV to the PSP, worldwide. Great idea!

Again, it’s not perfect. It’s all about over-the-air digital TV, and I want a box that simply takes a bunch of inputs and lets you switch between them, also providing more storage but it’s getting there, right? It’s also for Europe only. A second revision of this box with a 3.5” HD and inputs for cable TV and some additional sources would perfect it, and match exactly what I called for. Maybe at the end of 2008?

More to do!

Of course, Sony still needs the following on their to-do list: internet radio, podcasts, trailers, iPod support and Youtube. They seem to be doing at least the first two on the PSP, and the others aren’t totally unfeasible.

Either way, it looks like they basically did two of the three things I had under “major stuff”, with only the minor things left to do. And as a major thing to implement, AppleTV kinda stole Youtube-on-TV’s thunder anyway (I wrote my original blog before we knew about that.)

“Maybbe apple need a time machine so they can tell them selfs not to b so lame”

I think this wonderful Engadget comment captures the zeitgeist of the morning of June 11, where Steve Jobs gave the boringest WWDC address I have ever seen. To recap:

• Transparent menubar and reflective dock
• A completely new Finder that looks oddly like the old Finder
• A web browser wanted by nobody who’s not a Macfag already
• More iChat effects

Doesn’t quite compare to the Intel announcement, the theatrical death of OS 9, or even Leopard’s semi-underwhelming introduction last year, does it? Unless you’re a hopeless Apple apologist. Even still, when I bitch in chatrooms and message boards about how OS X sucks and we should expect better, people still say “WELL WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT THEM TO CHANGE ANYWAY??” As a result, I have come up with a bunch of ideas that can be seen as a mixture of what Leopard should have been and what new OS Xes should bring. Since Leopard’s ship has sailed, I will bill it as my featureset for 10.6 Liger.

You may notice I hold a bit of contempt for other lists like these. I have no problem with people who come up with great ideas to refine parts of OS X’s UI, but I think often people rely on. My first few features are supposed to be a lot more “revolutionary”, and as a side note would make an awesome demo for attracting customers in a way that “imagine if Safari had extensions!!” sort of ideas never will. I hope they’re interesting, though of course many of my ideas are influenced by others.

1. A Brand New Finder

Summary — Scrap the Finder, restart, and do something we haven’t seen before.

I’m gonna start with something I can’t offer a solution to. The Finder has been pushed as far as it can reasonably go, without major changes to the paradigm behind it. People have written interesting things about how the Finder fucked up spatial navigation and seems generally lost and confused. It’s functional as a file manager, for sure, but surely we’ve learnt something in the last 23 years since the Mac first came out.

Some people respond to the Finder’s problems with this kind of madness. You can see above the results of a technical approach to fixing the Finder.. “Oh, add terminal support! Make sure you can customise the colours used in alternating rows! Add support for multiple sidebar sets!” This suits people, but they’re typically the sort of greasy nerds who don’t understand good software, or who have really specific needs a common man’s Finder could never address. So you can see what I don’t want Apple to do.

What should the new Finder do? Define a new paradigm. Use some elements of icons and folders, and still work in the world of hierarchial file systems, but allow people to manage things visually, like Stacks but done properly. Use 3D. Use (Core) animation. Use metadata.

Imagine if the process of locating documents for modification\moving\viewing involved rifling through this screen:

Where you could see the documents you’ve been working with today, or yesterday, or in the last month. With small visual cues like individual thumbnail size to show which you spent more time on, or round outlines to show what you’re already working on. Or if you didn’t like that, click “Projects” to view stacks of files put together that OS X has determined are related to each other (through content, position in the file structure, and usage patterns) or simply click “relevance” to have it give you a selection of all the files that seem relevant to what you’ve been doing in the last few minutes (“Oh, you put in a USB drive? You seem to copy your recent photos to that a lot, let me bring those to the top.”)

Okay, so I do have some ideas for the Finder. But it’s this sort of thinking that is sorely missing from the Finder, and (disturbingly) from the mockups I see other people make. Finder cannot be fixed by allowing you to split panes, adding SFTP support and arbitrarily changing window dressing. It can be fixed by using Apple’s clever people to push the boundaries of what we expect from our computers as we manage documents.

2. A Spotlight that doesn’t suck

Summary — Give Spotlight a natural language parser and make it a lot smarter\fuzzier under the hood.

So, what enables cool UI ideas like that? It came in 10.4 - Spotlight. Not just a search technology, it introduced the concept of a metadata store for each file in OS X, and I think there’s a lot of room for improvement here.

Spotlight is great technology. Apple seem to be working well on that. I encourage them to make it faster, and to remove problems with the 10.4 implementation of it like the lack of support for single files containing multiple search records. But beyond that, what Spotlight needs is to be more usable. It needs to gather more and more metadata - whether that be by logging what’s used with what, how long it’s open, etc, and it needs heavy reworking with the UI.

Fixing the terrible lagging problems and the “mystery meat” search window would be a start, of course, but I think a great Spotlight will go hand in hand with Finder. Search belongs in Finder (duh, just read the name) but it deserves to be done a lot better.

I’m not going to provide a visual mockup here, as it’s so simple. I want you to imagine the primary usage of Spotlight to be through that menu item. No new buttons or a sidebar or anything, just that search input - but a much more powerful one.

Right now you can type “linguistics nominative” and you get your assignment about nominative\accusative systems, but that’s all. If I type “linguistics uni” it will find nothing, nor “language work”. Why not? Because it’s braindead! Why shouldn’t OS X know that my assignment’s in a folder called “Uni Work”, or even that while I was working on that assignment the other night I used the slang “uni” when talking to my friend over IM? Why can’t it associate the word “linguistics” with “language” and come up with a relevant result even when nothing matches exactly? Stupid, stupid.

Also, I don’t know if you noticed, but computers are getting really great at parsing images and speech now. Why aren’t all my audio files transcribed to a private text file? I’d love to type “podcast microsoft” and find all my podcasts where someone said “microsoft”. If I downloaded a huge wallpaper pack and decided I want something new, why isn’t it smart enough to figure out what “pastel colour wallpaper” means? (For those of you not following, that translates to filtering out all wallpaper-size images in colour which have pastel hues.) Why not “long noisy camera movie from last week” for that long noisy movie you took on your digital camera last week?

This is where Spotlight needs to go. I think it’d be possible to at least get a start on this with 10.6. Just give it a vocabulary, make sure it gathers loads of info, and code some sophisticated processing algorithms that constantly work behind the scenes to enhance your ability to find the stuff you want. It’s the sort of thing that could put Apple way ahead of anybody else if they tried.

3. Location manager

Summary — Use the sensory mechanisms of modern Macs to adapt to different contexts of usage.

I’m not sure if I’m the only one who noticed, but Macs are pretty good at noticing what’s going on around them now. By my count, a MacBook Pro can:

• Hear with its microphone
• See with its camera
• Detect ambient light with its light sensor
• Feel its movement with its motion sensor
• Detect heat with its internal thermal management system

That’s everything except smell and taste, with a bit of a double-up on the “sight” and “touch” ones there. Apple should do something with this.

A rudimentary idea, first. Let’s say you want to switch network settings between the office and home. What’s different about the office and the home? The MacBook knows that home has an airport network with a unique name, so it’s not hard to solve this problem with that sort of intelligence.

But let’s say we move it to the next level. Perhaps the MacBook notices that the outside world is brighter, noisier and involves a lot of movement, especially when it’s in its briefcase. Home has a warmer, dimmer light, is quiet (besides the music it can hear its friend the AppleTV making), and it’s usually sitting still on a desk, or getting warmer than usual on a bed. When it’s in the city, it sees tens of access points, and has a lot of bluetooth phones coming in and out of range.

This sort of information I envision in some sort of “Location Manager” in the system preferences, where you have some predefined settings like “Home” and “Work” and “School” and “Out and about” to adjust settings in - perhaps energy saving options, automatic muting, applications to transparently prefetch for faster loading, metadata to save. Perhaps we could search for “documents saved yesterday in the city” with this technology? Have iChat tell people where you are, or have iCal record where you have been? Adjust fan speed depending on the amount of ambient noise that’s available to cover it?

This idea has more to develop about it, but I think you could do exciting things if you played more with it. Again, more intelligent software in the background, constantly monitoring and recording activities, and doing its best to associate things with each other.

4. Resolution independence

Summary — Implement resolution independence and push it. Down our throats. Relentlessly.

Okay, they’re already doing this. But they’re doing it wrong. How should resolution independence be addressed?

Well, the day Liger is released, Apple say “okay guys, all of our Macs are running 160dpi displays now.” and update everything - their studio displays, their MacBooks, the iMac. And so a new era is born - where you measure a computer not only by its CPU speed, graphics and screen size, but by its dpi rating. At the point Apple moves beyond the 100dpi standard, Macs can once again stand out as super unique. Linux is a long way from getting its act together as far as resolution independence goes (hell, it’s still a long way away from getting it’s GUI together) and Windows won’t have it done for another two versions. Apple, as the only hardware+software PC company around nowadays, is in a prime position to not only become the supplier of computers that subjectively “just work” and look pretty, but the sole supplier of computers that display text and photos with amazing sharpness above all other computers.

Sure, Apple has to wait for LCD manufacturers to make more high-dpi displays, but there’s gonna be a 2-3 year gap where all the Linux and Windows people have a mix of low dpi screens and high dpi screens with tiny text, and Apple could pounce on this by quickly adopting a product line of all high-dpi screens with the only OS around that can supply them with big, crisp hybrid bitmap and vector images that look amazing and are readable by people older than 16. This is a big missed opportunity, and I hope with the next OS X Apple take this chance.

Miscellaneous other things

There are a few short ideas I have that are not necessarily minor, but harder to explicate into several paragraphs.

• Bundle iWork with OS X. A lot of PCs come with Office, but at an extra charge. Apple now has a suite of apps good enough to make Office a non-issue for most people, and it should be free with the OS. Imagine the comparisons - with Vista you get Wordpad, OS X you get Pages. Vista; Calculator, OS X; Numbers. And so on.
• OS X Personal Edition for Windows. Screw Safari, Apple should partner with VMWare or Parallels to provide a 1gb downloadable “app” for Windows that is a limited installation of OS X. Have it run indefinitely and come with all the standard OS X apps, but don’t allow any new apps to be run and make it so that you can’t maximise it to full screen. It’d be a great way of introducing OS X to the world. It’d be like BeOS all over again, but for a new century!! :|
• Redundancy when burning discs. If I have 10mb of files and a 4.3gb DVD, I should be able to tick a box so that OS X uses a proprietary method to burn the same files over and over and over so that they can be recovered in case the disc is damaged in a certain section. Of course, to every other OS, this would just be a “OSXRECOVERY.DAT” file or something like that, and the original files would remain accessible.
• TextEdit needs to be improved. Apple should give it a proper toolbar, add some stuff like word count, headers\footers, and some basic layout functions. Take MS Word, provide the functionality 70% of people need, and put it in the free, super fast inbuilt word processor. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Oh, yeah, and when they introduce this new OS X, they should stop making fun of Windows so much. Has anyone noticed that the amount of “Redmond, start your photocopiers”-esque banners at WWDC seem to have a proportionate relationship to the amount of ideas Apple will borrow from Windows that year? I find nothing wrong with teasing MS, but it seems that it makes Apple unhealthily self-satisfied, and in a world where Vista still has mostly everything cool about Leopard, they can’t afford to be this way for too long.

Apple has neglected its Macs for a long time. Think about it. When was the last time the iMac got a significant (non-spec-based) update? 2004. Their lower end laptops? 2001. Higher end? 2003. Years and years for some of these models. In this blog posting I want to outline what I think should be done about it.

I write this two hours before an Apple event in which Steve Jobs is expected to show a new iMac. My guess is that it’ll have an uninspired design that mimics the Cinema Displays, with some specs boosted and pricing reshuffles, and at least one braindead move (my guess is a 2.5” HD for the sake of thinness.) It is this event that has inspired me to post something that’ll either look really smart in two hours or really obsolete and stupid. We’ll see!

There was a famous slide used in an old 1999 Apple presentation that showed a 2×2 grid of products, divided into “Consumer” and “Pro”, and “Desktop” and “Laptop”. That seems to have evolved over time with oddball products like the Mac mini and eMac, but has generally been the model Apple has used for the past decade or so.

I’ve come up with what I think should be the grid, and I’ll explicate from it.

(“Jew” means “money-conscious”.)

iMac

The first and most comprehensive idea I have is for the iMac. I want to explain mainly in pictures.

Design

The iMac I envision is much like the current iMac, but with several aesthetic and functional differences that should make it more aesthetically appealing, but more importantly it would be an attempt to bring in the gamer market and other people who stupidly clamour for a “headless iMac”. I’ll start with a dissection of my mockup:

It’s a little hard to explain. I’ll go over the main bits:

• CPU etc is integrated. The screen is the computer, blah blah. Just like before.
• The bezel is as slim as possible. Some form of iPhone-like metal surround is used to minimise the visual impact of the bezel, so that it looks like almost all of the screen surface is actual pixels. This makes the screen look bigger than it would with a large bezel, and would be a pretty striking design change.
• There is a bottom strip. This is for function and aesthetics. A translucent Apple logo would sit in the middle of this black strip, which does pretty neat things. On the right there is an OLED screen, which appears to simply generate symbols to appear on the bottom right corner of the monitor - for instance, when turned off, it would take the form of a power button. It’d have a touch sensor for this use, and look\feel a bit like the old Studio Displays did in this sense.
• The bottom strip would change colour. Through the use of some sort of fluorescent light, the bottom strip would modify its colour depending on how the bottom few pixels of the screen look. With the Leopard background, it’d be green. With a DVD movie, it’d fade to black. With a maximised Photoshop window, it’d turn white. This is a little like the Philips Ambilight televisions, and would help extend the idea that you’re working on a single giant canvas, rather than a box with a screen on it.
• The iSight camera is hidden behind the screen. I have no idea how this works, but Apple patented it, right? Helps clear clutter and would make for more personal iChat conversations.
• Other stuff is hidden as always. There would be a microphone at the top centre, but it’d be almost invisible, just a little hole between the bezel and screen. An IR sensor would be behind the bottom strip, probably on the left. The metal body would cause issues for wifi and bluetooth reception, so the base would be made in a way that facilitated its use as an antenna.
• USB ports are located on the side. A little ugly, but they’d look much less offensive on a black iMac like this, and are simply a must. Reaching to the back of an iMac is annoying.
• It’d come with Bluetooth keyboards and mice. With USB ports on the side, why not push wireless? The input devices should charge via a mini-usb plug.

Here are a few ideas for the OLED screen, by the way. You could use it for all manner of things, but power, sleep and iSight should be the main ones.

Functionality

These are all largely aesthetic issues, though - functionality is the more important part of the design, and I have a few ideas to improve this.

The specs of the iMac have always been considered fairly highly, except for the GPU card. For this reason I’m not even recommending that Apple switch to desktop CPUs instead of the notebook CPUs - Apple tends to go for processors that do the job quite effectively, and I think in an enclosure as thin as the iMac’s it’d need the notebook chip. But the GPU is an issue that I think should be addressed by a simple inclusion of a PCI Express slot.

How would that work? Well, like the original iMac G5, the back of this iMac would be removable, and there would be a large space kept for a user-supplied video card. You would simply plug it in, attach a slim, internal dvi plug to it, and close the iMac up again. This would allow gamers to buy an iMac and replace the card with one they got on Newegg for $200, and play all their games in Bootcamp. They could also update the hard drive, RAM, optical drive, and other such features at will.

Another idea would be for the 24” iMac to use its extra internal space for a second hard drive. This second drive could be custom ordered with the iMac, so that it mirrors its data via Time Machine, while using the extra free space for file versioning stuff.

What would it sell for? $1299 for the 20” low end, $1499 for the 20” high end, and $1799 for a 24” model. A larger model could come at a later point.

eMac

I hate the Mac mini. Apple computers should be like appliances, not dorky boxes with wires to plug in and random shit to connect and ugh. So I’m recommending that gets thrown away, and replaced by a new eMac.

The iMac is a decidedly high-end computer, but Apple really needs something to compete with the $400 Dell systems of the world. I think they should simply take a 2006-era iMac, cut down the specifications, and sell it cheap for the educational and low end market.

It should have specs along the lines of a 1.6ghz Celeron M, with 1gb RAM, 160gb HD, CDRW\DVD reader drive, Intel graphics, and a fixed 17” screen. It should not have WiFi, Bluetooth, iSight, FW800, or any of the general niceties the real iMac would have. The focus should be on cutting costs.

I think Apple could sell this for $599, or even $499. And I think they’d sell millions. And when they made a new one, they could keep producing the old stock, and sell it for $400.

Mac Pro

Oh, the other desktop I haven’t really touched on. I think the Mac Pro is really quite good enough. The design is old, but it’s very functional. I think it just needs some spec updates.

Now for the portables..

iPhone with Keyboard

I’ll have more ideas on this later, but I think the iPhone plus a Stowaway-style fold-out keyboard could be Apple’s “ultraportable” offering. Imagine Pages on the iPhone, or iChat, or IRC.. it’d be a great way for students and business people to always have a small computer with them.

MacBook Mini

I’ve always had this idea that the MacBook should be sold in cute colours. The picture I used in the grid I ripped off from Sony (they do a bunch of magnesium alloy laptops with pastel colours), but it’s essentially the same idea. The MacBook should be cool and personal like this, with a thinner bezel and generally smaller body size. Apple were once unique for having a compact laptop (iBook G4) for a low price, these days they seem to be allowing the MacBook to bulk up in order to encourage more MBP usage. That’s no good! The MacBook mini should be slim, thin and attractive. The current one is dull, big, dated and boring.

Oh, and it should be lighter too. Damn thing is heavy.

MacBook Pro

The MacBook Pro is a hard one, as the design is kinda timeless. Either way, I think the MBP could do with some sort of new metal used for its design, and perhaps some curves reminiscent of the PowerBook G3. I always thought Liquidmetal could look cool, but Vaio-style Magnesium could be another idea.

I also think OLEDs could be put to use on the MacBook Pro quite effectively - why not have an extra row of function keys at the top that look like the Optimus keyboard? On a cramped keyboard, it’d be very useful to have flexible buttons that change icons and things depending on context.

Of course, eliminating the ugly forehead and IR spot on the current MBP would be a great idea too.

Conclusion

Again, I don’t expect much - this is just an exercise in pointing out that Apple’s computers CAN be improved, much in the same way a forthcoming posting about OS X shows how much more Leopard could be doing. I’ll go to sleep now and wake up to a new iMac. I hope my pessimistic guess turns out to be wrong.

This is a blog post I feel compelled to write, but I’m not entirely sure why. The UX50 kinda seems like that to me - it’s a compelling thing, but it’s ultimately pretty pointless and I don’t nearly have enough to say about it as I thought I would. I’m not even sure what the UX50 represents - is it the end product of unbridled technological fetishism gone wrong? Is it a “convergent” device that almost got it right? Would it be better if it was updated and sold again today? All of these questions I’m unsure about, but I feel it’d be an interesting topic to explore on this blog which is usually full of my opinions on how to make things better. For this one I’m not sure.

To start, the aforementioned UX50 is a Sony Clié brand PalmOS PDA. It came out late 2003 towards the end of Sony’s incredible run of twelve-new-crazy-PDA-concepts-a-month, and really captured the attention of a lot of the PDA community until Sony’s Clié business imploded a few months later and they began their withdrawal. It’s not a typical PDA, though - it doesn’t look like a typical tablet even when in the tablet mode, and it won’t even let you use the display in a portrait orientation. It also subscribed to Sony’s odd half-baked philosophy of the ”Personal Entertainment Organiser“.. which from what I can understand, involved taking PalmOS’s PIM functionality and shoehorning random media-related features on top of it.

If you read the reviews of it four years ago, you’d come to the conclusion that it was a small, well-made device with lots of features but a few functional deficiencies in the screen size and battery life. The Gadgeteer has probably the best review, and they lean towards the negative. The general vibe of the device was that it was a step above normal PDAs, and that it had aspirations to be like a miniature laptop, with basic web and email capabilities that retain a proper keyboard with a streamlined OS.

The Concept

Seeing some parallels here? A few days after I started this article, rumours started swirling about something similar to the UX50 coming out from Palm, and it being some sort of revolution. Of course that turned out to be pretty underwhelming, but all the while I couldn’t help but think that Hawkins’ dream device had already been attempted before, but slightly differently.

You can sorta see what it was going for from the pictures, right? It really is a baby laptop, and while the keyboard is a thumbboard, it’s designed to be used like a laptop, as it forces a widescreen mode, bundles WiFi (at the time a very PC-centric feature) and has facilities for large amounts of external storage (it was one of the first PDAs to support memory stick pro.)

It does let you flip over the screen for use kinda like a Tablet PC, but I don’t think this is very important or useful. The small screen stops it from being useful. That was one of the major things wrong with this PDA and something that stopped me from bothering with it for longer than a few weeks.

Software

But how about the software? This is the major failing of the UX50. Probably the best example of how the UX50 got things wrong can be seen in its web browser software.

The browser experience on the UX50 is pretty awful. The UI, fonts, navigation, speed and renderer are all substandard and would be hard to justify using for any extended period of time. The bundled browser, of which you can see a picture of above, is called Netfront, by that bizarre Japanese company ACCESS who bought PalmSource a while back. It’s the best of all the graphical browsers on the Palm, but it manages to chew up pages pretty bad and doesn’t do anywhere near as good a job at reformatting pages than, say, Opera.

The other software is pretty subpar too. I don’t have much to say about the PalmOS that’s unique, but in a nutshell it’s incredibly old, ugly, limited and dull. All the third party apps and system modifications in the world (you can see some in the OS X theme I tried to install) can’t make it nicer, and while I haven’t evaluated it yet, it looks like it’s a great lesson in how OS can matter above all when you compare it to the exciting OS of the iPhone.

I don’t think it’d have to be this way. The CPU and software engineering (never trust Japanese software!) are pretty poor by modern standards, and simply adopting Opera (like the Foleo!) could improve the browser experience tenfold.

Conclusions

But in the end, I have to conclude that this idea is just broken. While it’s a fun geeky toy, it never really transcends this to be truly useful. It’s awkward to use, the keyboard isn’t good enough to word process on, the battery life isn’t quite good enough, and it’s nowhere near as good as an iPod for media playback simply by physical constraints. But most importantly, the software on it is generally of poor quality. While some apps like Wordsmith provide a great word processor, and others like VeriChat do a good job of making AIM work on the device, it never quite pushes beyond the hardware constraints to be truly good in any of the areas it attempts to conquer. It reminds me of one of my favourite other gadgets, the Microsoft Handheld PC. While these (and also the Foleo) go for the idea of a larger keyboard over pocketability, the UX50 suffers from the same constraints. While they are adequate for some tasks, they’re rarely good enough to justify themselves, and the software consistently lets them down.

What do I think is the future? Not the Foleo, and not a redesigned UX50. The future of this sort of device will be in cheap, portable external keyboards for devices that you’ll always have by your side - like your phone or a PSP.

Epilogue

The UX50 sold on eBay for $AUD285. Veronica and I bought some KFC with the proceeds, and the rest is going to an iPhone.

So I realised every second entry on this page starts with so. So I’ll stop that.

Anyway, (Anyway is a lot more sophisticated), I guess this moment signifies the official opening of what used to be a secret blog thing! I’m still not totally comfy with Wordpress yet, so forgive some sloppiness with the custom template I made.

The main thing I want to say here is that this blog is totally open for anyone to read now, and don’t feel bad commenting on months-old stuff. This blog is primarily a repository for what other people might more formally call “essays”, so don’t think I’m all about up to the minute reports on anything. Why, my next entry is about a four year old PDA.

Without playing games.

Well, that helps. But after watching the Apple TV come out and having a fair idea of what Microsoft are trying to get at with Windows MCE and Xbox 360, I think Sony are in a good position to sweep them all away, if they do some work with the firmware, make some deals and maybe put out a hardware box or two. I’ve written out some ideas in two sections, small and large ideas. I don’t think Sony would necessarily succeed if they did all this, but they sure would make people sit up and take notice.

Small stuff

These aren’t groundbreaking, but if Sony did all this the PS3 would be more and more appealing to those who want it to be a do-everything entertainment centre. Nobody does this perfectly yet, and I don’t think Apple ever will, so why not go for it?

• Internet Radio. It’s the perfect opportunity, isn’t it? Have an index of good, free internet radio to listen to. Maybe partner with AOL Radio, too? Maybe introduce region-specific streams from FM stations and such?
• Podcasts. Maybe Sony should buy Odeo. But even if the index page is a bit crappy (I think Tivo is similarly crappy), it would be great to have the PS3 pull in a bunch of audio and video podcasts so it would contain more compelling media content to watch. The Apple TV does this well, and Sony would be making a good decision if they were to equal it.
• Codecs. Sony aren’t in a position to tell anyone how to do things in this area, and it’s abundantly clear that going the open route hasn’t worked for them either (Sony have been using standard MPEG-4 formats in their products for a while now.) Include DivX, Xvid, WMV, MOV and FLV support in the PS3. Maybe only the pirates will care, but it’ll be enough to convince a lot of techy folk. Apple and Microsoft will never do this, but Sony could.
• Comprehensive trailers site. Right now the PS Store has a few crappy trailers once in a while - this is not good enough. Either partner with Apple or make a page that’s a lot like Apple’s Trailers page, and offer 720p and 1080p trailer downloads to PS3 users in a smooth interface.
• Follow up on the trailers. You have wifi, why not use it? If you just finished watching a new movie trailer, list movie theatres nearby that are showing it. If it was just released on Blu Ray, allow the person to buy the disc for delivery at their house in the next few days. (Partner with a store for this, or have Sony create their own Blu Ray retail store.) Perhaps if Sony ever get to it, provide a link to a pay-only downloadable link at Sony Connect or whatever? This could be great.
• iPod support. And Sony players too, I guess, but iPod is the important one. Yes, it’s proprietary, and yes, it’d take some effort to keep up with the database revisions, but Sony really need to 1. Have the iPod’s media be easily accessible from the PS3 (right now it just shows the ugly directory tree and won’t use the iTunes metadata) and 2. Establish the PS3 as a media centre, by allowing the PS3 to “top up” the iPod with new podcasts and other content.

Okay, so those are the geeky things - but if Sony did it, they’d totally shake the image of being all about their own proprietary formats for good. The PS3 would all of a sudden capture the attention of the geeky people (and the retarded geeks could even install Linux with Sony’s permission! Whoa.) But there’s some more interesting things I think Sony could do.

Major stuff

• Youtube. Partner with them! Provide their content on the PS3! Make it easy to search and browse, and either watch one at a time, or pick a quicklist of stuff for background buffering and viewing later. Maybe even add a feature to download the file for local storage. Yes, people will use it to view copyrighted content, but it’d also be the first device to present this sort of user-created content all on your TV. It’s kinda like Podcasts but bigger and more.
• A much improved syncing\sharing model. Three things are involved here. Firstly: Implement iTunes support. Any iTunes share of music, movies and photos should be picked up by the PS3. Secondly: MCE support. Emulate the MCE streaming the 360 does. Thirdly: A small, clean, Sony PS3 program for Windows, Lunix and Mac that acts as a daemon that sits in the background, sharing music, photos and video to the PS3 for people who don’t already use iTunes and MCE for the same thing. What does this effectively mean? Well, right now the PS3 is quite confused as it’s hard to get content onto it and it’s unclear why people would want to do so (who the hell would load their photos onto a PS3 with a memory card and just gawk at them in a slideshow? Who would systematically feed their PS3 CDs to rip?) This would fix but by doing as the Apple TV does, and creating a “pool” of content gathered from all available computers holding source material. This would allow the PS3 to act as a true gateway to your PC’s media library and photo library, with less fuss than Microsoft and Apple’s stupid ways. Do dupe checking, buffer content via smart background syncing, and make sure it “just works” - and all of a sudden the PS3 just replaced your Apple TV and MCE extender.
• Digital Video Recorder. Okay, weird? Fair enough. But hear me out on this. I keep envisioning the PS3 as some sort of universal do-everything media centre, and I think this would be the last step in achieving the goal of being the one unified place for all entertainment to be filtered through. I imagine Sony selling a $200 box with a USB cord that takes input from your cable TV box and another device or two, and basically acting as a “receiver” for everything in the living room.

Let me elaborate on that last one. This is what it would look like:

And this is how it’d work: You plug the black box into the PS3 via USB, which powers it and provides a data link between the two. When installed, a “TV” option appears on the XMB, where you get a program guide and options to record TV shows - you know, like a Tivo. Sony could make partnerships globally to get TV guide data. So for $200, you turn your Blu Ray player\SACD player\music library\Youtube viewer\game console into the medium you watch your television through. Imagine that! A single unified interface with a single remote, the ability to flick between TV and Youtube and podcasts and Blu Ray with ease, and for less than a Series 3 Tivo or MCE PC.

Oh, technically? It’s a 400gb hard drive with a HD TV decoder chip and a bunch of inputs. You could plug your cable tv into whatever fits, and your other consoles or whatever else you might use into the other ones - it could have composite, svideo, component and HDMI. Considering that a 400gb external HD retails for $150 USD, I don’t think $200 is a stretch for such a device as this. It would allow hours of recording time, get people constantly engaged with the PS3 interface and really cement the PS3’s position as the ideal device for any new home theatre. It’d blow Apple TV out of the water and make MCE\Xbox 360 look really timid.

About games, I just thought, wouldn’t it be cool if a PSP could download from the PS3 and join a game? Imagine Motorstorm 2 with one guy on the PS3, five guys online, and a friend next to you holding a PSP. Also, a PSP2 with flash memory and finger-touch screen. They should totally do that.

Stupid idea? Comment on me!

The Setup

Firstly, this bastard was a pain to get going. To begin with, it’s pretty big, though the box isn’t a crate or whatever. We set it up in my room, on my desk, but encountered just a few problems. Firstly, it didn’t like my 240v->120v stepdown power convertor that I use for my Japanese Dreamcast, instead beeping with anguish when I pressed the “on” button. I did some research and read some labels, and I soon noticed.. my converter was rated for 30W, but the PS3 wanted more like… uh.. 400W. That’s right - while the Dreamcast is hungry for 20W of power, the Gamecube about 40 and my iMac about 180W (With screen!), the PS3 wanted as much as a high powered gaming computer. Well! I then ordered a 500W stepdown converter from eBay ($90 AUD!) which is already bigger than a Wii by itself, but it supplied ample power for the damn thing and it finally turned on.. with no picture.

You see, a few weeks earlier I bought a HDMI to DVI cable so we could presumably play in 720p on my cute little IBM 17” LCD screen. I made the mistake of assuming HDMI was worth something - unfortunately, it appears that the norm for HDMI devices now is to encrypt everything with HDCP, which basically means that even though a HDMI->DVI cable should work perfectly in translating the wires to the right positions, you need a HDCP-capable monitor to decode the stupid DRM shit they put on the video cable. My IBM monitor, being old, does not. Unfortunately, neither do that many newer monitors, either - even el-cheapo plasma and LCD TVs often omit HDCP support. Even Apple Cinema displays don’t do HDCP yet. It looked like my DVI idea was a waste, so I dug out the 14” CRT television in my warddrobe and hooked it up with the plain old composite cables it came with. (I later got some component cables and ran it on a big 51cm Sony TV, looks pretty good but I want to try HD sometime!)

The console

Okay, so that was the anguish-ridden process of setting it up. Boo DRM, haha that’s kinda funny power consumption. How do I rate the console itself, though?

Aesthetically, it’s pretty gorgeous. Yes, it’s hueg like a PS3, but the curves and gloss are clearly designed to hide this, and it’s only when you’re carrying it do you think “Man this is a huge bastard of a thing.” I don’t know if it’s bigger than a first gen Xbox, but even if it is, they are polar opposites in terms of what they aim for in the case design.. “HEY GUYS I’M A GIGANTIC BRICK WHAT THE FUCK’S UP IN HERE!” says Xbox, while the PS3 is sucking in its stomach and wearing svelte, form-fitting clothes, hoping you won’t notice the hidden girth. It’s a weird design for sure, with the curved top and various recesses, but sitting flat or standing as a tower it sure looks impressive, and it does feel like it cost the amount you paid for it. It looks like it could be an awesome little Vaio computer if you have it like a tower (and I think it can, if you install Linux!) and it looks imposing and next-gen in a way that the Xbox 360 is only kinda approaching.

What’s wrong with the case? I would have liked to see colours, and I hope they diversify soon. Black isn’t bad at all, though. The Spiderman font is absurd and hideous (I’d prefer they go with that bizarre PS3 symbol you see just to the side) but it’s not that repulsive in person. It’s also pretty obvious that Sony’ll release one that’s about 10x smaller in a year or three, but for now I think it’s on par with the Wii and DS in terms of high quality design. Did I mention the touch-sensor off and eject buttons, cool and quiet operation, Sony-style beeps and bloops as you switch it on and off, and the slot loading Blu-Ray drive? Totally awesome.

As for the other bits to do with the hardware.. the controller isn’t bad. The USB charge cable idea is absolutely superb, and the automatic bluetooth pairing system is reliable and quick. The controller feels a bit better than usual due to the lightness, and I can’t say I miss rumble that much. I do like the way you press the PS button in the middle to boot the console up. It’s super duper slick. The AV out plug at the back of the system is the same as the PS2 (and PS1?) which is very nice of Sony, and HDMI\optical audio out are cheerfully provided on the low-end version (remember the ridiculous Sony-bashing hype of last year about this? Probably better than you remember the quiet headlines when Sony decided to put HDMI on both anyway.) The PS3 has four powered USB ports at the front, which (so cool!) worked with my USB keyboard without issue, as well as Veronica’s iPod and a flash drive. You can also pair a bluetooth headset to it, and it was talking to my Mac through gigabit ethernet. It really is a little computer in there, and for once it feels like it.

The software

XMB, or Xross Media Bar, is the ridiculously titled PS3 system software. It’s so pretty and simple! But it does a lot. I have no real experience with the 360 system software, but I will say that the PS3 one is far more minimalistic and beautiful than any of the competition. I expect Nintendo’s might be easier to use due to the remote interface, but for a controller-based menu screen it’s about as good as you get. Basically, you get a ribbon of icons that flow horizontally, and you access the contents of each section with up\down. That’s generally it. You get a very beautiful wave of colour moving along in the background, with the rest left to big white text.

Oh, but the software on this thing is pretty great. I already mentioned how it works with peripherals like a keyboard or bluetooth headset, but there’s also an option for USB webcams (didn’t like a Logitech one I tried though.) If you watch the Engadget walkthrough of the XMB, you’ll see that it has a whole bunch of options to choose relating to video and sound output, Blu Ray movie display, preferred audio encoding, etc.

It seems quite good at playing media. It can swallow all your music from CDs, and while you need to manually find the files in Apple’s crazy structure, it will indeed play music from an iPod (I do wish Sony supported the iPod more directly, though.) The visualiser is quite nice, and it will display ID3v2 album art in an attractive way. My only real concern with the media playing aspects is that the little overlay of play\pause\repeat etc controls is small and a bit unattractive. This is used in the DVD playblack mode, as well as general video playback, CD and internal music playback, and I think photo display. It works, though.

As an aside, I think it does pretty much everything iTV does and probably not that much worse. Add iTunes share support and fairplay and you’re done. I would only marginally prefer Apple’s interface, but remember that Sony have a high quality Bluetooth remote you can buy and Apple are stuck with the antiquated IR Front Row remote.

The web browser is surprisingly good, supporting thumbnail browsing kinda like Expose, with clever usage of the controller for text input (of course, USB keyboards work too!) and lots of shortcuts to menus to use. The renderer isn’t too great, though, it’s a bit slow and messes up on complex sites. I’d compare it to Safari 1.x or something.. though I do wonder what it uses. (ACCESS maybe?) There’s a Playstation Store site you can visit which has downloadable games, movies and addons for the PS3, some free, some cost small amounts (Seems like $5-6 is the norm.) I never used Xbox Live before, so the experience of downloading demos and freebies from the Playstation Store was pretty exciting to me. Games range from 80mb to 800mb, with a fair expectation of game size being 400mb or so. It would be nicer if the store was presented as part of the XMB native interface, as the website design is a bit clunky at times, but the only thing it’s really begging for is background download support.

Oh, on second appearance it seems quite buggy and crappy in places. I forgot my password, but there’s no means to reset it. I also added $10 to the Playstation Store wallet so I can buy flOw ($8 game) but I can’t buy it (I get a page saying “commerce.purchaseFailed” and it cheerfully emails me with a bill for $0.00.) It’s not a total disaster but it certainly needs bugs worked out.

The Games

Huh, what? This thing has games? (You kinda feel that way after using a PS3.) But yeah, it’s not just a superduper media device, of course. It seems to me that so far, there isn’t too much to play on the PS3, and that we’ll be waiting until Christmas and early 2008 for the really big names (MGS4 MGS4 MGS4!!) Anyway, I’ll list the notable games I tried here.

• Sonic the Hedgehog. - This is a lot of the reason we bought it, and yes, we knew it was meant to be bad. I came away from it saddened that a game with such potential and obvious effort was rushed severely to the point of becoming difficult to enjoy.
• Resistance. Uh, I dunno. It seems polished, and well made, and original, and the story is kinda interesting.. but it doesn’t grab me. Console FPSes aren’t very good, and this one is no exception to that rule, at least to me. It’s also pretty hard! It basically comes down to feeling like Halo or Gears of War but not quite there - it’s better than the average also-ran FPS title, but it doesn’t make it to classic status either.
• GT:HD Concept. Zomg. Just one track and twelve cars with no competitors, but this is a lot of fun. I still need to figure out drifting, but overall this free download game really surprised me and took up a few hours of my time. I am now really hyped up for Gran Turismo 5, but I don’t think we’ll get it until 2009 or something. Here’s hoping for more GT:HD Concept downloads!

I will now mention the notable demos I played:

• Motorstorm. This together with GT:HD make for some really impressive tech demos, but Motorstorm is similarly refined and clever in its gameplay. While Gran Turismo has a super polished realistic feel, Motorstorm has a super exciting crazy exploding car-fest feel.
• Ridge Racer 7. Ridiculous drifting is ridiculouuusss.
• Genji 2 (an action game). Button mashey but very pretty at times.
• Formula One. Awesome graphics, pretty fun with all the automatic guide things turned on :(
• Blast Factor, Cash Guns Chaos, GripShift. Boringish.
• Lemmings. Great.

PS2 and PS1 emulation is so far flawless. It has this system where you create virtual memory cards, but apart from that it Just Works. We’ve played MGS3, Grandia 1, Grandia 3 and Sonic Heroes on it. It even shows the old BIOS bootup screens which is really cute - seeing the PS1 bootup screen is kinda weird on component video!

Conclusion

I like it! As a gadget, it’s versatile, well-built and extremely cool, and seems to be a good solution for the features it offers - movie player, music library photo viewer, though less so as an internet navigator. As a console? Up to you. I’d say right now it’s only a good choice if you factor the PS2\PSX into the equation, as right now there’s only like three PS3 games worth playing, and none of them true blockbusters. It has yet to truly shine and I continue to expect it to surge ahead towards the end of the year and finally assert its place as the top selling console of the year. Just wait for a price drop!

For those of you not in the know, it’s often ignored on the OS X platform in favour of Adium, a multi-network free IM app specifically for the Mac, without the audio\video features but with more comprehensive IM-related features. I believe Adium and iChat are perfect examples of the difference between corporate and open-source UI design ideas. Both are polished and nice, but Adium overflows with features and buttons and choices, while iChat restricts you to what Apple thought was best. In my mind, iChat wins out overwhemingly as far as user experience goes, and it has done so many more innovative things with even rudimentary UI features like “tabs”: In iChat 4.0 (Leopard iChat) you get this slick sidebar that’s far more informative and usable than the plain Adium draggable tabs.

Anyway, since this is one of my favourite applications that seems to get all the fundmentals “right”, I have some ideas on how to make it perfect.

First, this is how the app looks in Leopard. You’ll note they ditched brushed metal, which is something I feel a little bad about (I hate brushed metal and any UI design besides standard 10.3-era pinstriped Aqua, but iChat was one app I felt metal was useful in), but it’s largely the same as the old one. Just little refinements around the place.

Here are the things I think Apple should consider adding to this wonderful base application:

General changes

• Skype, MSN and Yahoo support. MSN and Yahoo can be rudimentary, I don’t mind. File sends, avatars and plain old messaging should suffice. Skype, however, should be a strategic partnership in order to promote iChat’s audio and visual features, right now useless except if you are only friends with other Mac fags. Skype video and audio should work identically to iChat video and audio, enabling Mac->PC connections that aren’t crappy like the limited AIM support we have now.
• Higher quality voice chat. Like, on iChat->iChat video\audio chat. Right now it sounds hideous. I expect Apple to be the first ones to at least introduce high quality audio chat, which will adjust to use all of my 25kb\s bandwidth to send high quality sound similar to a high bitrate AAC. Skype is good in this respect, but iChat could be better.

Contact List

• Unified contact list. There is no need for a separate window for each service. Everything should be consolidated into one window, and even if a user has 20 active usernames spanning all five services, they should show as one entry in the list. It only makes sense.
• Smart Groups. Why not? It’d be cool if you could create a group for your contacts with a set of conditions based on the address card information like “Business is ‘Microsoft’”, or other metadata like “Last spoke in the last seven days”, etc. Catch up with friends you’ve ignored in a “People I rarely speak to” group? All sorts of clever ideas could be done.
• Personal RSS feed. (Pictured above) You should be able to add an RSS feed (or two) for each person on your list, which would correspond to their blog or other personal content. It would work similarly to how recent versions of MSN do on Windows - you get a little icon that pops up when people update their MSN blog, but this way you could use standard RSS feeds from anywhere to monitor a journal.
• Local Clocks. (Pictured above) Skype does this but not as well as it should. I believe it’d be neat if each person with a known time zone should have a little clock next to their name, with a pretty colour theme that indicates the general time of day - morning, afternoon, dusk or nighttime, say with a sunset or moon or whatever. I don’t think the AIM network provides this information, however iChat should aggressively try and find the information out, through checking on alternate networks (if the person uses Skype, it will know), the listed location in their address book card, or if that fails, a traceroute next time the person sends a file or uses IM image connection. Why not? Computers can do this for you!

Instant Message Window

Several things.

Intelligent image resizing

We don’t live in a perfect world. Many people use AIM 4 or 5 on the PC, which chokes on huge images like photos. iChat should notice that they’re not using iChat, and that an image you’re sending is pretty big, and offer to resize it to something sensible for them.

Useful feedback when sending images

I wasn’t able to make this as pretty as I wanted, but it’s one idea.. why not have the image display in a blurred state, or greyscale, and slowly fill in and the file sends? At least put a status bar on it. Right now it’s impossible to tell when a file has sent on iChat and yet it will bitch at you if you try to send a message while it’s still working in the background. Oh, it should also store all the messages you type and images you send and transparently send them through as soon as it can.

Additional in-window notifications

Pretty self explanatory, right? “This user is currently offline, message may not be delivered” is one other obvious idea. Or “This user is away”. Even “This message is long, a direct IM will be attempted.” But we can do more with it…

Integrated image hosting

Do you see what I did there? Apple should make their own ImageShack-like service and have iChat send an inline image as a simple link to a temporary uploaded file. iChat should do this when it can tell that the user cannot accept direct IMs (this is a feature of the AIM network, easy to do), if iChat determines the user to have a history of failed direct IMs (firewall issues) or if the user is marked in their info panel to use this function. It’d make so many potential headaches disappear. It could be marked out in a pretty way with a thick border and caption mentioning that it was uploaded to Apple and was represented as a link to the other user.

For long bouts of text that are too big for direct IM or a single IM, this should also be uploaded to an Apple-run temporary holding space. No more worrying about huge logs!

Stored Notes

Firstly, I apologise for the ugly mockup and the stupid name. I couldn’t think of any better that readily came to mind - Apple could fix that.

Basically, this feature is like ICQ’s network. Remember how on ICQ you could send an IM to an offline user, and the next time they signed on they’d see your message pop up? (Uh-oh!) iChat should do that. I think Skype supports this already, and if AIM doesn’t, it should perhaps store them with an Apple-run AIM bot that forwards messages to people. (If you send to iChat, though, it should be made transparent and appear as if it was sent from a particular user so you can respond to them straight away.)

iChat Profiles

I think the profile “Get Info” window needs reworking. It’s bad in iChat 3 and looks all wrong in iChat 4 - kinda like an address book contact, I think. I think it should be a big overbearing Aqua window like above.

We need a big avatar image to look at, and a pretty way of showing idle times, online times, their time and location, as well as support for Skype, AIM, MSN etc. There’s not much to say about the example above that you can’t already see.

Here’s a few more interesting things. We keep the event stuff, which is useful, but we add options for the uploading to Apple, an RSS field, manual timezone selection field (if we hate what iChat figured out itself from their address card, traceroute etc) and a preferred IM service for when a person is on multiple services at once. I’d pick AIM, but you see Skype there. It’s cool.

Other bits and pieces

• Show the last 5-10 IMs sent and received in a greyed out way. Many clients do this including Adium. iChat should too, it’s useful and a no-brainer if you have a client that keeps logs.
• Animate files being dragged to the window in a pleasing way. Why not a water droplet where you put it? Even just a big blue highlight? Right now it doesn’t feel satisfying to drop stuff on an iChat window when it should be made second nature.
• If you drag a contact to the window from address book or the buddy list, a drop-down window should appear asking you if you want to “Paste as” a home address, work address, email address, IM, etc.
• If you drag an event from iCal, it should paste details of the event.

I think all that should make iChat pretty great. Of course, there’s more polishing to do, stability issues, etc.. but I think a lot of these ideas would be considered innovative and useful in a way that other chat clients haven’t approached yet. Doubt it’ll happen.

I still like iChat 4, though.

I really think the Apple TV fails it. Do I think that it’s a bad idea in general for Apple to make a TV product, though? No way, I think they could do it well, and they’re almost there - the implementation is just wrong. Instead of making a weird custom Mac mini, they should be looking to make an Airport Express successor. I called it Airport TV here.

So what’s this Airport TV idea? Why is it different? Well, Airport TV has no hard drive, it has no IR port, it is not an ordinary AV component and it is not super expensive. Airport TV is $129, and it does a few things differently.

Why?

I guess when it comes down to it, the Apple TV is basically this idea (which I’ve had for some time) in the form of a set top box, but it’s made all wrong. Not just aesthetically, it’s positioned as something you use alongside your cable TV box as some sort of simple gateway, but I think the Airport TV could do it better.

The purpose of the Airport TV should basically be to get “Apple in the living room”, just like Microsoft are trying to do with Vista MCE and Xbox 360, and Sony with Playstation 3. It should allow someone to play all their media back on a TV, as well as explore other things appropriate for television - for instance, Youtube surfing, reading mail and other future usages.

A simplified Mac Mini is the wrong way to do it. Anything that’s a noisy, complicated box you put next to your DVD player is the wrong way to do it. This is the right way, and it’s a lot simpler:

Connectivity

Let me explain with a diagram. This is how it would hook up:

Got that? No? Alright. So.. the Airport TV is a white power brick, like the Airport Express. Difference is.. it’s a drop-in solution, that doesn’t play with all the crap behind it. It has a video\sound input, and a video\sound output, so that everything coming from the receiver passes through it then into the TV. It basically acts as an “always there” device that can be summoned at all times. I suppose if you use your TV’s multiple inputs it doesn’t work quite as well, but its prime intention should be to sit inbetween all the junk. Maybe there can be a custom port on it with splitter adaptors made for having several devices plug into it?

So it’s a box that sits inbetween the TV and your stuff. But how can it do anything if it’s as small as a power brick? Well, it operates on the principle the Apple TV half-operates on - that it piggybacks on a computer in the house that gives it media. It also accesses the internet through your wireless network.

There should be a “Airport TV daemon” that you can install for Windows and Mac. This app sits in the background on your PC and will serve a library to the AirPort. All computers currently available will be auto-detected and added to the pool of media content via Bonjour or whatever.

Marketing

I doubt $129 would be a profitable price to set, but Apple should do it. This should be an extremely high volume device, sold to everyone, Mac or PC user, iPod user or not, intended only to break even.

Why? So Apple can become this huge monolithic media company, of course. Basically, if Apple can sell millions of them, they’re gonna be able to better compete with the Xbox 360 and PS3 once Microsoft and Sony start eating at the iTunes Store’s dominance.

Functionality

So what does it do when you plug it in? Well..

• Plays music.
• Plays videos. (Not just from iTunes, should allow you to pick a directory to scan.)
• Shows pictures.
• Can buy stuff from iTunes Store
• Views more dynamic video - trailers, but also full Youtube support (do a deal with the company!) and free streaming TV channels.
• Views email (support for Apple Mail, Outlook, Entourage should be enough.)
• Web browser.. maybe. Be the new WebTV!

But how do you control it with no IR port? Well, amazingly, they invented this new radio frequency technology a few years ago called Bluetooth, which would be pretty ideal. I haven’t got a mockup, but I think it should have a sort of iPod-mini-like remote control that has an LCD, and a proper clickwheel. If it’s affordable, maybe it could be touchscreen like the iPhone? This would allow you to more easily search out complex things and maybe even type stuff out for searches and other things like that.

Conclusion

The Apple TV is overpriced and pretty stupid. It just seems like it was done the wrong way. I think Apple should make this device, instead, and further the whole “we make great consumer electronics” thing by making the swift, decisive move of releasing a product far more clever and unique than the competitors.

Think about it - the power brick is invisible, all the buyer sees is a pretty remote control. At any time they want to watch stuff, they press a button and smoothly move around the pretty menus, watching interesting stuff that’s all quietly streamed in the background from their desktop PC that has all their media.

No fuss with noisy boxes with lots of cables everywhere. No pointless hard drive buzzing away. No huge complex remote, but no oversimplified toy one either. No $299, $399, $599 or $799 price tag, just a simple $129 impulse purchase that lets you do oh so much with oh so little hardware.

Maybe we’ll get it with Apple TV’s next revision? I have low hopes.