Multi-touch for Mac

MacNN has a post on a 17 year old who built a Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (that's multi-touch in common speak) interface for the Mac.

Multitouch Out for Retail

If you haven't seen Gizmodo, they say that Jeff Han's Multitouch panel is now out for retail. But I was kind of disappointed to read the price tag. I was hoping they could have at least made one model that would be more affordable, guess that last part was wishful thinking, which isn't to say that the ideas and opportunities that Multitouch has to offer isn't tantalizing.

Microsoft Surface: Future is Here

Anybody interested in that coffee table computer the boys and girls up at Redmond came up with? Checkout this video from SarcasticGamer.com that surely will make you wanna change your mind.

SarcasticGamer.com: kudos! excellent video!

It's a good thing the future isn't written in stone.

where credit is due: I ran across this reading The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs post, appropriately titled, "If this movie doesn't make you buy Microsoft Surface, nothing will"..

A Conversation with Steve Jobs

One of the hottest things today is D: All Things Digital Conference.

(isn't it amazing that the concept of "today" is relative to your "timezone", i.e. location in space? But enough geekyness, we digress.)

In this video, Walt Mossberg has a conversation with Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

They talk about Apple's business:

• iPhone,
• iTunes/iPod,
• the Mac
• and "hobby" Apple TV which now features, watching YouTube on your big screen tv.

you can find the transcript and original video over at All Things Digital.

memorable moment of the interview: "iTunes (in Windows) is like selling ice water to people in hell" -- Steve Jobs.

And oh, speaking of Microsoft, they just launched a multi-touch "product" called "Surface" (they have video, text and pictures of the thing) and will be targeted at hotels and such, none for us ordinary folk. Microsoft can sure take the fun off great technology (and it looks ugly). Guess, there isn't a lot of ice water to go around in hell Redmond.

Don't Cry For Me Cupertino

What if, for the next version of your Software, you put in no new features? What!?! You might call me crazy! Why would people buy to upgrade? How are we going to sell software, if we don't put in new features?

Software technology has reached a point where we complain about bugs and bloat. We pack in SO many features that quite frankly, no one uses or few people do. Just look at Microsoft Word. How many of you use anything beyond Spell Check, Grammar and Thesaurus? Or the occasional bullet points. My point exactly.

The truth is, our world is filled with mediocre software design. I made this case in my post: "Will you Enlist", that Windows makes everyone an idiot for not trusting enough to let Users know what their IP address is as opposed to the open and frankness of Mac OSX. By-the-way, Linux's Gnome and KDE makes the same mistake. David Pogue in his TEDTalk makes a better case when he asked: "Why do you shut down a Windows PC, by clicking on 'Start'?"

A few months back, the Linux kernel boys and girls had this idea: one release to clean up all the mess in the Linux kernel. That was a bright idea: cut the fat.

Sadly, for Windows, everyone agrees that cutting the fat out is a good thing, but can't because you have this huge ecosystem that exist around it.

Simplicity sells and software designers shouldn't make users stupid. If any task takes too many clicks of the mouse, then it is too complicated and must be redesigned.

New York Times technology columnist David Pogue had this story: A woman called Apple to complain that her mouse was making a squeaking noise. And the technician on the other end asked: what do you mean, ma'am, that your mouse is squeaking? The Woman replied: "well, all i can tell you is that it squeaks louder the faster i move it across the screen." Shocked, the technician exclaimed, "Ma'am you've got the mouse on the screen?!" She replied: "Well the message said: Click here to continue".

The truth of the matter is that, we should make current software better by not adding in new features but making sure the software we have right now works the way they should. David Pogue's Simplicity Sells TEDTalk is hilarious, and filled with myriad insights in the State of Software. Hearing Pogue's spoofs: "The Sound of Silence", "The Bill Gates Song" and "Don't Cry for Me Cupertino"--- simply well worth the price of admission, so go ahead and play it and enjoy.

Jeff Han, one of the pioneers of Multi-Touch who was one of those guys we blogged when we "Search(ed) for the Holy Grail" for his TEDTalk, unveiled "the genius of multi-touch interface design". This new way of interacting with our computer will help revolutionize the way we interface with the multitude of data that is bombarding us daily.

Over at the invisiblethings blog, understanding stealth malware is up, so if you've ever wondered if Blue Pill was a stunt or not and/or if you wanna know more about how to be good hackers, go over there and read security researcher joanna's entry.

Speaking of hacks, lock-down your systems boys and girls, our shields are down! "The Mac has been hacked!" (locking down is kinda over the top, don't you think?) US$10,000 and a Macbook was all it took for a Safari-Client side hack to work:

You were wondering if your MacBook was vulnerable even after you applied that last batch of Apple patches? Sean Comeau confirms, “Currently, every copy of OS X out there now is vulnerable to this”. You are. So, uh, switch to Firefox until the patch comes out? Or live dangerously like me.

I've decided to live dangerously then they updated saying:

The vulnerability affects Firefox as well as Safari. More details, momentarily

Oh, NO! I'm on Camino! (probably, shouldn't have said that out loud, the guy in the white shirt out back didn't quite hear me).

Anyway, go over their blog where they have some suggestions on staying safe while the boys and girls over at Cupertino mull things over. So "Don't Cry for us Cupertino!" (that song just won't go away) just go to work and make all Macs safe!

At the end of the day, Technology should work for us and not the other way around. It should be simple, it should be intelligent and designers should make interfaces that do not make us idiotic or think of us as one (And i'm looking you straight in the eye, Microsoft, Friendster, Nokia and Yahoo on that last one. Your interfaces are such royal pain to use). It's time to join the cult of doing things right and make that the default setting.

The Search for the Holy Grail

Wouldn't it be way cool to bend space-time to your will and peer into the future or stand witness to the past with fresh eyes? Though as Master Yoda would say from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, "Always in motion the future is". Yet the allure of peering into "what's next" is just so captivating and exciting.

Take my initial reaction to Appleinsider's post on Intel's next generation mobile chip based on Penryn that is expected to come out sometime next year. It is quad core and it is mobile.

What's so exciting about this is that finally--- power comes to mobile. it caught me by surprise because a few weeks ago, i've been looking at the Intel roadmap to help plan for future technology purchases. The illusive holy grail (i.e. wishful thinking on my part) is to consolidate all my technology needs into one device, preferably one that I could take with me anywhere, where i could work anywhere. It would be nice to just have one box that does it all for me--- raw power to do all my "playing around with," and mobility.

If you've been looking at new PCs and Macs, you'd find the world to be moving towards Multi Core. They're essentially many "cpus" in one. The technology enthusiast may find this Ars Technica article to be of interest, where they mull over the implications of leaping ahead to an 80-core chip world.

Anyway going to back to the here and now: sadly, the ranges of laptops across the mobile computing spectrum (yes, both Macs and PCs) are so disappointing. Which is why for me, the mobile quad is a welcome product in spite knowing that at least for the foreseeable future, will affect only a tiny bit of the computing population. Mobile Quads are for people who would trade battery life (never a good thing when going mobile) versus performance and most people--- who browse the web, who do word processing, spreadsheet, presentation work wouldn't benefit from such technology at all. Though I have my reservations about it, still it would be worth considering in 18 months.

While we're in the topic of mobility. I remembered coming across this video on YouTube. It is from Intel, and their vision for the UltraMobile PC. Their vision of future computing is that you get to wear your device.

ultra mobile pc

Sounds a bit too impossible? Hey! Flying cars are here now and... they sort of work. So why not wear your device? come to think of it, with the iPod shuffle, isn't that the beginning of wearable devices?

The technology in the video is actually here now. Well, maybe you can't command your computer to do stuff as depicted in the video and today's ultramobilepcs are just plain ugly (even from guys like Samsung).

Still, much of the underlying infrastructure is here, which translate to knowing it is do-able. With devices like iPhone (which makes the whole umpc genre look sexy as well as useable) and many other similar devices approaching us on the horizon, expect this future to begin to make an impact in our lives in as little as 5 years.

Speaking of the iPhone, David Pogue of the New York Times blogged about Multi-Touch screens, which is one of the features of iPhone and of future UltraMobilePCs (as seen in the video). Multi-Touch is a fascinating piece of technology, right out of Minority Report. And yes, it is a viable piece of technology that is here, just not in the hands of ordinary consumers.

jeff han and his multi-touch screen

If you must ask, the YouTube video above is indeed real. This technology exist now and one of the pioneers is Jeff Han of New York University. You can find him narrating this bit of technology over at lastminuteblog.


Another appealing piece of technology coming to town is Joost. It is, as the proponents behind it have called it: TV, the way you want it. It combines old school television with business-model disrupting new media of the Internet. The idea isn't really new. Just ask the Bittorrenting, TiVo cradling, DVR/PVR running crowd. It is however an excellent one.

Upon joining joost beta (i had to wait a few weeks for the registration to be approved), you download a client and you create a username. You then get to channel surf. Pick one and it gets sent to your Computer. Now, i've had problems trying it out when what i wanted to watch wasn't available. I suspect it is largely because my Internet connectivity (in the speed-of-molasses-range of 370kbps down, dsl and); joost recommends at least 1Mbps down.

I don't know yet if this is a feature. I haven't explored joost enough to know, but it would be really nice if joost would be more TiVo/MythTV/Bittorrent like that you get to choose before hand what you want to download and it fetches it in the background while you work and watch the video when it is done downloading or after you've done your work.

It would be nice if Chad Vader from Blame Society Productions could automatically be sent to say Joost or MythTV automatically upon subscription to them.

chad vader from blame society productions

Though I must admit such thought really breaks the whole joost-paradigm. The beauty of joost is that as long as you've got internet connectivity, you can watch the tube. Expect joost or joost-like business to be the norm in a few years.

In medicine, Osirix is this open source project that lets docs and medical personnel share your medical image data. It lets them create their own PACS-server. A few years back this would be a difficult thing to do. But Siemens and their ilk are standardizing over DICOM to deliver those high quality images and across the network.

I started writing this post because of my search for the illusive (and admittedly, futile search for the) Holy Grail: consolidating my tech needs into one platform, one device to rule them all. What i ended up doing was googling the Internet for all those links about upstart future technology. One of the fringe benefits of living in this nascent Age of Information is that power is decentralized and democratized (i.e. handed over to people)--- to do-it-themselves, to collaborate, to form communities, to build exciting new technologies. May be the Holy Grail isn't one device to rule them all, it is about making sense of what is today and what is to come and that may be the zeitgeist for now.