CrassPip

2009-03-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

This recent article, Bionic hand is gripping stuff (From thisisoxfordshire), talks about the use of a device called the SaeboFlex. It is a hand brace with springs that stretch open a clenched hand and allow the wearer to exercise weak muscles that otherwise cannot be moved. People who have suffered a stroke or spinal cord injury can potentially use this treatment to regain function in their hands.

I first learned of the Saeboflex while inpatient for physical rehabilitation after a spinal cord injury. The device was new at the time, and unfortunately I haven't had access to one myself. However, a friend who makes leather armor created a similar device that I have been using. After just a few days of resistance exercises with the glove, I have seen improvement in my ability to open my clenched hand. I'll add more updates and photos of the device in the near future.

Another Exciting Stem Cell Study

2009-02-09T08:08:00.001-08:00

A study recently published in the online journal, Stem Cells, showed regeneration of function in paralyzed rats. The authors transplanted stem cells from different sources to find the best way of repairing injury. This study shows hope for the use of non-embryonic stem cells in treating spinal cord injuries.
Before and after videos of the rats can be seen here: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121664916/suppinfo

Exciting New SCI Studies

2009-02-04T14:49:00.001-08:00

The last two weeks have been an exciting time in the science of nerve cell regeneration. First, a study published January 22 tells of the identification of specific genes responsible for restoring injured nerve cells in nematodes. These genes have direct correlates in humans. Activating these genes in humans may eventually be a way of treating neurological damage.

Secondly, and closer to fruition, on January 23, the FDA Approved a human study injecting embryonic stem cells into the spinal cords of recently injured people with paraplegia. The researchers hope to improve function below the injury site, as has been the case in similar rodent studies.

Links: ScienceExpress article (required paid subscription)
Geron, the company running the human study

President Obama's Disabilities Agenda

2009-02-03T15:54:00.001-08:00

The new administration has a page on its website devoted to plans related to improving conditions for Americans with disabilities. It offers a four part plan for increasing education, restoring the ADA, increasing employment rates, and supporting independent community living.

In addition, the whitehouse.gov site itself is promised to be accessible to all. The Accessibility page invites comments from people with disabilities, "To improve the accessibility of WhiteHouse.gov, the White House has asked users with disabilities to review the site and has also reviewed the site's accessibility with outside web tools. The results of these reviews have been incorporated into the website. The White House welcomes comments on how to improve the site's accessibility for users with disabilities."

It's a great time to get involved and keep pressure on politicians to live up to their promises. Help ensure that the new era of transparency includes all Americans.

How Quickly Things Change

2009-01-28T12:53:00.000-08:00

A recent news story recounted how an up-and-coming Brazilian model contracted a rare necrotic virus and passed away after a short fight against the disease. Prior to her death, Mariana Bridi da Costa had undergone amputation of both hands and feet in an attempt to save her life.

This tragic story underscores just how fragile all our lives are. The public has been infatuated by other celebrity tragedies in the past, such as the deaths of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Brandon Lee, and Selena, just to name a few. The difference here is that da Costa's death was due to natural causes, not a freak accident or substance abuse problems. It also took time.

Imagine being a beautiful 20-year-old model, trying to take your career international. You feel a little ill. Doctors diagnose a urinary tract infection. No big deal. Then suddenly you are fighting for your life. Your hands and feet have to be removed.

Imagine if she had lived. I wonder what kind of life would have ensued after this experience. Would the fashion world have embraced a beautiful young woman amputee? Might she still have found work doing only head shots? What kind of horrible trauma it would have been to live through such an ordeal. Would she have risen to the occasion or fallen from the pressure and pain?

To be fair, I only learned of da Costa's existence at the time of her death. I don't know how she would have acted had she survived. However, her story as it unfolded gave me pause. I realized again how fleeting are life and health. I thought about every person's inevitably declining body and mind and how quickly things can change. I hope others took the time to think these thoughts and to feel the sadness of loss and corresponding appreciation for what they do have.

New Year's Revolution

2009-01-24T10:47:00.000-08:00

As anyone who follows this blog regularly might have noticed, (and I know there was one of you, thanks Michael) the publication schedule has gotten a little less frequent of late.

In the past I spent hours writing, reading, rereading, and rewriting a piece before publishing it. In the olden days before the diarrhea of immediate mass electronic publication, this was called "revising and editing". (I wonder what Britlanders do to their writing if they "revise" rather than review for tests?)

To move more in line with the modern era, I hereby vow for 2009 to write more and rewrite less. It's not such a huge stretch. Believe it or not, I compose many of these posts in my head initially. Too bad I no longer have the magical ability to retain pages of text verbatim after one go-through (it slowly dissipated around puberty, which is also when I started taking Spanish, for which I blame the loss of my above-average spelling ability.) (That's also the year I met Michael, hmm...) Anyway, hopefully what remains when my fingers hit the keyboard will be most of the good stuff.

So despite this new, more lax editorial policy, the headline is no mistake. I am officially joining the revolution of the me generation. Forgive me if I still don't confuse there for their or its for it's.

An Animated Return

2009-01-20T10:16:00.000-08:00

I posted about a year ago reviewing the animation package, Anime Studio. Recently Innocentive.com started their second annual commercial video contest. Using Anime Studio, iMovie, and Corel Painter, I completed an entry. I am pleased and proud to announce that it has been chosen as one of five finalists. Please view my video on YouTube and rate it (highly if you please!)

Mac OS X Speech Synthesis

2008-05-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

Since the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984 Mac OS has had the ability to convert text into speech. Even eight-bit computers like the Commodore 64 had SAM, an early voice synthesizer, but as I bemoaned several months ago, there has been relatively little progress in speech recognition and synthesis in the intervening decades. For the more than 45 million Americans with literacy problems this is especially important. Despite the lack of exceptional progress, OS X does offer options for text-to-speech that may be of interest to users regardless of their literacy level.

Here are some uses for speech synthesis that you may not have thought of. Anyone who writes, even if it's only an occasional professional email, can benefit from text-to-speech. While spell checkers are great for finding egregious errors, more subtle problems are harder to spot. Often writers inadvertently use the wrong word or add extra words to their text. For example, how often have you seen "you" in place of "your" accidently? One easy way to find these problems is to listen to someone read what you wrote. OS X can do that for you.

Similarly to the Dictionary application, speech synthesis has been integrated into the modern Mac operating system. Any highlighted text whether it be in a web browser or an e-mail, can be read aloud by the computer. In many applications like word processors the user just needs to bring up the context menu by right clicking or control clicking and choose the "Speech" option, and "Start speaking". If the option is not in the context menu it is still available in the Services menu. Click on the name of the application in the menu bar and then go to "Services/Speech/Start speaking". It is also possible to create a shortcut key for this option. Simply go to System Preferences and open the Speech preference pane. In the "Text to speech" tab, check "Speak selected text when the key is pressed" and then push the "Set key" button. Now just highlight text in any application, and your computer will read it to you at the touch of a button.

Another speech feature can be useful to many people. When working on the computer it's easy to lose track of time. Sometimes hours go by before I realize it. To avoid this, OS X can announce the time for you. The option is available in the Date and Time settings. These can be accessed in several ways. There is a button in the aforementioned "Text to speech" pane, or you may click on the time in the menu bar and choose the "Open Date & Time..." option. Date and Time is also a choice from the main System Preferences menu. Once there, simply click "Announce the time", in the Clock tab, choose how often, and click "Customized voice" if you wish to set specific voice options.

Some users like me, who keep their Dock hidden, may not always notice applications bouncing their icons in the Dock when they need attention. This can be addressed by having OS X speak to you when a program needs attention. This option is also in the "Text to speech" tab of the Speech System Preferences. Just check "Announce when an application requires your attention". The computer is even very polite, saying, "Excuse me. Application X needs your attention."

What if you are dissatisfied with the standard computer voices? Without doing an exhaustive search I found two companies that offer commercial voice packs for OS X. Both have fairly realistic voices. You can hear many samples or download demos at the InfoVox and Cepstral web sites. Unfortunately, they're rather pricey. The InfoVox voices are $100 for the American English pack, whereas Cepstral voices are sold individually for $29 each.

While it would be hard to say that speech synthesis has come a long way on the Mac, the availability of universally integrated speech options and high-quality commercial voices does make a compelling combination. For those who prefer to have text read to them or just simple system alerts, text-to-speech can be a useful and important component of the operating system.

For more great information on the Services menu, see this web site.

Universal Access Options for Everyone

2008-05-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

As with most operating systems of the last decade or so Mac OS X contains options for accessibility by people with disabilities. What users may not realize is that some of these options are extremely useful to anyone.

OS X puts these functions in the Universal Access pane of System Preferences. This article will concentrate on a few options in the Seeing and Keyboard tabs.

The first item that is certainly of use is the zoom feature. Pressing Command- Option 8 zooms in on the screen around the mouse cursor. By default graphics are smoothed after the zooming takes place, so images that would otherwise appear pixilated still look decent. I often use this feature when watching low-quality web video. Rather than putting up with a tiny postage stamp sized video I simply press the short cut key and watch it much closer to full screen. Once in zoom mode the magnification can be adjusted by pressing Command- Option-minus or Command- Option-equals.

The Keyboard tab has features designed for people who have difficulty typing. However, one of the options in Sticky Keys is very useful for people creating screen casts. With Sticky Keys open and the option "Display pressed keys on screen" checked, the symbols for modifier keys, command, option, control, or shift, appear on the screen when they're pressed. In tutorial situations and with new users this is useful to provide a visual cue to go along with the name of the key being used.

Finally, the option "Enable access for assistive devices" appears at the bottom of the Universal Access pane all the time. This choice needs to be selected in order for tools like text expanders to work. It allows applications to access the keyboard buffer as you are typing.

For people with no challenges using a computer the Universal Access pane may be the last place they would look to add useful functionality to OS X. As you can see, there are some options, however, that can improve the computing experience for anyone. Hopefully people will be inspired to explore further.

A Blog Meme Thought Virus

2008-05-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

Many years ago my brother became interested in the concept of "thought viruses" as he called them. In high-school he tried to get everyone he knew to "whomp the zimbob" (a nonsense phrase that he made up). He is also fond of infecting people with tunes by whistling or humming a catchy song.

The idea of these thought viruses, however, goes back farther than my brother. The concept is called a meme and was developed by Richard Dawkins in a book written in 1970. Memes are very prevalent on the Internet, starting with simple e-mail forwards and now including vast social networks. One manifestation is the blog meme. I was recently "tagged" by Lon of NoLimits2Learning. Here are the rules that were outlined.

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player's blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

Here are the questions:

1. What were you doing 10 years ago?

Ten years ago I was working as a software developer at a printing company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I had dropped out of college a couple years before. My daughter was only three, and I tried to spend as much time as possible with her. I had not yet broken my neck, so I still had full control of my body. We enjoyed going to the park, riding bikes, and going on walks.

2. What are five things on my to-do list for today?

I don't keep a to do list, but today I am trying to catch up on my writing. I am using voice recognition for only the second time, so learning to do this better with also be on my list. This afternoon I have to pick up my nephew from school.

3. Snacks I enjoy...

I love chocolate, the darker the better. I also tend to snack on oatmeal or a banana since they are fast and easy.

4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

If I were a billionaire I would have a private jet. Traveling is such a hassle. I would also have a portable wheelchair that allows me to go up hills. I am not strong enough to push myself in my manual chair, but my power chair is not portable. I'd also have money to start a business. I'm not sure which idea I would pursue, but I would do one of them.

5. Three of my bad habits:

My worst bad habit is procrastination. I can also be hypercritical, and I'm not very friendly with new people.

6. Five places I have lived:

I have lived in the northwest suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, on the east side of Milwaukee, on the west side of Milwaukee, on the northwest side of Milwaukee, and in Santa Barbara, California. Not much diversity.

7. Five jobs I have had:

I have worked as a pizza delivery guy, an archaeologist, a beetle dissector and drawer, a software developer, and an elementary special education teacher.

8. People I would like to know about because I am just that nosey:
I'm afraid I don't have five or six people, but here is my list: Jared Goralnick at Technotheory.com, Ricky Buchanon of ATMac, and Daniel Eran Dilger of Roughly Drafted Magazine.

Recognition for Speech Recognition

2008-05-13T22:36:00.000-07:00

My friends came through again. If you've been following this blog you may remember reading about my attempts to get dictation software installed and running. I ended up creating a virtual Virtual PC. Unfortunately, the package with the IBM ViaVoice did not contain the CD. However, yesterday I received a disc in the mail from my friend; ViaVoice version 10 for Windows XP.

This is the first article that I am attempting to dictate. So far the recognition has been so-so. Correcting mistakes is not intuitive yet. I'm sure it will get better as I get used to the software. When it works the speed is amazing, so I am looking forward to getting this working better.

In order to make this somewhat more technical I am going to describe the set up that I am using in the order to get my dictated text onto the Mac.

ViaVoice's SpeakPad dictation application.

As I have it set up, ViaVoice allows dictation into its own application called SpeakPad. I am using this program to create a simple plain text file. In order for my Mac to access it, I set up Windows file sharing. Because I am using the Powerbook as a wireless gateway for the PC, it was somewhat harder to get the two computers to see each other. I was able to see the Windows share from my Mac but not vice versa.

The simple green screen interface of WriteRoom.

Aside from that issue setting up sharing was fairly straightforward. I followed the directions here. Then, to finally published the article I am using several Mac applications. First, I save the file from SpeakPad into the shared directory. I use the application, WriteRoom, to open that text file in order to proofread. I like the green and black full screen mode for this because it is easy on my eyes and typing with text expansion is responsive. Plus, once a file is open in WriteRoom, it will reopen it the next time the program is run. I simply save over the same text file in the virtual PC, and the Mac text editor reflects those changes. Next, I drag the text file into MacJournal in order to keep a nice, searchable copy. From there it's one click to publish. I open the blog in a browser where I add images and links and do the final check.

It seems that voice recognition will be a real time saver if I manage to tame it. Obviously the current setup is somewhat convoluted, but moving the information from app to app is actually fairly painless. And the much smaller amount of typing certainly causes me less pain. It's nice to have good friends, and it's especially good to have nice friends.

Assistive Technology Blogging

2008-04-24T12:29:00.000-07:00

Assistive technology (AT) is a topic that has become near and dear to me. For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to devices that help people with disabilities perform a function better. There are low tech examples like pencil grips or colored text overlays, or high tech items like a pen-based optical character recognition text reader or advanced computer software. The reason I am familiar with the subject is that I was trained as a special education teacher and worked in that capacity until an accident imparted to me a disability of my own. After breaking my neck, assistive technology became essential for helping to recover as much of my former function as possible.

AT: Pencil grip and pen text scanner

This blog has not focused on AT per se, but several of my posts relate to the topic. ATMac made me aware of a blog carnival asking for submissions of bloggers' favorite AT posts. Mine are on the topic of text expansion tools.
Text Expansion: Wasting Time Trying to Save Time tells of my travails as I tried several tools to improve my typing speed. I recently added an addendum, Text Expanders Revisited. While this reads too much like an advertisement for my taste, it necessarily updates the topic of available text expansion software since newer versions have been released.

If I may be somewhat optimistic for a moment, I'd like to think that some people who never considered the topic of text expanders may read this information and use it to improve their ability to use a computer. No one has requested my abbreviations yet, but I hope they may be useful to someone in the future. In particular, users of head pointing systems with onscreen keyboards may benefit from using fewer keystrokes. Plus, anyone in a position similar to me, where finances impede the adoption of a full dictation system, could be able to type faster. The two linked posts, therefore, are my entries to the AT blog carnival.

Attachment in the Digital Age

2008-04-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

Lately I've read several books involving Buddhism. One of the primary teachings of the Buddha is that attachment causes suffering. This was exemplified for me this morning by a dream. In it the roof of the house I lived in caught fire. After a brief effort by firefighters, the neighboring house caught fire and became the focus of their attention. We risked entering the first floor of our house to retrieve the kids' possessions, but the second floor, where my things were, was already lost. When questioned about what was up there, I could only remember a couple things, yet my feeling of loss was extreme. For the remainder of the dream, I had intermittent crying spells, and a few tears even crossed over into waking life.

For ages past the fear of loss was merely related to physical things. We were saddened by the death of a loved one or the breaking of a treasured memento. Now, however, a whole new breed of attachment has been born-- attachment to non-physical, digital media. Steve Jobs understands this. This was initially demonstrated by his comments on subscription music services, and then again by recent Apple product innovations.

Jobs has repeatedly declared that people want to own their music. It has been the rationale given for the iTunes Music Store eschewing any type of subscription download service. From a marketing perspective this choice was right on. The subscription-based music stores have all stuttered or folded, and Apple now controls 85% of the legal download market and is the number one music retailer in the world. That belief has also led Jobs to publicly call for music files free of Digital Rights Management (DRM) software, which makes it harder to use legal music when and where a person wants.

Along with ownership comes attachment. Apple has responded to this fear of loss in several software and hardware offerings. People can assuage their fears by making backups to other media or across the internet.

Probably the first such offering was the Dot Mac subscription service. For between $69 and $99 per year, a user gets a storage area on Apple's servers (called an iDisk), in addition to several other services. Many applications now include quick and easy back up to iDisk. In addition to Apple's own Backup utility, which will copy photos, purchased music, and other selected files, users can also store their book and CD collections on iDisk via Delicious Library, back up their taxes from Turbo Tax, and more. This service is an easy way to create off-site back ups of important digital documents.

A noted feature of the most recent release of OS X, Leopard, is the program called Time Machine. It is basically just a backup utility, but its innovations are that it runs automatically with little user intervention, and it provides a novel interface making restoration from backups simple and easy. The stated goal was to increase the number of people who actually back up their data.

In conjunction with Time Machine is a hardware offering called Time Capsule. It is a wireless router (aka Airport Base Station) with a built in hard drive for seamless backups for an entire home network with little user intervention. These innovations are obviously geared toward ensuring that more people are more comfortable with the digital world where music, movies, and memories only exist as pips on a disk.

If you imagine losing all of your digital photos and MP3 or AAC music, it may bring a tear to your eye. I for one have not become enlightened enough to release my attachment to these modern age materials. Which reminds me, I haven't made any backups for quite a while. Better go do that.

Text Expanders Revisited

2008-04-22T21:32:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago I posted an article about my experience with text expansion utilities. At the time I had chosen TypeIt4Me as the only alternative able to expand one-character shortcuts. Recently, both MacUpdate and MacHeist launched new shareware bundles. Since the former includes Typinator, and the latter originally was said to include TextExpander, and I was already interested in a few other offerings, I decided to give them one more try. To my surprise, Typinator exceeded my expectations and contradicted my memory.

As you may recall, I intended to use text expansion as a poor man's assistive technology for improving text input speed and accuracy. I had used CoWriter with elementary students but could not afford the price tag for my own use. As an alternative, I set up a large number of abbreviations in TypeIt4Me, allowing it to expand out the most common words as I typed the first few letters. However, I was not entirely satisfied with this solution either, since TypeIt4Me had the fewest features of the three programs I had tried but retained a fairly hefty $27 price tag. Therefore, I turned it off for the moment and located TextExpander and Typinator once again.

After a brief revisiting of TextExpander, it was clear once again that it would not fit my needs. As noted before, the one-letter abbreviations did not work. They gave a warning message, but were not highlighted in red and disabled like other illegal shortcuts. I sent the following email to their tech support.

Subject: TextExpander snippets
Date: April 11, 2008 5:55:59 PM PDT
To: info@smileonmymac.com

Hi,
I've previewed your product, and it has very nice features. Unfortunately, it does not fit my needs because single letter abbreviations are not supported. (It seems to me a bug that it does not highlight them in red even though there is a warning message.) I use a text expander to facilitate all my typing because I cannot use one hand since I broke my neck. Being able to use "t" for "the" and "n" for "and", for example, saves me a lot of time. The only program that I have been able to do this with is TypeIt4Me.
Please let me know of you will ever make single letter abbreviations possible.
Thanks.

This email was sent almost two weeks ago, and I have not heard any reply, plus the MacHeist bundle does not in fact include the program, so I have written off TextExpander.

The other program, Typinator, was a pleasant surprise. I believe the version was updated to 3.0 since the last time I examined it, and the changes were dramatic. First and most noticeably, Typinator now runs nearly invisibly, with just a small icon in the menu bar. Next, when I went to import my TypeIt4Me shortcuts, I had none of the problems that I had had before. I simply dragged and dropped the file into the list of abbreviation sets, and it worked. Finally, my one-letter shortcuts worked! It may be in part due to my faulty memory, but the new version of Typinator was well worth trying.
There were some differences to adjust to in switching from TypeIt4Me. In Typinator features like whether to expand immediately or after a delimiter and how to treat case sensitivity can be set on a shortcut by shortcut basis. Unfortunately, the default on my imported abbreviations was not what I needed for most cases. In the long run, though, having this level of control will enable better functionality. Another issue I had was trying to create an expansion with a backspace in it. In TypeIt4Me I used this to enable typing " g" instead of "ing". The program would backspace over the initial space before adding the "ing". Typinator allows setting the cursor position, but not using the backspace key as far as I can tell.

Overall, I am happy I gave Typinator another try. I have over 200 abbreviations set up, and it is pretty amazing how many of the words I type are abbreviated now. The application is part of the 10-program bundle being offered by MacUpdate for $64.99. I was seriously considering the package before, but Typinator sealed the deal. I would love to have the full functionality of CoWriter or dictation software, but Typinator is not a bad replacement, and right now the price is right.

If anyone else is interested in my abbreviation file, I would be happy to share it. If you purchase the MU bundle through the link above, I earn a $3 credit.

Why-Mac Part One: Window Management

2008-04-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

Apple stock compared to the Nasdaq and Dow Jones.

Until recently, there were no real contenders to Microsoft's OS monopoly. Since the release of OS X and the iPod, however, Apple has steadily begun to challenge that dominance. Apple has over 19 billion dollars in cash stashed away. Their stock price, despite recent declines due to economic fears, has increased over 350% since 2005. Studies have shown 40% of incoming freshmen at some universities using Macs, and Apple has garnered a 25% market share by revenue for laptops sold by all manufacturers for February 2008.

Why-Mac will be a series of articles explaining in detail how I have found Mac OS X to be the best in usability, productivity, and aesthetics. Much has been written about switching to Mac or intricately tweaking OS X, but most of this information is either very basic or too technical. These articles will span the middle ground. For readers who are familiar with computer usage and MS Windows, recent switchers or those considering a Mac, it will present details about how Macs are different and how those differences can make you more productive. Hopefully even longtime Mac users will find some tips and tricks and come to understand their computer better.

First, a bit of background on what qualifies me to be writing these articles. I started using personal computers at the age of 11 on a Texas Instruments 99 4/A. My parents wouldn't buy any game cartridges for it, so my brother and I learned to program in Basic. Later, I became a fan of Atari computers. The Atari ST used the GEM interface, which was a knock-off of the Macintosh OS, but it offered more "Power Without the Price". In high school, the local newspaper published a letter to the editor in which I argued against the purchase of Macs for our school (infuriating our computer teacher). After high school, I worked at a couple of PC clone stores, selling, building, and repairing computers. I learned the workings of DOS and Windows. The promises of Microsoft for each revision of Windows would excite and then disappoint me. In 1995, I became an internet programmer and later learned Java. My experience with Macs began shortly after OS X was released. Having tinkered with Linux off and on for years, the stability of Unix coupled with a nice user interface appealed to me. I got my first Mac in 2001, spent a couple months learning OS 9.2 in order to understand some history, then plunged into OS X and never looked back. While I don't like to consider myself a "fanboy", as my friend said on the matter, "There is no fervor like that of the converted." Without further ado, here then is part one of Why-Mac.

One of the primary differences between Windows and OS X that is often overlooked is the basic way applications are run and windows handled. The Unix world uses the concept of a window manager. It decides how to arrange and display the individual windows of running applications. Though MS Windows and OS X lack a true window manager program, for ease of discussion I will nonetheless use this terminology.

The OS X window manager offers many usability and productivity advantages over Windows. As most anyone who has used a PC and a Mac knows, the running application in OS X displays its menu options, File, Edit, et cetera, at the very top of the screen. Windows on the other hand, puts these options within the window of the program. Ergonomics experts talk about Fitts's Law, which calculates the amount of time for a desired target to be accessed when doing something like moving a mouse. It has been shown that having these common options on a border makes them easier and faster to access.

Safari windows revealed by Exposé.

The next OS X feature that is often overlooked is how multiple documents within one program are handled. Unlike Windows, Mac OS distinguishes between an application and its separate documents. This enables several advantageous usage scenarios. Take the Safari web browser, for example. If several separate windows are opened, they can be quickly switched between by using Command and ~, the tilde key, (i.e. Apple-~). To view the open windows graphically, press F-10 to activate what Apple calls Expose, which also gives the ability to click on a desired document. If you want to switch to a different program altogether, say going to iTunes to change playlists, pressing and holding Command-Tab shows the current apps. Sensibly, they are shown only once, not once for each open document. Similarly, the Dock shows running applications, not their individual windows.

Alt-Tab reveals running applications.

There is even more granularity available, though. Minimizing a document by pressing the yellow minus sign removes it from this internal list, so it no longer appears in Exposé or when switching with Command-~. This is useful, for example, when there is a website I want to read but not right at the moment. A tiny screenshot of the minimized window appears in the Dock, complete with the icon from its parent application to make distinguishing it easier.

Safari windows minimized in the Dock.

OS X has also retained the Macintosh feature of hiding an application. Pressing Command-H makes a program hide. Its minimized windows are removed from the Dock (though the program's icon remains), and Exposé no longer shows any of its documents. The program can be unhidden by selecting it with Alt-Tab or clicking on the Dock icon.

The differentiation between windows and applications provides still more benefits. Pressing Command-W on a Mac will consistently close only the current document window. Pressing Command-Q will quit the entire application and close all of its documents. In MS Windows it tends to be a crap shoot whether Alt-F4 (the shortcut for closing a window) will exit just that document or the entire program. In addition, an option available only in OS X is running a program with no open documents. At first this seems nonsensical and confusing. If you close all a program's documents, it remains running with its menu bar at the top of the screen but nothing below. An obvious use for this functionality is loading a program like Photoshop and leaving it run even when no images are currently being edited. Photoshop has many plug-ins and takes a long time to load. Being able to leave it open in this way is a real productivity boost.

The newest OS X, Leopard's window manager also gives the option of placing programs on various virtual desktops. This feature is called Spaces. It provides a simple way to segregate your work into separate domains; a further option that eliminates the clutter of running many applications and makes accessing information faster and easier.

The final area of window management in which OS X excels is maximizing windows. In the Microsoft world, maximizing a window means making it take up the entire screen regardless of how much information it actually presents. In most OS X applications the documents are smart enough to resize only as much as needed. For example, when zooming in and out on images in Photoshop, a maximized image window will fit the size of the image on screen as long as there is available real estate and not cover additional space with a blank window.

This concludes part one of my Why-Mac series. Understanding window management is key to maximizing productive computer use. Mac OS X facilitates efficiency by providing the aforementioned means of organizing, viewing, and switching between applications. The rest of this series will look at more ways Macs enable a more pleasant and productive computing experience.

Playing Games with Python and Volity.Net

2008-04-12T06:00:00.000-07:00

A few years ago my friends and I used to get together just about every Friday night to play board games. Our old standby was Risk in all its variations. One week, however, a guy brought over a new card game he had bought called Fluxx by Looney Labs. It was fast-paced and fun and quickly became a regular at game night.

The game Fluxx on Volity.net

Then about a year ago I met someone who serendipitously mentioned that she played Fluxx. She introduced me to a free online version hosted by Volity.net. It's a great implementation of the game, complete with the original artwork and decks from two different versions of the game.

Volity.net, though it has largely failed to do so, aspires to build an online community for gamers interested in traditional card and board games played by computer. They have developed an infrastructure using the Jabber network for interested programmers to develop their own games. The great thing is that the implementation is open source and very expandable. There are several games I would love to see electronic versions of, and having quite a bit of programming experience, I decided to take a look.

While the games available on Volity are fairly impressive, I unfortunately found their documentation and infrastructure underwhelming. The following is a log of the steps I followed in trying to use their Application Programming Interface (API). Hopefully it will not only serve as a critique of the Volity service but also be helpful to others considering using it to implement their own games.

I found a developers' guide on the Volity wiki. The first thing to do was decide what language to use. Volity has libraries for Perl and Python. I have a passing familiarity with both, but decided to go the Python route in order to learn it better. After a bit of searching, I headed to another wiki page to download the following libraries: volity.tar.gz, games.tar.gz, zymb.tar.gz, and volityd.py from another wiki (I didn't feel like dealing with a Subversion server.) Some people will recognize these as *nix compressed files, which they are indeed. They need to be ungzipped and untarred in a working directory.

Next, rather than trying to implement a whole new game off the bat, I decided to modify an existing sample in order to get a feel for the API. I chose the classic, and very simple, Rock Paper Scissors (called RPS for short in the Volity docs).

Following the tradition of many a shoddy programmer, the best documentation I eventually found was in a source code file, volityd.py. It explains how to get things running. It's a bit complicated (fortunately OS X includes Python, so I did not need to install it), but basically there is the concept of a Parlor. It is a specialized Jabber client that knows about one type of game and lets users sit down at a Table to play that game. Making a new game means creating a new Python class that extends the class volity.game.Game.

To get things going, I made a simple change to games/RPS.py, commenting out the logic that decides the winner so that white was always victorious. In order to test my changes I had to register my Parlor with Volity's servers. This was a simple process on the Volity web site. Note that if I had created a whole new game rather than just modifying an existing game, I would also need to register a RuleSet document and a User Interface.

I fired up Gamut, the Java-based user interface application for Volity.net. Gamut requires a Volity user ID, which I had already created for playing Fluxx. After logging in, I chose Game/New Table At... and typed in my Volity/Jabber ID for my Parlor. The RPS interface came up. I could add a bot (computer player), take a seat, and play the game. As white I won every time, sort of.

Apparently the user interface code has its own logic for determining the winner. The Game (ie referee) knew that I won and registered that fact with the server, but the UI would show the result of the original implementation. This is obviously far from ideal, especially in a distributed system.

At this point my initiative was about spent. I explored the UI implementation for a time. It basically requires creation of an SVG file to create the graphics and Javascript to implement interface interaction. Even though for this game the interface file is surprisingly short and straightforward, dealing with two more technologies was a bit more than I was willing to bite off at the moment.

For others more adventurous than myself, I did locate the following resources. Within Gamut, selecting Game/Game Info... and clicking the UI tab tells the location of the current user interface SVG file. This can be downloaded and modified. Then choosing Game/Select New Interface... can load a local SVG file. There is also a UI tutorial available on the Volity web site, and an SVG Testbench application.

I give the Volity developers a lot of credit for creating a usable infrastructure with many good game implementations. It is also great that they have made it open source and tried to lure further developers. Unfortunately, the system fails in the way many open source projects do. The documentation is hard to locate and often incomplete, and the implementation is exceedingly complex. Granted, if I dedicated several days to understanding the intricacies of the system, I'm sure it would all be very straightforward, but in reality how many people are going to take the time to do that before getting started on a project?

In addition, to be fair, my choice of Python may have been non-optimal. The Volity reference implementation is in Perl, so that language may be better documented. There is also a developer forum available on the web site that I did not take advantage of. Overall, I found Volity.net a good effort but disappointing for new development.

The Psychology Behind Apple's Success

2008-04-09T12:10:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, psychologists can watch a 10 minute conversation between spouses and predict with a high degree of accuracy which couples will remain together. Or would you believe that adding a sprig of parsley to the apostrophe in a soup can's logo can compel taste-testers to use the term "fresh" in their comments? These studies and more are described in the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell.

A couple of the stories in particular had me thinking about Apple's product lines, marketing, and psychology. Whether conscious of it or not, Steve Jobs's company does a great job of appealing to people's underlying decision-making factors in their corporate strategies. Blink illuminates some of these otherwise murky processes.

One counter-intuitive factor in decision-making is that more options does not mean greater sales. Most people would think that we would rather get exactly what we want rather than have our choices limited. However, a study by Sheena Iyengar described in Blink found just the opposite. She set up a stand selling jelly. When offered 24 flavor options, only 3% of customers made a purchase, whereas 30% of customers bought when given only six choices.

Apple follows this example in several ways. The iPod line has always been limited to three or four base models, each with only two or three capacity choices and up to five color choices. Each of these decisions has few enough options to be quite manageable. Similarly, while slightly more complicated, Apple hardware is divided into a few simple categories. There are laptops or desktops. Within each category there is a consumer-level machine and a professional model. For example, in laptops there is the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. They are named to easily distinguish the intended market. Finally, for each model there are usually three basic configurations. Advanced users can specify components more precisely, but the average consumer has only a few limited choices to make. As a final example, Apple has made a point of the confusion surrounding the numerous versions of Microsoft Vista as compared to their own latest release, OS X Leopard. Leopard comes in only one version, with all the options included.

The Aeron office chair.

On the other hand, some of Apple's choices butt up against another psychological propensity, fear of the unfamiliar. Jobs tends to take product design risks, keeping Apple on the cutting edge. An analogous situation is described in Blink with the creation of the now ubiquitous Aeron office chair. It was the first such product to incorporate many ergonomic advances. The back was designed to fit the contours of a person's body, smaller at the base and larger at the top-- the opposite of traditional chairs. The chosen material was a thin, breathable plastic stretched tight over the frame, no padding or leather as in most high-end office products. The design was rated by early users extremely high in comfort but remarkably low in aesthetics. It took quite a while for people to get used to the chair and appreciate it. As Gladwell writes, "The problem is that buried among the things that we hate is a class of products that are in that category only because they are weird. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes us some time to understand that we actually like them."

Apple's iMac and the later Dell XPS One

Following the maxim, Think Different, Apple has not been afraid to create "weird" products. The original berry-colored iMacs, all-in-one computers, were extremely novel, and they did end up being liked by many people. The more recent LCD iMacs have set design standards copied by other companies. The Mac Cube, on the other hand, was never well-received, but its reincarnation a few years later as the Mac Mini has done quite well. Apple has also been first to dispense with older technologies. They stopped putting floppy drives in Macs while PC's continued to incorporate them for years. The recent MacBook Air, despite its high price tag, does not include any optical drive. It has been decried by many pundits for this fact, but sales have been extremely strong nonetheless. In each case it may have taken time for customers to adapt to these changes, but in most cases they eventually get entered into the collective culture as part of the standard, just as the Aeron is now a prototype for many office chairs.

The psychology of consumerism is a large and complex topic. Gladwell's book focuses more on how our snap judgments can be useful once we are trained at recognizing situations where the subconscious can lead us astray. An article in Time magazine, "The Why of Buy", further discusses the neuroscience of buying decisions. They conclude that 95% of consumer purchasing is decided subconsciously. Also, "brands are so powerful that we are sometimes more likely to buy something we identify with than something we like better or that is better for us." The Apple brand has certainly been successful at entrenching itself in consumers' psyches. Whether they are conscious of it or not, Apple has very adroitly navigated the complexities of marketing.

MS Idealists Gaining Ground

2008-03-24T11:32:00.000-07:00

I recently commented to friends that the continual shunning of web standards by Microsoft's Internet Explorer team would surely lead to the demise of that browser in the long run. My point was that as other browsers gain market share, I think more sites will follow the standards. It seems self-destructive to be non-compliant. My thoughts were prompted by the release of the Acid3 test, which the beta of IE8 scores a whopping 18% on. The result of my comment was a brief debate that left me with an altered opinion on the state of Microsoft.

My friend referred to an article by Joel on Software. With the danger of blogging on bloggers fully recognized, I do have some comments. Joel seems to ignore a few things in his discussion of the difficulties of choosing standards (such as those measured by Acid) versus compatibility (with IE7) mode for the new IE. First, an easy solution does exist. Simply return a different string for the browser name when asked. User agent detection code in existing web sites searches for the string, "MSIE". It'd be pretty easy for version 8 to return "MicrosoftIE" or any of the 1000 variations you can think of. Then those sites looking to include the new version just update their script, while the majority of sites that would break with the newly more compliant browser treat it as an unknown standard browser.

Second, Joel bemoans the triumph of the "Idealists" when in fact it is a good thing. It should have happened when Windows 95 came out. MS tried to maintain backward compatibility with 3.1 at the expense of quality (and to sidetrack OS/2). Then, the NT kernel was supposed to eliminate the DOS layer from the consumer Windows, but this did not happen until a decade later with Vista.

Look at Apple as a counterpoint. They have effectively abandoned their entire installed base (OS 9 "classic" apps don't work on OS X.5), switched to a new hardware platform, and with the latest OS X introduced a number of API's that will quickly make it the standard for new applications. Their numbers are up to the point that in February 2008, Apple captured 25% of the PC market by revenue. The great improvements in Macs have come from a willingness to stick to the "Ideal", and that is in a niche market.

Apple Mac share of web surfers for two years.

If Microsoft had maintained technological integrity, it could have deployed better operating systems with less regard to old software. Certainly the monopoly OS has the ability to deploy standards and have people come around. They have done this repeatedly by "embracing and extending" industry standards. The same philosophy of breaking interoperability could be used for nice (technological advancement) rather than naughty (monopoly maintenance). Stop selling XP, and Vista will catch on inevitably.

The third thing the article ignores is the fact that, for the most part the "bugs" he talks about were intentionally put into IE 7 and before in order to differentiate it and build its market share. Why people cared back then whose browser people ended up using is beyond me, but the war was so hard fought that standards were ignored, and web developers have paid the price for last decade and more. It makes perfect sense for people to be fed up with coding browser specific hacks to get a site working. Code to the standards and let the "buggy" browsers wither on the vine.

Creativity Unleashed Through Technology

2008-03-20T09:04:00.000-07:00

"When the tools of productivity become transparent, true creativity is unleashed."* I worked next to a guy who was so fond of this quotation that he had it scrawled on his whiteboard for several months. It has become increasingly clear to me that the advance of technology is providing more and more of these transparent tools, and, indeed, the creativity of more and more people is being unleashed.

Historically, there has always been a distinction between the artist and the rest of us. Average Joes may have enjoyed doodling, writing stories, or making up songs, but their audience was typically limited to friends and family or, at most, the local community. The main barriers between "creative professionals" and everyone else could be placed in one of two categories: expense and expertise.

The example of photography is a good illustration of the diminishing barriers to creation and distribution of artistic works. The amount of devotion and expertise required to create in the modern world has dramatically decreased. The Eastman Kodak Company revolutionized photography in 1888 by releasing a camera anyone could use. It cost $25 for the camera with 100 exposures and another $10 for developing and reloading. The company's slogan was "You press the button, we do the rest." You can't get much simpler than point and shoot, so changes in photography were evolutionary for almost a century. Then came the digital revolution. An employee at Eastman Kodak created the first successful digital camera in 1975. It weighed 8 pounds, captured black and white images at 0.01 megapixel, took 23 seconds to do so, and was never put into production. It took until 1990-91 before this technology reached consumers.

As you can clearly see from the graph, the price of digital photography drastically came down during the first decade of the technology. Now people can "press the button" and don't even need anyone else. The ease of utilizing digital photos is an equally important development. Most cameras make it trivial to hook up to a computer and download the images. Software like Apple's iPhoto, Google Pikasa, and Adobe Photoshop Elements make it easy for consumers to quickly make simple changes like cropping, removing redeye, or adjusting colors. Photos can be printed on inexpensive photo-quality ink jets, shared by email, or loaded on file sharing sites like Flickr. What used to be the expensive, reclusive process of film developing and printing can now be a simple, communal activity.

Obviously, there are myriad examples of this transition. People armed with camcorders and iMovie become celebrities on YouTube. Back in 2006, YouTube announced it was serving 100 million videos and receiving 65,000 uploads per day. Anyone with a mic and something to say can develop a following with a podcast. According to Steve Jobs last September there were over 125,000 podcast programs available on iTunes and over 25,000 video podcasts. In addition, blogging and web site creation are simple enough now that anyone can make professional-looking content for the world to read and review. Also from back in 2006, an article reported these astonishing statistics: There are over 50 million blogs. Two new blogs are created every second, and 18.6 new blog articles are posted every second.

Clearly the technology of creation is liberating many people, allowing their artistic expression to come out in the form of graphics, text, audio, and video. As technology continues to advance and simplify the creation and dissemination of such content, it certainly seems that true creativity is being unleashed for more and more people.

* I quoted the saying as best I can remember. I was unable to find a source, so it may have been something my coworker made up.

Making a Virtual Virtual PC

2008-03-16T16:24:00.000-07:00

Before the transition from PowerPC to Intel CPU's by Apple, Mac users had to rely on various other means if they needed to run the occasional Windows app on their computer. The most popular and practical solution was the commercial software package, Virtual PC. It was created by the company, Connectix, but subsequently purchased by Microsoft. Virtual PC would emulate a full Pentium II computer system. Unfortunately, translating instructions between processors is time-consuming and fraught with errors. The program worked for the most part, but was slow at best.

Recently, some of my friends conspired to get me voice recognition software. As I have posted in the past, here and here, my ability to type has been greatly decreased, and I have sought ways to make entering information into the computer faster and easier. Dictation is certainly a good option. It so happened that my friend had gotten a free copy of IBM's ViaVoice for Windows. The system requirements call for a 600MHz Pentium III. Obviously, my emulated Pentium wouldn't cut it.

The native Mac options for speech recognition are very limited. The company, MacSpeech, makes a product called iListen that would run on my G4 PowerBook. There is also a Mac version of ViaVoice. Unfortunately, these products have gotten fairly negative reviews and cost between $50 and $100. A new, superior product called Dictate is being released by MacSpeech, but it will only run on Intel Macs. The answer to this conundrum, my friends figured, was to just send me another computer.

So I have inherited my friend's Gateway 1.6GHz Pentium 4 with Windows XP. Since he wasn't using the computer, this became the most economical option. However, there were a couple of issues to overcome in order for this system to be useful to me.

Issue one: No wireless
First of all, my computer is set up in the garage, far away from any physical network cabling. I use the Mac's Airport card to connect to our wireless network. The Gateway, being an older desktop model, has no wireless available. Thanks to OS X's amazing networking, though, this problem was easily resolved. The first step was to connect the Gateway and the Powerbook with an ethernet cable. Normally this kind of direct connection would require a crossover cable, but I recalled reading that Mac network adaptors automatically detect when a crossover cable would be needed and adjust accordingly to use a regular cable, so I gave it a try. The next step was to enable Internet sharing in the Mac's System Preferences. This was as simple as choosing Airport from the drop-down list and clicking Ethernet for the other computer's connection. I hooked up the cable, started the sharing, and it just worked.

OS X Tiger Internet Sharing

Issue two: Only one monitor
The second issue was that I only have one monitor available (and really no room for another). Normally, I could just use my laptop's display and hook the monitor to the PC. Unfortunately, due primarily to some very rough treatment by its previous owner, my Powerbook's hinge broke, disconnecting the LCD from the computer internals and effectively rendering the display useless. Therefore, sharing the one monitor was the only option.

For several reasons I decided to continue using the Mac as my main computer and run the Gateway remotely as needed. To facilitate this I installed VNC on both systems. For the Windows VNC server, I used Alkit VNC, which allows the sharing of a single application window or the whole screen. I figured this would enable me to just have a ViaVoice window or IE window displayed within the laptop's applications. On the client side I used JollysFastVNC. Though technically just an Alpha release, this app eliminates the biggest problem in using VNC; this client is actually fast. In my limited use I have not had any problems with it. You can see the Gateway's XP desktop running half size in the screenshot beginning this post.

Final issue: No disc!
After getting everything set so I had a virtual Virtual PC, a real PC in a VNC window, it was time to install ViaVoice, the whole reason for all this effort. When I opened the box, I found a nice USB headset mic and a directional desktop mic, a user manual, and an empty CD case! When I asked my friend about it, he said he had never opened the box. Someone must have taken the disc before my friend got the package.

This last problem was one I couldn't overcome. I had successfully set up the computer, but obviously couldn't do dictation with no software. In the end I have a surprisingly responsive "virtual" Windows computing solution. Now I just need some reason for using Windows.

Future-Proofing Applications: another purpose of design docs

2008-03-13T21:23:00.000-07:00

I was doing some reading recently on statistics and testing, and I came upon a free online book, The Basics of Item Response Theory, by Frank B. Baker. It had originally been published in 1985, with this second edition from 2001. What had made it very popular, it said, was the availability of free, as in beer, software to use while following along with the book. The first edition application was written in AppleBasic for the Apple ][. Fifteen or so years later, the program was ported to Microsoft Visual Basic 5 for Windows 95. I don't know if the program runs on modern Windows computers. It certainly does not work on my PowerPC Mac. I found it unfortunate that a freely available educational program would be limited in this way.

Bouncing these ideas around got me thinking about how it would be possible to future-proof an application. It is clear to anyone who has worked at a large company more than 20 years old that aged software platforms are a real problem. Internally developed applications become a mainstay of business operations, but more and more quickly, it seems, the computers and operating systems to run these programs become obsolete. Companies in the situation of upgrading their computer systems can use one of several strategies. Most common, perhaps, is to port the app to a new platform. This usually involves a large expenditure in software development and user retraining and many headaches as new systems attempt to replace the old while having the kinks worked out of them. Many resist porting and end up keeping legacy systems in place long past their expected life cycle. Another possibility is to upgrade computers but keep legacy applications alive through emulation software, which can have a slew of problems of its own.

It is a fact of modern life that programming languages, operating systems, even user interface devices change over time. To truly archive the functionality of an application would require isolation from all of these factors. One such means which would work for simple applications at least, occurred to me. Basically, the idea is to record the functionality of the program in an easily read and understood design document.

To illustrate, I will create a description for a game of tic-tac-toe as a dialog between the user and the computer. This technique is similar to a Use Case, but to me is much more clear. The questions the computer asks are the parameters necessary for the program to run. Note that this example is incomplete in that the rules for deciding if the game has ended would have to be specified, but I left this out to keep it short and simple.

User: I want to play tic-tac-toe.
Computer: Do you want to be X's or O's, or should I choose?
U: You choose.

[Assign symbols randomly with an equal chance User is X's or O's.]

C: You are X's. You go first. Please choose a location for your X.
U: Middle box.

[See if the game has ended. If not, randomly choose one of the remaining plays.]

C: I go in the upper left.
[See if the game has ended. If not, repeat the turns until the game ends.]
C: You win. Do you want to play again?
U: No.

The important point of this trivial example is that it describes the functionality of the system while remaining entirely interface-independent. If written for the Apple ][, it would probably use a simple text prompt for user interaction. More modern computers would likely allow the user to click on the game board to mark their move. The choice of X's or O's could be made by a GUI button. The computer of the future might use synthesized speech and voice recognition to interact with the user in a very similar manner to how this dialog is written.

Even the algorithms employed can be written in plain language and left up to the programmer to implement in the most reasonable way for the current architecture. For example, assigning the X's or O's randomly in Java could entail use of java.util.Random class to perhaps check whether the next random integer is even or odd. In Python, the "random" module provides the following easy syntax: human = random.choice(['X', 'O']). As long as the implementation follows the documentation of assigning the marker with equal probabilities, the details are unimportant.

There is another advantage to such documentation. In some cases, especially in the sciences and education, the person creating a computer application is not a professional programmer. However, a domain expert could specify the exact functioning of a desired program and leave the actual implementation to others with more expertise. Even if an implementation is created, the functional specification can be made freely available, allowing others to make versions without needing access to the original source code.

Obviously, the more complex a program is, the longer and more complex its design document will be. Full-blown design languages like UML provide the standardized means to create such documentation. For applications that will be around for a long time, a proper functional specification becomes vital to allow for changes in the computing environment. This is clearly the case with many educational computer programs as well as integral business systems. Well documented design is not just for the initial implementation as most people think it is. It can also be one of the best ways to future-proof applications.

The Coming iPhone Halo Effect

2008-03-07T15:09:00.000-08:00

The other day Apple held their much anticipated iPhone SDK Roadmap event. Executives Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller were on hand to kick things off. Around the same time Fortune magazine published an interview they did recently with Jobs. At some point during the coalescence of these two events it occurred to me just how big the SDK announcements were. They foretell the coming storm of new Mac adoption due to an iPhone halo effect.

Jobs references the so-called iPod halo effect that analysts cite as a reason for rises in Mac market share in the Fortune article, "We helped it along. But I think a lot of it is people have finally started to realize that they don't have to put up with Windows - that there is an alternative. I think nobody really thought about it that way before." Since digital music players didn't have a monopoly brand associated with them, there was no stigma in the Apple devices gaining a lion’s share of the market. As these devices become more advanced, people are starting to realize that when they have “the whole internet” in their pocket, as with the iPod Touch or iPhone, what they really have is a mini-computer; and that mini-computer is running Mac OS X, not Windows.

Steve Ballmer on YouTube

Back to the SDK Roadmap, it might have been more clear if Schiller had stood on stage shouting, “Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!” in a mad frenzy like Steve Ballmer, but it still became apparent that Apple’s strategy is to bring developers into the Mac fold to build a robust application ecosystem all the way from the mobile iPhone OS up through full-fledged OS X.

A large portion of the event was taken up by developer presentations of the work they had completed in just two weeks using the new SDK. It was mentioned repeatedly how many of them had never used a Mac for development or even used Objective-C. It was also revealed, though not trumpeted loudly, that iPhone development will take place on Macs and only on Macs. Those who want to take part in building the iPhone revolution will have to become Mac users and XCode developers.

Just how lucrative this market could be and how easy it is to sign up were clearly flaunted. Apple will host, sell, distribute, and update your app if you simply register as a developer for $99. The tools are free. The developers set prices and get a straight 70% of the revenue. And of course there was “One more thing.” If the regular enticements are not enough, how about $100 million in venture capital earmarked for revolutionary iPhone apps?

Apple is pushing the Mac market from the bottom up and from the back door in. More than a few independent developers are going to be enticed by this potential revenue. They will need Macs. Many of the mobile apps will likely scale easily to full-blown OS X. Once developers are comfortable in XCode, why switch back to anything else? At the same time users are getting used to carrying around a mini Mac. With the OS, applications, and even multi-touch gestures transferring over from mobile to desktop, more and more people will find comfort in this Windows alternative. The iPhone halo could be huge.

Whither (or Wither?) Mac Mini?

2008-02-27T13:22:00.000-08:00

It's been over three years since the Mac Mini was introduced. At the time it had a clear mission and was built to fit its goals. Apple was pushing hard to convert Windows switchers. The Mini filled the niche of an entry-level PC replacement priced to compete with the beige commodities. After several revisions and a price increase, it seems to me the Mini has lost its way.

In early 2005 a person could become a Mac user for $499 if they already had peripherals. A full system with 17" CRT could be had for $799 in the form of the eMac. Since the transition to Intel processors, however, Apple seems to have been sapped of its desire to compete for the low-end market. The eMac was discontinued and now the Mac Mini comes in $599 and $799 models.

The extra $100 for the modern Mini would not be so bad if it purchased a full-powered system. Unfortunately, the base model includes only an 80 GB hard drive, a combo optical drive (no DVD writer), and a graphics card using 64 MB of shared main memory (no dedicated video RAM). Even the one gigabyte of main memory is problematic in that it fills both memory slots, so upgrading means discarding the old memory.

The design of the Mac Mini is very nice; too nice in my opinion. In order to fit the components into the miniscule 6.5 x 6.5 x 2" case, more expensive laptop components have to be used. Is extreme smallness really so important? Why does anyone need a desktop system that weighs less than 3 pounds?

If Apple continues the Tuesday updates it has been releasing every week, I would like to see a Mac Mini update. The AppleTV, now priced starting at just $229, is very similar to a Mac Mini internally. Teardowns show a one GHz Intel processor, 64 MB NVidia video card, 256 MB of RAM, and a Fujitsu laptop hard drive. Obviously the Mini could have improved specs and/or a lower price.

The desktop PC market is no longer as explosive as the laptop market, but Apple could be a much larger contender by answering the wishes of many users and making a Mac Mini "Maxi". It would necessarily come in a bigger case. It would have a desktop hard drive, a full video card in a real PCI or AGP slot, and open memory slots. Ideally the case would even swing open easily like the Mac Pro, encouraging people to upgrade it. With a larger hard drive and better video card than currently offered and otherwise similar specs, the base model could still be priced back at the $499 level.

My imagined Mac Mini Maxi

Whether this would be a new product or a redo of the Mac Mini would be up to marketing, but such a formulation would demonstrate a commitment on Apple's part to continue to court Switchers. Without such a model in their arsenal, the Hackintosh becomes much more appealing to potential Mac users. Better to have a low-margin customer than no customer at all.

Immersive Virtual Reality Is All About the Turing Test

2008-02-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

While the technical specifications and modes of interaction with modern computers and gaming systems continue to advance, we are still quite a long way from graphics, sound, and user interface that provide a life-like experience. Even so, a properly programmed virtual world could be extremely immersive if the focus was in the right place. Imagine a game world where it is impossible to tell which characters are controlled by real humans. If the ugly troll might be your cousin, and that swamp rat could be your neighbor's pet, while the friendly paladin might simply be a computer character, the world suddenly has some moral ambiguity.

The key to a new breed of virtual reality is the Turing test. Simply put, the idea is that a true test of artificial intelligence is whether you can interact with it and a human being and not know which one is the computer.

Most of the immersive games up to this point have primarily focused on hack and slash. World of Warcraft (or a decade ago Diablo II) allowed people to create a virtual personality and go around looking for evil to slay and treasure to liberate. Other virtual worlds focus only on the social aspect. Services like Second Life let people set up homes and environments and communicate via avatars. The web site, Virtual Worlds Review, lists almost 30 such games.

Some single player games have started to introduce the idea of players choosing their character's morality. Most notable in this genre are Black & White and Fable. Both have sequels in the works. These games were novel in their approach to the characters' interaction with the world. Stealing, killing civilians, and other "evil" acts are allowed. The game tracks a characters' behavior and changes accordingly.

An evil character in Fable has grown horns.

While it is a start for games to apply their own interpretation of ethics, having the world apply real, natural consequences seems even more interesting. If you have no idea whether that troll is computer- or human-controlled, attacking it without provocation becomes much more problematic. Say you kill a real player's troll character. He may have friends or family in the game or even the ability to be resurrected. Those characters could either seek revenge or go through the legal system and seek justice.

This would lead to many new types of game play. Being a thief stealing from both "real" and artificially intelligent shopkeepers adds a new level of potential danger. Some characters might specialize as bounty hunters, tracking down the miscreants. Even the details of a world could vary to increase player interest. Some communities could be frontier towns with only personal revenge type justice, similar to the Old West. Others would be more "civilized" and have complete systems of laws and consequences. Racial prejudice from place to place or outright war would add further interest.

All of this could be realized with existing technology if only people were allowed to play a wide variety of roles in the virtual world and the computer characters became smart enough to blend in with the humans. If Turing is satisfied, the game world would be very satisfactory.

Pulling My Leg, Robotically

2008-02-05T18:34:00.000-08:00

For over four years bipedal robots have had the ability to run (defined as movement where both feet are off the ground at some point). High tech walking robots have been developed by Sony (the QRIO) and Honda (Asimo).

These developments are of more than academic interest to me because just over two years ago I lost the ability to move. On December 28, 2005, I went over a downhill ski jump, landed on my neck, and shattered a vertebra and damaged my spinal cord. After a five-hour surgery and another three months of inpatient physical therapy I slowly regained my physical function. Now I can walk slowly for short distances using a cane.

Spinal Cord Injury is more complicated than I would have imagined. My accident resulted in hemiplegia, which means paralysis of one side of the body. Doctors also call people like me "walking quads". But even paralysis has a lot more subtlety than you might expect. Some of my nerves are indeed disconnected, causing those muscles to be unresponsive and atrophy. Another result, however, is that sometimes the muscles get into a feedback loop causing an uncontrollable sputter or spasm. Still other muscles are overactive, firing all the time. This results in an inability to move the affected limb in the opposite direction.

This last is the main factor inhibiting me from walking better. My calf and hamstring are perpetually flexed, so lifting my foot and bending at the knee are very limited. In addition, for reasons I don't really understand, my balance is very poor.

If robots can be made that walk and even run and climb stairs bipedally, couldn't this technology be applied to a medical condition like mine? I can envision a cast-like legging containing robotics for helping to propel the leg forward and keeping balance. There would be some adaptation necessary to take the mechanics of a solid robot and transform them into a hollow shell. I suppose keeping the balance of a six-foot, 150-pound person would be considerably more difficult than for little Asimo, but the mechanics wouldn't have to do the job alone. The person still has some sense of balance to contribute.

Even if such uses are being developed, one major problem remains: medical technology is ridiculously priced. As an example, I recently found geared manual wheelchair wheels available online. They allow downshifting like a bicycle to facilitate climbing hills. This kind of wheel would be great for someone like me with limited upper-body strength. I checked the order form and discovered that a pair cost $5,000!

$5,000 "Magic Wheels"

Part of the problem is surely the proprietary nature of this kind of development. If it is patented technology, the manufacturers basically have a monopoly to charge whatever they want. A bigger issue, I think, is our whole health care insurance system. It is standard practice for doctors to charge more when someone has insurance than if they don't. Likewise, products that are typically paid for by insurance seem to have super inflated prices. For those of us with no or limited insurance it makes these items out of reach. I hope that some day in my lifetime our country puts an emphasis on quality of life and helping people whose lives can be greatly enhanced by some of these great developments.

Text Expansion: Wasting time trying to save time

2008-01-28T15:01:00.000-08:00

Perhaps nothing is more irritating than trying to set up some time-saving software, having problems, and wasting lots of time resolving them. That's one reason why I found OS X so compelling when I first started using it; for the most part things just worked. Rather than fighting with the computer just to get the proper tools in place, I could actually get things done.

For reasons I'll go into some other time I have been searching for quite a while for ways to speed up my text input. My most recent endeavor was based on the idea of using text expansion to minimize the number of keystrokes I have to enter. As a special education teacher I had worked with the application Co:Writer by Don Johnston software, which does a fine job of text prediction as letters and sentences are typed. Unfortunately, a single license is $325. Since that is far too rich for my blood, I decided to set up a system of abbreviations myself. That can't be too hard, right? Guess again.

I found three programs that work as text expanders for OS X, Typinator, TypeIt4Me, and TextExpander. All are available as free trials with full licenses costing 19.95 Euros, $27, and $29.95, respectively.

All three programs work the same way. They run in the background watching your keystrokes. When you type a space, punctuation, or other defined key, the programs compare the keyboard buffer to the list of abbreviations you have defined. If there is a match, they backspace over what you have just typed, copy the expansion onto the clipboard, and paste its contents. A sound can also play when this happens.

To give you an example, I have "ty" defined as a shortcut for "thank you". When I start a new word with "ty" (typing it right after a space or other delimiter) and then type, say, a period, the text expansion program backspaces three times, deleting the delimiter and the "ty". Then it copies the expansion and the period onto the clipboard and pastes it into place, effectively replacing the "ty." with "thank you.". It may sound complicated, but it's really not.

The product pages for each program tend to emphasize the use of abbreviations for larger snippets of repetitive text like form letters. My usage goal was a little different. I wanted to use very short abbreviations for very common, but sometimes also very short, words. According to teacher school, if you take the 100 most common words in the English language, you can read (or write) 50% of all elementary text. One of the popular lists of words by frequency is Fry's First 100, named for its creator, Edward Fry. I figured that would be a good starting place for my abbreviations. Of course that is where the trouble started.

The Fry 100 Word List

I began simply enough. I had a text file of Fry's List with one word per line. The programs all had options for importing text files, so I started typing abbreviations after each word, with a comma in between. If a word was only one letter (like "I") or not easily abbreviated (like "in"), I deleted it from the list. For very common and short words I used one-letter abbreviations ("t" for "the", "n" for "and", etc.)

Unbeknownst to me, there were several problems with this. First of all, the programs would accept tab-delimited but not comma-delimited text. I had to search and replace all my commas with tabs, but not too big of a deal. Next, however, I discovered that the order I had put the abbreviation and expanded text were reversed. I didn't want to retype all of that (though it probably would have been faster in the long run), so I found a simple Java program that read in a comma delimited file and wrote it out differently and modified it to fit my needs. Unfortunately, after all of this I still had a problem with the encoding of the text. The text expansion programs would not accept Unicode, so I had to resave the file.

After all this conversion I finally had my abbreviations loaded into TextExpander. The program installs itself as a System Preferences pane and has a nice interface with some advanced features. You can decide on a "snippet" by snippet basis whether to type the delimiter and how to treat upper case. I started using the program while doing emails and blogging. As I encountered a new word that I use a lot, I would add a snippet if there was not one already. It was gratifying to hear the little beeps as I typed, knowing that I was saving keystrokes each time the sound played.

But my troubles were not over. For some reason my one-letter abbreviations were not working. It turns out that TextExpander and Typinator set a minimum of two letters for an abbreviation. While TextExpander correctly highlighted my snippets in red if I accidently created duplicates, it did not flag the one-letter snippets. This limitation eliminated much of the benefit of text expansion as I was using it. Fortunately TypeIt4Me allows single letter abbreviations, but changing programs led to another problem.

I had used TextExpander for a while and added some 50 new expansions. Once again I had new abbreviations that I had to transfer into a program. TypeIt4Me's "Open File..." would allow me to choose the TextExpander file, but no new words would appear. I took a look at the two programs' abbreviation files, both plain text XML. Both are standard Apple plists, even using the same name for most attributes. However, TypeIt4Me capitalized the first letter of each, while TextExpander did not, and XML is case-sensitive. In this case close did not count.

In my stubborn refusal to do data entry when something is already in a computer, I ended up with another time consuming solution. I took the TextExpander XML file and used XSLT to parse out each abbreviation and expansion and write them to a tab-delimited text file for import into TypeIt4Me. I'll try to be an optimist and imagine that maybe somewhere all this foolishness of mine will be useful to someone else.

I have since gotten TypeIt4Me set up to my liking. I have a shortcut key to toggle it on and off, and another to add a new abbreviation. My abbreviation file has grown to over 200 items. I have also learned not to type too fast after a replacement is triggered, or sometimes I end up typing in the middle of the copy and paste.

TypeIt4Me has a nice feature where it tracks the number of expansions done and keystrokes saved. As you can see below, it will be a while before I make up the hours spent mucking around with these programs, but I did get to polish up my Java and XML knowledge and eventually solve my problems.

TypeIt4Me shows how many keystrokes have been saved.

C64 Movie Maker for the 21st Century, Review of Anime Studio

2008-01-25T18:29:00.000-08:00

Back in "the day" (1985 to be exact) my friends and I had the state-of-the-art gaming machine, the Commodore 64. In addition to classic games like Alternate Reality, Archon, M.U.L.E., and the Ultima series there was a great animation program for us aspiring young movie makers entitled, fittingly, Movie Maker by Electronic Arts.

Movie Maker character editor.

That simple 8-bit program running on a machine with 64k of RAM (yes, 64 kilobytes, not even one megabyte) allowed us to draw the different stages of movement of an animated character, situate them over a background we could also draw, and specify changes to make them come alive. Despite the low resolution it was a step up, both in productivity and movement quality, from the Betamax camcorder stopmotion animation we were also attempting.

In recent years I have returned to those roots for the occasional hobbyist animated short. My default methodology evolved around the tools at hand, Photoshop and iMovie. I would start with a scanned drawing of a complete scene and chop up the characters into Photoshop layers, moving, rotating or scaling them as needed. Then I would make the appropriate layers visible and save the image off as a jpeg to be imported into iMovie. The occasional transition or Ken Burns effect, some sounds and music, and voilà, a movie.

While working on a similar project of late I began to long for the good old days of computer animation. I imagined a program that would simply allow me to place images as objects in a scene, move, rotate, or scale them, and take a snapshot to use as a frame of the movie. It'd be even better if it could interpolate the results for smooth animation. My final wish would be to slice up the image of a character into parts that could be moved independently.

I happily found Anime Studio by e frontier that makes all of the preceding not only possible, but surprisingly easy. The program is available for Mac OS X and Windows and has two versions available: the basic version sells for $50, and a Pro version, which adds some 3d capability, is $200. I reviewed the downloadable demo (30 day trial) version of Anime Studio 5.5 on a Powerbook G4, 667mHz, with 1 GB of RAM running OS X version 10.4.11.

The Good

For basic animation, AS made things easy. Simply import the image of your character or draw one from scratch using the vector drawing tools provided. Then add a skeleton layer, defining the bones by simply clicking and dragging to draw them. The bones are automatically associated with the body part they are drawn over. Click on the timeline below to choose a frame, then move the character by manipulating its bones. The program immediately interpolates the intermediate frames. Using the right and left arrow keys you can scrub through the new animation.

It is equally easy to do other effects like moving, resizing, or rotating a layer, or moving or zooming the camera. Each time a change is made a new dot appears on the timeline. These can be selected and moved around to refine the animation or deleted if a mistake was made.

Anime Studio's user interface.

More advanced features are also available. Objects are arranged in layers, which can be given a Z value to determine their order as they pass by each other or the camera moves. They can also be set up as masks much like you would use in Photoshop. This can enable pretty sophisticated interactions.

One great feature of AS is the ability to add a soundtrack to your animation. I used Quicktime Pro to create a simple voice-over and added it to my project. The waveform of the audio immediately appears overlaid on the timeline. This makes it much easier to sync the character's movement to the sound file.

For lip-syncing, AS uses the concept of Switch Layers. These allow more than one image to be associated with a single position and switched out as needed. To generate the mapping between mouth positions and sound, a free program called Papagayo is available. This is an open source GPL application supported by Lost Marble software. I'm not sure what the relationship is between e frontier and Lost Marble (if any), but one of the tutorials uses the Papagayo lip-sync. I was not incredibly impressed with the results, nor with the fact that only the small selection of included mouths can be used by the program, but it is nice that this feature exists at all in a low-end product.

The tutorials built in to the AS user manual go through most aspects of the animation process, logically building from the very basics to more advanced topics. All of the files are included in the Anime Studio directory so it is also possible to skip some of the steps and simply load the finished product to see how it all came together. After spending a few hours with the tutorials I felt pretty comfortable with the program.

There are more tutorials and user forums available online. It is plenty to get you started. The 30-day trial is fully functional except for the ability to export the final video. A preview export is available, but it stamps a "Free Demo" watermark on the file.

In addition to the tutorial files, the program has the option of importing sample characters, props, backgrounds, and more, that are included with the program. The sample below was created using an included background and characters. The explosion movie came from one of the tutorials. I added the beaker and cylinder and the sound. Putting this short animation together only took a few minutes.

Sample movie.

The Bad

I do have some gripes with Anime Studio. In perhaps 30 hours of use the program crashed about three or four times. Granted my test system is rather old and underpowered, but it can be very frustrating to work on a project for some time and then lose that work due to a crash.

Even less forgivable is that the tutorials, while having excellent content, frequently refer to options and features not available in the demo. For example, they tell you to do a preview to see gradient shading, but this option does not exist. The worst part is that e frontier has been aware of the documentation problems for over a year (via messages on their forums) and hasn't bothered to fix the problems. Some of the later tutorials are entirely focused on options that only exist in the Pro version.

As far as I could tell, the option for exporting a sample movie was completely undocumented. I found on the forums that pressing F5 does the trick; however sometimes this keystroke was ignored. I believe the secret was to make sure a preview was not already open in another window before pressing F5.

The Ugly

For all its goodness, Anime Studio also had a lot of simple interface problems that, if fixed, could make AS much more pleasant to use. In general, the windows and icons look like they came from a 1990's OS 9 application. The dialogs are not standard OS X Cocoa windows, and the icon images are not only ugly, but are very confusing. Some of the options' icons are virtually identical. I found it easier to memorize the keyboard shortcuts for each tool than to try to decipher the corresponding icons.

Anime Studio icons and dialog window.

Similarly minor but annoying issues were the program's handling of zoom and the layout of the windows. By default there are windows for Tools, Styles, the Timeline, and the main display window. On my 1024x768 display, three of these four overlap. If I am using the timeline, I cannot see the play, rewind, etc. controls in the main window. To resize the main window I have to hide or resize the timeline first. The preview is resized along with the main window, so maximizing it causes it to take up the whole screen and be obscured by the other windows. I much prefer the Photoshop or Safari style where a maximized window simply expands until everything is visible. This would, for me, make the zoom tool much more intuitive.

Obviously maintaining a cross-platform application has its tradeoffs. In this case the look and feel are decidedly un-Mac-like.

Overall

On the whole, I found Anime Studio very easy to use for 2d animation. It was good enough, in fact, that I will be purchasing the basic version. Sometimes I went into the app with a quick idea I wanted to try out and would find myself several hours later still at the computer, working on other ideas that had occurred to me. Being able to move drawings with the skeleton effects, sync with a soundtrack, put objects on layers, and see the whole thing smoothly animated is exactly what I was looking for. If you have similar cravings, I recommend giving Anime Studio 5 a try!

Before Touch Screens, Multitouch Mice

2008-01-24T09:52:00.000-08:00

As much as I would like for there to be a sub-$1000, tablet-like, touch screen Mac the economics of it just don't work yet. The company Axiotron previewed its Modbook over a year ago and just started shipping them (supposedly). Still, the price of $2,300-2,500 is prohibitive. A Wacom 12.1" touch LCD runs a grand and weighs over four pounds. Unfortunately, I don't think there is enough magic at Apple Labs to deliver the product I crave; however, an intermediate step may be entirely plausible and could ship soon. Imagine grafting together a slightly rounder, flatter Mighty Mouse, a MacBook Air trackpad, and the guts of a Wii controller.

The ideal device that I envision is decidedly a bit ambitious and futuristic, but there are variations on the theme that keep it more practical. First, imagine an iMac G3 "puck mouse" (shudder) without the cord or button. Overlay on this surface the multi-touch, gesture sensitive trackpad that debuted recently on the Air. For just moving the cursor around it is much more convenient to have something physically moving than trying to rub a trackpad just the right way. That is where the mouse nature comes into play. Due to its roundness, it would be convenient if the mouse were inertially sensitive rather than relying on optical movement over a surface. That is where the Wii-like internals would be used. The orientation wouldn't affect the direction of cursor movement. You could move it around without worrying about the direction it is facing, avoiding the annoying problem when the puck mouse would turn. Eventually, this could lead to hand-held devices being moved in 3d space though at that point gestures would have to be handled differently.

For the current iteration, however, the surface of the mouse would register taps (mimicking the behavior of standard mouse buttons) but would also allow the use of iPhone gestures- swiping side to side, pinching and expanding, or rotating. Since these gestures are based more on what is currently selected than the mouse position, it makes sense for that sensitivity to be layered on top of the means of moving the cursor rather than coupled with it.

If an inertially sensitive, orientation-independent version is too ambitious for now, it would be equally plausible to base the design on a slightly flattened Mighty Mouse rather than the puck mouse. This would maintain the standard mouse directionality, and the device could come with a cord or wireless. It would also eliminate the need for the hardware and software to handle Wii-like position sensing. The basic idea of overlaying the gesture sensitivity would be the same.

It may look a little clunky, but the multitouch mouse would provide a new level of interactivity to the Mac interface. It would also leverage the work done on the iPhone and Touch interface and get users used to the "standard" Apple gestures. Until we can get fully touch sensitive notebook or tablet screens, the multitouch mouse would be a welcome step forward.

Television 2.0: Can Apple TV replace cable?

2008-01-18T11:28:00.000-08:00

When I watched the Stevenote the other day I was suddenly struck with a notion. Over 125,000 Podcasts, a huge number of YouTube videos, a thousand movies, and 350 TV shows are available through Apple TV's new interface. Then Elgato recently released a new version of their EyeTV software for TiVo-like functionality on a Mac. Do the economics and content availability make enough sense that people could replace cable?

The first question is whether there is enough content for this idea to be feasible. Further, how much can be viewed for free versus how many movies and TV shows would be purchased. The numbers above seem impressive. Add to that the fact that an Elgato tuner will record HD video (which all broadcast signals are supposed to be by February 2008) and stream it to the Apple TV, and you have all broadcast networks, all video Podcasts and iTunes U content, and all of YouTube available for free. The answer then boils down to how much of the free content is of interest to an individual, and how much of what they want is only available on cable networks. If a person is big on movies they may find the 1,000 available on iTunes to be pretty paltry compared to NetFlix's 90,000 DVDs for rent, plus 5,000 available for viewing on demand (on Windows only).

If content is not an issue, the question remains whether the cost makes sense. Of course markets vary, so I will be using my personal experience to estimate the costs involved. First off, cable. Most of the cable companies currently offer bundle deals with basic cable, internet, and home phone in the neighborhood of $100. Assuming that you can use all those services, that puts the cost of basic cable around $35. Add another $10 for DVR rental (TiVo service costs $12, plus the initial purchase of the hardware), and you have around $45 per month. This buys you programming on all the non-premium channels that can be recorded and played back easily via DVR. It does not include any pay channels like HBO or any HD programming, and it probably a very conservative estimate for a cable bill.

In contrast the initial hardware expense of the Apple TV/Elgato solution is around $330 (40 GB Apple TV: $229, Elgato eyetv hybrid: $99). This assumes an existing Mac and wireless high speed internet. Shows from cable networks cost up to $1.99 per episode. A daily show like, well, The Daily Show, can be purchased as a multi-pass for $9.99 per 16 episodes. Obviously the point at which a person breaks even, if ever, depends on how much paid programming they consume. The average American watches around 30 hours of TV per week [link]. The $45 basic cable expense would not go very far on the iTunes Store toward acquiring 120 hours of programming. For four-hour-a-day television viewers then, this will not be a solution.

The viewing habits of me and most of my friends, however, are much more modest. There are two or three shows I try to catch regularly and maybe ten others that I know I enjoy but don't make a point of seeing. In addition, I probably watch two movies per week on average. I believe I could easily satisfy my video entertainment cravings for $40 per month. This would buy me four movie rentals ($2.99 x 2 + $3.99 x 2 = $14), a month of The Colbert Report ($10), and eight assorted cable programs ($1.99 x 8 = $16). This would total about 20 hours of television, plus as much broadcast TV, Podcast and YouTube'd video as I care for. The leftover $5 per month would take five and a half years to pay off the initial hardware investment ($330 / $5/mo = 65 mo).

Would it be worthwhile? The best thing about moving toward the Apple TV/Elgato solution would be an increased democratization of media consumption. I'm sure there are many worthwhile Podcasts that are just waiting to educate and entertain me. Likewise, I have spent hours browsing YouTube videos with perhaps less education and more entertainment. The cable TV shows and movies would be accessible on demand. The broadcast programming would be predetermined by having been recorded, but once captured would also be on-demand. Suddenly the world of video entertainment changes from flipping through "100 channels with nothing on" to making choices from thousands of available options. The old favorites would always be there, but a new breed of programming by independent film companies or John Doe's with camcorders would be equally accessible. For someone like me who values education, diversity, and novelty, this could be the prescription for a video media revolution.

Macworld 2008 Predictions and Reality (Tooting my own horn)

2008-01-15T14:23:00.000-08:00

The long anticipated Macworld Steve Jobs keynote has come and gone. Now is the time when people go back to last week's columns and review the accuracy of their prognostications. Since my article was right on, I am happy to do so.

A fairly large part of the speech, and a good number of my predictions involved Apple TV. Indeed it is gaining the ability to buy and rent movies directly, and the price was also reduced (to $229, squarely in the middle of my $199-$250 prediction). The answer to the question of content was surprisingly positive. Eleven studios signed up! That's far more than anticipated. I also did not expect the availability of HD content, but I know this will be applauded in many quarters. Unfortunately, no announcements about non-purchase TV shows, but maybe those networks will fall into line if movies take off. One other great selling point with the Apple TV and iPod/iPhone paring is that movies rented will transfer between them, even remembering a pause location.

Next up, I predicted mention of the iPhone SDK and possible third party app announcement. We did get a mention of the release of the developers kit and then new software updates including GPS-like functionality on Google Maps. As expected there was no new iPhone model or pricing announced.

About new laptops I said, "Make it slimmer, lighter, maybe update the color design.... A fairly minor new feature that could dramatically change the usability of the laptops would be the incorporation of the iPhone style multitouch to the MacBook's trackpad," and, "If, as rumors suggest, it does not have a DVD drive or conventional hard drive (using Flash instead), this would make for a very slim, light system indeed." The MacBook Air announcement was right on the money, if I do say so myself. The solid state drive is optional (and very expensive), but available.

The Mac Pro was actually updated before Macworld, and hasn't received a visual makeover, but otherwise this prediction also came true.

The unexpected announcement was the Time Machine, an Airport Base Station with a built in hard drive. Priced at $299 or $399 for a half or full TB, this should prove to be a popular product.

Overall, my expectations were met and slightly exceeded. The biggest disappointment was what happened to "One more thing"?

Tech Stock Insanity

2008-01-11T08:45:00.000-08:00

It sits there, waiting quietly, a testament to over-exuberance, maybe greed on the down side or idealism on the positive side. I stumble upon it from time to time and reminisce about what might have been. What I am referring to is my My Yahoo! stock market widget with my portfolio from 1999.

At the time I had a lot of extra money to invest. Following stocks became a hobby of mine. Being in IT myself, tech companies were the main ones I investigated and invested in: Yahoo, Cisco, Intel... I got in right before the bubble burst. Within two months or less the values had doubled. It seemed the market would keep rising forever. Then, less than a year from my initial purchases, all of the stocks had plummeted below where I had bought them. Some still have not recovered their November 1999 value.

Overall, the stock market has been a great investment opportunity. Greater indexes put the annualized return of the market around 10% since its inception. Isolating the tech-heavy Nasdaq, however, shows a different story. In March 2000, the Nasdaq composite index passed 5,000. In the nearly nine years since then it has not broken 3,000. What is the reason for this volatility? I have some theories but more questions than answers.

First, I would guess that most day traders are computer savvy. Therefore, they are more likely to invest in tech stocks. These individual investors may be subject to letting the hype and excitement surrounding new technological products or businesses overshadow their true value. Part of this theory could be tested by comparing the individual versus institutional holdings of tech and other stocks over time. I believe the tech stocks would generally have higher individual holdings but also would show greater variability in this percentage over time as traders en masse buy and sell on whims.

Another reason for volatility seems to be the passing of arbitrary milestones. For example, the late '99 Yahoo stock price went from under $100 per share to over $200. Once that somehow magic number was passed, people began to question whether that valuation was really justified. Many people began to get worried or simply had seen enough appreciation to want to cash in, and the massive sell-offs began.

The stupidity of this is that price per share is really an arbitrary number. Double the number of shares and suddenly the price drops in half. This is commonly done when a stock splits. Companies also often buy up stock in order to increase the individual share value. Anyway, there is really no difference between a stock going from $75 to $80 as there is in it going from $94 to $100. These milestones make no objective difference but seem to have a great effect on traders' actions. Again this could be tested fairly easily by looking at transaction volume at key values.

Another very annoying tendency is for a company to come out with an earnings report that beats the projections, but the market reacts by lowering the stock's value because it didn't beat estimates by enough or some unknown reason. I don't understand how a company can lose 5% or more in market valuation for making the profits that everyone expected.

Despite these problems and annoyances I am back in the market in a small way. I have one stock-based IRA remaining. It often seems best to do the opposite of my inclination, but then those few times I guess correctly have me thinking that somehow this foolishness will all make sense, and I can figure it out. I just have to remind myself that it is ultimately irrational and hopefully only invest money I can afford to lose.

Hello, Computer?? Apple can you hear me?

2008-01-09T16:37:00.001-08:00

There is a classic (among geeks at least) scene in Star Trek IV where the crew of the Enterprise has traveled back in time to the late 20th century. Chief Engineer Scott sits down in front of a Mac computer and says, "Computer. Computer?" Getting no response Dr. McCoy helpfully hands Scott the mouse, which he holds like microphone, "Hello, Computer??" The befuddled 1980's Earthling standing by finally tells him to just use the keyboard ("How quaint"). [Watch on YouTube] While the Mac was not able to respond to voice input, it did bring the mouse-driven graphical user interface revolution to the masses.

Moreover, when Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh over 20 years ago his demonstration, in part, "let the computer do the talking" via a synthesized voice reading a short speech. This was quite a feat in 1984. However, very little has changed in speech synthesis between then and now. Why has there been so little advancement in voice-based computer interfaces in over two decades? Are the factors finally in place for the next interface revolution to truly put the Personal in PC's. The answer may be yes, and the company poised to lead that change is once again Apple.

The answers to the first question are many. Primarily, voice-based interfaces have stagnated not due to technology constraints but because of a lack of demand. The niche market has been served by software venders like Dragon Systems (now owned by Nuance) who have been able to do voice recognition since the days when the 486 processor ruled. Current iterations showing the feasibility of voice recognition include voice dialing, available on many, even the most inexpensive, cell phones, and the Sync system for making phone calls and controlling digital music players in Ford cars. The lack of demand on desktop systems in the past is largely due to the fact that the majority of computer use took place in the cubicle farms of the American office. Voice interfaces would not fit very effectively into that environment.

As more people spend more time online at home, speech-based interactions make more sense. In addition, many people compose numerous emails, and blog, chat, or Twitter daily. All of these applications would be well served by dictation software. Further, the generation of people having grown up with computers continues to grow. While older people, as a general rule, may be less comfortable with technology, kids and young adults have no aversion to talking to a machine. Perhaps the time is finally right for someone to take this seemingly logical next step in computer interfaces.

If the time is now the company may be Apple. Buoyed by an amazing chain of products since Steve Jobs regained the helm, Apple has shown a repeated ability to take existing technologies and polish and package them in a user-friendly way that brings them to more people. The iPod and iTunes have done it for digital music, OS X for Unix, and now the iPhone/iPod Touch for mobile computing. History has shown Apple to have an interest in improving the user experience. Another major advantage is control of the hardware and software environment and a commitment to open source. Apple has long included built-in microphones on its laptops and all-in-ones. Tweaking these for noise reduction or other speech enhancements would be fairly easy. If they set their engineers to the task, speech could become an intrinsic part of Mac OS.

This is the key to my argument. I don't purport to have done an exhaustive review of the available add-ons that can make a computer voice-activated. Far from it. But that is because this technology should not be an add-on. If I can edit a photo, listen to digital music, browse the internet, and write formatted text using a stock installation of an operating system, I should just as easily be able to search for a file, cue up a song, navigate to a web site, or dictate text without using the keyboard. I'm not saying that the computer should understand complex natural language or that the mouse and keyboard would be replaced entirely. I would be happy to follow a set format for commands and annunciate clearly and separate each word from the others.

Mac OS X even includes some support out of the box for voice recognition and computer speech (my computer tells me the time every half hour). The problem is these features are not highlighted as the way to interact with the computer. Until there is a keynote where Steve Jobs uses spoken commands in a demonstration or there is an Apple ad campaign that shows users talking to their computers, consumers (and therefore developers) won't take speech seriously. But if it were suddenly put forward as part of human interface guidelines a whole new breed of more usable applications could take hold, and the next generation of computer interface could develop. If only Apple is listening.

Managing Macworld 2008 Expectations

2008-01-06T11:41:00.000-08:00

Tom Hanks is supposedly signed for the highest sum ever paid an actor to reprise his role as Robert Langdon in the film adaptation of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. I shuddered as I read that news the other day. You see, I've never walked out in the middle of a movie, but The DaVinci Code is about as close as I have come. The new prequel having the same star and director ensures that I won't see it. It's not even that the movie was necessarily horrific. The main problem was that having really enjoyed the book, I had very high expectations for the movie. As I have come to realize is so often the case, I had set myself up for disappointment by expecting something more or different than what was delivered.

A similar, though less intense experience was last year's Macworld keynote. As an avid follower of Apple news and technology I was looking forward to announcements that just didn't pan out. The event turned out to be almost all iPhone, no new Macs, no super surprise features for Leopard, not even a Beatles music distribution deal. Sure the iPhone looked cool, but it was six months away and more money than I could afford. The things I was looking forward to didn't materialize.

With that experience in mind, here are my down to earth expectations for Macworld 2008, and unlike everyone and their sister regurgitating the same predictions I even have some new ideas to contribute.

AppleTV
Staying down to earth I will start with what is already known. The iTunes store will get movie rentals. The details to be filled in include how many movies will be available, how much will they cost, and how long will the rental period be. Related to this is a likely update to AppleTV. While it was announced as a mere hobby it's possible for this simple set-top box to start making inroads into the American living room. The key factors to address are price and content. Price is easy enough to take care of. With a year of Moore's law since its introduction I expect that AppleTV will be repriced in the $199-$250 range. Content, on the other hand, is a bigger question. Certainly being able to browse, buy, or rent movies directly from the unit should be fairly trivial to add. Hopefully enough studios are on board to make the selection worthwhile. If Apple could deliver TV shows on demand (maybe a 24 hour window) for say 50 cents to a dollar, plus movie rentals for $2-3, many people could virtually replace their cable service with on demand programming for less money.

Unfortunately, where the AppleTV really shines for many users is the elimination of physical discs for watching DVD video. This requires technically breaking copyright law with a program like Handbrake. Apple can't really advertise this great selling point without incurring the wrath of the film industry.

iPhone

Almost certainly the Software Development Kit for third party applications will get some attention. It has been promised for a February release. I could see Steve Jobs bringing out some developers who have had preview access showing off new iPhone functions. Maybe a Google app like Google Earth?

I don't expect a new model or change in pricing. People are still coveting the current iPhone, so why mess with it.

Notebook Updates

The idea of a subnotebook, superthin laptop, or Newton-like Mac tablet is getting a lot of attention on rumor sites. The MacBook line could use some revamping, but in keeping my expectations in line, I'm not looking for anything dramatic. Imagine the change from the Titanium Powerbook to aluminum. Make it slimmer, lighter, maybe update the color design (most new Apple products tout the black and silver styling of the iMac). A fairly minor new feature that could dramatically change the usability of the laptops would be the incorporation of the iPhone style multitouch to the MacBook's trackpad. While a touch screen would be much more exceptional, the added price and difficulties like keeping it clean seem to make that concept less likely.

One area that everyone seems to be missing is the shrinking of recent Apple keyboards. The most recent wireless keyboard in particular is little more than ultra-thin keys atop an ultra-thin sheet of aluminum. It has even dispensed with the numeric keypad and separate cursor keys. I mention this because I could see the thinner MacBook having more of the guts of the system behind the screen like an iMac, with the ultra-thin keyboard flipping down. If, as rumors suggest, it does not have a DVD drive or conventional hard drive (using Flash instead), this would make for a very slim, light system indeed.

Mac Pro

Just based on the age of the current Mac Pro design it would make sense for there to be an update. Little has been said about this, so speculation is basically up to the imagination. I could see a new, smaller case and modest speed increases. I won't be in the market for a Mac Pro any time soon, so this is not that important to me.

Overall I have set some conservative, realistic expectations for the upcoming keynote. The main thing I am hoping for is there to be much more Mac in this year's Macworld. I'll be anxiously awaiting "one more thing" and, unlike some movie franchises, even if not every expectation is met I will keep watching year after year.

Nintendo Wii: Good but Not Too Good

2008-01-05T14:37:00.000-08:00

Sales reports have consistently shown the Nintendo Wii to be leading the pack when it comes to current generation game consoles. Back when the Wii was just the conceptual "Revolution" I predicted and hoped that it would indeed revolutionize gaming with its user interface innovations. The Wii has been successful because it is good but not too good.

The most obvious interpretation of this statement involves the price/performance trade offs that console manufacturers face. While Sony and Microsoft chose to continue escalating the technical specifications of their hardware Nintendo took a middle ground approach. The Wii does HD but not 1080 resolution. It has a DVD drive but doesn't play movies (let alone Blu-ray or HD DVD). In all respects the system has less power than the competition, but by choosing lower hardware requirements Nintendo was able to deliver a more affordable, smaller console.

A less apparent application of good but not too good is an aspect of human nature that I believe will foretell near term advances in virtual reality (VR). On the commentary for one of the early CGI movies (it may have been Shrek, but I don't recall) the animators talk about a phenomenon whereby people started to dislike the characters if they became too close to real. It seems the human mind is happy to place itself in a state of suspended disbelief when what it is experiencing is clearly unbelievable. We don't watch a Roadrunner cartoon and complain that there is no way the coyote could survive that fall. The problem for movie makers occurred as animated characters started approaching reality. At that point people would look at them and know that something was "not right" but not necessarily be able to put their finger on it. The computer graphics had passed the threshold of being obviously fake but had not yet reached the point of being believable. They were too good for their own good and actually had to be made less realistic.

The same logic can be used with virtual reality and the Wii. Nobody would claim that waving around a remote control truly gives you the same experience as swinging a tennis racket at a ball or slicing a goblin with a sword. Yesterday I was reading about haptic interfaces. The Webopedia article states, "For example, in a virtual reality environment, a user can pick up a virtual tennis ball using a data glove. The computer senses the movement and moves the virtual ball on the display. However, because of the nature of a haptic interface, the user will feel the tennis ball in his hand through tactile sensations that the computer sends through the data glove, mimicking the feel of the tennis ball in the user's hand." This is certainly far above what the Wii's controller offers. Will this be the next generation of gaming? I don't think so, and the reason is that it defies the good but not too good philosophy. When games start to mimic tactile sensations it butts up against the "close to reality but just not right" barrier. I'm sure such a device would be interesting to try, but in order to lose ourselves in the experience of a game, just like with a movie, we either need to be in a clearly non-real environment or so totally immersed that it is difficult to distinguish what is and is not real.

It's been over a decade since Pixar introduced us to full length CGI animation with Toy Story. Movies are just now approaching the use of fully realistic human characters. While VR has also been in development for decades, the Wii gaming console is definitely the largest real world application of virtual reality concepts. Before the next level of immersive VR is achieved the industry will have to overcome the problem of being too close to reality without being close enough. In my opinion this will likely take the next ten years. In the meantime there is plenty of opportunity using the current technology for unbelievable games to be incredibly fun.