Mindful Ink     Life, Living and Productivity

Just a quick notice… the MacHeist bundle I mentioned a few days ago has about a day left, and got a lot sweeter with the addition of VectorDesigner (an Illustrator-type program).  It’s a pretty good deal for you Mac users now, Pixelmator and VectorDesigner alone would be a good deal.  And a good chunk goes to charity, so you may want to consider it.  I went ahead and got it myself.

When I rebooted my blog here, one of my concerns was “how do I blog?” I use Wordpress, and I love Wordpress, but I also love using Safari and the two are not friends. You may have noticed some terribly mangled posts before, that was me even opening the editor in Safari with that post. This bug has been around a while, and it doesn’t seem to be going away - so that means I have to figure out another way to go.

That meant finding a client. I purchased ecto almost a year ago, but never really found myself liking it all that much - sufficiently that I’ll use it, but I’m always on the lookout for something else. When MarsEdit got an update recently, I tried it out as well - I liked it, but not $30 dollars liked it (not when I had ecto which wasn’t much different). It being a few months since I’ve searched for an alternative, I went out and looked around to see if anything new had came out. (If you’re a Mac user, i use this is invaluable)

Low and behold, Blogo had been born. Blogo (Shareware, $25) was something new for the Mac - it was a very simple, very clean blog writing client. Certainly, it’s UI was one of the nicest and most unique I’ve seen.

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Well, I ended up not going to my doc appt and (unrelatedly) stayed home to follow the keynote.

All I can say is wow… not because of the keynote, but because it was a strange thing to watch the internet implode. I was watching a few sites (necessary since they kept crashing) to see what was going on and Gizmodo, Engadget, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog all puttered and died at various times. A million people hitting “Refresh” has to do some pretty brutal things to your bandwidth.

No tablet from Apple, though - so, I’m crushed. Don’t they know I want to hurry up and live in the future? I guess I will put all my birthday money into Amazon’s Kindle (if they ever start shipping them).  I’m a bit torn, though.  The idea of being able to get to almost any book I may want instantly is ridiculously appealing, more to the point - the ability to keep a lot of books with me easily is very appealing (I tend to be reading 4-5 books at a time, aside from school books).  Unfortunately, I’m one of those that absolutely hates reading anything very long on a screen.  E-Ink evidently fixes that problem.  At the same time, the Kindle is ugly as sin and reeks of “first gen device.”  Of course, color e-ink is a ways off…. so no telling when we’ll see the next real version of the ebook reader.

What can I say, I’m a technophile…  I’ve no substantial vices except a desire to access all of my(and the world’s) information as easily as possible whenever I want.  That’s not too much to ask, is it? 

 Any of you used the Kindle? Have any experience with it?  You see the MacBookAir or follow the keynote?  Let me know in the comments! 

Okay, so I’ve got one of those long, lovely doctors visits tomorrow right during the keynote. I’m on pins and needles for one thing and one thing only - a tablet.  The rest I either know already or it won’t effect me (most likely.)  I don’t need a sub-notebook, for instance.  I find it difficult to do much more than email, browse the web and write on my MacBook as it is.

Now, I know everyone is going “it’s not going to happen, at least not yet” (John Gruber explains it well).  And that’s probably true… But I tell you what, if they can make something like the iPhone but bigger they’ll have nailed it. Tablet’s have been around for a while, hell… my last non-mac PC was a tablet but the UI has always been a disaster.

That’s been issue number one - you can’t have a tablet computer and the only difference be you use a pen or your hand just like a mouse.  It’s awkward and slow and irritating.  It’s the same reason that before you had the iPhone most pocket pc/palm devices were about 90% evil.  Using them just never became a process that was pleasant.

Issue two has been size/weight and general usability design.  For example, the Gateway convertible tablet I had before my MacBook had a big grip along the hinge.  It was great for when I was standing up and writing, but if I set it down one side was about a half-inch higher than the other, and giving that the device weighed 7-8 lbs, I didn’t stand around with it often!

Gruber makes the excellent point that it can’t be, at least right now, a total computer.  And if it is, the boys at Apple have been staying up awfully late; it’s going to have to be a specialized device.

So imagine a device with a clean, fast interface (ala iPhone) that specializes in just two things - retrieval and input of data.  Of course, it’ll do a few other things like let you listen to music or chat with your friends, but primarily it’ll been a fast and light web-browser, document reader, note-taking, email receiving, rss reader.  You can probably type a long email or blog post, but wouldn’t necessarily want to.  Not by typing, at least.  When you actually do have to input data, you’d be writing it out most the time.

If someone can do this right, make it usable, make it sexy, make it fun and pleasant to use - Apple can.  I absolutely believe this sort of thing is where our tech is heading, and I want to get there sooner rather than later.

Sp if Apple announces a tablet tomorrow.. I’m going to have to rob a bank or something.  As scared as I am of first gen hardware…  I’ll go sell plasma if I have to!