Category Archives: Apple

Conscientiously Objecting to the Living Room War

Apple TVTime was, you’d buy a TV, bring it home and plant it in your living room. Then you’d watch it. For like a decade. And when the picture started failing, you’d go and buy another and do it all over again.

Nowadays, television is more than a piece of furniture, it’s an experience. It’s multi-sourced, time-shifted, narrow-casted, and/or delivered on-demand. Digital, in short. Like all experiences in the digital age, television now requires the support of a full complement of systems — a peripheral army of boxes, wires and software — to make it happen. You can’t experience digital television, really, with just one of anything.

This is why, I think, I’m an unlikely customer for Apple TV, Steve Jobs’ set-top contender in the living room war. To be honest, the couch potato in me is intrigued by its ability to access Internet video, which I’m sure I’d watch more of were it made as convenient as Apple TV promises. And last week’s announcement that Apple will rent movies on demand through the device, too, is intriguing.

But I just can’t imagine myself buying one anytime soon. It’s not only that I would be adding another box to my living room (though I’m certainly not eager to take on that added complexity), it’s also how much the digital television experience demands of us.

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Indulging a Suite Tooth

I don’t mean to pick on Adobe, I really don’t. I admit, I have a fundamental disagreement with the insurrectionist strategy they’ve been pursuing with their Creative Suite applications; the company has essentially spent the decade so far leveraging those programs to carve out more than its fair share of space on my hard drive, and using the appropriated gigabytes to not so subtly transform the software into an unwanted back-door operating system of its very own. It’s immoderate behavior and frankly a pain in my butt.

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Living in the Future

MacBook AirWe’re living in the future, and I’ll tell you why: if you’re drinking water and breathing air in a time when a Steve Jobs-helmed Apple Inc. maintains stock keeping units for both a handheld computing device and an ultra-portable sub-notebook (the thinnest notebook on the market, no less), then clearly you’ve left behind the constraints of late 20th and early 21st century life and entered the wide, wonderful world of science fiction.

Back then, back in the distant past, Apple only ever entertained products that could fit inside a conveniently simplistic matrix of desktops and laptops of two grades: consumer or professional. To ask for a device of a more unusual order — something of the sort that even Apple’s less prolific rivals were regularly shipping even a decade ago — was a farcical daydream. Want to carry around an Apple-branded data device in your pocket? Want to tote around a Macintosh laptop all day without bringing on spinal injury? It just wasn’t done, son.

But now, today, we’ve got the MacBook Air, a laptop so thin and light it’s named after a shoe. At just three pounds, it fits inside a manila envelope, and is practically guaranteed to bring about envy in those with heavier laptops for at least the next three months. It’s not perfect — no Ethernet port, no FireWire port, and no swappable battery — but you know what? I’ll take it. After all those years of unrequited pining for a sub-notebook, the future looks just fine.

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Expanding on Syncing

TextExpanderIf I’m going to be such a persistent critic of .Mac’s anemic state, it’s only fair that I give Apple’s service its due when it does something right. Well, it’s not so much that .Mac has done so much right lately as it’s being used by third parties for the right thing.

Specifically, I’m talking about the latest version of Smile on My Mac’s TextExpander, the keyboard shortcut utility that, in the past nine months or so, I’ve become incredibly enamored of. I’ve created dozens of shortcuts for the snippets of text that I type repeatedly — fragments as small as “<a href=""></a>” or as long as the instructions for getting to my house — and I’ve become almost addicted to the highly satisfying bonk! sound that TextExpander plays each time I successfully invoke one of them.

That’s why I was pretty happy to see that, in its latest version, TextExpander now provides support for synchronization through the .Mac service. It makes sense. TextExpander is the kind of utility that works best when it’s nearly invisible, and .Mac synchronization makes it even more transparent. Before this update, I had to manually back up copies of my shortcuts, which I’d then shuttle from computer to computer, laboriously importing them into each instance of TextExpander and weeding through duplicates by hand. Now, I can happily create shortcuts on any one of the three Macs on which I have the utility installed and almost instantly have them available on the other two.

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Look What the Leopard Dragged In

Mac OS X 10.5 LeopardWhen I sat down to write this entry about the recently revealed final product details for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I nearly described the operating system upgrade as being ‘much anticipated.’ But then I wondered, “Is it really much-anticipated?” No, in fact. The iPhone was this year’s darling, and Leopard’s so-so feature list doesn’t seem to hold much potential for grabbing the spotlight back. It may also be no accident that the product’s animal namesake also happens to be the smallest of the of the four so-called ‘big cats.’

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Preserving Preferences

One of the more popular posts that I wrote in July was “Designed Deterioration,” in which I observed that digital hardware is rarely intended to get more beautiful as it gets older.

Governed mostly by the modern business principle of planned obsolescence, today’s hardware products are meant to get scrapped and replaced when they age beyond the near future. By contrast, older hardware goods — like the cast iron skillet I mentioned in my original post — often seem to have been designed with their eventual deterioration in mind. As they get older and become more heavily used, they get better.

That post might have led many to believe that what I’m advocating is that digital products should all be developed with designed deterioration in mind. While I wouldn’t object to that, I wouldn’t expect it to happen any time soon. By now, planned obsolescence is too strongly rooted a concept to allow for that.

I also happen to think there’s a lot to be said for designing for the current moment, designing something that addresses today’s values without feeling the pressure to create something that will last for all time. Which is to say that I have a bias towards what I consider to be ‘timeless’ design, for sure, but I also believe that our craft and our culture don’t progress when everything tries to appear timeless.

There’s one more part of this discussion I want to bring to light. So far, I’ve been harping on hardware and industrial design. But my original thought, when I sat down to write that post, was that designed deterioration seems like an idea that software could benefit from, too.

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How I Spent My iRebate

No big ideas or design insights today; just a few Mac-related things I wanted to clear off my notepad.

First, I tried hard to spend my US$100 iPhone rebate at the Apple Store in SoHo yesterday — without going over the hundred dollar-mark. So I bought myself a Contour Design Showcase for my iPhone, and one of those slick new Apple keyboards.

Total price, including tax: US$90.98. So close; now I need to find something for US$9.02 to spend the balance on. I know I can just put it towards something of a greater value that I probably would’ve bought from Apple anyway (e.g., iWork ’08) but for some irrational reason, I’m feeling defiant. I guess I don’t want to feel like a sucker for letting Apple’s rebate offer trick me into some larger purchase… though as one of those faithful drones who waited in line to buy an iPhone in the first place, it’s hard to make the argument that I haven’t already got “SUCKER” written all over my face.

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The Little Keyboard That Could—n’t

iPhone KeyboardLet’s not even talk about the horrible wincing I did when I learned that Apple lowered the price of its iPhone today by US$200 — a mere eight and one-half weeks after I dutifully and idiotically waited in line to buy one. Apparently, there are some avenues of recourse available to us early adopters, but here’s my take: I have neither the time nor the energy in my life to go charging back up this particular hill. I knew what this thing cost when I bought it, and I knew it was going to go down in price one day, and so here we are.

In a tangentially related matter, the lower iPhone prices and the introduction of the iPod touch presumably means that more and more customers will soon be exposed to the wonders of Apple’s multi-touch, software keyboard. On that, I have something to say.

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A Subway System in Your Pocket

If you’re an iPhone owner and you live in New York City, you want to be able to carry around the official Metropolitan Transit Authority subway map on your iPhone. There are a few options for this, including using a tool like FileMarker which locally saves a PDF copy of the map to be accessed through Safari. It’s a clever approach, but it seems too tricky for me.

Instead, I prefer using Photo Albums in my iPhone to view cropped versions of the subway map, a simple but effective technique I first saw demonstrated by Mike Essl, and which doubtless many others have also used.

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Unsung Software

What are the least glamorous software tools for the Macintosh that you can’t live without? I’m not talking about the likes of Quicksilver, Adium or other high profile applications that, even if they don’t come from major league publishers, manage to get plenty of coverage already.

Rather, I’m talking about little known or little-discussed applications, widgets or utilities without which your productivity just plummets. I know that I’ve got a handful of these that I unequivocally must install on any Mac I use; I’m passionately dedicated to them. So it occurred to me the other day that lots of people probably have unsung favorites too; and by virtue of their modest dignity, I likely haven’t heard of them.

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