3D Chalk

Art is amazing.

Check out the video of the Mario drawing being done, but don’t miss the Pac-Man photos below. I especially enjoy some of the ones taken from the ‘wrong’ perspective.

Trashing Toy Story

With Brave about to premier, and the first trailer for Monsters University just out it seems like a good time to link to this story about the creation, near loss, recovery, intentional scrapping, and recreation of Toy Story 2.

A huge chunk of Toy Story 2 was indeed deleted and was only recovered by a stroke of luck and the intense efforts of the Pixar staff.

But what most people don’t know is that the whole movie was actually tossed out again, not by the computers, but by the filmmakers themselves. It was then completely remade with mere months to go before a release date that was set in stone, cementing Pixar’s legacy as a crucible of commitment to quality.

Surface vs. ?

Regarding John Gruber’s Not Getting the iPad piece where he calls out Sam Grobart for:

jumping through hoops to justify his sensational “Microsoft’s new Surface tablet computer is not an iPad competitor” lead sentence

Is that a sensational lead sentence? Sure, but it isn’t like he buries what he means pages deep in the article. Here are the first three sentences:

Microsoft’s new Surface tablet computer is not an iPad competitor. It’s an ultrabook competitor.

I mean, of course it’s an iPad competitor, but it would appear Microsoft is going after other segments of portable computing as well.

Had he stopped right there, I might even agree with him. Unfortunately, Grobart does go on from there, and Gruber calls him out on some of what follows. However, let’s go back and focus on the first three sentences. I think they are actually pretty accurate.

First, a few points from Gruber:

  • Gruber frequently calls people out for dismissing the iPad as a device for consumption only.
  • Gruber has an iPad and a Macbook Air, but prefers to do most of his on-the-go content creation on the Air.
  • Gruber himself pointed out back in 2010 that in some ways the primary competitor of the MacBook Air is the iPad.

To me this gets at part of what is interesting, and part of what I think Grobart was trying to express, about the Surface announcement from Microsoft:

  • Apple has the MacBook Air and the iPad in competition with each other. In some sense this means that any product that competes with either the Air or the iPad must, by definition, compete with both of them.
  • At Apple the Air and the iPad learn from each other, but they aren’t on converging paths.
  • Microsoft seems to be aiming at a target in between the Air and the iPad. They are making a bet that the future isn’t tablets AND laptops, it is something in between.

Credit to Microsoft for taking a different position, and for being willing to jump into hardware to support that position. Of course, since they are still selling Windows to their (non-Apple) tablet and laptop competitors, it may be hard for Microsoft to lose, even if the Surface concept does.

Surface

I’m generally no fan of Microsoft, but the new Surface tablets have to be the most promising thing they’ve done in a long time. I still think the Metro UI is a good direction, and this seems like the right product for it (much more than on a traditional desktop PC/laptop, and slightly more than on a phone).

Positive: The design seems well done. Reports suggest good build quality. A device that is primarily a tablet seems to fit well with the Windows 8 concept. They appear to have taken some lessons from Apple, but have clearly taken them in some slightly different directions. 

Negative: No price. No timeline. Seems crazy to have both Intel and ARM versions that appear to be so similar, but have such fundamental differences in capabilities.

Unsure: The cover seems promising, but imagining my iPad Smart Cover with a keyboard makes me realize that I don’t use it in a way where that would really work very often. Does the ARM version answer the ‘why should I get this instead of an iPad’ question? The Intel version might answer that question by running ‘full’ Windows, but years of Windows tablets prior to the iPad suggest that using non-Metro Windows on a tablet isn’t that great. What will the hardware partner fallout look like?

In short, I hope this is a great product and does well, but mostly because I want it to drive my next iPad to be that much better.

Marklar

Fun story if you didn’t already see it:

In JK’s office, Joe watches in amazement as JK boots up an Intel PC and up on the screen comes the familiar ‘Welcome to Macintosh’.

Joe pauses, silent for a moment, then says, “I’ll be right back.”

He comes back a few minutes later with Bertrand Serlet.

Max (our 1-year-old) and I were in the office when this happened because I was picking JK up from work. Bertrand walks in, watches the PC boot up, and says to JK, “How long would it take you to get this running on a (Sony) Vaio?” JK replies, “Not long” and Bertrand says, “Two weeks? Three?”

JK said more like two *hours*. Three hours, tops.

Via MacRumors.

Retina

Although my eyes don’t agree with the premise that Apple’s current retina math is wrong, I do agree that what Apple calls a retina display today will not be the last word in high resolution displays.

If nothing else, the current definition is too dependent on viewing distance. Sure, you usually view a given display from some typical distance, but anyone who sweats every single pixel in a design - and probably lots of people who don’t - has spent time getting up close and personal with a display. A few years from now, once every product Apple sells has what they call a retina display today, I can certainly see Apple introducing the next retina display. One where you can’t see individual pixels no matter how close you get.

But why stop there?

Imagine the day when you can pull out a magnifying glass to check out a picture on your iPad, and instead of seeing pixels, you see a whole world of perfectly resolved detail that you didn’t even know existed.

The Promise of iCloud

With WWDC just around the corner I have no doubt that we will soon learn new details about Apple’s plans for iCloud. However, before they make their real announcements, I’d like to throw out some speculation of my own.

  • Guest User
    • What if, similar to enabling a Guest User on your Mac, you could enable iCloud login? 
    • What if you could go up to any Mac (perhaps in an Apple store), log in with your iCloud account, and have access to all of your personal data?
    • Today iCloud has simplified the setup of a new device. You can backup your iPhone or iPad to iCloud, get a new device, and restore your backup to the new device straight from iCloud. Is something similar for your Mac so far away? Is there any reason that would only work for a new device? Why not also with a temporary user account?
    • Today logging into iCloud can give you access to your email, notes, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, documents, and music. In MobileMe you could also sync Dashboard Widgets, Dock Items, and Keychains. With the Mac App Store and the iTunes Store you can download apps, TV shows, and movies that you’ve purchased to additional devices. 
    • How much data on the typical user’s Mac couldn’t already be replicated on a different device via a few logins and a fast network connection?
    • What if a customer with just an iPhone, or just an iPad, wanted to try out a Mac? What if they could try out a Mac with all of their data already on it? What if all the apps on the Mac were similar to the apps they already know?
  • Entertainment
    • With my DVR at home I can start a movie in my living room, pause it, and continue watching in my bedroom.
    • With iBooks I can read a chapter of a book on my iPhone, and continue from the same location on my iPad.
    • Music? Movies? Games? Apps? How long will it be before I can stop worrying about what kind of content I’m dealing with and know that I’ll always be able to use it seamlessly across devices?
  • Hardware, Software, Data
    • Apple is known for making hardware and software that work together seamlessly. 
    • In some ways iCloud is the new hardware. It is the new hard disk where your data is stored. 
    • In some ways iCloud is the new software. It is what the hardware in your hands must communicate with. It is what you see on your hardware. 
    • It is both, and it is neither. It is the new third leg of the Apple stool, and it must become as strong and as well integrated as the hardware and software legs for Apple to support its new weight.
    • Apple has found new levels of success in selling devices that are not Macs, but in doing so they have introduced a whole new group of people to the problems of having multiple devices, and the need to keep data in sync.
    • Microsoft has realized that as users work with multiple devices they must see the same ‘thing’ on each device. They are in the midst of a gamble based on that very premise, but they are wrong. The ‘thing’ that must be the same is not the interface, it is the data.

To be clear, I’m not necessarily suggesting that anything directly related to these items will be announced this week. Instead, I’m speculating about the direction that iCloud is headed.

Three quotes from Steve Jobs at WWDC, in 1997:

I have computers at Apple, at Next, at Pixar, and at home. I walk up to any of them and log in as myself. It goes over the network, finds my home directory - on the server, and it just is - I’m - I’ve got my stuff wherever I am. Wherever I am. And none of that is on a local hard disk. 

The iCloud of today doesn’t quite do this. What about the iCloud of tomorrow? Steve is talking about four computers that belong to him, but why stop there? Why should you need to be at your own computer to access your data, when your data isn’t on your computer at all?

And some, thin, thinner hardware clients. Hardware clients that are thinner, not necessarily software. That Apple could make that as plug and play for mere mortals as it made the user experience over a decade ago.

Thinner hardware clients? Check. In every sense of the word ‘thinner’.

I can’t communicate to you how awesome this is until you use it. And what you would decide within a day or two is that carrying around these non-connected computers or computers with tons of state in them - tons of data and state in them - is Byzantine by comparison.

Steve was talking about a problem that most people didn’t have, or at least didn’t realize they had. Even now, most people don’t work from more than one computer, or from more than one location. Or at least most people didn’t until they got an iPhone or an iPad. This is the very problem that more and more people are starting to recognize as they integrate new types of devices into their lives.

Apple loves to solve the problems you didn’t know you had.

(Re)moving Parts

Quote from Steve Jobs at WWDC in 1997:

One of the things I’m really excited about is to look at that personal computer and take out every moving part except the keyboard and the mouse. I don’t need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the sever faster.
Of course, here Steve wasn’t thinking crazy enough. As it turned out, he removed the keyboard and mouse too.

Dock

Apparently crossing the Pacific isn’t as difficult as you would think.

one made an incredible journey across 5,000 miles of ocean that ended this week on a popular Oregon beach

Four Inches

I'm intrigued by the rumors of a new iPhone with a four inch diagonal screen accomplished by making the screen taller while maintaining the width and pixel density.

I've been particularly enjoying the mockups that show how this change would work with existing apps. This one from modilwar on The Verge Forums, and this one from overdrivedesign are both great. However, no one seems to be tackling what I think is the most interesting question: landscape.

The mockups from modilwar show landscape video (which is easy, the proposed change is great for video) and suggest that things like games could simply pad the existing screen with black bars until developers make updates. I agree with all of that as far as it goes.

However, I'm much more interested in how 'normal' apps will handle the new ratio in landscape. For example, what will happen to the landscape keyboard? It seems like there are two options:

  1. Make all the buttons wider
  2. Introduce the split keyboard from the iPad

The split keyboard seems like the better option to me, and so I introduce the results of my (far from expert) mockup of a four inch iPhone with a split landscape keyboard.

Original

Mockup

Looking at the space available, and comparing to the iPad's split keyboard, I suspect that if Apple goes this route they might actually add in a few additional keys.

Phrasing

Love the non-inflammatory article title from Cult of Mac:

Apple Gearing Up To Screw iOS Developers With A 3.95-Inch Widescreen iPhone 5 [Rumor]

Next up, just to cover all the bases:

Apple Gearing Up To Screw iOS Users With No Changes To 3.5-Inch iPhone 5 Screen

Chrome

I had no idea that Chrome was doing so well (via The Next Web):

Google Chrome has been long expected to leapfrog Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) to take its position as the Web’s most used browser and, according to data from Statcounter, the momentous change of leadership happened last week.

I wasn't writing back in 2008 when Chrome launched, but if I had been I probably would have very sceptically linked to this (via my Instapaper archive, but who knows where before that):

this is huge for Google, a step that needed to wait until the company had, essentially, come of age. It is an explicit attempt to accelerate the movement of computing off the desktop and into the cloud — where Google holds advantage. And it's an aggressive move destined to put the company even more squarely in the crosshairs of its rival Microsoft, which long ago crushed the most fabled browser of all, Netscape Navigator.

I'm sure I know people who use Chrome as their primary browser, and I use it myself for occasional Flash needs, but I definitely didn't realize how much market share it had picked up. Among Windows users I would have said that the conventional wisdom was:

  • most people use IE because it is there
  • people who know to even consider another option tend to choose Firefox

Chrome's market share, along with the trending for IE and Firefox, seems to suggest that Chrome is making strong gains in the first category. I say good for them.

I also wonder how continued growth in Mac sales might play into these changes. I'd be interested to see how growth in Mac OS usage correlates to growth in Safari usage. If Mac OS growth is more rapid than Safari growth I suspect the difference would largely be due to Chrome.

However, it seems important to point out that I was led to all of the above via data from Statcounter as reported by The Next Web. The same pair responsible for this gem:

Android has already become the most dominant type of mobile device on the planet, and now the Google-owned operating system is owner of the mobile Web’s most used browser

The problem with this 'news' is that it somehow takes 'Android' as one entry, but treats the iPod touch and the iPhone as two distinct entries, and doesn't appear to even consider the iPad. Maybe if iPhone browser share were to gain a bit more they could start splitting out the 4S, the 4, and the 3GS individually to keep it from being on top.

All in all, maybe this is closer to the truth in both desktop and mobile numbers. It is certainly closer to my gut feel for the situation.

Enterprise

It seems highly unlikely that this will get enough immediate momentum to happen in 20 years, but I'd love to be wrong.

We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let’s do it. The ship can be similar in size and will have the same look as the USS Enterprise that we know from the Star Trek science fiction.

Via The Verge.