EGOPOLY

KAYAK, the greatest travel app of all time.

Another in a series of megalomaniacal self aggrandizement.

How awesome would this be?

http://www.forsyth.co.nz/index.html

“Totally awesome” is the correct answer.

Maybe in 10 years or so…

All the professional writers are making their predictions and/or wish lists for what Apple tablet/iSlate/iPad/Magic Muffin will be and do. So here are my amateur guesses:

1. It will essentially be a larger iPod touch: mostly a large glass multi-touch screen running multi-touch OS, the same OS as the iPod and iPhone. Not Mac OS X, nor something in between that and the iPhone OS. CORRECT

2. It will have a single camera, mounted on the front/screen side. For video iChat. It will not have a camera on the back of the device. Something that is 4X larger than an iPod would be an awkward camera. WRONG

3. It will have Wifi, bluetooth and some kind of 3G support. The 3G vendor will not be ATT. It will be Sprint or Verizon. You’ll need to sign up for a contract to get the discounted price. Right on 3G, wrong on ATT

4. The discounted price will be $499. The full price with no contract will be $799. NAILED IT

5. I wish, wish, wish it would have an OLED screen. But I don’t think it will. Update 2010-01-11: so I got a Nexus One. The OLED screen on that is so beautiful, it makes the iPhone screen look very rusty by comparison. Clearly, it’s also economically viable since the Nexus One price isn’t too far off the iPhone price. So I’m thinking OLED is a real possibility on the table, especially given the battery life benefit. WRONG

6. It will be about the thickness of the current iPhone 3gs. WRONG

7. It will have a brushed aluminum metal back, like the new iMac. The apple logo on the back will be plastic, and will be the antennae location (like new iMacs). This is a completely random guess, and I’d be just as happy with a black plastic back like the iPhone. YES NAILED IT!

8. It will have an integrated speaker, and microphone. The only inputs/outputs will be dual headphone jacks (so you can watch a movie with your friend on a plane) and an iPod dock connector. 1/2 WRONG No dual jacks

9. It will have the same physical buttons as the iPod: power/sleep; home button; volume NAILED IT

10. There will be two models: 64GB and 128GB. The 128GB unit will be $649/$949. WRONG: models are 16/32/64

11. It will have an ARM processor, not a netbook-style x86 chip. Battery life, people. WRONG: Apple processor

12. It will have a fixed, non-user-replaceable battery. Of course, duh. EASY

13. software: will include iChat, so you can video chat with your friends who are on macs or on other apply tablets.WRONG, given lack of camera

14. software: there will be some kind of Apple ereader with itunes store support for buying content. Amazon will also offer a scaled-up version of kindle reader for the larger screen.CORRECT; amazon kindle app already works on iPhone, so will work on iPad

15. size: about the same total dimensions as the Kindle, but it will be almost all screen. I guess that makes the screen about 9″ to 10″. CORRECT

It took me a long time to figure out why anyone would really want a giant iPod like this. But watching how people consume applications in the App Store, I think I’ve figured it out. People, normal people, not nerds like me, hate computers. HATE them. They are mystified by basic concepts like files and applications and processes.

The dead-simple iPhone model is this: your magic candy bar does one thing at a time, whatever it is you want it to do. You can add more things to it for one or two dollars, sometimes more. You don’t have to install backup software, anti-virus. You don’t have to decide which mail program to use. It does what you want it to do, and you don’t need any of that nerdy computer bullshit to use it.

A large iPod, then, does all those ‘computer’ tasks that work better on a larger screen, but don’t require a mouse and keyboard. Essentially, many small information and entertainment ‘tasks’ that you don’t do all day long. Computers as we use them and think of them today are destined to be work devices, used by programmers, scientists, financial workers, artists, designers, architects, doctors, accountants, lawyers to do their actual work. When they go home, when they want to check the weather, watch a movie, read a book, play a game, they will pull out their little magic mirror. The conventional computer as an entertainment platform, as a budding replacement for TV, as a mass-market consumer electronics item will have been a short-lived phenomenon, from the 1990s to the 2010s.

I’ll update this post later with my score. If I get over 50%, I should be a professional.

Update: here is what John Gruber thinks, and John Siracusa. They are both very clever fellows, and it seems to me that their predictions mostly match mine. Which makes me say: woo hoo! yeah, baby, we’re on to something!

Update: more rumours that support my guessing: http://gizmodo.com/5437479/google-china-ex+president-says-apple-tablet-is-a-101+inch-iphone-with-webcam

Update (Jan 11, 2010): Orange exec giving more weight to my front-video camera prediction.

Update (Jan 21, 2010)): More intelligent analysis that totally supports my ideas. From Gizmodo.

Paul Graham’s recent essay, Apple’s Mistake is a very clear, and I think, fair description of what’s gone totally wrong with the App Store and the associated review process.

The absurdly reductionist summary is: “unless Apple pays attention to what programmers think, the iPhone as a platform will wither and die.” How I hope Apple takes that argument to heart! But the bitter, cranky realist in me says it’s probably not going to happen. Nor do I think Apple will suffer much (noticeably) if they continue on their current path.

I’ve had an iPhone since the second day you could buy them. I love the device, as I have not loved any other gadget. And this is what I believe breaks Paul’s argument: the device, without any apps at all, is so much better than anything else out there, I would not seriously consider switching to some other phone. I suspect a lot of people, most people in fact, who care not a whit of the pain and suffering of programmers to labor to get their wares into Apple’s store, who like the simplicity and elegance of the iPhone would behave the same way.

I actually have two phones. I’ve been carrying a Motorola Droid for about two weeks. There are some things about it that are quite cool: GMail is the best email I’ve ever used on a mobile device, better than Blackberry and several million times better than email on the iPhone. I love that I can use my Google voice number for all calls, automatically.

Aside from that, though, it feels very, um, Linuxy. And nerdy. And clunky. (I won’t even get into how ugly it is next to the iPhone. Some people care about design, and many don’t.)

Linux is great, of course. But UI’s built on top of Linux tend to be oddly inconsistent, patchwork and fussy. The Android UI, at least the one that Motorola has put together for Droid, feels a lot more like a computer UI than it does a seamless mobile UI. Apple managed to take what a phone UI was like and extend it to do things you wouldn’t think you could do with a tiny screen and fat fingers. Android seems much more to have been taken from a computer UI and hammered down to a way you can touch that UI on a tiny screen.

It’s hard to describe exactly what things make it seem that way. But probably it comes to things like: too many nested menus; two ways of navigating apps; no direct manipulation to delete an app; and too much awareness that there is a ‘file system.’ To install music on the Droid, you have to find a special menu, enable and mount the phone as a drive, and then copy mp3 files from your computer to the droid. How many normal people are going to even know what the heck “mount” means?

So, the problem with Paul’s warning scenario actually affecting Apple is this: the iPhone is so much better as a device, hardware and software, out of the box, that millions and millions of people will prefer it to other devices. And there’s no close second: you have the crappy phones from Samsung and LG, and the meh phones from Nokia, and the almost-good-but-too-geeky phones from Motorola. And they all have different quirks and sizes and input methods. So where will most developers put their time? The ones who actually want to make some money? On the one phone where ALL the screen sizes are the same, and all the APIs are the same.

I wish it weren’t so. I wish Apple would think something like “Gee, we are just crushing everybody on industrial design, simple interfaces and marketing. Let’s also crush them on making the developers love us too.” But they don’t seem inclined to care, and I don’t really think it will impact their bottom line if they don’t.

Motorola: if you want to beat Apple, make one phone. One single phone that is the expression of all the very best your industrial designers can put together, and one UI on top of Android that is the most carefully researched and tested that your UX experts can come up with. Or Samsung or LG, or Nokia. Make one single phone, and make it better every year until it beats the iPhone. Then people will buy it. Then the developers will come. And you can treat them like crap, or not, it doesn’t matter.

HDR and OCR software, looks kinda cool, for future investigation: http://www.creaceed.com/

http://www.dataliberation.org/home

This is what you do when your shit is so awesome, you don’t need to fear that people are going to go elsewhere. Open the door, and they won’t even want to leave.

Cue Sting singing: “If you love somebody, set them free. Free, free, set them free.”

cd tomcat-connectors-1.2.28-src/
./configure --with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs
make
make install

It actually just works!

this has now happened to me more than once.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1808

http://www.theenergydetective.com/ted-5000-overview.html

Install looks easy.

Bummer, this is too late for me to play with. I switched my wife to iPhone 3 weeks ago. :-(

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/desktop/desktop_mac.jsp