On the eve of another exciting announcement from everybody’s favorite Cupertino company, I felt it was necessary to chime in on my predictions for what the Apple tablet will look like, how it will work, and what kind of experience we can expect from this supposedly revolutionary device, and why I still seem somewhat skeptical over the idea of an iTablet.

There is no Gap

There’s no end to the amount of coverage and speculation about this product, which can be found here, and here most notably. But my anticipation is mostly in the “surprise” to come since at the moment I’m not excited for this product really. Current offerings out there have some problems with input methods, power, and well… functionality. It seems to me that the gap that the Kindle, eReaders, and these proposed media tablets are trying to fill does not really exist.
I would describe my day as having three “levels of mobility.”

• Home: At my desk with a 23″ display or two, running a Quad core processor. My computer keeps up with my workflow, it never lags behind. Video is large, clear, and stutter-free, and since I’m at my desk, that’s the only thing I would tolerate.
• Portable: I have my MacBook with me, and I’m setup somewhere other than my desk. Perhaps I’m on my bed, downstairs, outside, or in the library. I’m in class or at work somewhere, but I’m still computing. In this case, I tolerate some mild lag in my computing environment, since there isn’t really a laptop that is as powerful as my desktop and still within budget both money-wise and battery-life wise.
• Mobile: I am likely physically moving, whether on the bus, in the car, or simply walking around. I can still receive content and view it, although I don’t expect to perform a lot of input, it still is effective when it needs to happen. Loading times are much slower (or not available at all on my iPod Touch), but I can look out the window of the train or put it in my pocket for a few moments while it does its thing, and I’m not irritated.

At each of these stages, I feel that all my needs are fulfilled despite having limitations at each of these mobility levels. Most of my tasks can be performed at all levels.

So at which point would the tablet enter my workflow? Naturally it would be somewhere in between Portable and Mobile. I’m lying down or on the bus for more than a minute or two, and I’d like to read a book, watch a video, or take a note. Yet, a tablet would not fit in any pocket, and would likely need to be extracted from a bag, and thus somewhat of a hassle for that extra few inches of reading room. Why not hit up the iPhone/iPod Touch? Assuming that this Apple Tablet would be equipped with a nearly identical Operating System to that of my iPhone/iPod, what advantage in terms of functionality would really be present?

(The HP slate, a lamefest. Probably the closest thing to the iTablet that I can imagine, but maybe my imagination is simply too small for the likes of Steve.)

Put simply, the Apple Tablet seems to be far too close in functionality to the iPhone/iPod to be advantageous over it, and yet remains less pocketable and more of a pain to whip out, so any advantage is nullified.

An Industry Shift

Despite all this, and the terrible mystery of input method which I won’t address except to predict: there won’t be any, I still think that tomorrow will be revolutionary in a market sense, and here’s why.
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This is kind of “captain obvious” once you figure it out, but just for the sake of publishing this on the Web….

To have iTerm open to a certain directory for a bookmark, simply set the “Working Directory” to the path you would like to open. This seems ultra obvious, but the trick here (which I got confused about) is to not escape the path.

Usually anything shell-related requires either escaping spaces (/Users/horse/Documents/My\ Documents/) or using quotes of some kind around the string so that the command line know you’re not trying use the space as an argument delimiter.

Obviously iTerm does this escaping for you, but it doesn’t actually say that anywhere in the documentation, so here ya go!

Speaking of terminal emulators for OS X, what do you prefer? I started using iTerm when I first got a Mac, since it was far superior to the Apple-supplied Terminal.app application. As of Leopard, Apple has included a much more feature-rich version of Terminal.app, although it still seems to be lacking in the Bookmark department. You can setup different window-sets and styles, but it’s not quite the same thing as being able to just save out certain commands or SSH connections easily.

What do you think? Do you use iTerm or Terminal.app? Do you have a trick for bookmarking in Terminal.app?