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The iPad is finally here, in all its glory.

To my surprise, I don’t feel too phased by the RDF this time around, and still remain quite certain that the iPad does not (yet) have any role in my computing workflow and environment. My MacBook is without a doubt my sidekick, but for all those out there that get cranky about the 5 lbs in their backpack or hot and bothered by their poor battery life of their laptops, I can see this product really catching on. The general sense from the tech community is that this product is quite niche, and yet I think it is quite the opposite. We, the technologists, are the anti-niche. We have our bases covered for the most part, but it’s the regular consumer who would need a device like this.

I could see the iPad taking the spot of my laptop day-to-day quite easily, but it’s lacking some functionality that I would need to get my work done, and thus I will wait and look forward to the day it will undoubtedly come. 

• Flash: Despite being rather loathsome of this nightmare, the fact remains that half of my online course material in University is in Flash-powered eLearning sites. This varies from semester to semester of course, but as the perfect homework companion, I’d need something that can…well….get my homework done with.
• Multitask: My fingers are glued to Command-Tab. Not much more to say to that. 
• Dev Environments: If I’m taking a CS degree, clearly I’ll be doing a compilation here and there. I can always whip out a VNC client, or more likely an SSH client, but until those tools are proven to be efficient alternatives, it’s pretty tough to bring it to CMPUT class.

Those are the three big ones for me. I would certainly spring for a hard keyboard and expect things like proper file management to be integrated in future versions of iPhone/iPad OS, but those are relatively minor issues. Flash I predict will come very soon. Flash 10.1 is coming down the pipe, and I figure Apple simply didn’t want to share their plans with Adobe in the development of this product. Flash is a power hog, but 10.1 is supposed to improve that. Multitask will come in time. If it’s been hacked on the iPhone it will be hacked or introduced on the iPad. As for development environments, I cannot wait to see a spinoff of JollyFastVNC in the App Store so that all the power of my desktop can come straight to my tablet.

The iPad, I would say, is almost evolutionary. It’s the natural progression from the multitouch devices Apple has been churning out. As we all know, 6 months from now iPad Plus will show up with a camera and double the pixel count (jk) and everything else that was on our wish lists, so for me I’ll be holding off until then.

As for the name, I’m positive that in a few months iPad will remind us more of the Apple product than what it does now.

Posted via email from jole posterous

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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?

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New Apple products came out this morning. Here’s an overview of the updates, and some of my thoughts.

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It seems to break this long period of silence with something so trivial, but it seemed blogworthy.

After forgetting to take the headphones out of my shirt pocket, I realized after the weekend that the shirt had gone through the wash cycle. Not sure if  it went through the dryer too, but it definitely went through the wash, and felt very very clean, but works just fine, distortion free! Not bad Apple, although I wish I could say that they last very long, they seem to withstand *certain* elements…

Things have been busy, as always. I have some photos to upload, but once again I’m stuck in this chicken-before-the-egg dillema of whether to just upload my pictures or optimize my photo management so that it’s easier to do… sigh…

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If you keep up with the latest processor and hardware technologies you know that 64-bit is the next big thing. For more than 15 years 32-bit has been the architecture of choice for almost all computers and devices, but as the limitations (in particular in the area of RAM) begin to be more apparent, the move to 64-bit becomes more and more important.

One of the problems facing Microsoft is the slow adoption rates of x64 Windows XP and Vista. If you listen to Security Now!, you may have heard of the important security features that x64 Windows brings to the table, and essentially restructuring Windows during this transition. While some people seem to disagree with me, 64-bit Windows just doesn’t seem to be compatible enough for most users, most often running into hardware issues or just plain incompatible software, despite the fact that 32-bit apps are supposed to run just fine in the 64-bit environment.

On the Mac side, things are a bit different. Not necessarily better, but definitely different, and it will be interesting to see how things play out in 2009, as it is suspected that next year will be that of 64-bit Apps (Notably Adobe CS4, and potentially some “legacy” Carbon-coded Apple applications like Final Cut).

AppleInsider has an excellent series on the history, present, and future of 64-bit, that, while focussed primarily on the Mac platform, has an excellent overview of the Windows perspective. Check it out, it’s an excellent read.

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So after looking into RAMDISK as an awesome way to get hyper fast workspace, I began to realize what the issues were with modern day RAMDISK and why it is that it’s not very popular.

First let’s make a ramdisk. Easy enough, OS X is unix based, so let’s just map some RAM off to a device. Then format and mount it. The process it outlined here:

http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/23/create-a-ram-disk-in-mac-os-x/

Next let’s do a few speed tests. First, a standard SATA 7200RPM drive (seagate) nothing fancy, but no slow poke either.

Sure enough, the results are as expected. Sequential writes are decent, averaging out at about 35MB/sec. Random writes are weaker though, due to the mechanical nature of the drive.

Next let’s take a look at the RAMDISK. We begin to start measuring things in GB/sec here. Scores of 1336 on an XBench test are pretty insane. Overall, just plain incredible.

So what can we use this in the real world?

1. High bandwidth video capture or rendering:

Sounds intriguing, as reading or writing to disk large HD files can be difficult on traditional HDDs.

2. Use as a photo storage while photoshopping

Would offer rapid access to all your images while loading.

3. Large file transfer over network etc.

If the bottleneck is the disk like I insist it is, then file transfers should be exactly 1.0GBps – overhead

So what happens really?

1. In video application, the problem lies within the size of the Ramdisk. While if you had a large capacity for storage of video captures or render, your’e still limited in terms of capacity. If you’re working with a video that is smaller than 1-2GB in footage or render size, then chances are the render times won’t be too terrible, that is, assuming you’re not doing anything intensive. However most applications who are working with large intensive files are going to load them into RAM first anyway and then work with them, especially if you have the memory to spare that you’re making ramdisks in the first place. So really, there’s no advantage there.

2. Next, we have a similar roadblock here. Photoshop loads your images into RAM anyway so by loading all your work files into a ramdisk, then opening them, they might load quickly into the application, but you’re better off ejecting the ramdisk and letting photoshop use the memory itself once everything is opened, which is really just a waste of time.

3. On the other hand, large file transfers seem to be quite good. I was able to transfer a 653MB TOD over SMB, gigabit, jumbo frames from jQuad ramdisk to MacBook ramdisk in 10 seconds flat. That’s about 65.4MB/sec. That’s about 0.5Gbps. I’m sure if I did some better tests with HTTP and other protocols, doing multiple tests I’d get a better result of .6 or .7, but overall it was quite impressive. In comparison, HDD to HDD did so in about 22.5 seconds, which is about 0.2Gbps. Pretty impressive increase.

But after considerable thought, it’s virtual memory and intelligent applications that killed the ramdisk. Before the time of virtual memory, (and system 7 and 8

didn’t have it as I recall) your system basically would have to use memory as carefully as possible, because once it was full, you basically were told to close applications and try whatever you wanted to do again. (If you want to experience such nostalgia, disable page file in Windows, it’s a party and a half) but nowadays the operating system just writes out to disk any memory that isn’t going to be in use (such as background applications) so that it can be given to the application at hand. Because applications can now use just about as much memory as they want, they do. Most applications now will simply load the entire file into RAM and work with it from there. As a result, it’s really only the initial load into the application that the hard disk is penalizing your speed.

Now one of the other downsides of virtual memory and it’s effect on ramdisk performance is that once another applications starts to request more memory that is currently available, the system will start to write memory to disk to offer it to the application. In this case, RAMdisk is not actually clear from this dumping to disk, and so if Photoshop decides to use more memory, then the system will simply write out your ramdisk the hard drive, and all of the sudden your hyper-fast temporary space is back on the disk and not so speedy anymore (that is, until it is restored to memory.)

All these factors contributed to the ultimate demise of ramdisk on the consumer desktop. While it’s still very useful for nimble linux live discs and to my knowledge Google uses it extensively in their server technologies, ramdisk will most likely stay a benchmark dream rather than a useful tool for high performance computing.

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So I don’t think I’ve given a full review to my iPod Nano yet, but I will make a quick note on some cool features (a complete review is yet to come.)

One neat feature that I really like is the sleep timer. I regularly use my iPod to put me to sleep , and it’s a great way to keep it’s battery alive by the next morning. For those of you unfamiliar, it essentially turns off your iPod after a set time.

Now, by no stretch of the imagination is this a well designed feature. Something it is missing is: exact times, fade out at end of time (nothing like about to fall asleep and it CLIPS right off) but I did notice that if it isn’t going to be able to finish the song in time, it won’t start it, which is pretty neat.

I will complain however, that it no longer displays the time remaining on the playback screen like it did in previous generations.

One thing I never really thought of is just to use an On-The-Go playlist, let it play through, and then just let it put itself to sleep.

Either way, I though it was some neat functionality. Thanks again !

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Well it’s been about a day and a half with Leopard, and after reading a few reviews, I’m happy with it.

While it has it’s little quirks, and Apple unnecessarily removed certain functionality for some arguably ineffective functionality, it still is a significant improvement over Tiger, and it’s growing on me.

Overall there’s no real grand features, but lots of polish, which is still really great. Most of the advancements occurred “Under the hood” at the API and Programming Level, which means while Leopard isn’t SUPER fantastic right now, it will be soon as developers discover the great new technologies emerging.

I’ve compiled a list for things I hate and love about Leopard below.

Annoying things in Leopard:

• MDS still can’t be turned off (MDS = spotlight service), although spotlight is a lot fastetr
• iTunes has skipped twice in the past half hour. It never does that. I think it might be the single-coredness of my first install.
• Stacks are a bit pointless, but fairly useful.
• Spaces are ok, but are more like switching around too much. I think it will come in handy for when I’m not in full desktop mode with dual display, but I can see using it with FCE and stuff
• Maudio doesn’t work in any way (yet)
• The Menu Bar is a bit dark when there’s a dark background, but it’s less distracting, however there’s a “star” right where the application is right now and it’s driving me up the wall. For those of you dying for a hack for this, you can always just make 20 pixels along the top of your desktop background white (or black for a consistent silvery look) and you’re done. No special apps or defaults writing required.
• Time machine shows a status bar all the time when it’s backing up…maybe that’ll go away, but it’s ticking me off. Also, it didn’t exactly work the first few times, but I think it is now.
• Notes folder randomly takes time to “Load” (Spinny thing) even though there’s only one note, wtd? UPDATED: I hate Mail notes and Todos. I am not using them whatsoever.
• They did some weird thing with the bezel interface, making volume controls etc, harder to read. I’m pretty sure the drop shadow is gone.

Things I love in Leopard:

• Scrolling background windows
• The fact that when i’m done this note, I can just hit send. UPDATE: Not really, I went back to stickies.
• Time Machine is SOOOO awesome.
• Coverflow is neat, but not as useful as i thought it would be. We’ll see. Ars Technica goes into details about the UI changes in the Finder, but I find it pretty good.
• QuickLook is excellent. It even does SVG! 
• FrontRow is better….I guess. I wish I could use the same keyboard shortcuts, and also, I hate that it’s not the fwoosh it used to be. Also, it pauses iTunes when it launches. wtd is that? I don’t like it.
• Instalations made with Installer now do the iTunes “Complete” sound when they’re done. Also, an obnoxiously large green check mark shows up. Great.
• Mail.app is like Apple Outlook. I love it. Sort of.
• The new network preference pane are excellent.
• iCal, Mail, and pretty much everything is very quick. 
• Terminal updates are nice, but I still like iTerm
• My MacBook speakers actually have decent volume now UPDATE: Maybe not, I think iTunes was just preamped.
• AirPort finally shows secured/not secured in listing
• AirPort seemed to connect to networks really fast…
• Not only does “Scroll another window” work, but you can also right click a non active application, VERY useful for when say, you ahve a window on a second monitor, move your mouse over to the window, have something selected and right click to copy it. Amazingly, it works! AWESOME!!
• Cool feature: the checkbox in todo lists changes to an alert box when it is overdue
• Photo Booth effects are neat, the hacks are neater.

* Overall very solid.

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