@lindsay.at

So, Apple has an announcement at Photokina today. Everyone expects a new version of Aperture, but what if there were one more thing? I speculated on what a redesigned MacBookPro might look like (after iChatting with Fraser, I now favour a black anodised Aluminum MBP body). But what if this were the event to release the MBPs with Core Duo 2 processors? It certainly would match the professional image and profile of the event.

So, Ars Technica's post on the brains of the iTV has got me speculating even further: is this a "thin" version of Mac OS X, or a custom bit of software? The idea that it might be an x86 chip, plus, say, Intel integrated graphics, makes me lean a lot towards a stripped-down Mac OS X.

How small a memory footprint can you fit into with just, say, Darwin, plus Core Foundation, plus QuickTime and Core Animation? The full QuickTime API (i.e., editing) need not be exposed to developers, right? And Core Audio/Image/Video seem implicit in the above choices. Quartz Composer? If we were to be greedy, what about WebKit? On the plus side it could enable a Widget ecosystem on the TV. On the minus side, it's browsing on the TV: not always the right place for the job. On the plus side, if Apple could nail the user experience, then it could be amazing, and perhaps the killer app for an iTV.

Three more points to consider: my Nokia S60 Browser demonstrates how small WebKit could be made to be, and that web browsing is possible with a four-way remote plus select and back buttons. The Surfin' Safari blog also had a series of entries about high DPI web sites, which might equally be applied in the opposite direction for standard definition televisions.

It's a design truism that high-end design features eventually find their way to the low end, rendering them the most accessible to the masses and therefore undesirable to those who consider themselves of the elite.

Have we seen this happen to aluminum at Apple? What started as an executive-level product in the 17" and 12" PowerBooks had a healthy life with the professional PowerMac G5s, and with the updated Intel versions of these products. Aluminum is now all over the low-end iPod range, most significantly with the 2GB iPod nano and the 1GB, $79 iPod shuffle. Can a professional designer continue on with a computer that now adorns the most "toy-like" product in Apple's product line?

I think that the next product refresh of the MacBookPro and the MacPro may see a new casing, a new fashion, and a step forward from the "continuity" message that was so important in the Intel transition. Anyone who has paid any attention to Apple during 2006 has received that message loud and clear: Intel Macs are indeed fully Macs, only faster. I'm inclined to think Apple will move forward with black, as that has represented premium pricing lately. My co-worker's new Core Duo Sony Vaio makes a compelling case that Carbon Fibre could be a nice path, but then it would seem strange and unlikely for Apple to follow Sony's lead on this, so soon after Sony is caught in imitation of Apple style.

I promised to go into further detail on what I mean between ownership and rental and the spaces in between. These are thoughts very much in progress, and with some aspects of it, my thinking on it changes daily.

I have "subscriptions" to certain multimedia/digital services for which I pay a flat monthly fee:

• ADSL: £25/mo for 20GByte download allowance,
• eMusic: $10/mo for 40 mp3 track downloads
• Amazon DVD Rental: £8/mo for four DVD rentals

With my internet access, I try to hit about 75% of my usage allowance in a given month, since usage caps were introduced at my ISP. Before then, I was paying more, getting less than half the throughput, and downloaded significantly less. I feel an internal pressure to get as much as possible out of this "limited" resource....

The underlying CMS engine, which should be invisible to most users, is the Flux content management system. (It's based on Popoon, a PHP-based clone of Apache's Cocoon.) I mention it because already it's starting to pay for the fairly small time investment to learn it: the XSLT/XML processing pipeline on the back end has proven its usefulness in adapting some XSLT stylesheets I had lying around for my work. To my surprise, the localisation that I had built into the stylesheets worked in the CMS with no extra effort. That's the sort of project I like: a fairly small bit of glue that multiplies the benefits with everything around it....

So, welcome to my blog. I actually started deploying and mentioning it sooner than expected, prompted by Apple's media event. It provided a lot of food for thought, and it didn't really fit my other main online outlet, so I put those musings here.

I hope to have a chance to import some relevant content from my old livejournal (since May 2000!), which had been my previous blog platform of choice. It still has a place, I think, for much more personal musings and as a somewhat social hangout. The geekier and more political entries could find their home here. If I still have emo or personal things to post, they should still live at livejournal. I don't want to be that kind of blogger, putting everything out in the public to see, all in one feed. I've never attempted to be entirely anonymous, though, so anyone with a bit of initiative could find me.

The final thought stemming from the stream: Steve Jobs really is uncomfortable talking about television. There was something profoundly clunky about the way he would say "big-screen, flat TV." They were the words of someone who is not enthusiastic about television equipment, or, perhaps of watching TV in general.

Could this be why we took relatively long to see an iPod with video, that Steve just doesn't care about the idiot box? I'm brought to mind how Larry and Sergey of Google apparently aren't music fans, so it took so long for Google to do anything mith music.

As for the iTunes 7 reviews, the officemates installed it and are enthusiastic. It's amazing how Apple's (and no one else's) software can garner this sort of attention.

On seeing the streaming video of the event, there was one question that leapt to mind when I saw iTunes 7: did Mike Matas (the UI wunderkind, who moved from Delicious Monster to Apple just following last year's WWDC) do that?

It sure has the Matas sheen, at least in the videos.

(I'll be trying iTunes 7 later, once people check in on what, if anything, is lost in functionality.)

TextDrive has introduced a new product, Bingo!. 100 GB of solid, redundant, networked storage for $199 per year. It's an interesting service model. It's about three times the cost of Amazon's S3 storage, but much more usable, and most likely more solid/redundant. Interesting thing.

I love using their StrongSpace product, but I think that's largely a product of having paid for a "lifetime" account package, which was essentially 20GB of secure storage for life, for $200. (Mixed Grill upgrade, for those keeping score at home. I see the Joyent as an interesting bundle thrown in "for free," which is exactly what they're doing with the Bingo! plans, as well...) Paying that amount every year for five times the space? I think I need to be convinced of that.

Rental versus ownership, I think, is the issue here. I'll need to comment more later.

(See also the Joyeur Weblog post on it, as well... and TextDrivers can pick it up at a discount using a code from the forums.)

So, the dust hasn't settled yet on the one-hour Apple media event, but there's a lot to say already.

Lions Gate entertainment were obviously shut out. The CEO does not appreciate unplanned leaks, and dealt with it in his usual way. This is significant, because all watchers seemed to think that some non-Disney representation was necessary for credibility's sake. There's a reason why he showed the graph of the growth of the iTunes TV show offerings: it grew from five shows to over 220 in a year: they're not worried...