@lindsay.at

My daughter is very clever at two and one-third years of age. Not a day goes by when she doesn't surprise and delight me with something new she's learned. She just returned from a weekend with her grandparents, and proceeded to strut her newly-acquired linguistic stuff.

That a very very big butterfly!

Mummy [com]puter is tiny tiny one!

A missing verb here, an elided article there, sure, but I was amazed at the assured use of repetition for the purpose of intensificatory reduplication. I was stumped as to what to call this, as I started out thinking about reduplication, but wikipedia's article on it gave me little clue as to whether I was right. Google eventually sent me to the Language Log for the above-linked blog post. Reading the very very good post also let me know why I had such trouble finding a description of the process:

When I realized in 1999 that intensificatory reduplication (of both adjective modifiers in the noun phrase and adverb premodifiers in adjective phrases and adverb phrases) needed to be described in the Adjectives and Adverbs chapter of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, I rummaged around in all the earlier reference grammars I could find to see what they had said about it, and the answer was that the exact facts had apparently never been recorded. What Rodney Huddleston and I wrote for Chapter 6 of The Cambridge Grammar (pages 561-562) was apparently the first description that dealt with both adjectives and adverbs.

It's strange. The Language Log only came onto my personal radar when it covered LOLCODE, but it now requires an honoured place on my blogroll. My weekend has been filled with it, since I've become obsessed with the recent controversy over the Pirahã, as described in the New Yorker. The Language Log's coverage of Dan Everett's work has been a great introduction to the topic.

Yes, it's The Register, and yes, other rumour sites are throwing doubt on the idea, but El Reg asks, are the 'Alu-mac' iMacs due next month?:

We've got around a month to wait before Apple unveils the anticipated next-gen iMac design, it has been claimed. Expect to see the 20in and 24in machines on shop shelves between the middle of July and mid-August, moles maintain.

Earlier this month, it was claimed the new models, which are said to sport a stylish, Mac Pro-like aluminium all-in-one enclosure, might see the light of day by now. No mention of the machines was made at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference last week, though last-minute schedule shifts were likely, the sources claimed.

Could this be the definitive shift in the product line whereby brushed metal is the new white as I predicted? The twist here would be to push aluminum down to the bottom-end products, making the high-end products less attractive with the design ubiquity, and forcing the fashion-conscious to upgrade with the next high-end fashion. We'll see.

(Via The Register - Personal: Mac Channel.)

I can't take credit for this one: this idea was completely that of my brilliant young officemate, Johnathan Ishmael.

Rather than concentrating on the "Safari on Windows is to help the browser acceptance ecosystem" or the "there to entice people to the Mac experience" arguments that most have been concentrating on. Johnathan cuts straight to the big punchline and sees it as a trial run for offering commercial sales of previously Mac-only applications like iLife.

The browser itself might not go very far in capturing people for every-day browsing (especially judging from initial reactions), but it may well be enough to shake out problems with the underlying software platform for porting Safari. Technically, it has some legs. It has been observed that Safari is very much like a Mac application, and that there are CoreFoundation, CoreGraphics and CFNetwork DLLs. Is this, plus QuickTime, plus some of iTunes's efforts enough to provide the underlying frameworks for the iLife suite?

iLife is cited by many (including Johnathan, a Windows user) as one of the most compelling ideas to buy a Mac. Why should Apple offer that commercially? Not only does it get the income from the sale, but it gets people comfortable with the application platform. iPod People are comfortable with the way iTunes organises their music. Some of them have been comfortable enough for that to let them think they'd be comfortable with a Mac. If iLife were introduced on Windows, it could capture a lot of loyalty: there's nothing quite like it for media creation and management on the PC.

With that captured loyalty, there's a lot gained. If Apple applications already take care of some of your most prized digital content, then that's a fairly big barrier lowered there. What other barriers are there? Microsoft Office? Nope. Accessing MS Word files with WordPad? TextEdit fills that role handily.

I personally think it's an intriguing idea and a possible future. As with my other speculation here on the blog, it's an idea that could be done by Apple, and perhaps something that has been discussed internally. Apple doesn't always do what's feasible, and certainly not right away. Apple does what's right for Apple in the future, and happily that's often right for me, as a consumer.

I was distinctly unimpressed by the WWDC keynote as I "saw" it in realtime, taking advantage of the live updates by various websites. Now that I've seen some of the online demo videos, it triggers some further thoughts.

Seeing Finder being made over to look like iTunes triggered strongly mixed emotions. On one hand, it feels very much like Windows' misadventure with making over Windows Explorer to look and work like Internet Explorer. Microsoft did that for some different reasons, but it did share the reason that it wanted to tie in with a familiar, popular interface that people dealt with every day. Hey! iTunes is familiar! People like iTunes! Let's leverage that!

On the other, I'm cautiously optimistic about the new finder features. I spent about fifteen minutes with a recent Leopard seed, and found myself missing the Quick Look feature for the rest of the day and during the next day. That's a seriously powerful feature. Expanding that to the CoverFlow view seems like it will have a lot of potential for browsing certain types of documents, but I'm not sure. I'd also have serious concerns about performance on my PowerBook.

Overall, I'm not sure if the new Finder features are glossy demo-ware that I seldom (spotlight) or never use (dashboard), or that it will make for a helpful step forward. The only things that will ultimately matter with the new Finder is performance, stability, and ease-of-use. We shall see...