What could Apple’s ‘Media Pad’ be?

The rumor mill is buzzing with evidence that Apple will soon release two new wireless devices, what amounts to an iPhone micro and an iPod touch macro. It’s clear that the larger iPod touch-like device will not be a cellular device, though it may include the 3G cellular wireless internet technology. I have a specific interest in a tablet-like device whose screen is exactly 7.5″ x 10″. Here’s why.

The problem is that it’s nearly 2010. I seem to recall in the 90s being promised a future full of Jetsons-like gadgets. We are not supposed to have to walk from point A to point B but have those belt things you see at the airport. Cars should be flying by 2010. (Dogs should be talking?) And our offices were guaranteed to be paperless by now! We are quite far from the paperless office, specifically, and I want the Apple’s iPod touch macro to be a media pad that helps fill this gap. What will it need to do to succeed?

1. LED-backlit high resolution LCD: 7.5″ x 10″. It’s the size of a sheet of paper, minus the margins. Small form factor but all screen. And readable.

2. One USB port, 802.11n, bluetooth, mini-DisplayPort, and optional wireless 3G. This is the bare essentials for ports. One USB port for universal connectivity. 802.11n for fast internet access. Bluetooth for connecting external keyboard and mouse if desired (someone will make a kickstand for this simple device). Mini-DisplayPort so it can give presentations. And finally, I say optional wireless 3G because I have absolutely zero intention of buying something that requires a monthly service contract. I simply don’t want it.

3. 8 GB solid state drive. Enough space for applications and some music, perhaps. No moving parts, please.

4. Touch gesture controlled but with stylus input. While it’s clear that multitouch is the future of a specialized device like this, the stylus input will be key, though auxiliary. The stylus will be crucial for utilizing the Ink Well software already part of Mac OS X.

5. Operating System. It’s clear that this device will have to run some variant of Mac OS X. As I see it, Apple have 3 options for an operating system. They can go with the iPod touch/iPhone model of downloading apps from a controlled source (iTunes store). They can go with the full Mac OS X model and open the device up to any software on OS X. Or they can go the Microsoft route and brand yet another version of OS X with ambiguous “Media Center” differences and confuse branding on their stellar OS. To me, the full OS X model is the way to go here. The primary reason for this is users should be able to run all of the wonderful software available to OS X currently, without limitation. Merging contents of the iTunes store will make that space confusing, as apps compatible with the iPhone/iPod touch will likely not be compatible (at first) with the new media pad device. Nevertheless, I can completely see Apple erring on the side of control in this case, for at least the perceived reason of protecting the 3G network from malicious programs. Of course, as with all attempts at DRM type control, this can and will be circumvented. Why confuse the space unnecessarily for marginal benefits?

6. Software – PDF Reader Example. There is one piece of software that I’m going to focus on, in order to give an idea of what such a media pad device can accomplish. It’s a simple PDF reader, on its face. PDFKit driven, the model in my mind here is Skim.app, a freely available program that takes full advantage of PDFKit’s annotation and note-taking capabilities. Consider being able to underline, write notes, and mark up PDFs on the go in a digital format, where your notes are automatically converted into text and your underlining/highlighting is automatically converted into digital underlines. Saving this file will make all notes transportable to other devices or printable. Furthermore, one can zoom text effortlessly with the multitouch features already demonstrated in multitouch trackpads on Apple laptops and on the iPod touch/iPhone. To be able to keep a library of PDFs on this device will solve the problem for paper that the mp3 player solved for music: while a CD player requires carrying CDs and cumbersome switching, the mp3 player can now have dozens or hundreds of albums in a convenient form factor. The Media Pad device will allow us to become more mobile with more documents.

7. A few other issues. Give us a thin bezel, please. Battery life should be reasonable. The device should be thin. While a sync feature would be in line with the iPod touch model, I still prefer a full on OS X device model. Perhaps there could be a compromise here. It’s also clear that this device will require its own special developer tools to take advantage of stylus transduction and multitouch interaction. Apple will do well on this, if their past is any indication. Finally, I think Apple needs to seriously look at their anti-aliasing to make this device very readable on screen. e-Paper is not the solution, until refresh rates and color are both substantially improved; however, e-Paper is very readable.

I’ve been thinking about a device like this to solve many of my problems as a scientist whose life of reading revolves largely around the PDF article. I suspect that other professions also could use something like this, especially in the software model in which any arbitrary application can be created to take advantage of this device.

The Boston Celtics’ clever play?

So since the All-Star break, the Boston Celtics have been performing poorly. The loss of our power forward Kevin Garnett to injury, along with a huge string of other important injuries, has made the second half of our season especially striking compared with the beginning, where we set records for best opening season for the C’s.

Concurrently, the LeBron James Team, also known as the Cleveland Cavaliers, have been on a tear, and they’re likely going to tie the Celtics for best home record ever at 40-1. Ok, it’s not entirely fair to call the Cavs by His Highness, but it’s not far off. We are not amused.

The Cavs recently routed my fair team. I didn’t watch because the outcome was inevitable. They are at the top of their game while we are near the bottom of ours. But I do have a theory that explains this, at least in part. It’s no secret that we lost home court advantage and the top division spot. In actuality, that’s been going on for the second half of the season. So allowing KG et al. to fully recover makes perfect sense. Additionally, I think Head Coach Doc Rivers may be making a very smart play, by treating the regular season game with the Cavs as completely unimportant. After all, it’s weighted by the numbers just like any other game in the season. It’s the playoffs that matter, and when the time comes, I expect the C’s to bring it all. I’d be disappointed any other way. The cleverness here is that this could also inspire a touch of overconfidence in the Cavs — save for the all important LeBron, who I think has enough respect and desire to carry, well, an entire team. Nevertheless, we can’t measure the C’s most recent performance as indicative of their playoff possibilities. While I actually think that this may well be LeBron’s year, the playoffs ain’t gonna be pretty.

Mac OS X Exposé – flip through different applications

Here’s a quick tip for Mac OS X Leopard’s exposé feature that I just encountered by accident. If you activate Exposé, in either the application windows or all windows mode, you can use splat+tab or splat+~ to move back and forth between open windows of each application. This is very useful when you have dozens of windows open, because they are now contained within each individual application space.

Note: splat is also known by its inferior names as “command key” or “apple key”

.bashrc by example

The learning curve for .bashrc is very broad and takes patience or a very good tutorial. Here’s a happy medium between those two.

Basics:
Bash is a shell that allows you to enter commands at the command line. It’s a very robust program that allows scripting, variables, and a whole host of other features you may/may not ever use. If you’re interested in learning about it, there are a lot of great books on the subject.

If you don’t know what shell you are running on Mac OS X or if you’re new to Linux, try opening a Terminal window and typing this:

echo $SHELL


That will tell you the full path of the shell program you are using. For instance, mine is ‘/bin/bash’.

Bash reads from several files in a prescribed order, depending on various circumstances. This can allow for customization or be very confusing, depending on how sophisticated you want to be. I’m only now getting a sense of why that could be useful, but let’s ignore that for now. I tell bash to basically look at one file for all my shortcuts, etc., so that’s what we’ll set up here.

Python Startup on Mac OS X Leopard

The promise of the open source programming language Python for numerical computing has been frustrating for lack of good, consolidated advice out there to troubleshoot issues that should be really simple. Here’s a brief tutorial on how to get readline support on Mac OS X 10.5.x.

What is readline? Readline is a program that allows you to use tab completion, history, and other features that you’re used to in your favorite shell, MATLAB from the command line, and GNU Octave.

There are two steps to this. The first is to tell python to always use a startup file. The second is the create the startup file with the right info inside. I’m assuming you use Bash and are running python from a terminal — in xterm, Terminal.app, or iTerm.app, etc.

Step 1: In your .bashrc file (or .profile, .bash_profile, etc.), using your favorite text editor, put the following line:


export PYTHONSTARTUP=~/.pythonrc


To initialize this, at your shell, type:


source ~/.bashrc


(substitute your file appropriately)

Step 2: Create the file .pythonrc in your home directory (~/):


import rlcompleter
import readline
readline.parse_and_bind ("tab: complete")


Save this file, and now run any python build you may have on your machine. Python will read this file automatically and now you can test out tab completion by typing (no quotes): ‘imp’. The word “import” should be completed.

Cocktail party concerto

Zeroth order thought.

Someone recently was listening to a Brahms’ Violin Concerto and asked the question of whether or not the soloist could be picked out amid the background of the much louder orchestra, when playing tutti. I recently had seen some evidence presented by a speaker that might apply here, and I thought it would be fun to consider the two things together.

Essentially, the problem is the following. You have a very large contingent of instruments playing, with a single instrument playing something different. We would like to hear the soloist, either in harmony with the other parts or distinctly, above the din. Now, there is clearly an absolute volume at which the soloist would be drowned out — we believe this from experience. However, assuming we’re not at that level yet, there’s sort of an interesting problem of differentiating a very loud section of instruments that is often of equal timbre but of higher amplitude.

The cocktail party problem refers to the observation that, when in a crowded room in which people are speaking, by looking at a single speaker, one can often hear what she is saying, despite the distracting, surrounding noise. So the concerto problem is similar in this regard.