Pre-event predictions:

• touch iPod, basically the iPhone without the phone
• Some sort of mobile iTunes Store
• new version of iTunes
• iPhone software update with some noticeable new features
• still no iPhone SDK
• New iPod Nano (predicted here)

Other than that, I have no idea. I’ve got a bunch of browser windows open and will be posting on Twitter. Reactions posted here a little later.

Aftermath

Overall, a pretty impressive run of new stuff. I’ve also never been this accurate in predictions, basically 100%, although there wasn’t much swinging for the fences in that list.

iPod Nano

I’m getting one. Mostly for Nike+, but I do really like the new form factor. It’s astonishing how small these things are getting. The colors seem very mid-80s, but I expect the metal will have have more depth in person. One more video-playing device won’t hurt to have on the next plane flight either. (can we get Yo Gabba Gabba on iTunes pls?)

iPod Touch

The iPod Touch looks great, but I’m mostly surprised at how much it doesn’t do.

• No Email
• No Maps
• No Stocks
• No Weather
• No Notes (not that I’ve ever actually used iPhone Notes)

If email was there I’d be hard pressed to justify breaking an existing phone contract for iPhone. But the missing features are most likely conscious choices to differentiate iPhone and to maintain the focus of iPod. There’s room for the inevitable To Do List application which will come alongside Leopard’s To Do list framework.

iPod Shuffle

The iPod Shuffle is close to a perfect product. We got one as a gift early this year along with one of the best wooden watches and we both love using it at the gym. New colors, it really doesn’t need much else, except maybe an internal clock and a bit more space.

iPhone Price Drop

The price drop on iPhone was shocking. I was all set to buy a new Nano, but the idea that my iPhone now costs one-8GB-nano less has me waiting. This seems like a big enough PR blunder, or setup, that Apple will followup with some easy goodwill. I’m still going to get a new nano, but I’m going to wait at least until the weekend.

iTunes Everywhere

The iTunes & Starbucks integration is jus asonishingly huge. This is the beginning of a complete re-imagining of how recorded music works. The idea of a “record store” just evaporated throughout the air we breathe. In a few years this system will be used all over. Any place that plays music will be able to enter into a music distribution profit sharing arrangement with Apple. Doubtlessly they’ll also be able to use custom playlists to promote local or smaller artists. This is the beginning of iTunes Everywhere. Anytime you hear a song, you will be able to take out your iPod and buy a copy. I fully expect to see this in the Apple Stores in a few months as well.

This was the promise, it’s finally happening.

Three miles in 25 minutes on the treadmill, I started off slow instead of stretching. Various body parts felt good. Followed up with lots of stretching and iced knees.

My left knee was pretty messed up after the five mile run back on August 12th. I saw the sports medicine doctor again a few days after that and she advised taking a few weeks off to let my knees recover. Tonight was the 12th day, things have been feeling pretty good for several days now.

The other thing she pointed out was that my experimenting with off the shelf arch-support insoles (my feet have hurt for a long time) was probably a big part of my knee pain. Legs seem to be very precisely balanced, the hips, knees, ankles and feet all affect one another more than it seems they would. I now have a prescription for orthotics and some medieval looking thing called a night splint. That’s only supposed to be worn for 4-6 weeks, but it would be nice to wake up in the morning and not have the first 15 minutes on my feet be excruciating.

Valerio Proietti, author of the MooTools JavaScript framework wrote a benchmarking tool called SlickSpeed. This tool runs a number of JavaScript libraries against a suite of CSS selector tests. The source is available from Google Code, I downloaded a copy so I could run tests against the most recent versions of Prototype, MooTools and JQuery against one another.

Results are in milliseconds (ms), smaller numbers are better. Asterisks indicate errors returned during the test.

All tests were served and run from a MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz Core Duo, iPhone tests were run on a 1st Generation 8 GB model. Firebug was disabled for the Firefox tests.

A few things which are immediately apparent:

MooTools is a solid performer. Not the fastest and not the slowest, but Valerio Proietti’s code is consistently impressive.

JQuery has gotten significantly faster in the most recent version, John Resig is also writing really good code.

At least as applies to Valerio’s set of selector tests, JQuery is the fastest library on iPhone, nearly twice as fast as MooTools and almost three times faster than Prototype. Joe Hewitt’s iUI project uses Prototype, how much would iPhone performance benefit from switching to JQuery?

The Webkit team is writing some seriously crazy speed optimizations. If they could just get Safari to stop leaking memory we’d be all set (don’t go looking all smug Firefox, you’re standing in a puddle). As it stands now, when Leopard ships Safari will have the fastest JavaScript engine available. The difference between jQuery and Prototype on Webkit and iPhone is surprising, iPhone runs JQuery nearly three times faster than Prototype using the same browser core.

Firefox runs faster in virtualized Windows than it does native on the Mac. Camino (Mac native version of Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko) was slightly faster, but still not as fast as Firefox Windows.

I’ve got one project wrapping up soon which used MooTools and I’ve been very happy with it. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of buzz about JQuery and might be working that into another project. These tests were mostly just done to satisfy my own of curiosity.

Last year I wrote about Mac Virtual Desktops, focusing mostly on You Control: Desktops. I ended up buying a license and last week they released version 1.3 beta 2

Some of the good stuff I noticed right away:

• Customizable color for the highlighted desktop in the menu bar. The previous beta used a hard-coded red outline which was ghastly.

• Behavior of the cursor on edge-screen flipping. It can now be set to mimic Compiz/Beryl, where the cursor starts at the opposite edge of the next screen. So if you drag a window off the left side, it appears on the next desktop on the right side. With a transition like Cube or Pan, I find this to be spatially very intuitive. The cursor can also be set to remain in place, for transitions like Slide, it feels like you’re holding a window while the current desktop just gets out of the way beneath it. Not sure which one I prefer, but the options are a huge improvement.
• Overall, the speed of transitions and switching feels much faster, especially on the more graphics intensive effects.

Feedback I’m sending to the developers:

• Fade, Swirl, Twist and Zoom still use an additive composite, which means they pretty much always blow out to white during the transition and then pop to the next screen. It’s uncharacteristically ugly.

• Cursor repositioning seems to wait for some mouse movement before redrawing dragged windows. If the mouse is kept perfectly still, the dragged window will remain at the position it was pre-transition, then pop into place when the mouse is moved again.

  It would be fantastic if the dragged windows could be composited before the transition or in the transition buffer, I think it would be perceptible and intuitively support the various repositioning options. If you’re doing that, might as well update the menu-bar icon’s status pre-transtion too. It’s disorienting to see it show up wrong and then update — the menu bar should reflect the new state before the transition finishes.

• Hardware support for extra mouse buttons would be fantastic.
• Hot key assignment is way too clumsy.

While I go through phases of using and not using virtual desktops, if you want multiple desktops on your Mac right now and can’t wait for Spaces in Leopard (which doesn’t do as much), YC:Desktops is the way to go.

Finally, my friend Heins Kim has his artwork online, and it looks great. All of his work is crafted with exceptional detail, zoom in by rolling over the large image.

It’s hard to appreciate some of the works online, many of the paintings and drawings are completely different from various distances and angles. Also be sure to check out the photos accompanying his Bio.

Until I get the Nike+iPod thing, I’m going to post my runs here and just keep bumping it to the top.

Sunday July 29:

4 miles on the treadmill

Tuesday July 31:

4 miles on the west side with Harris and Kai. We went before lunch at around 1pm, it was hot.

August 2:

5.5 Miles in 46 minutes. Personal best by 10 minutes and 1 mile.

August 5:

5 miles in 40 minutes. I was angry about something when I started so I ran the first three miles pretty fast.

August 8:

2.5 miles, sort of fast. Ran after an exhausting day.

August 12:

5 miles up First Ave to 64th and then down Second. Hills kicked my butt, left knee was a bit tight. Route

August 16

3 miles on the treadmill at the Y. My left knee is sore.

August 20

2 miles on the treadmill, after a lot of stretching and 3 miles on a stationary bike. Felt fine and could have kept going, but my knees are still hurting more than they should be.

this post should really be a category with multiple short posts. Adding to to do list…

The Ecamm brothers got two-way video conferencing working between two iPhones. As good as I think the iPhone is now, just wait a few months when this thing is really broken open. (link via Buzz @ C4)

I don’t know why I’ve waited this long (ok I do, my life has a density), I’m jailbreaking my phone tonight.