In the WWDC keynote, right around 1:18:30, Scott Forstall’s nervous typo started a slide which ended up knocking about $5 billion dollars off of Apple’s market cap.
To be fair, it wasn’t just the typo, though I felt it in my gut the instant that happened. The stock’s drop from the mid-124s down to nearly 120 almost exactly matches the duration of the iPhone web apps section of the keynote. Rumors and expectations can be expensive.
My initial reaction to the Keynote was fairly positive. While it was a little short on new stuff and heavy on spinning questionably functional features, there were some really funny moments, some suspense and we all had a good time.
Everyone at WWDC is under NDA, so I’m not going to cover anything which hasn’t already been covered, featured on Apple’s site or mentioned in the press. Considering how much attention Apple’s getting these days, there’s quite a lot to talk about.
My thoughts started to sour when I had a chance to use 10.5 and really try out the new features. The whole of Leopard often just feels thrown together in a hap dash sort of way. Bits and pieces of one app are in other apps Todos and RSS in Mail? Coverflow everywhere? Shiny Dock backgrounds? This is called bloat when Microsoft does it.
Rather than try and finish one monster post like my predictions post, I’m going to eke out shorter, more topical posts as I have time. Those posts will all be linked from here.
Posts:
The rumor mill is exceptionally quiet this year, I’m probably more excited because of that. Quoth Fake Steve Jobs:
Arrive early, wear comfortable clothes, and prepare to have your mind blown. Because this one is going to be the most awesome WWDC we’ve ever had. Seriously.
Here are a few rumor roundups: TUAW, MacRumors.
I’m not expecting any new hardware. It’s too close to the iPhone release and there haven’t been any major recent hardware developments. The only potential outlier is some sort of ultra-portable based in part on Intel’s mobile Metro notebook or that new Dell ultra-portable. Even if that is coming, I don’t think it will be announced here. This show is about what can be made with software. Even the t-shirt says so.
Sun’s slip about ZFS in Leopard is probably true. ZFS is just too good for Apple not to use it. Time Machine with a ZFS backend becomes efficient and practical.
I think it might be technically possible to convert an active drive from HFS+ to ZFS, in-place, without any additional hardware. The foundations are in place, Boot Camp has proven that HFS partitions can be dynamically resized. ZFS seems to be astonishingly robust and inherently malleable The process might take a few hours, but I think the shocking thing is that, if you have a few gigabytes of free space on your HFS drive, it will be possible to convert a drive from HFS to ZFS without reinitializing the whole thing. But I have no direct experience with ZFS, so I could be completely wrong here.
Core animation will prove to be central to the entire Leopard experience. Everything will have transitions, animations and eye-candy–however small and fast. Apple knew what it was doing with the Dashboard animations, and they’re going to run with it, not just in the iPhone, but throughout the MacOS. Apple isn’t competing with Aero here, the really amazing UI-candy to beat is mostly coming from Beryl/Compiz
An Apple virtualization product/feature doesn’t seem likely. Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion are providing a load of value in this area and it doesn’t make sense to shake up an already healthy competitive marketplace. Apple only benefits from those two companies trying to outdo one-another, providing an integrated virtualization product doesn’t seem to make sense from a business standpoint.
I really hope there’s some integration between some of the Google apps and the iApps. Especially read/write from iCal to Google Calendar, but I’d just settle for allowing multiple people to work on the same calendar with iCal via .Mac.
We might see a radical re-casting of the iLife and iWork components. The various applications have proven different levels of usefulness and some seem far more important than others. Personally I don’t even have GarageBand, iWeb or Pages on my machine anymore, I needed the space and they are all pretty big. iTunes is it’s own universe, there’s absolutely no reason it should be a part of iLife, besides it’s too tied to development of iPods and Windows. iPhoto is the gorilla of iLife, it should probably be rolled into Leopard and let iLife be a suite of creative apps, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb and Garageband. iWork is more coherent, but keynote is the component that I see getting the most use. Maybe Apple will finally introduce the long-rumored Charts, but this doesn’t seem like the place. Un-rolling iPhoto would cut into iLife’s sales, but it would fit in with the “whole package” idea that Steve mentioned last time.
Random predictions:
Pie-in-the-sky hope: Apple will have iPhones on hand and offer Developers the chance to buy one and start using it this week, before anyone else gets them. Yeah, this is completely nuts and not going to happen. While it would turn several thousand developers into Apple indentured servants, completely cowed vassals ready to do Apple’s bidding. It would also piss off all the international attendees who wouldn’t be able use it yet.
Not a WWDC prediction per se, but I am certain that there will be several dozen articles and blog posts about errors typing with the iPhone. Someone (probably some apple-hater on c-net) will attempt to enter Jabberwocky, just like Robert McNally on his Newton in 1993, and try to hype the hell out of whatever comes out. I share some of Steven Frank’s concerns about the touch screen, that thing had better work.
So one of my credit card numbers got jacked and was being used for an incredibly useless shopping spree; all sorts of crap I didn’t order is showing up in my mailbox but well at least I’m getting card travel rewards. Good job morons.
Whoever did this either guessed my email or googled me. Records of fraudulent purchases came to both my normal email and my gmail account, which I don’t give out and rarely use. It almost seems like someone was deliberately trying to sabotage me, however the GMail account is such an outlier that I doubt it.
Credit card theft most often happens when someone takes a receipt from a store or restaurant. I rarely use this card physically, so I’m pretty sure I know precisely where and when the number was taken.
In a way, this episode might be an argument for lack of privacy, aka open secrets. I have a listed phone number, I still google well and, much as it sometimes makes me nervous, especially as a parent, it’s just not that difficult to find out information about me. That same information might be the reason I was able to find out about this fraud quickly instead of waiting several weeks until my credit card statement showed up.
I first noticed this because a slew of subscriptions to Jagex/RuneScape showed up in my email. Initially I thought these were just more spam, so I waited a day to call my card’s issuing bank. I wrote Jagex and they were very helpful, refunded all charges and blocked the card from future purchases.
Columbia House and BMG Music Club present an incredibly sleazy face to the world. Trying to get a phone number on their websites is just about pointless.
BMG had several numbers listed though most were “no longer in service”, thankfully one referred me to another number where I was finally able to get a person after pressing zero repeatedly. The phone number for BMG was 317-692-9200.
Columbia House was worse, there were no numbers I could find on the site. I ended up getting their corporate phone number via whois (then I found it in several other places relating to the corporation). The number for Columbia House is 212-596-2000, tell them you’re calling to pursue a fraud case and they get you to a person very quickly.
With both BMG and Columbia House, once I got a person on the phone they were very helpful.
Citibank’s fraud division has been amazing and I’m really not worried about having to pay for any of this stuff. Mostly I am worried that my email address, which I’ve been using for over 10 years, might be polluted to the point that I can no longer use it for purchases.
The only thing I definitely won’t be able to get back are the hours spent dealing with this.
Web typography has gotten larger because typography’s traditional fine-tuning is impossible at smaller point sizes. Increasing the size of type on screen re-introduces more traditional levels of typographic subtlety and produces more beautiful results.
At Bell Labs in 1962, John L. Kelly recreated the song “Bicycle Built for Two,” also know as Daisy Bell, using an IBM 704 computer. This might have been the first demonstration of digitally synthesized speech. (MP3)
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage.
I can’t afford a carriage.
But you’ll look sweet,
upon the seat,
of a bicycle built for two.
Listening to an MP3 of the event, the wonder of that accomplishment still comes through.
Arthur C. Clarke happened to witness that event and would go on to use the song for HAL9000’s death scene in 2001.
IBM is said to have sold only 123 model 704 computers between 1955 and 1960, though the machines were extremely expensive and often rented. A single computer might have cost as much as $24 million — in 1957 dollars.
FORTRAN and LISP, the foundations of most all modern computing languages, were first developed on these machines (FORTRAN was started on the IBM 701 but first compiled on the 704). The 704 was the first commercially available computer to feature floating point arithmetic, and magnetic core memory (initially containing 4k of 36-bit words, which I think works out to about 18 bytes of memory. An installed machine was said to have come with its own human field engineer. Here’s a scanned copy of the IBM 704 Manual of Operation.
First glimmer via Wikipedia by way of Defective Yeti.
At a weekend playdate for the girls, Jonathan showed me this movie:
It’s a ferrofluid sculpture by Sachiko Kodama, Yasushi Miyajima, Morpho Towers — Two Standing Spirals, higher quality clip at the link.
Another video, possibly showing a prototype and scale of the above fountain:
A ferrofluid is:
Ferrofluids are composed of nanoscale ferromagnetic particles suspended in a carrier fluid, usually an organic solvent or water. The ferromagnetic nano-particles are coated with a surfactant to prevent their agglomeration (due to van der Waals and magnetic forces).
In English, I think that means very small metal particles are coated with oil, then those oil-coated particles are suspended in another liquid. Sort of like a thin version of artists oil paint. A ferrofluid isn’t a liquid metal, it’s a liquid with lots of very tiny pieces of metal suspended in it. Sort of like a stable mixture of iron filings and oil. Ferrofluids do not retain any magnetism.
Ferrofluids can be made at home using water based or oil based recipes. It can also be purchased online (prices seem to run $12 to $25 per ounce).
Here’s someone playing around with ferrofluid at home using a bolt (instead of precision crafted metal spirals). The first 30 seconds are still images then it switches to video. Please jump around, the results are beautiful and fascinating, but it’s ultimately just 10 minutes of someone dripping liquid onto a bolt:
As beautiful as the spikey ferrofluid demonstrations are, this video shows patterns I would never have expected to see coming from magnetic fields:
The changing patterns looking like typographic ornaments or petroglyphs or cartoon drawings of bacteria. As pointed out in the YouTube comments, the pattern-transformation at 2:04 is especially crazy.
Most of the recipes online involve some scary chemicals.* However this video deserves linking not because it makes a ferrofluid from laser toner and motor oil, but because the guy has a spoon in his drill:
Yeah the music’s horrible. I’m surprised the magnets in the drill’s motor didn’t cause the stuff to shoot off the plate.
Someone needs to find a way to turn this into a sub-$40 desk toy. Way better than a lava lamp. If anyone’s interested in organizing production of something like that, I have sketches and ideas ready to go.
* Almost all chemicals scare me. I never had much chemistry in high school, don’t have anyone to ask and the margin of error seems to involve the range of explode->not-explode or horrible-disfiguring-chemical-burns->no-reaction. As someone who tends to learn by trial and error, chemistry is an area I actively steer my curiosity away from.
