On the iPad

Today, I skimmed through this post from eWEEK. It's interesting to note that the guy he wrote this obviously does not have a clue at all what the iPad is all about. He mention the lack of video output, dvd drive, and usb as problems.

• If you want to connect to an external monitor, why use an iPad; it's supposed to be portable—connecting to a tv or a display defeat the purpose. Just hook up your laptop (or Mac mini).
  
• If you want to lug around an external dvd drive or accept an internal dvd drive, you can as well just use your laptop.
• Data is on the net, your "usb" memory is for instance Dropbox.

The lack of flash is as big a problem as it is on the iPhone. Not a big deal really. But what draw my attention most was probably the fact that he was pointing to Dell or HP for better tablets. I may add Fujitsu or Tabletkiosk to that list. The problem is that those tablets are nothing like the iPad. I have tried a few. Those other tablets want to be full computers, just like the big guys. So you have a lot of fan-noise, you have a crappy operating system you need to maintain, you have extensive boot or out-of-suspend times, and a whole lot of other problems. On paper, they seems like a good idea, but for most people they don't work in the real life.

The only thing from this eWEEK thing I accept is the fact that the cheapest version of iPad is way to cheap. You will need 3G and a bit more storage is also nice to have.

Do you think I will get an iPad?

Qtpfsgui news!

Hi, Giuseppe figured out the problem with qtpfsgui 1.8.12 on OSX today, and created a sucessful fix. The 1.8.12 version now compiles and runs just fine on the Mac again.

I have uploaded the new version over at sourceforge, please grab it there. In the process of eliminating sources for errors, I have also upgraded my tool chain a bit. There are therefor now newer versions of most of the dependencies, but since most of these are linked directly into the binary you should not need to do anything. I have however updated my version of Qt. I believe that Qt is sufficiently backwards compatible such that this should not cause a problem, but if you get any problem running the new binary, please update Qt by downloading the newest version from this link. You may also visit http://trolltech.com/developer/downloads/qt/mac where the download-link for the diskimage can be found, as well as sources.

Now that 1.8.12 is out the door, I will look into the alignment functionality that Giuseppe have included, to see what kind of problems that pose on the Mac.

Take care.

Well done, Apple!

That was it for this year - the WWDC'07 is history. My first post, based on the impressions from the keynote, was a bit harsh in the tone, so I figured I should say a few more words.

First, I must say congratulations to the folks who put together WWDC'07. Just face it folks, they must have had a big problem. All the announcements were done in 2006, probably under the assumption that everything would have been on the streets this year. Which did not happened. Still, they managed to put together an impressive program. While the keynote was a bit bad, and as a side note - I am not the only one who have that opinion; most of the people I spoke to at the event shared my view - the rest of the event was very good. Unfortunately, all the other sessions are under NDA so folks that did not attend will not know much about that. But because our shared opinion was that the keynote was not outstanding, the people at Apple who was responsible for the program and the content and the presentations deserved a big thank you. Many of the presentations was excellent both in content and delivery. And especially in the developer tools sessions we saw and heard a lot of new things. Which we can not talk about of course. But, developers out there, expect cool stuff :)

Hopefully that set the record straight. I still have to just dream about my favorite 10 inch touch-screen macbook pro though, as now new hardware was revealed. We'll see what they can come up with next year.

Now I am off to the more academic Usenix Annual Tech, and can speak freely again! That does not mean that I have something to say, of course. By the way, I can also still play with my Leopard seed dvd which I must say is quite functional :)

Until later, take care!

The WWDC'07 keynote

This years WWDC'07 keynote is history. As always it was delivered by Steve Jobs. I have to say it was a mediocre event. The presentation was smooth enough, but Steve seems to be a bit uninspired. And with good reasons, as much of what was delivered was just a repetition of what we heard last year. No new hardware was presented, the shipping date for the "Leopard" is still october and the iPhone is not out yet.

The only new things really was that there will be a new desktop and a new finder (the file browser and management thing in OSX). Not a very big deal, mostly graphics tweaks that people like myself tend to avoid anyway. There was quite a few animated demos on stage, but notting to brag about to be honest. Sure, Leopard will be great and everything, don't get me wrong. But we know most of it already!

There was also announced that EA and id will have more games on OSX in the future, which I guess is great for people who avoid apple due to limited gaming support. And then Apple will start pushing browser to windows users, but I don't care much about that either as I use firefox anyway. It might be good for IE users, though. And it is supposed to be fast, too.

There has been some discussions on iPhone and development tools. This was but was not presented, too. What apple had to say on this is that iPhone will have a full safari engine inside, so people can do web2.0/ajax style applications that can be used on the iPhone. Which is a no-solution solution. It was not mentioned whether such applications can be downloaded and installed or have to be run from a webserver all the time. It was mentioned that such applications should get access to the phone and network services of the iPhone, but nothing specific was presented. I think this was another mediocre part of the presentation. Maybe good enough for some, but certainly not what most developers had in mind when they asked for development tools. It remains to be seen if Apple is right on this one.

What else is there to say? A large crowd was gathered as usual, more than 5000 persons we was told. And apple did the usual but very annoying marketing trick of lining people out before we could get in - had to stand in line for quite a long time. Now, I'm usually not the line-standing kind of guy, but I am still somewhat on the Norwegian timezone as I flew over only yesterday, and couldn't get much sleep after 5:30 in the morning anyway. So I get out of bed, had a shower, went to a breakfast place which was quite nice - Cafe Venue, I'll post the address later on if someone care. And then I went down to Moscone convention center. There I found a long, long, long queue of people waiting to get in. Which is only marketing of course. It was 7:30 in the morning, and a couple hundred people waited to get in as this was a rock concert or something. There where rumours around that someone was getting into the line 3 in the morning. That is simply a freakshow.

So, Apple, I have this suggestion for you for next year. If you don't have anything more to give us than we got this year. Please, just open the doors and let people walk in and get a seat, just as we usually do. No need to be so annoyingly special all the time.

Ok, that's it for now - I'm off to more presentations. While the keynote wasn't that good, I hope the other presentations will be. At least, the rest of the week will have more technical content delivered by engineers. I'm looking forward to that.

Take care!

iPhone release date

As reported "all over" the net now, Apple will go public with iPhone on 11. June. And that is not a coincidence, as that's the same day Apples developer conference WWDC starts.

And guess what - I ordered my tickets for WWDC yesterday - I will be there in the middle of the buzz, and report back right here on the blog on what's going on. I also figured out that Usenix Annual Tech will be the following week in Santa Clara. It is high time I go to the Annual Tech, so I will probably rent a car and drive down there, at least for a few days.

I'm looking forward to it already - it is always nice to be in San Francisco.

Btw, I don't think I will buy an iPhone. Really. It's probably not usable over here in Norway anyway, and it will lack a few things I really need. We'll see what happens if I get to hold it in my hands....

Do I want the iPhone?

I will not add much to all the buzz about Apple's iphone, there is already way
to much said about it as it's still months out in the future. For us living in
Norway, I guess it will take almost a year before we can get our hands on it,
unfortunately.

What I will say is: First, I want one! Second, as it is clear now that the
operating system is MacOSX, I really hope that Apple is clever enough to add a
terminal, a bash shell and a ssh client as optional install items on a dvd that
will follow the phone. That will make it so much more interesting! If we even
can get a python interpreter and some GUI toolkit to do programming right on
the phone, we will be happy!