All modern web browsers can now zoom a webpage. That is, you can scale it up or down and all the text, graphics, white space, movies and so on will scale with it. In an era where screen sizes range from 3.5 inches all the way up to 30 - with stops at 10", 15" and the low twenties - being able to adjust the size of an entire webpage is important. It's also wonderfully liberating for a webpage designer to know that they can design a site for the low end - say, a 1024x768 resolution screen - and still have it large and readable on big 24" desktop screens.
There is a problem, though.
Reading E-BooksJon Bell, whose blog I had not previous had the pleasure of stumbling upon, has just neatly eviscerated the idea of using an infinite canvass on book reading apps. Lukas Mathis also came in on side.
And they're right. Absolutely right.
Skill and ArtThe skill can be seen in what is drawn. The art can be seen in what is not.
The File System is the New Command Line...which is to say for geeks only. Normal people need not apply.
I tell my beginner computing students that a computer is an environment. These are the sort of students who are starting from first principles and need a couple of hours playing solitaire to get a handle on mouse control, you understand. The thing about an environment, I say, is that to learn how to operate in it, you must be immersed in that environment, you must experiment and play, see what works and what doesn't. You have to try everything to find out what the rules are.
The Missing Keyboard RevolutionWith the iPhone and iPad, Apple's multi-touch technology has successfully replaced the mouse with a new input method which is more intuitive and intimate. However, the second half of the old input tag team - the keyboard - is still struggling on the new devices. It works, sure, and it works pretty well, but, like the mouse, it needs replacing with something newer and better.
The Three Most Important Words in the iPad IntroductionWell, here we have Apple's "big iPod Touch" with, so it would seem, a dearth of new, revolutionary features. I mean, the book store is great and all but Apple's pretty late to that party.
But there were still three things that struck me in the keynote as being significant, of being unique to the iPad and therefore being revolutionary, almost as a side effect of the nature of the device. It wasn't so much anything that could appear in a bullet point but rather what you would get for free if you scaled up an iPod Touch.
Operating System PricingOver at the Mac Night Owl, Gene Steinberg has just written...
"Did anyone think that Vista Ultimate was truly worth $399 list price, when Apple charges $129 for its standard Mac OS X user licenses? Talk about greed!"
Hm.
Naming SupermanIn the original 1978 Superman movie, Lois Lane names Superman after he has flown away from his interview with her using the following line of dialogue...
"What a super man. Hm. 'Superman!'"
The Operating System on FlashFlash memory, used in the ubiquitous USB thumb drives, has been happily chugging along to Moore's Law for a while now and they've managed to get high enough capacities at low enough prices that it's perfectly feasible to have a computer's internal drive entirely made up of fast flash memory. However, it's a little pricey yet and flash drives - generally called solid state drives - can't hold the sheer quantity of data as their more refined disk-based predecessors.
In the meantime, I've been wondering why not use a chip or two for some targeted speed improvements? Say, for example, putting the operating system on a flash chip.
Dead SpaceI recently played the new science fiction horror survival game Dead Space. It was extremely stylish and had some very original ideas in it, although not in regards to the story which was pretty much a copy of System Shock 2 only less interesting. (It even had the same pair of plot twists.)