So, keynote, predictions, blah-de-blah, gotta put your money where your mouth is if you want to comment on the announcements after the fact. Just finding something to do, anything at all really, rather than work on this business proposal I have to do.

Phil Schiller: until today, I found it perfectly viable to take Apple’s comments at face value, and assume that they had just gotten bored with Macworld, and that Steve was for some reason pissed at the organizers and wanted to skip that last keynote just to spite them — because he’s impulsive enough to do this even if it’s going to fuel the speculation about his health. I was even given the most perfect explanation in last week’s MacBreak Weekly, when Andy Ihnatko said that Macworld had always been very inconveniently scheduled, but it’s not like IDG wouldn’t have accepted to move it to spring if Apple asked: well, what if Apple did ask, and IDG said no? Wouldn’t Steve do exactly what he did, now that he thinks he doesn’t need Macworld anymore?

As of now, though, I’m not quite so sure. (Well, I was never sure anyway; just giving them the benefit of the doubt.) Steve’s open letter about his health can actually be read like an admission that his health played a factor. But then, it also reads like the letter he’d write after he had slammed IDG’s door in anger and had only later realized that the way the story developed wasn’t too good for Apple — that he has to take the rumors about his health into account even if they are wrong.

Mac mini: it would make sense for Phil Schiller to announce a big transformation for the computer Steve likes least. I’m still waiting for the Mini and Apple TV to merge into a single range of devices, and still not expecting it to happen; in the meantime, no idea what the new incarnation will look like, and I don’t care that much. It’s nice that this week’s rumors aren’t announcing its impending death, for once — let’s hope the blogs don’t jinx it.

17-inch MacBook Pro: it would be about time for Apple to announce it, but I don’t understand where that fixed-battery rumor is coming from. People buying 17-inch MacBooks are the most power-user of the bunch, and there’s no way they’d go for a non-user-serviceable battery, no matter how revolutionary it might be. And why the hell would the 15-inch have traditional design and functionality, but the 17-inch model suddenly go Air?

iPhone nano: as far as I’m concerned, any significant announcement on the iPhone platform (by which I mean a new device that isn’t just a minor revision of what already exists, or an OS 3.0 presentation) would be a confirmation that Steve left this Macworld in Schiller’s hands because of his health — the iPhone is his baby, and he wouldn’t pass announcing a new sibling. I do believe the iPhone nano is actually a possibility (because Interface Builder is clever enough that most well-designed apps — not games, obviously — would work on the new screen size without even needing to be recompiled), but I don’t expect it to be announced now.

iPod tablet maxi touch or whatever: same comment. (Minus the ease of porting existing applications.)

Was that all? Well, I guess that’s all I vaguely care to think about. There will be a Snow Leopard presentation during which Steve would have been utterly unable to hide his lack of interest; maybe iWork, iLife (without editing videos on the cloud, thank you very much to whoever thought that one up and those blogs who commented on it as if it was remotely thinkable), Cinema Displays, a new iMac or whatever, and I’m not interested because my bank account is dry.

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Goddamnit, there aren’t two icons with the exact same shade of gray. How hard is it to sample a screenshot with the eyedropper? Do all developers really have to use crappy, uncalibrated no-brand monitors?

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hicksdesign.co.uk

Whenever I try a new or updated GTD/storage app (such as Evernote or Yojimbo), I always think longigly of how well OS X’s Finder could do everything I need if it only had a few additional functionalities (such as tagging, or easier, less modal search — I hate how searching in the Finder transforms the current window into a Spotlight window, instead of just performing the search where you are). The thing is, I always forget about non-free accessories such as Leap, which is just what I need: a Yojimbo-like interface to the Finder.

And the idea of coupling it with Dropbox is great: you get Leap’s browsing, searching and tagging interface; direct access to all your contents with any OS X application; transparent synchronization across as many computers as you need (including PCs); and a nice web interface with an optimized iPhone version I didn’t know existed.

The only question is how secure it really is, but that’s just the same as Evernote (or Yojimbo with MobileMe synchronization, for that matter): you can just keep your sensitive information out of the Dropbox folder, or encrypt it.

Dropbox provides 2GB of storage for free, and my current Yojimbo library is 300MB, so I’m gonna give this a test drive right away.

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blog.stevepoland.com

Almost like the domain game of 1995, I grabbed some of the best Twitter usernames, because I could see value in their use in the future. […]

Last night, “celtics” was pulled from me. You moved my account to “bc fan news“. I’m running a fan account with news on the Boston ‘Celtics’. […] In prior weeks, I lost ’stanford’ and ‘bostoncollege’. Why not give them [The Boston Celtics] the username ‘bostonceltics’ instead? Why was my ‘celtics’ one swiped? Why was anyone’s username swiped?

I had no idea that the terms of service (what? did you read them?) included that Twitter reserves “the right to reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames,” and I think that’s great. It makes Twitter look pretty ridiculous when Britney’s account has to be “therealbritney,” to use the most famous example — if you just know that she has a page, but don’t know its name, the only way you can find it is a Google search, and that’s just not right.

Sure, it’s a little troublesome that the decision process is completely opaque and we have to assume they decide who’s the “rightful” owner of a user name based on the highest bidder, but what can you expect? This is a private business; they’re not going to ask the World Intellectual Property Organization to arbitrate disputes.

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