Charlie Brooker’s thoughts on the iPad

Two brilliant paragraphs about two of the major missing features in the iPad. First, the missing camera…

Some people are complaining because it doesn’t have a camera in it. Spoiled techno-babies, all of them. Just because something is technically possible, it doesn’t mean it has to be done. It’s technically possible to build an egg whisk that makes phonecalls, an MP3 player that dispenses capers or a car with a bread windscreen. Humankind will continue prosper in their absence. Not everything needs a 15-megapixel lens stuck on the back, like a little glass anus. Give these ingrates a camera and they’d whine that it didn’t have a second camera built into it. What are you taking photographs of anyway? Your camera collection?

And then, “video calls”

And don’t bring up videocalls to defend yourself: it’d be creepy talking to a disembodied two-dimensional head being held at arm’s length, and besides, the iPad is too heavy to hold in front of your face for long, so you’d end up balancing it in your lap, which means both callers would find themselves staring up one another’s others nostrils, like a pair of curious dental patients. (Videocalls are overrated anyway. You just sit there staring at each other with nothing to say. It’s like a prison visit: eventually one of you has to start masturbating just to break the tension.)

I’ve owned a camera equipped computers for over 5 years, and the number of times I have been in a video chat is once, that too with the genius in Goa. And this was not because it was necessary, but more because I wanted to try out iChat’s amazing UI for video chat. I can never imagine myself holding a thin sheet of metal before my face, staring into it and talking to someone. And forget keeping it on your lap. Neither do I intend to hurt my neck terribly while video calling, nor do I want to appear like I’m talking to my crotch.

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NYT on the Lack of Flash on iPad

But concerns over the lack of Flash in the iPad and iPhone may be short-lived. Many online video sites have been experimenting with a new video format, called HTML5. Unlike Flash, which is a downloaded piece of software that can interact with a computer’s operating system, HTML5 works directly in a Web browser. And although this new video format does not work in all browsers, it will allow iPhone and iPad users to enjoy more Web-based video content.

Emphasis, mine. Ignorant stupidity, theirs.

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Jeff Croft’s thoughts on the iPad

Among the many things missing in the tablet…

Let’s talk about multitasking. For those of you who are bitching that there’s no multitasking, I have one thing to say: get over yourselves. You’re a fucking geek and regular people aren’t. Regular people don’t need multitasking. Shit, 95% of Windows user maximize every window, anyway. So quit your bitching about multitasking, and let’s talk about something that really matters: multi-user support.

There is no excuse for this thing not to have multi-user support. This could have been the world’s greatest coffee table device, if it only had support for multiple users.

Not one article I’ve come across since Apple’s announcement talks about the missing multi-user support.

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Three Magical Weeks with the Magic Mouse

My review of Apple’s Magic Mouse on Smoking Apples

What’s sad is, even after 3 months of its announcement in the US, the mouse is still not available for sale here in India (Mumbai, at least) and I know at least 3 people who are willing to pounce on one as soon as it does. Unless, I make them purchase a Logitech.

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No Android Donuts for Rogers’ Customers

If you have either a HTC Dream or Magic (or perhaps both) from Rogers Wireless, you might want to brush up on your rooting and porting skills because it appears that both devices will not receive an official OS update past Android 1.5.

I can’t help but mention that the first generation iPhone, announced back in June 2007 at v1.x still receives free updates today, with the OS at 3.1.x

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Mozilla: Firefox Mobile could be demise of Apple’s App Store

Mozilla is touting that its mobile version of Firefox, currently codenamed Fennec, could be the beginning of the end for mobile app stores like Apple’s App Store and Android’s Market. Mozilla VP of mobile Jay Sullivan told PC Pro, “Anyone who knows JavaScript and HTML can develop a great app without having to learn a specific mobile platform.”

Oh, look. Someone woke up from his sleep induced coma.

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How P2P is finding legitimacy as BitTorrent sites struggle to change

Devindra Hardawar discusses the opposing trends of illegal versus more legitimate uses of P2P technology.

More importantly, what’s interesting is…

The Pirate Bay is using a combination of DHT (a de-centralized P2P network) and PEX (peer exchange, a method for gathering peers) to share files directly between peers without the use of a traditional tracker. They’re also doing away with torrent files by offering “magnet links”, which send torrent data directly to BitTorrent clients.

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Summary of Responses from AT&T, Apple and Google

Engadget’s Nilay Patel summarizes the responses from Apple, AT&T and Google.

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I have been a huge fan of Patrick Rhone’s Minimal Mac, ever since he launched the tumblelog a few days back. The content that is published there is truly impressive and inspiring. A couple of days back, Patrick happened to post a picture of Shawn‘s Desk and his Desktop. But it was his Dock that really caught my attention. It was one of the simplest Dock I’ve seen so far, but it was in no way lacking the functionality offered by the conventional Docks you see on most Desktop screenshots with a billion icons in them.

With all the minimalist gyaan in my head, I decided to redo my Desktop and here’s what I ended up with:

Minimal Desktop (Click for larger, 1920px x 1200px view)

Now, everyone has their own way of looking at things, and this simplistic, minimal approach may not appeal to you, but I’ve observed that this has made me so much more productive. I’m very particular when it comes to clutter on my Desk and I always usually keep is clutter free. After completely changing the look of the blog as you can see, transforming my Desktop into a clutter-free environment was the obvious next step in evolution and was to happen sometime soon.

Here’s what has been done to the Desktop:

Wallpaper

I’m pretty sure a ton of people are going to ask for the source of the wallpaper, but sadly, I do not remember it. I think it was somewhere on DeviantArt.
//Update: The Wallpaper is from here. Thanks David.

No Icons on the Desktop

While there are apps out there that let you simply hide the icons on your Desktop &mdash such as Deskshade or Camouflage, I decided to do it manually. After moving every file on my desktop (I had about 30 of those) into neatly categorized folders in my user directory, I simply turned off the drive icons in Finder’s preferences.

Finder's Preferences to Hide Drive Icons on the Desktop

Dock

As you may have noticed, the Dock isn’t simply positioned to the right of the screen, it is at the bottom right. Thanks to Shawn again for this excellent tip. Executing the following two commands at the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end

killall Dock

LaunchBox

Launch What?

Just like a DropBox is a box to drop your stuff into, I have set-up a LaunchBox in my Dock to launch stuff that I most frequently use. The permanent icons in my Dock are of the apps that are running almost always running. Other, less frequently used apps such as Coda, MarsEdit, Photoshop etc. are available from the LaunchBox List when required. Everything else is just a Spotlight away.

The LaunchBox is a folder in my user directory that contains aliases for all those apps. By making this folder available from the Dock, I have access to any of these apps without wasting any space in the Dock or waiting for Spotlight to launch them. This is by far the best tip for the Mac and I’m surprised I didn’t come up with it earlier.

I’m very happy with this current set up and I don’t think I’m making any modifications in the near future. You can take a look a some of my previous Desktop styles on Ember.

What’s your Desktop like?

First Acer Android netbook will dual-boot Windows →

“Sorry — Acer chairman JT Wang says that the first Android netbooks will ship with Windows in dual-boot configurations.”