Anyone reading this will be at least fairly familiar with the internet, and has learned to use wrestle with a computer. Some geeks like me are somewhat of a black belt at wrestling, and enjoy the experience. But most people aren’t like that.

They just want a computer to be invisible. They want the answers to their searches to be visible. They want to see all the photos they took on holiday last year. They don’t want to worry about files or viruses or updates or even the applications themselves.

Yes, the iPad is in some ways just a large iPod Touch. But the most intriguing part of the announcement to me was that Apple have ported the iWork suite to it. (For non-Apple types, that’s the equivalent of Word, Excel and Powerpoint.) These are real get-business-done applications, not ‘mere’ video players or music players, or tip calculators, or neat games. (I mean no disrespect here: several billion app downloads show they are entertaining and/or useful, but they’re not what most office or lab or creative types use in their work.)

From what little I could see from the on-stage demos, Apple have managed to do away with the ubiquitous File/Edit/View menus. And more importantly, it seems, even the concept of files and folders themselves. If I have this right, this is showing us a new paradigm of computing. One where we don’t need to wrestle with learning the black magic of precisely ‘where’ things are stored inside the computer. And then re-learning it for different applications, and re-learning it again when you have to upgrade something. This is a future where you need to know less about computers, and in some ways you can’t fiddle around as much. The geeks will lose out, but the ‘normal’ user will only gain.

Old World vs. New World Computing is a post that takes this same idea, and explains and expands on it very clearly.

A quick techie note, to help others that would also like the following combination:
using site-specific browsers (so you can have GMail, GCal or GDocs as separate ‘apps’ living in their own windows that don’t get in the way of other browsing)
using Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
wanting to use offline access to GMail, GCal or GDocs

The most popular SSB technology is Fluid, that itself uses WebKit as found in Safari 4. So far, Google haven’t provided a version of Gears (the technology underpinning offline access) that works with Safari 4.

But there is a workaround: use Mozilla’s less mature SSB, Prism, and then hack around with the Gears installer following Westacular’s instructions.

Having finally found the solution to this particular issue, I’ll probably find that Google produce a Fluid-compatible Gears in the next week …

When people become confident computer users, they often find themselves held back by the mouse, and try to use the keyboard as much as possible. It has the advantage of speed, accuracy and greater use of muscle memory.

People have been tinkering with mice design, with as few as 1 or as many as a ridiculous 18 buttons. But they’re all still the same basic rodent. But finally here’s a real alternative, that takes the idea of multi-touch (yup, pioneered by Apple), takes it beyond their latest “Magic” offering, and extends it out to all 10 fingers. Check the video for more:

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

h/t: FlowingData blog

A quick note for people running Snow Leopard (Apple OS X 10.6): if your Address Book application is starting up and running very slowly then there is a fix. It’s almost certainly linked to having a ’smart group’ defined. See this OS X Hint for a couple of different versions of the problem and solution.

This also appears to solve Mail.app being very slow as well.

Of all the commentary I’ve seen on Google’s new wave technology, the best has been from Daniel Tenner. In a longish piece he argues why it isn’t a replacement for social media or networking apps such as IM or Facebook. But rather it could solve some of the real problems with email, such as:

• Adding new people to the conversation (and them seeing the full view as all others)
• Keeping added people added
• Multiple conversation branches

He concludes:

It was never designed to appeal to the crowds of geeks who are currently trying it out. Wave is built for the corporate environment. It’s a tool for getting work done. And as far as those go, it’s an excellent tool, even at this very early stage.

If only I could try out in a work context with enough other ‘wavers’ to make it feasible to try his conclusions out …

As Martha dislikes the performance of her laptop that’s running Vista, and as Emma needs a new laptop, we’re wondering what the options are.

My obvious answer is “switch to Apple”, but the prices are now seriously higher than Dell laptops, for example. A big enough gap to even make me pause …

So, time for an experiment with Windows 7. I downloaded the (free) Release Candidate before it disappeared and have now installed on the laptop as an alternative to Vista. Even as an Apple fan, I’m pleased to say it’s a vastly better experience than Vista. And that’s got to be good for everyone over time, as it will have to keep Apple innovating.

Installing Win7 itself was easy, though it failed to find the in-built memory stick reader. But the real test is in installing the additional applications that make it a useful system. And this is now very quick and easy, with no need for reboots. Even the infamous security nag screens are painless now. I hate to say it: if anything it’s a slightly quicker and easier process than on a Mac.

The interface seems slightly more straightforward, and the whole experience feels much snappier. So, I can see Emma being happy with it, and maybe Martha too. Unless she’d be OK with a smallish 13″ screen on the more affordable MacBook laptops.

None of this will stop me from upgrading my MacBook to run the new version of its operating system (Snow Leopard) released yesterday. This will save space, make it run faster, and also brings lots of small improvements throughout. I can’t see myself switching to Win7, but with it Microsoft could well slow down the large recent drift to Mac.

Total Recall — now appearing in real life, not just movie theatres.

Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell from Microsoft are exploring storing the totality of Gordon’s life experience digitally. All phone calls, emails, documents, receipts, and even pictures taken of each person he meets. It goes by the name MyLifeBits, and a book is coming out soon on Gordon’s experiences at totalrecallbook.com.

It was covered on a tech podcast recently, and Gordon says the best thing is that means he doesn’t have to rely on fallible “biomemory” any more; he can leave it all to the more trustworthy “eMemory”. You just need to make sure that you’ve got good tools to bring it all together and make it searchable … and that’s really the focus of the research work.

But one surprise was just how little storage this has taken. Gordon’s been 100% digital since 2002 and that has only needed 250GB of storage. OK, this doesn’t include video, but that doesn’t seem very high …

One to keep an eye on, if I don’t forget …

Adobe’s Flash technology is great for creating interactive websites, and sharing videos. But for the same reasons, it’s also used for particularly distracting adverts that are harder to block.

From Bruce Schneier’s blog I now learn that they have privacy issues, as they leave ‘cookies’ that browsers currently don’t know about or control. (You are blocking third-party cookies on your browsers, aren’t you?)

For Apple Mac users, there’s a utility called Flush that quickly deletes them. I expect there’s something similar for Windows by now.

This tweet from megnut is the best summary of what the latest iPhone can now be:

“Yes, iPhone = my computer, and $399 is worth it. Haven’t bought new laptop since late 06 and don’t plan to for long time.”

The iPod Touch is pretty much the same as the iPhone, except with the phone taken out. And, crucially for me, no mobile data connection available pretty much wherever you go. So, much as I like the iTouch, it won’t just yet become my “new laptop”. (Wherever you can get onto a wireless network, you’re OK. For example, at the wedding last weekend, the hotel handily had free WiFi for all guests, and it was doing a reasonable job as a stand-in computer. But WiFi is still not available in many places you want internet access.)

3 years ago I bought the clever Roku Soundbridge gadget, that let us play any digital music stored on either the laptop or the home server, or found on internet radio. Apart from not understanding modern secure WiFi (forcing me to switch to ethernet-over-mains to connect it up), it was OK but not that special. Martha never used it, so I decided it should go.

But rather than just sell it and forget the idea, I pondered for a long while about replacing it with a decent media player for the TV. This is, after all, the age of YouTube, iPlayer and streaming movies on demand. More important for us than movies right now is playing music and showing pictures — and something that’s easy enough for us both to use often. Asking around the answer was either Apple TV or a MacMini. I went the cheaper route, and decided to buy a second-hand Apple TV on eBay, and have just finished upgrading its disk from the rather laughable 40GB up to a more sensible 250GB.

As you’d hope from Apple, it is dead simple to setup, and does the job well and rather stylishly. (The functionality is a little lacking, and clever people have found out how to add richer media centre software like Boxee or XMBC to it. I’ve not decided which of those to use yet … but when I do, the ATV USB Patchstick creator is the way to do it.) Recommended. (Though if you want lots of streaming video, without being tied to iTunes supported formats, then the advice was strongly for getting a Popcorn Hour Media Centre.)

If you have an inner geek, you might want to read on …

I followed Engadget’s instructions on how to do this, though they are 10.4-specific. But as MT pointed out to me, before you try to recreate the media partition, just delete the old one and bung it back in the apple tv (no need to reassemble it – it works fine open), do a factory reset and it should rebuild the missing partition at the new size. But it won’t if you don’t clear out the Spotlight files, which always get written when you mount the drive.

To enable the low-level bitcopy from the original ATV HDD to my external backup HDD, I was at first getting ‘Resource Busy’ errors. Reading this hint helped me round that: unmount but not eject the backup HDD’s partition. BTW, this dd command unhelpfully doesn’t give any progress as it works. (For info it took 194 mins for the full 40GB data (about 3.5MBps). Doing this before you put data on the system could be up to 30x quicker.)

One of the options is showing photo slideshows from Flickr; but unless you have a lot of photos, this isn’t very useful. However, someone has put together a special account that just shows photos voted as being ‘interesting’ that are also available under Creative Commons. Ask it show from ‘dailypool’ and see what emerges …