Until we can harness our brain-power for desktop pointing, Apple's Magic Mouse will remain one of the most innovative (and polarizing) clickable rodents on the market. But it definitely isn't new.
In fact, if you look at how your hand is supposed to use Magic Mouse, which Apple released last month and updated for Windows this week, it's really not a mouse at all. To your fingers, it's more like a trackball.
The Magic Mouse asks you to draw your digits around the surface as if you're sweeping some diminutive kitchen floor. Doing that allows you to scroll in any direction, including in a circle, or flip between Web pages just like on an Apple trackpad.
You may remember feeling this same sense of "magic," and not talking about the last time you watched Serendipty with a chocolate-and-Vicodin milkshake. The "magic" mouse feels brings back muscle-memories of this bad-boy: the TrackMan Marble+, one of many beloved and now-anachronistic-seeming trackballs that combined the best of mice -- scroll wheel, three buttons -- with the planted bliss of the ball-pointer. (Image courtesy of this blog.)
Microsoft also took a crack at this kind of hybrid device in their Intellimouse line with this marbly monolith, the Trackball Explorer, versions of which have a cult following that keeps eBay prices high.
Microsoft's competitors have keep churning out trackballs, some of which are almost identical to their forbears. This thing -- the Kensington Expert Mouse -- looks just like it did 15 years ago.
Logitech still has three trackballs that also look like slightly steroidal versions of their former selves, most of which (like the aforementioned Trackman Marble) date back to around 1995.
As this blog post from Logitech's corporate blog shows, some people are still singing the trackball's praises in 2009. Computer-users obsessed with precision love that you can click a trackball without accidentally moving the cursor, and that the device needs less desk-space than a mouse. Turbo-nerd gamers also like it because, well, no one else does, and that makes it effing sweet.
Trackballs also harken back to their gamer youth. Arcade games picked up the device in the 1980s and quickly brought it to ubiquity. Atari's game Centipede was one of the earliest and most successful iterations of the trackball-controlled arcade machine, and the company later brought the trackball to home consoles, too, like this Atari 5200. (Photo courtesy this blog.)
Of course, Atari didn't invent the trackball; that honor goes to the Royal Canadian Navy, which built the first recorded trackball device using a five-pin bowling ball in 1952 -- 11 years before the mouse was invented, for those (turbo-nerd gamers) that are keeping track. They used it to navigate a big-ass computerized "battlefield information system" called DATAR.
DATAR was so big-ass, in fact, it was discontinued due to cost after the U.S. declined to co-sponsor the project. A couple of years later we Yankees developed an almost-identical combat information system called NTDS, but with water-cooled computers and without the syrupy Canadian taint. And thus was coined the phrase "WTF?"
Everyone loves Microsoft interactive table, Surface--just check out our list of killer Surface apps to see why. So it's good news that this week Redmond announced it would be opening up the Surface software developer kit, or SDK, to the public. It will also be freely available through Surface.com.
To celebrate the occasion, Microsoft announced the winner of their developer contest, which was an app called User Interface Design GmbH written by a German developer. Check it out below.
Developing for Surface is a little bit like developing for Windows--except, of course, it's best to have a Surface table to test things on. That said, Microsoft does provide in the SDK a "Surface Simulator" so you can test your interaction design on your PC without loading your app onto an actual table.
It'll come easiest to game developers familiar with Microsoft's XNA runtime environment, but will also be a cinch for .NET developers used to working with Windows Presentation Format, or WPF.
Microsoft has also launched this resources page for developers and designers, as well as for IT folks looking for guidance. As with all new platforms (witness the iPhone) the documentation can make or break development, so if you're an interested party and you have feedback on how Redmond is doing, let us know in the comments.
Google's OS was sneak peeked today at the Googleplex. The Wall Street Journal digital called it a "direct challenge to Microsoft Windows." Really? Let's clear up some confusion once and for all: Putting the word "OS" after something doesn't mean it's a shot at Redmond. (Screenshot below courtesy of Gizmodo.)
When we first heard about the Chrome OS this summer, I argued that it was destined for relatively simple embedded devices like kiosks. What we saw of Chrome today backs that hunch up.
According to the principals involved in the today's sneak-peek, the Chrome OS is being optimized for the devices that will pop up in between smartphones and laptops. This is, in fact, the only segment of the computing world that Windows doesn't serve. Right now, many netbooks run Windows XP, but are phasing out support for that version.
In a nice piece of cognitive dissonance, the WSJ reports: "Every [Chrome] application will be a Web application. There will be NO desktop apps. Chrome OS is essentially a browser with a few modifications. All data in Chrome OS resides in the cloud."
That's meaningful. Google is very good at Web apps, but even they cannot overcome the Web's restrictions. WebKit, the core rendering engine of Chrome, doesn't support multi-threaded JavaScript: That means any app you run in Chrome OS can only use one thread of the processor in your computer. Multi-threading is what makes apps like iTunes do so much work so breezily on Windows and Macs.
Using Web apps also limits what you can do with the hardware. That's one of the reasons that Chrome will be a "locked down" file system. As WSJ reports: "It's a read-only root file system... All user data is encrypted and all user data is synced to the cloud. Essentially, Google uses the PC for caching. Again, if you should lose your machine, you buy a new one, fire it up and it syncs with the cloud restoring your previous computing experience." Great for cheap (or apparently, disposable) computers, but not great if you want to, say, install a program that can burn DVDs.
Neither is Google convincing people to "ditch their hard drives" and store everything in the cloud, as Wiredmisleadingly argues. Think for a moment about how stupid this would be: As soon as you're out of range of WiFi or 3G, you lose access to most (if not all) of your stuff. Forget listening to your music on a plane, or watching a movie at your country house that gets crappy 2G reception. In fact, forget watching a movie at all, unless it has YouTube-level quality. Google knows you need local storage--that's why it's not letting you install Chrome OS on your home computer. It will be available only as a baked-in OS on low-cost netbooks.
To be clear, I'm not knocking Chrome OS--it'll be great for netbooks and other in-between devices--but it's just not meant to compete with Windows or the Mac. If anything, it might compete with an upcoming Apple Tablet or Microsoft's ailing Windows Phone OS. But Chrome OS is not going to be sitting on your desk at work. One possibility: It will veer in the direction of Linux development, as PC Worldargues.
Chrome OS is expected to debut in "about a year," says Google.
A new study says that big companies just don't get Twitter (PDF file). Of course they don't: They're not paying anyone to get it.
The study, performed by Weber Shandwick, says that only about three-quarters of Fortune 100 companies have Twitter accounts, and of those, many were either inactive or mere placeholders to fend off name-squatting. Few of the companies were following Twitter "best practices," says WS--that is, retweeting pertinent messages, @replying, and using hashtags to mark topical tweets. Most corporate accounts had fewer than 500 followers, and fewer than 500 tweets.
But look at the "account purpose" question in the study, pictured above. It found that many corporate Twitter accounts exist to promulgate "brand awareness." Huh? If you're already a Fortune 100 company, "brand awareness" is probably not your biggest problem. Another big raison d'etre was "news feed." As if customers care about the minutiae of your products.
Look at the people who are most popular on Twitter; let's take Ashton Kutcher as an example, with three million followers. People listen because he doesn't tweet for "brand awareness." He tweets because he likes tweeting. (Below, a typical Ashton tweet.)
Ashton is just as much a brand as Coca-Cola or J&J. When I worked at Red Bull, we were constantly taught about the company "personality." Who is this "Red Bull" guy and what would he do at parties? On New Years'? What does he listen to? Where does he live?
To succeed on Twitter, I'd bet that companies need do no more than ask those questions--and then hire that person to tweet about anything but brand awareness and product news. Twitter is so popular because it's so personal and so direct; give one person the keys to your brand's castle, and they'll go out and connect. But don't try to drag the whole board-room table.
That said, don't feel bad if your company hasn't yet found that person. It was big news when Twitter itself hired an outsider who got Twitter.
AdMob is planning special video advertisements for iPhones that play like movie clips before an app launches. In other words: time to go offline before you fire up that app. (Below, an ad for an EA game plays before a Tapulous app launches.)
These video ads, which you can sample here, will presumably be served inside games, since games make up the plurality of that apps that are both free and popular enough to monetize. Games, of course, are also the apps you're least likely to need the Web to enjoy; they're mostly stored locally, unlike, say, your The New York Times app, which is pulling all its newsy stuff from some server. Ironically, it's only been in the last few months that we've seen iPhone multiplayer games really take off. So the question is: Will video ads kill multiplayer? (Below, a normal AdMob ad.)
The ads will be hard to skip over, according to Mashable, though a skip button is clearly in the sample video; they'll probably take the tact of most streaming radio apps and only give you a certain amount of "skips" per day or per session. But simply flicking the Airplane Mode switch on your device should be enough to incapacitate the ads--it's hard to imagine any ad block would be empowered to kill an app if it couldn't download its ad content. That means a lot more people switching into Airplane Mode before playing, and therefore many fewer people playing network-reliant multiplayer games. (Or to look it another way: app-makers will seem to be punishing people who love multiplayer games by forcing them to eat video ads before playing.)
It's no surprise that the ubiquity of 3G and 4G wireless will come with ads in tow, like so many rats under the deck. But developers will need to figure out an appropriate level of choice to provide their customers. There are enough apps in the App Store that a video ad like AdMob's could easily drive people to a competing app; there's almost no friction involved in buying and downloading on the iPhone and iPod touch, so replacing an annoying game with one that isn't so annoying is cake. Being "free" just isn't the free pass for advertising that it used to be.
Viacom's general counsel says that suing people for file-sharing is "expensive, and it's painful, and it feels like bullying."
Speaking to a group of Yale law students, Michael Fricklas admitted that "it felt like terrorism" when his company and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) engaged in suing a college student for peer-to-peer file sharing. Viacom, which controls properties like Paramount and Comedy Central, saw its copyright-enforcement policies gain notoriety after the company's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube in 2007.
That lawsuit compelled YouTube to quit being the Web's "Wild West" video host and to build its current content recognition system, a search engine that roves for video or audio similar to known and copyrighted content and then takes down the offending video. That system was worth it: YouTube has been steadily experimenting with profitable ways to host advertisements, and its model of "create and curate" might prove to be a big money-maker after all. And Viacom proved that you can tame the Web--or at least most of it.
The problem with YouTube's content filter is that it's not enough to please the big content producers. Fricklas says he's still a big advocate of digital rights management (DRM), the software that keeps you from sharing videos or music you bought digitally. Why? Because, he says, DRM will make possible the most inexpensive forms of viewership--namely, video rentals and streaming video.
But as ArsTechnica points out, DRM becomes tyrannical (even nonsensical) when applied to ownership. "Ripping a DVD to an iPod, using an external Blu-ray drive to load a film onto a PC for a long trip, making backup copies of those expensive Disney films your kids love, using a film clip in a mashup or piece of criticism--these are all rendered difficult or impossible to do legally by DRM. What is content protection "enabling" here?" the site asks.
Fricklas didn't go into details about ownership issues, and Ars argues that after all their trouble, content providers usually realize that DRM software leaves them beholden to whoever provides the digital sales--in the case of the music industry, it's Apple. But this isn't a great analogy, being that music's potential for advertising monetization is nearly nil. Companies will continue to fight hard on video rights, no matter how much they profess to understand the plight of the user. It's too essential to their business not to.
The New York Timesdoubts Palm's comeback in light of recent Android buzz. But Palm isn't competing with Android--at least not yet.
"Both phones got good reviews for being easy to use and great for Web browsing," the Times says, but Android has "grabbed the attention of the public." The article refers to the buzz around Droid, which was almost entirely a product of a forthright ad campaign voicing the tea-partyish opinions of a bunch of iPhone haters.
Take the blogosphere out of the equation and put an Android device next to a Palm, and the Palm will win the hearts of all but the most devoted Google fans. Why? It actually makes things simpler for most smartphone users. Chances are, they have contacts spread around a bunch of silos--Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, Outlook--and want to pull them all together. Palm's linked contacts (above) makes this easy, but there's no ready analog for Android--or any other smartphone platform, for that matter. Other features like combined messaging and layered calendars are similarly unrivaled. While Google and Apple tout the ability to do more, Palm is for people who want to do less. And there are a lot of those people. Point being: all three are great platforms for different users. (Below, Palm's centralized message conduit lets you switch between SMS, email, and IM.)
It doesn't matter that "developers have not rushed to write applications for the [Pre] as they have for the iPhone and Android phones," as the Times says. That's entirely true, and Palm is working on their app store. But it's also moot. Apple languished with few software developers for an entire decade and now has managed to create--on the desktop and the iPhone alike--the most fecund environment for homegrown software development in the industry. Usability has to come first, because usability is the thing that suffers first when a platform begins to scale.
By contrast, it's Blackberry and Windows that are most behind in the battle for both usability and apps--at least in terms of overall quality and interaction design. As literally millions of RIM and Windows phone defectors slough off those platforms, they'll need something to fill the void. For the next few years, at least, Palm and Google can be content to share.
A new standalone streaming TV service called Sezmi has launched a pilot program in LA, after announcing it had raised another $25 million in funding. So what is this thing?
The Sezmi plans to compete with cable and satellite TV by offering live TV and on-demand and Web video content -- all through one set-top box that looks like a more sober cousin of the TiVo. You'll finally be able to ditch your cable and dish and go what I call "full Hulu" -- all your video will be Internet-delivered.
Of course, you'll need all your usual channels. Sezmi has partnered with 25 of cable's most-watched networks (Discovery, MTV, Turner, etc.) and all the major broadcasters (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, CW, Univision, and Telemundo), so most of the channels you're accustomed to getting from your current TV provider will be available. Sezmi has also partnered with movie studios to deliver their content: Sony, MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, and Universal are all participating.
At the risk of launching into another who's-who list, I'll just say Sezmi is well-funded by a variety of VC firms you've heard of, as well as one "unnamed strategic investor," according to Variety.
How much? The service plans start at just five bucks. You read that right. In fact, to go all-out and get the full on-demand package, it's only $25 a month. Of course, these prices could change once Sezmi does its final rollout, but for now, the details are an auspicious start. We'll learn more at CES come January.
It's called "hNews," and it could provide instantaneous context for any online news article.
HNews is the product of a project overseen by none other than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the physicist who created the first Web protocol in 1990 and is widely regarded as the "inventor" of the World Wide Web. The Columbia Journalism Review explains how hNews would change online news thusly:
Imagine this: you visit one of your favorite news sites and the homepage displays a notification that an article you read yesterday has been updated with new information, and a story you read last week has been corrected. The notification enables you to click on a link and read the correction, or to be taken to the updated story.
After checking those items, you continue reading articles on the site, and each story includes a box of information explaining the type of sourcing used within the story (anonymous, etc.), as well as a link to the organization's relevant policies and standards. If you spot an error in an article, you can easily submit a request for correction via that same info-box. And if the article is corrected, you'll receive a notification during a future visit to the site.
The purpose of hNews, says its creators, is twofold: its first goal is to enable media outlets to "tag" their sources and make them searchable and dynamic. Its second is to make that information readable by computers, an effort more broadly known as "semantic Web." The thinking goes that if computers can recognize and "read" the content of a website, instead of just browsing for keywords, it will enable more accurate searching.
As the Web crowds with data, these technologies might become crucial to readers' ability to separate wheat from chaff. An early example of this technology is something called "Value Added," which auto-generates a reading list (pictured below) at the end of an article. You can see it in action here.
Spammers can only operate for so long before they're found out and shut down. Once eradicated, they leave a virtual ghost town behind them.
Scores of Internet addresses have been abandoned this way, says The Washington Post, creating eerie pockets of deadness that few legitimate businesses are willing to take over. If a spam host operates for long enough, its addresses become known to IT and security professionals, at which point IP addresses originating at that host get "blocklisted." But once an IP reaches a blocklist, it's rarely, if ever, revisited and considered for removal--no matter if the address now points to a legitimate entity.
The result has been ever more clever malware. Once spammers were privy to the vulnerability of their hosts, they began designing their software to distribute itself from a litany of hosts--a perversion of "cloud computing." Conficker, one of the most aggressive bot-net viruses built to date, works this way and has found its way onto an estimated 7 million PCs.
The solution might be a centrally-controlled block-list that could conflate and test the dozens of lists currently in circulation. But such a list could run into legal obstacles presented by the Commission's proposed net neutrality regulations, which might effect the ability of Internet providers to deprioritize or block certain hosts.
The purpose of hNews, says its creators, is twofold: its first goal is to enable media outlets to "tag" their sources and make them searchable and dynamic. Its second is to make that information readable by computers, an effort more broadly known as "semantic Web." The thinking goes that if computers can recognize and "read" the content of a website, instead of just browsing for keywords, it will enable more accurate searching. 
