An important lesson learnt from the Newton

A real treasure in the Rizland Observer’s archives are numerous issues of MacUser Magazine from the years 1993-1995. It’s good to keep some Mac literature of the last decade, especially things written in a time when the Web was an infant. And it’s surprisingly refreshing to find that, still nowadays, that literature retains some value.

I’ve been reading many of those MacUser issues, and found — along with the sweet savour of nostalgia — quite inspiring bits here and there. Take for example this excerpt from an article by then-editor Caroline Bassett (MacUser March 4, 1994):

The first five minutes with a MessagePad could well be your last. They’re almost certain to display Newton at its least efficient worst. For a start, it won’t recognise your writing. “Bill”, you will shakily write, holding the pad at a ludicrous angle to the light to try and stop the glare. “Burk”, it will sublimely reply. This shouldn’t surprise you because Newton needs to learn your handwriting, and to do that it needs samples. All those Burks and Bulls are Newton’s way of saying “Give us a, break. KO?”. It may not surprise you, but it will annoy you, and it may even undermine you — after all, if a miserable little gadget can’t understand your writing, either it’s stupid, or you are.

Further straining your relationship with the MessagePad, sitting in solitary sales point glory near all the consumer stuff that you know works, is another downer: not only will your MessagePad not understand you; you won’t understand it. All those icons, whose meanings will become self-evident very quickly, will look like blobs and squiggles the first time you see them.

All this is unfair to the MessagePad. Handwriting works, say people who have practised; the MessagePad is simple to navigate around, and the longer you use it the more it exerts a superglue-like grip on the disorganisation of your life. [...]

See? When the Newton MessagePad was introduced fifteen years ago, it undoubtedly had appeal, but unfortunately gratification was delayed. Ms Bassett nails this issue perfectly. The Newton MessagePad’s main feature, the most advertised, and what indeed still distinguishes it from all other PDAs — handwriting recognition — was not something you could grasp and enjoy instantly. Moreover, in the first Newton models running NewtonOS 1.x, handwriting recognition was worse and still not optimised as in the later MessagePads running NewtonOS 2.x.

The fact that the main feature of the Newton was disappointing in the Instant Gratification department, coupled with the price of the device (certainly not “for the rest of us”, at least in the 1990s), was ironically the main factor in Newton’s commercial failure. And it is indeed a pity: only by using the Newton on a daily basis, only by growing accustomed to it can one appreciate it fully.

With the iPhone, which is the PDA for the 21st century, Apple didn’t make the same mistake twice. iPhone is all about instant gratification. iPhone’s icons are wonderfully self-evident. Its interface, too. When it was introduced a year and a half ago, some were disappointed that it lacked handwriting recognition and a stylus. But it was wise from Apple’s part, I think, not to provide and boast that feature. I’m sure handwriting will come along with time and future software updates; in the iPhone Software 2.0 it’s already implemented for Eastern languages. It’s something trickling in the background and I expect we’ll see more Inkwell goodness in the future. The iPhone is already a worldwide success as it is; if a future system-wide implementation of handwriting recognition needs the same training and getting accustomed as it was for the Newton, users will surely tend to be more forgiving than they were 15 years ago.

End of the hiatus

The Rizland Observer is operative again. Briefly, April was spent travelling abroad. May was spent in the hospital, since the Maintainer & Director of The Rizland Observer suffered a case of toxic hepatitis. June was spent recovering, following many projects and catching up with work and various backlogs. In short, we’re here. The galleon is again back on course. We apologise for the long, sudden silence and for the interruption of our publications, and for any inconvenience or impatience this might have caused.

How to hold the camera

I love film cameras; I own a small collection and I like to use them, not to leave them on a shelf just for display. Thanks to the Internet, finding manuals and documentation for 30 or 40-years-old cameras is not that difficult, unless the camera is some rare or obscure model. The design of most of those old manuals is priceless, and I always like to search for a section entitled Holding the Camera or How to Hold the Camera. Perhaps it’s just a personal liking, but those black and white photographs of a young woman (of the Far East, most of the times) or man (rarely) are so evocative of their era, have a certain je ne sais quoi, that I thought it’d be a nice idea to showcase some samples here (click to enlarge).

From the Agfa Silette LK Sensor manual

[Link] Shareware and the iPhone App Store

Macworld | Editors’ Notes | What’s shareware’s role on the iPhone?: Peter Cohen at Macworld asks the same question I’ve been asking myself since I saw the iPhone March 6 event on QuickTime.

What Apple didn’t detail, and what’s missing from the documentation provided with the SDK, according to the developers I’ve spoken with, is any mention of how to distribute trialware or shareware software for the iPhone.

[...]

Another possibility according to a couple of developers I spoke with is that they will need to release two versions of their applications—one that’s feature-limited, as a free demo, and another full version for paying customers. That might ultimately too cumbersome for some customers to bear, though, as it’d require them to download the same program twice.

I’m no developer, but another scenario I was thinking doesn’t exactly involve two versions (one crippled, one full-featured) of the same application.

1. You first download a semi-functional, trial version of the software; you visit the application page in the App Store and you find two buttons: demo and buy.

2. You choose demo and try the application.

3. You don’t like it? You delete it.

4. You like it? You return to the application page in the App Store. You tap the buy button, and instead of re-downloading the whole software you just download a small piece of code that unlocks the application.

I thought about this by observing the process I went through when I updated my wife’s iPod touch with the 5 new Apple applications. The applications were already in the software update. After paying for them in the iTunes Store, the following download was very quick — only 9 KB of code or so. Shareware on the iPhone could somehow follow a similar pattern.

Not an ordinary monograph

Author: Hugues Boekraad
Title: My Work is not My Work - Pierre Bernard - Design for the Public Domain
Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
Year: 2008
ISBN: 978-3-03778-087-9

I’ve just begun skimming through this book, which I find quite interesting. The Preface opening clearly explains that This book is not an ordinary monograph about a designer: it is about the contribution made by a particular designer to the quality of the public domain.

It was written at the request of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation to mark the award of the Erasmus Prize 2006 to Pierre Bernard. The Erasmus prize is a European culture prize, and the book accordingly not only looks at the aesthetic qualities of Bernard’s oeuvre but also examines its cultural, social and political significance.

Pierre Bernard is the co-founder of the design collective Grapus (1970-1990) and is now leading the Atelier de Création Graphique in Paris. The book presents and analyses sixteen projects for the public domain, divided into six main areas: Politics, Social, Cultural, National heritage, Science and Public Space. I very much like the poster for a cultural festival in Martigues in 1986. The imagery is simple and effective:

(This image is © Pierre Bernard)

But this is just a small sample; the book is full of many other, even more compelling images. Definitely worth of attention and deep delving, starting from the introductory section, Visual rhetoric and ethics.

Some thoughts on bookmark management

For my work I have to read a lot and stay up-to-date. I have to read books to improve my (technical and non-technical) writing. And I have to read many online resources to improve my technical writing and my skills when I translate a book or article or a whole website. And then there is a lot of stuff I simply enjoy reading. Therefore one application I always keep open on my Mac is the browser. The two browsers of choice on all my systems are Safari and Camino, although I have also installed others, like Firefox, Opera, OmniWeb, Shiira, Sunrise, not to mention Lynx. I like to try many browsers because I think that limiting the surfing experience to just one, no matter how good it may be, is simply not enough. And when it comes to bookmarks and bookmark management, it definitely isn’t.

Generally speaking, bookmark management on the major browsers for the Mac is — with the possible exception of OmniWeb — remarkably insufficient. Considering the huge amount of bookmarked websites I have amassed so far, I wish my browser(s) could be a little more helpful with the organisation and, well, the browsing of said multitude of bookmarks. All browsers have a separate window for managing bookmarks, usually divided in two areas. On the left there’s a sidebar with bookmark folders hierarchy and other useful groupings (like History, Bookmarks Menu, Bookmarks Bar, RSS Feeds etc.). In the main window there’s the actual bookmark listing, with columns for title, address, and so on. In this regard, I’m surprised by the lack of options provided by Safari. The only things you can do in Safari’s bookmarks window is adding a folder and searching the bookmarks repository with the search field in the upper right corner.

What I’d love to find in a browser, especially in Safari:

• More sorting options. Safari doesn’t really have sorting options. At least Camino provides arrangement by Location (ascending/descending) and by Title (ascending/descending), which is fine. What about arranging by number of visits? I could have an instant overview of my browsing habits, and take notice of sites I haven’t visited in a while, for instance. Thus, I could pay a visit to those neglected sites and decide whether I’m still interested in keeping them or not.
• A more flexible Bookmark Bar. I think it would be interesting and useful to be able to change sorting options directly in the Bookmark Bar, by adding those options to the contextual menu that appears by Option-clicking the various bookmark groupings added in the bar. In Safari’s Bookmark Bar I have an item named “Interesting readings” and its contents have been growing and growing, reaching more than 100 links. I have manually arranged this list so that I have the most frequented blogs on top, but this way I tend to neglect many others. I imagine a contextual menu with sorting options like “Alphabetically (A to Z)”, “Alphabetically (Z to A)”, “Most visited first”, “Less visited first” and “Custom” — the latter allowing me to revert to my manual order.
• Borrowing the playlist metaphor. Safari’s bookmark management window is quite similar to iTunes’ interface. Why not extend the playlist metaphor to bookmarks? Consider this part of iTunes’ left panel:
  

  Why not have a similar portion in Safari’s bookmark window, with folders such as “My top rated”, “Recently Added”, “Recently visited” and “Top 25 most visited”? That could be useful when searching and accessing bookmarks, especially sites I recently added but perhaps misfiled. Camino sports at least a Top Ten List in its bookmark management window.

• Smart bookmark folders. This would be a real plus when searching and organising the bookmark archive, especially a huge one like mine. If it were possible to add information to each bookmarked site (like in other browsers such as Firefox, Camino and OmniWeb) and have a sort of “Spotlight comments” or “Keywords” field, then it would be easy to create smart bookmark folders according to specified search criteria (all poetry-oriented sites, all design-oriented sites, all Newton-related sites, all online newspapers, and so on).

These are the first suggestions coming to mind. I know there are some third-party applications for bookmark organisation and synchronisation, but it would be nice if these features were built in the browser. I don’t understand why bookmark management is so overlooked and underdeveloped. Not only should a browser help in finding and reading information, but also in managing and fine-tuning all the information one decides to retain. Some of these suggestions have been sent to Apple via its Mac OS X feedback page. I’m not holding my breath, of course, but I thought it was worth a try.

This posthumous criticism

The other day I was reading Daring Fireball as usual, when something got my attention. On his Linked List, John Gruber linked to an article by Bill Bumgarner entitled The Cube’s Fatal Flaw. Knowing that Gruber has a fine eye for noticing interesting and fascinating material on the Web, I assumed that this too was the case. The blurb he posted was enticing enough to make me click on the link, curious to discover what was that Fatal Flaw which doomed the poor PowerMac G4 Cube.

Expecting a somewhat interesting essay, I was disappointed to read Mr Bumgarner’s thoughts on the Cube. As a G4 Cube owner myself, I certainly agree with him when he writes:

The design was such that anything requiring a cable change was inconvenient. You had to physically tilt the machine over, often all the way onto its side, connect/disconnect the cables, and then very carefully re-route all the cables through the little gap in the back.

That is true. When I set my Cube up, I had a difficult time especially with the VGA connector and cable. Being both thick and not quite manageable, I had to take special care in positioning the Cube so that the VGA cable was not too angled to end up prematurely broken by excessive bending. The space on the bottom of the Cube is far from abundant, and when one connects two USB cables, Firewire cable, Ethernet, VGA, and power cord, it gets really cramped down there.

Alright then, when it comes to cables, things could have been better. Let’s move on and find that Fatal Flaw. Bumgarner continues:

The top wasn’t much better. The top featured both the slot for the optical drive and the power button. Unless you paid careful attention, it was damned easy to brush the power button when dropping in or removing a disc.

This is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion. Sure, one has to be careful with the power area (I call it power area because there’s not really a button there, but a sensor), but in my experience I never found that easy to brush the power area when handling an optical disc (actually it never happened to me). If you look at the very picture of the Cube on Mr Bumgarner’s blog, you’ll see that the power area and the optical drive slot are not that close. Apple’s worst power button placement, in my opinion, remains the ill-designed case of the PowerMac 6100, where the power button can be easily mistaken for the floppy drive eject mechanism.

Back to Bumgarner:

Worse, the top of the machine was a magnet for dirt, hair and cats. Hair would fall across the optical drive slot and then get sucked right into the drive when you inserted a disc.

Well. Dust can be annoying on a flat surface like the Cube’s. I clean my Cube frequently to prevent the accumulation of dust and dirt. But I do that with everything on my home-office desks: my PowerBooks, monitors, desk lamps, iSight, speakers, keyboards and mice. Hair? Oh I don’t know, I think it depends on the owner and where the Cube is placed. However, the problem of hair/dirt being sucked into the optical drive when a disc is inserted looks a little exaggerated to me. With minimal care, this is something easily avoidable. Certainly not a Fatal Flaw. So let’s proceed.

And, yes, cats. My friend had a cube at his home. The cats would love to sit on top of the nice, warm, flat cube. Which would both fill it with cat hair and turn it off… then on… then off… then on… then off for as long as the cuts stuck around. He finally had to put one of those pigeon guard kind of strip of nail things on top of the cube to keep the cats from corrupting his filesystem!
(People seem to think I actually take the cat thing as a serious criticism or design flaw. Please. It was funny, that is almost all. Certainly, if the cube had been marketed like the iMac, it would have been a consideration — not a big one, but a consideration none the less.)

Thankfully the part regarding cats has been revisited by the author, after some commenters pointed out pretty much the same I was about to say: the cat argument was silly, more than funny. If being cat-proof were the primary standard by which any product design should be judged, many products would badly fail. The colourful G3 iMacs had the same fan-less cooling system, were certainly prone to dust and dirt entering the perforated plastic top all around the handle, and of course were not cat-proof. Yet, they were hugely successful, unlike the Cube. The Fatal Flaw must lie elsewhere.

The cube was certainly a gorgeous piece of engineering. As a piece of art, it deserved all the awards it received.

However, as a computing device, it really sucked.

Eh, the article basically ended here, before Mr Bumgarner wrote some comment-related addenda. I must have missed the Fatal Flaw and all the consequent analysis. Perhaps it was in that sentence, In particular, the cube sacrificed function in the name of form. Well, that there were some compromises it seems quite evident in such a machine. But the sacrifices, if we talk about the Cube’s technical specifications, were more than acceptable. Considering the Mac line available back in 2000, the Cube was powerful enough. Gruber, again, is spot on here:

But here’s the thing: the Cube was not underpowered. It was, if anything, overpowered. I’ve long thought that if it had been the G3 Cube rather than the G4 Cube — powered more like the then-current iMacs than the then-current Power Macs, and down-priced accordingly — it would have been far more successful. I offer the Mac Mini as proof.

(From The Appeal of the MacBook Air).

So, it was not a matter of power. Bumgarner’s opinion is that the main flaw of the Cube was basically design-related, although his argument does not seem particularly convincing (the Cube failed and sold poorly because handling cables was tricky, and if you didn’t clean it regularly dust and dirt could enter the top vents? Hmmm). I still maintain it was a matter of pricing. Look at the Apple Store page on May 2000 (approximately). Apart from the PowerBook G3, the Cube had the highest entry price, $200 more than the regular PowerMac G4. It was more compact, way more silent and way more stylish than a regular PowerMac, but the PowerMac was more expandable (more slots and an easier processor upgrade path — the Cube CPU is indeed upgradable but not without internal hardware modifications). I watch that page and those price tags now and still think they should have been reversed, “from $1,599″ on the Cube and “from $1,799″ on the PowerMac G4. Apple itself repriced the Cube in February 2001, lowering it to $1,299 for the low-end configuration.

Mr Bumgarner concludes his addenda writing:

Unless you are one of the few that can actually maintain a minimal, uncluttered, desktop, stuff stacks up. Having a computer’s primary ventilation, optical drive, and power switch built into a conveniently attractive target for stacking is just flat out a bad idea.

Actually, the bad idea is stacking things over the Cube’s top.

This image is on page 13 of the “About the PowerMac G4 Cube” booklet, quite easy to find even for those users who don’t particularly love reading manuals. Furthermore, it should really be a matter of common sense: if you prevent air from entering your lungs, you’re going to have some troubles. The same principle applies to machinery vents, no? My desk space is far from uncluttered but the Cube has its own corner, undisturbed, as it should be when you take proper care of a tool you use. Many people use their PowerBooks and MacBooks also as desktop Macs, attached to an external monitor, and with the lid closed for practical reasons. There are no vents on a laptop lid, but that doesn’t mean you can happily stack things over a closed PowerBook or MacBook. Anyway, let’s admit that the best design ever should be idiot-proof, I still can’t be convinced that the reason of the Cube’s early demise lies somewhere in its mere design. Design is what actually enticed people into purchasing the Cube.

All in all, I expected a better linkage from Gruber (at least considering his high standards) and more analysis from Bumgarner. However, as a computer device, it really sucked isn’t some tremendously insightful criticism.

A conversation between writers

Paul Auster (photo by Jerry Bauer)

Jonathan Lethem talks with Paul Auster: an interesting, insightful conversation with Paul Auster, one of my favourite contemporary writers. Published in the February 2005 issue of The Believer, this informal chat between two writers covers lots of different topics, and as a writer myself, I wholeheartedly agree with Auster when he says:

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind. I write in longhand, and the pen is scratching the words onto the page. I can even hear the words being written. So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I’m hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be. That music is a physical force. Not only do you write books physically, but you read books physically as well. There’s something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies. An attentive reader is finding meanings in the book that can’t be articulated, finding them in his or her body. I think this is what so many people don’t understand about fiction. Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don’t understand prose. They’re so used to reading journalism—clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information—facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

(Via my friend Mario Rizzi.)

A brief retrospective on failures

Despite The Rizland Observer’s tag line, it seems we have much to talk about Apple and Macintosh lately. Reading the Feeds the other day I stumbled upon an article by Mr Bryan Gardiner on Wired’s Gadgets/Mac section, called Learning From Failure: Apple’s Most Notorious Flops. The short, eight-part piece was written on January 24, on the occasion of Macintosh’s 24^th birthday, and wants to be a brief examination of eight of the supposedly most unsuccessful Apple products. These are the Newton, Pippin, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, the Macintosh TV (essentially a black LC 520/Performa 520), the PowerMac G4 Cube, the Apple IIc, the round mouse (the one which made its debut with the first iMac G3) and the Apple Lisa.

There are many parameters with which we can judge a product’s success. The most obvious is the purely commercial one. How much did the product sell during his life-cycle? If the number of units sold has been ludicrously low, to even lead to a premature discontinuance of the product itself, then we can undoubtedly call it a commercial flop. Looking again at the list of Apple flops drawn by Mr Gardiner’s piece, it is obvious that the ‘failure parameter’ is not always the same, yet in the brief introduction the common denominator of all these failures is clearly outlined:

[They are products] that just didn’t live up to consumer expectations and market demands.

But the round mouse – being bundled with G3 iMacs and Powermacs – actually sold a lot. And what led to the Newton platform termination wasn’t exactly its poor sales, strictly speaking. And the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh is a unique case. More about this later.

My question is: were those 8 products real, all-round failures? I wouldn’t be hundred-percent sure. At least four of them have reached the cult status: the Newton, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, the Cube and the Lisa. The Newton was misunderstood and consequently thwarted by the press (technical and not) especially in regard to the Newton’s handwriting recognition capabilities. Admittedly the first Newton models were not that good at it. But the MessagePad 2000, 2100 and eMate were very much improved models with a better handwriting recognition. A technology, I must stress, still unseen and unparalleled in the PDA market. There simply isn’t another PDA on which you can write with a stylus in a natural, paper-notebook way, and which recognises your handwriting (or leaves it as it is) that well. Sure, it makes errors, but with your help it can learn. Other proofs of the Newton’s non-failure are the incredible quantity of software produced for it and the fact that, 10 years after its termination, there still is an active, thriving community of Newton users. Even today the Newton attracts interest, and judging by the number of new users appearing on NewtonTalk and speaking enthusiastically about it, I’ll ask my question again: was it really a failure?

The Pippin shows up regularly when outlining such lists of failed Apple products. Nothing much to add here, except perhaps that it’s a little unfair to mark as failure something that was never branded as an Apple product. At Apple they must have sensed Pippin’s ill fate, that’s why they licensed the technology. I still think it had the best controller design (you can see a good picture of Pippin’s AppleJack controller in this Low End Mac article by Joshua Coventry).

Earlier I said that the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh was a unique case. I think it’s incorrect to analyse this particular product through a commercial or a consumer’s expectation perspective. Mr Gardiner writes:

Unfortunately, the computer featured a lackluster array of internal components and offered nothing new in terms of technology. Some also considered the computer to be overpriced and underpowered. The lesson for Apple? Slick design alone doesn’t sell computers.

The fact is that the TAM’s raison d’être was neither to offer something new in terms of technology, nor to sell a lot. It was a unique designed computer made to celebrate Apple. It’s like a special edition of other products like cars or cameras, which usually do not add anything either in features or in technology, are manufactured in limited quantities and on top of that are unbelievably expensive. For instance, some Nikon or Leica film cameras have special edition or anniversary models that come in a gold finish, are a limited, numbered series and cost a fortune. The TAM is no different: roughly 11,100 units were made before Apple broke the molds, and the initial price was $10,000. These figures speak alone: quite clearly, it wasn’t a Mac made to sell.

About the Apple IIc, I have insufficient data to claim it was not a complete failure. One of the most informative online sources seems to be Steven Weyhrich’s Apple IIc history page at the Apple II history Web site. Apparently, the Apple IIc suffered the same pricing problem of the Lisa and the first Macintosh: the then-high costs of all the technology packed into these machines forced Apple to put out quite steep price tags. Quoting the aforementioned Apple IIc page:

[Apple's] original goal had been to sell the IIc for $995. As productions costs turned out, they found that they couldn’t hit that price, so they came up with $1,295, balancing the decision with the number of people who were predicted to buy the optional Monitor IIc or an external Disk IIc drive.

The only problem was that although the IIc was a technological breakthrough in miniaturization, customers at that time didn’t value smallness. They viewed something that was too small as also being cheap and lacking power. Although The Apple IIc was equivalent to a IIe loaded with extra memory, a disk drive, two serial cards, and a mouse card, most customers seemed to want the more expandable IIe. Apple marketing went to much effort to make the IIc attractive, but it didn’t sell as well as the IIe.

The second paragraph contains, in a nutshell, the reason why the Apple IIc didn’t sell very well, although I would like to emphasise the very last words: it didn’t sell as well as the IIe, which was a huge success. It’s like saying that the iMac G4 was a failure because it didn’t sell as well as the colourful iMac G3. From the same Apple IIc history page we also learn that the Apple IIc remained in production from April 1984 to August 1988. Not that bad and surely better than other, much more short-lived, Apple products (Apple III, anyone?).

There is no denying that the ill (some say undeserved) fate of the PowerMac G4 Cube has to be ascribed to its high price. And I believe it was only a matter of price. The proof that its form factor was a winner lies in its subsequent incarnation, the Mac mini. The Mac mini’s performance/price ratio is quite the opposite of the Cube’s, which was rather powerful for its time (8 years ago), but not that much to justify its pricing. I bet that if Apple had maintained a lower profile for the Cube, it would still be selling it (can you imagine – a Mac Pro Cube with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor? Tasty).

Similarly, it’s undeniable that the awfully steep entry price of the Lisa ($9,995 in 1983) did not grant a very long life to this fabulous machine, which was the first to have a graphical user interface with the desktop metaphor we are all now accustomed to see. It’s a real pity, because the Lisa had great potential.

And now, the infamous round mouse or ‘hockey puck’ mouse, as all the tech world seems to call it. I don’t quite understand the general bashing (perhaps it’s nicknamed ‘hockey puck’ not for its shape, but after all the bashing). Perhaps it’s just me and my slim, long-fingered hands, but I’ve been using one for 9 years without a problem. It has to be handled slightly differently than a more elongated mouse (like the Apple Pro Optical Mouse or the Mighty Mouse, for example), and you can’t expect to be resting your hand on it. The way I hold it (putting my thumb and little finger at either side of it and using the forefinger and the middle finger to press the button) has made it the most comfortable mouse I’ve ever had, believe it or not. Before using that mouse I frequently ended my day with an aching wrist – that issue disappeared after using the rounded mouse. In conclusion, I don’t know and I can’t say whether the round mouse has been a huge fiasco or not. On a strictly personal level, it has not. That’s why I thought I’d mention my positive experience with that mouse – a voice out of the bashing chorus.

On a closing note, Apple has surely made some mistakes in its 30-year history, and some of its products have been total disasters. Mr Gardiner’s choice is questionable, in my opinion, especially in regard to the Newton, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, and perhaps the Apple IIc. I tend to be more in agreement with Low End Mac’s Second Class Macs choice (see “The 12 Worst Macs” on the right of that page).

A partial relationship

The other day I was considering the whole MacBook Air affair, while reading here and there more criticism about its apparent closure to the outside, wired world. Then a thought struck me: connecting the MacBook Air to an Apple Cinema Display could be a nice step up in regard to expansibility. Those displays have, in fact, 2 USB and 2 Firewire ports. But alas, having never owned one of such displays, I didn’t know that, for those ports to be operative, you need to connect the display to the Mac’s Firewire and USB ports.

Page 4 of the Apple Cinema Display User’s Guide shows how to connect your display to the Mac.

Of course, such connection scheme works well with all Mac models… except the MacBook Air. I suppose that a Cinema Display can still be used without connecting it to the Firewire and USB ports on the Mac – you just lose the funcionality of the Firewire and USB ports on the back of the display. With the MacBook Air it’s a pity that one cannot take full advantage of the added benefit of those ports on the Cinema Display. Perhaps one could connect just the USB cable and therefore ending up with 2 USB ports instead of one. But still, no Firewire.

Speaking of Cinema Displays, it’s been a while since the current lineup was introduced. As John Gruber said at the end of his Macworld Expo predictions, I too have been expecting Cinema Displays with better resolution, brighter screens (their contrast ratio and response time could be better, for instance), and built-in iSight for a while now. Perhaps this year? Perhaps a model specifically designed for the MacBook Air with added, usable ports and perhaps with a built-in optical drive à la iMac? Now, that would make a nice Dock.