Category: Geek

Disney’s Michael Eisner on Steve Jobs:

“He created the computer, or at least Windows, or whatever he created, and did a good job,” Eisner said to peals of laughter from analysts attending the company conference in Orlando, Florida. (Forbes)

In fairness, this may have been meant as a barb rather than abject cluelessness, so the analysts were either laughing at him or with him, not clear. But if meant as a joke… I don’t get it.

Back to MacWorld today, but wasn’t able to get into the FireWorks session — bulldog at the door making no exceptions for press badges, though there were only 10 people in the room. Instead sat through an hour of the LDAP conference, but kept falling asleep. Headed back to the exhibits to take Ben Van Houtte’s recommendation and check out Synthetik Software’s Studio Artist.

We’re all jaded from a decade of easy access to graphical and video special effects, but this software is incredible. Examples on the web site are great, but you have to see the software in action – images under constant, unbroken transformation as controlled by a stylus on a Wacom pad, burbling through genres and styles as fast as the dude could swirl his wrist. 3000 presets, or generate your own and distribute them as plugins. All the effects work on video as easily as on stills.

Found myself itching to take a month off, make a short film, and run it through Studio Artist — create my own Waking Life. In fact the crew of Waking Life is now working with Synthetik to add custom features for their next movie. Anyway. I was blown away.

OK, so here I am with towel in hand, wiping egg from face. I’ve been making this prediction for a year. It hasn’t come true yet, but it will, because it makes sense, and because so far all we’ve seen are underfunded entrepreneurs chipping away at the edges of the concept, rather than tackling it head-on.

Instead we got Mini iPods that don’t make any financial sense at all. Jobs claimed they were trying to go after the upper end of the Flash-based player market, but I think the real deal is that this is a play for teenyboppers who love to accessorize. Crap deal or not, they’ll sell a zillion of them.

G5 XServe, darn right. Glad to see it, but no surprises there. Had to do it. Kudos to the engineers who figured out how to cool the beast in a 1U space. Some cool footage of the G5-based Virginia Tech supercomputer. 1100 G5s. 2200 processors. 3rd fastest supercomputer in the world, at a tiny fraction of the cost of the next fastest. Apple has completely rocked the supercomputer world. The guy who called Apple to place the order for the 1100 G5s had never bought a Mac before in his life.

Arrived too late to catch the replay of the original 1984 commercial for the 20th anniversary of the Mac, but did see a variety of original Macs scattered around at historical booths. It blows the mind to see how far we’ve come… and to think that even those primitive little boxes with tiny screens and no hard drives were leading the industry in their own time.

The introduction of GarageBand to the iLife suite was pretty impressive, especially with John Mayer in person on keys and guitar. Anyone who’s played with Soundtrack can see that Apple has basically repackaged its guts — removed the video soundtrack-specific elements and wrapped it in hipper packaging. Nothing wrong with that. It’s the most intuitive multitrack editing, looping, etc. i’ve experimented with. Can’t wait to play with it more. As Mayer said, “If I had had this when I was 13, I never would have left my room.” Ahem.

The downside: More incentive for people not to learn to make real music. GarageBand and similar apps make it too damned easy to sound good.

On the flipside, plug a real instrument into GarageBand and you can do some pretty awesome stuff. The MIDI guitar sounds Mayer was generating via keyboard were incredible – realistic attack, pitch bending, fingertips touching string spirals. Amazing. Mayer claimed it was the first time he had heard software-based guitar sounds he’d actually want to record with. Not sure what he was paid to say that, but it sounded convincing.

There are revolutionary MacWorlds and there incremental MacWorlds. In all, I’d say this one was incremental. But there was one really revolutionary thing I saw – a guy in a wheelchair at the same height as standing men and women. He was a crippled Vietnam Vet in an iBot 3000 — a chair designed by Dean Kamen, who also invented the Segway. The iBot uses gyroscopes to balance, just like the Segway, and lets handicapped drivers climb stairs, traverse rough terrain, reach tall shelves, and stand at the same height as everyone else. Said he was riding one of 12 existing prototypes in the world. A thing of beauty to see in action.

Off to MacWorld for Jobs’ keynote. Rumors are floating about $200 iPods, but price reductions and performance enhancements are de rigeur and therefore not all that interesting. I’m going to predict that Apple finally nudges into the living room with some kind of home entertainment device — a stationary iPod sort of thing networked to MP3 collections throughout the home via Rendezvous (iTunes already automatically and seamlessly finds shared collections and playlists elsewhere on the local subnet). In other words they could end up taking the sliMP3 / SqueezeBox model and making it super-elegant, super-easy, and DRM-integrated. Of course it would be tied into ITMS. The kicker is that such a device would double as a DVR and compete with TiVO et al. So it would be a full audio/video centerpiece ready to tie into modern home entertainment systems.

Basis for prediction: Apple has been positioning the Mac to be the hub of the digital life for a few years now. They’d be crazy not to push all this stuff out of the den and into the living room. It’s a tough category to get right, so Apple has been taking their time to make sure it’s another category definer.

Oh, and it’s got to be as attractive to PC users as Mac, right out of the gate.

I’ll be standing by ready to wipe egg from face.