Ted Landau, writing for Macworld:

For me, the biggest reason I still take my MacBook with me when I need to get work done on the road is simply: typing. Whenever I expect to spend quality time with a keyboard, I want something beyond the iPad’s virtual layout.

I think this is a crucial point, even if it is a little bit boring. As a technology, the QWERTY keyboard is definitely archaic. I have friends who went to the trouble of learning alternative layouts for the sake of efficiency and easing carpal tunnel, but I imagine the debate about which layout is best will rage for some time. Nevertheless, QWERTY solved the input problem of its time. Unfortunately, its legacy has been a long one, and the problem it was meant solve no longer exists. There will surely come a day when the input problem of our time is solved, but it clearly hasn’t been by either porting QWERTY to touch screens—a technology for which regular touch typing is, in my opinion, singularly inapt—or introducing voice recognition. I can envision an ergonomics genius figuring out the perfect marriage between the necessity of manual input and the abstract nature of language, but my feeling is that keyboards are not the solution. There may not be one, in fact, given the diversity of human languages and the wide variety of their transcriptions. For English, I sometimes wonder if a syllabic method might be invented, something akin to the way Japanese is typed using transliterations of kana.

The other piece of this article I agree with is the discussion of cloud computing. Landau identifies a few problems, primarily the lack of sufficient local storage for our ever-uppiling midden heaps of content and the present limitations of iCloud’s ability to store, backup, and provide access to that content. I find iCloud to be occasionally useful, but I wouldn’t say “it just works.” Ideally, iCloud should be transparent—an integrated, in the background part of the OS that end users needn’t even think about. It should also provide unlimited storage for free. I believe we’ll eventually move in that direction, but, for now, the 5 GB maximum is pitiful and useless. Perhaps Apple (and other companies) could offer a “services subscription” that bundles a number of genuinely useful support services together for a yearly fee. In Apple’s case, it might make sense to combine unlimited iCloud storage with iTunes Match (a service I even have trouble explaining to people) and AppleCare. I have no idea if this would be cost-effective for Apple, but given their eagerness to push AppleCare plans on customers, it might be a way to sell more of them, assuming the gain here would offset the cost of all those server farms. In any case, I suspect all the competitors in cloud world are carefully analyzing the situation for the best competitive advantage they can come up with. For now, however, cloud computer is just like the keyboard: they both suck at what they do, but for now, nobody has an alternative.

Sony says it’ll study your downloading and playing habits to actually predict the next titles you’ll want and download them ahead of time. Unless that’s very smart, it’s going to be very annoying.

Umm. Yes.

As David Chartier points out, there’s still a little bit of hypocrisy left in the world. I imagine the outrage over Apple’s pricing of the iPad (that is, that they put any price on it at all) has more to do with the greater emotional attachment people have for Apple’s products than for Google’s. Google has generally given everything away for free and not required its users to buy into an ecosystem. Apple, on the other hand, has cultivated a garden that can feel at once paradisiacal and infuriating to live in. Sort of like home. We all have daddy complexes, and nothing is ever enough.

From TechCrunch:

Yesterday, though, Facebook announced something very unsettling. A “sophisticated attack” uploaded malware onto the computers of several Facebook engineers when they visited a hacked mobile developer site. Facebook quickly quarantined and scrubbed the devices, called the police, and kicked off an investigation. So far, there’s been no evidence that any user data had been compromised. Perhaps the attackers were after Facebook’s trade secrets or information about partners. Regardless, it was a very close call.

There’s a new weather app out today from Robocat. It’s called Haze, and it’s quite attractive and minimalist, as befits the current crop of cutting edge, Retina-ready apps (a flatter, more vibrant design with none of the skeuomorphic bric-a-brac that makes so many apps look infantile). I generally use Cross Forward Consulting’s Check the Weather, because it’s beautiful, fast, and simple, and that’s not likely to change. But Haze is worth a look. It’s even simpler yet and uses both color animations and an intuitive swiping interface to immediately present the most important information about current conditions. The app is so simple, in fact, that it may take a little hunting around if you’re looking for more detail. The thing is, Haze somehow makes this fun.

The app is on sale for a limited time. You may hardly be looking for yet another weather app, but isn’t it reassuring that when it comes to the efficient presentation of data, no problem is ever left entirely and satisfactorily resolved?

Consider a distant-future iPhone roughly the same width and height as the iPhone 5, but as thin and as durable as a credit card. Accidentally drop such a phone and it’d flutter harmlessly to the ground. Now maybe this would be a terrible design—the edges might dig into your hand, and it might be even less secure-feeling when held—but it’d clearly change the equation when it comes to fear of dropping your iPhone (not to mention where and how to carry it, and so on).

Interesting piece on the ineffable trajectory of technological progress by John Siracusa.

My place on the Mailbox line as I start this entry: 318,822 (12,690 people behind me).

There’s a new email app for iOS that’s all the rage today on the Twitters and Interwebs. It’s called, simply, Mailbox. I’ve been a happy enough user of Google’s own Gmail app for some time, mostly because I don’t like the built in iOS Mail app. But there are some things that annoy me about me. For example, they got rid of the convenient “next message” button in the latest version. Now I have to go back to my inbox to see the next email (unless I’m missing something). Why? Even with all the bells and whistles I could ask for, however, very little is likely to change a cardinal fact of my life: I hate email. It was exciting in the 80s, but now it’s just drudgery.

The developers behind Mailbox apparently want to make sorting through your email a pleasurable experience! An interview with them at The Verge offers details:

“What are people trying to do with email? What are the goals?” They started with Apple’s Mail app for iPhone, which people were already familiar with, and injected elements of to-do apps he liked, since increasingly people are using their inboxes as to-do lists. The point was to create an experience that was distinctly mobile — an app that would let you take meaningful action while you’re in line at Starbucks.

Mailbox needed to intelligently display emails so you can parse and deal with them as quickly as possible. Most email apps require two or three taps to archive an email — perhaps the most common action you take on emails while you’re mobile — but Mailbox only requires one: a swipe to the side. “Our biggest a-ha moment was when we realized that the primary use case of email on the phone is triage,” Underwood says. Mailbox takes the reality of people using their inboxes as to-do lists and and builds on what Mail and Sparrow did right (push notifications and nicely threaded messages, respectively).

Triage. Perfect word. I hope they can deliver. Cult of Mac thinks they do:

How well does it work? So well that we’re comfortable saying that if you get any volume of email, Mailbox is worth throwing any other iOS email client in the trash.

I won’t know until I’m allowed to try it out for myself. I should have signed up as soon as I saw the first tweet about it.

Current place in line: 318,816 (17,500 people behind me)

The hashtag isn’t a technology or even a platform service like the Facebook Poke. It’s more of an organizing principle, a way of opting into a larger public discussion. To get metaphorical: It’s more about the signal than the wire. It’s a good idea and it works. Everyone should be able to use it. And to Twitter’s credit, it’s not trying to lock down the hashtag. It hasn’t filed any patents or groused about other services ripping them off.

Which orphan keyboard character shall we rescue next? I vote for the tilde (~).

Valve wants to give gamers something different than the motion controls that Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have raced to create in recent years. Newell told us that he’s not particularly impressed with motion control, and that Valve wants to take advantage of advances in technology that can passively track what people are looking at (gaze-tracking) and how they are feeling (biometric feedback). That means games would be able to respond to your body in deeper ways, like adjusting the flow of a game based on your emotions.

It sounds like getting that kind of biometric feedback in a game would be a big leap, but Valve has worked on responding to players in sophisticated ways in popular games it already has on the market. The company invented an “AI Director” for its Left 4 Dead series that’s like a virtual Dungeon Master; the game can look at each player’s unique situation, like where they’re located and how much health they’ve got, and adjust the flow of the game on the fly to create new experiences in each playthrough. Biometric feedback is a logical extension of that system; it just adds more data points. Imagine if zombies in the next Left 4 Dead could literally sense your fear.

Yikes. Read the full article for the inevitable notice of Apple’s potential threat.

Via Mark Bittman, opining on an article in the same publication. So when do we start worrying about ingesting other forms of nanotechnology? Around the same time we start celebrating it?