iOS 4 installed without a hitch. R2-D2 is proudly displayed as my new wallpaper underneath my home screen apps. I had already backed up my iPhone with iTunes 9.2, so the update process took about 10 minutes, which it did seamlessly while I was doing some writing in Pages. I will play with the phone more today, but I will say now that the app transitioning is nice, fluid, and fast.

I left iTunes downloading iOS 4 while I was running errands. Now, it is installing.

Other updates: Waiting on a very important fax. Dropped off book for Dawn at the post office. Talked to Dave for a minute outside SFH–he’s out of the hospital and taking it easy.

I have waited for a true tablet-sized PC for a long time. I have dreamed of having a way to easily operate a computer without a mouse and be able to seamlessly write without a keyboard. Perhaps this is rooted in my trouble learning to type in the seventh grade, or it could be from the images of handheld computing devices that litter science fiction stories and film.

I was reading on Liliputing today about Lenovo’s resistance to cutting the keyboard from their ThinkPad tablet PCs. The post’s author, Brad, wrote:

Sure, cutting the keyboard would let you make thinner and lighter devices that can be used with stylus input and/or on-screen keyboards. But ThinkPads are productivity machines first and foremost, whereas tablets like the upcoming iPad are designed for consuming media rather than creating it. [read the whole post here]

He’s absolutely right about the current importance of media consumption on the iPad. It’s something that I’ve given some thought to, particularly because of the limitations of the iPad in terms of ease of writing and the lack of a built-in camera. The lines of access, the ways in which we can get our ideas and work with them within the digital space of the computer are squeezed, not shut, but pushing the limits of anti-ergonomic torture. However, I don’t think that it should be this way.

I disagree with Brad’s idea that slate PCs are all about consumption. We are just beginning what I hope to be the emergence of cheap, lightweight, portable keyboard-less computing, but even in its infancy, we should (and I’m sure many of us will do so) push the limits of this new technology. We shouldn’t settle for just using these things for the consumption of entertainment that others make. We have to do the making, and we should find ways that we can use this new technology in ways it may not have been imagined by its creators. Furthermore, Window 7′s handwriting recognition has significantly improved over its earlier iterations, and Apple is pushing its iWorks suite on the iPad (with virtual keyboard and sans handwriting recognition). So, the possibilities for content creation are there.

If the iPad had a back facing camera, the first thing that I thought about was augmented reality, but it would be so much closer to what James Cameron used for ‘filming’ Avatar. Gripping the sides of the iPad like the stick of an airplane would have felt like flying a camera through space.

I had wished the iPad had handwriting recognition, but there are many other tablet and slate PCs out there and coming out soon that have this feature. Will someone develop an app that will provide this kind of feature, or will Apple bring this into the fold with an update to the planned iPad-based iWork?

Regardless, I believe that we have to rethink these new tools and I’m confident that many folks will do exactly that. Apple, as demonstrated by their recent moves with the app store, want to define what their products are used to do. Obviously, we, the people who use their products, can find our own uses for their products that challenge and disrupt the models proposed by corporations.

Why can’t tablet or slate PCs be productivity oriented computers? They can be, and will be, because we will make them serve our purposes despite the worst intentions of their corporate creators.

And a final note: K9, pictured above, would be a significantly giant leap forward over the iPad and any slate PC. Just saying . . .

I believe that Apple has lost their damn minds regarding their arbitrary approval of adult themed apps in the iTunes App Store. When the app store first opened, Apple rejected adult oriented apps (I will not attempt to define what this means, but suffice to say that this is an arbitrary category assignment for particular iPhone apps with the intent to ‘protect the children’–I will refer readers to Lee Edelman’s work, No Future, for more on this categorical thematic), because they had no way at that time to restrict the purchase of age restricted apps. Then, Apple developed a way to categorize and restrict particular apps from being purchased with parental age controls. Now, Apple has backtracked and begun the obliteration of apps with breasts, butts, and tight clothing. Why would Apple reverse course from being progressively minded about the types of apps available? Why would they turn away from the fact that adults buy and use their hardware and buy third party software of all sorts to be used and enjoyed on their products? As reported in the New York Times, Phil Schiller at Apple is quoted as saying:

“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.”

Who are these women and why do they determine what other people should or shouldn’t do on their, um, hardware? How are kids seeing these restricted apps on their iPod Touch or iPhone when their folks should implement content age restrictions and not give their kids the damn credit card number?

I agree with Violet Blue that this is an unfortunate turn of events for a company that we both love. Most importantly, she observes here that:

Now that Apple has released the iPad — and importantly, it does not have the cat-flavored Apple OS we know and love — with the iPhone operating system on what is intended to be a reader and tablet computer, it means that Apple has now produced a computer with a very closed system indeed. And a closed *minded* one.

Apple, closed minded? Aren’t they supposed to be guys who think different, or was that only a limited time deal when Steve Jobs first returned to Apple to deliver the company from the technological dust heap? Where is the insanely great opportunities of recognizing the differences between children and adults, and the different ways these two groups do and should (depending on who you ask) use technology? Apple’s draconian and antiquated approach to controlling the marketplace microcosm of the iPhone/iPad app store reveals that they are not only closed minded, but they are also giving into a un-Apple conservative mindset that reinforces Victorian-derived heteronormativity by their reinscription of what is and what is not appropriate for adults to see, and in this case, touch (at least virtually). Apple is, unfortunately, taking the sex out of sexy tech.

More on the app removals, extent of the removals, and responses from axed developers here, here, and here. Not to mention the hypocrisy of keeping the Playboy and Sports Illustrated apps in the iTunes store as detailed here.

Yufang gave me the sweetest Christmas present a little bit early so that I could begin using it right away. Actually, I’m using it to write this post. She gave me an Apple Wireless Keyboard as pictured above on my desk.

I’ve had a Wireless Mighty Mouse for a year, which I really like except for scroller issues that have to be remedied too often with the help of a rough sheet of paper.

Now that I have the Wireless Keyboard, I can set my MacBook on Yufang’s hand-me-down computer stand, which places the screen at eye level. She’s been worried I spend too many hours perched over my laptop, so I hope that her fears are now allayed with my keyboard and elevated computer screen. I can report that it is more comfortable in this new configuration, which I haven’t experienced in quite awhile.

However, I do have a beef with Apple about the way that they shipped the Wireless Keyboard to our house. The keyboard is the same size as my MacBook keyboard, and the box that it came in isn’t that much larger. To save space, they even pre-installed the two AA batteries! With all of these packaging efficiencies, Apple looses their environmentally friendly gains by first shipping it DHL, which circumnavigated a curiously long route from Pennsylvania to New Jersey to Kentucky before being handed off to USPS for its final trek to Ohio with USPS, and placing the teeny-tiny keyboard inside a ginormous box full of packing paper, which you can see below.

Perhaps they mega-packed my keyboard, because they knew that it was going on an epic journey to find its way to us. Nevertheless, Apple needs to find a better balance between packaging and product shipping safety. I’m afraid that this earns them a SHIPPING: FAIL.

Now, if I can only keep myself from reaching up to my laptop keyboard to do things like adjusting the volume.

I installed Apple’s latest update for Snow Leopard, 10.6.2, with their 476MB Combo Updater available here. The upgrade successfully installed, and I have not had any problems with my usual apps: CS4 and NeoOffice. Luckily, I haven’t experienced the invisible menu bar status icons issue reported by some folks. I do, however, need to run PhotoBooth and find out if the update addresses the MacBook fan revving issue while video chatting that began with MacOS X 10.6.

Above is a screen shot of my desktop, and the desktop picture was one that I recently made when I was walking around downtown Atlanta on Peachtree Street.

As you can see in the screenshot above of Markus Winter’s 32 or 64 bit Kernel Startup Mode Selector running on my aluminum unibody MacBook, Apple will not let me run the MacOS X 10.6 kernel in 64bit mode. My hardware, which is identical to the rebranded 13″ MacBook Pro, is locked out for the only reason that my laptop carries the “MacBook” instead of the “MacBook Pro” moniker. As you can read in my previous post on Snow Leopard, I thought that my MacBook would support the 64bit kernel since I have the right hardware to support it. Unfortunately, I was wrong as Mr. Winter explains in this post on his website. This makes me particularly mad, because I purchased Snow Leopard knowing that it had a 64bit kernel which would make use of the 4GB of RAM installed on my computer and allow for 64bit drivers. I realize that individual applications can run in 64bit despite the kernel running in 32bit mode, but I believe that Apple’s decision in this matter is intended to reward particular customers for purchasing higher end hardware. Except in this case, my hardware is no different than the rebranded 13″ MacBook Pro–the difference internally and externally is name alone!

This is my second day with MacOS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and all is running well! As you can see in the picture above, the DICOM viewer OsiriX is displaying my brain beautifully (how science fictional is that?!). My other apps including InDesign CS4 and NetNewsWire have been working perfectly as well. I did run into a problem launching NeoOffice 3.0, because I negligently forgot to update it to Patch 7, which opens without a hitch.

One of the features that I really dig in Snow Leopard is the ability to increase Finder previews up to 512×512 resolution, and as I’ve mentioned before, the previews are lightning fast on my SSD equipped unibody MacBook. I have been lusting for this seemingly simple feature since my first color Mac (a PowerMac 8500/120–my first Mac was a Powerbook 145B, which had a monochrome LCD display). Now that I have it, I have found some of the mundane locating a particular file version significantly faster, because I can quickly spy inside each file within a folder packed with an overabundance of files.

Regarding my post yesterday where I mentioned that the fans were revving. Luckily, that behavior has subsided. My guess is that the indexing service was reindexing my external hard drive, because the fans returned to normal after I ejected the drive and briefly returned when I reattached it today. However, the excessive fan use has subsided and my Macbook is as quiet as ever.

There is one thing that bothers me about the 64bit kernel of Snow Leopard. As I mentioned previously, I had to manually enable the 64bit kernel on my MacBook (13-inch, Aluminum, Late 2008). After Yufang installed her copy of Snow Leopard on her MacBook (Early 2008), she too had the 32bit kernel running by default. However, the 64bit enabler application reports that the 64bit kernel is unsupported on her MacBook. This seems odd, because the Intel Core 2 Duo is a 64bit CPU which leads me to believe that it can run the 64bit kernel of MacOS X 10.6. I wonder if this has something to do with the memory controller (her MacBook uses DDR2 memory and mine uses DDR3). I’m not sure, but I will do more research on this topic and report back.

More (less accurate than my reporting above) details about the return of Steve Jobs here.  Thanks Chris for the link!