The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

This second iMac mockup prototype posted on Mac Kompass looks like an attractive television set (but not really like an Apple designed product). The curvilinear back, which I think looks quite striking, is offset by the unremarkable front. A nice case study nonetheless.

With all the speculation that arose after The Register posted details of Apple’s European trademark filing for a “handheld computer”, and Think Secret’s claim the new iMac will sport an all-in-one body form factor, its interesting to see what speculative industrial design Mac mockup master Isamu Sanada came up with:

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The Mac Observer notes that Apple has applied for a patent for a colour changing computer case, using “a collection of red, green and blue LEDs, capable of being used to generate any colour entered as an RGB value”. Looks like the concept is aimed at the iMac and/or eMac line of products:

A computing device is disclosed. The computing device includes a housing having an illuminable portion. The computing device also includes a light device disposed inside the housing. The light device is configured to illuminate the illuminable portion.

Personally the concept in itself sounds too gimmicky/cheezy for Apple to seriously pursue simply as an aesthetic direction. The idea was actually penned back in 1999, but Apple filed for a trademark on a “MORPH PAD” in the UK on July 14, 2004, possibly indicating more solid plans regarding the use of such a concept in the finicky and trend hungry consumer market. But I’m sure Apple has plans of creatively incorporating the feature into something greater than a computational disco ball. Or not. The obvious idea would connect such a feature with music/multimedia. Another idea would use the case colour capability to indicate the status of your computer in much the same way the power light pulses on various Apple computers when in sleep mode (i.e. after an application crash, the case would flash red several times, or when a file was sucessfully downloaded the case would change green to notify).

Mac Kompass posts an impressive mockup marriage between an iPod mini and the defunct but never forgotten Cube:

I personally use Proteus for my everyday instant messaging, but its always fun to test drive other new chat client that might offer just a little bit more or something wildly new. EmoteMail diverges from the usual laundry list of features of other instant messengers and adds an additional dimension to online communication by capturing facial expressions and indicators of typing speed with graphical cues. An interesting direction that might not catch on because in a sense, people seem to enjoy the anonymity of online chat. Might be interesting to cyber with ;)

Instead of dynamically modifying individual characters, EmoteMail relates contextual cues to each paragraph. The prototype uses a camera and a timer as sensor inputs to capture additional information relating to the paragraph. Reminiscent of the commonly used smileys, the EmoteMail client annotates every paragraph with a small black and white thresholded image of the face of the writer. Each paragraph also includes a background colour representing how much time the paragraph took to compose. If the sender changes their facial expression (perhaps as part of an emotionally meaningful communication) then the small camera grab beside each paragraph reflects this. By capturing a snapshot of the face of the writer with every paragraph, the system attempts to display the fluctuation of the emotions throughout the message, rather than attempting to summarize the whole message as a certain mood.

Its really too bad the 4 megapixel Finecam SL400R family from Kyocera will only be available at Apple’s Ginza store in Japan (for about $400). I think they’re quite fetching.

”Intelligence” is as debatable of a term as “taste”, and nothing produces passionate debate online like questioning one or the other (maybe “less filling” or “taste great”). Using a diction and style program to analyze the vocabulary and readability of Slashdot, PC and Mac users’ posts, Paul Murphy of LinuxInsider set out to discover which camp has the best grasp of the English language. The results are cited as a purely unscientific and loose indicator of intelligence, since “almost everyone agrees that a native English speaker’s ability to write correct English correlates closely with that person’s ability to think clearly.”

So do Mac users differ? You bet. Here’s the ratings summary based on about 3,000 lines of text taken from reader comments hosted by the Macintouch site:

 Kincaid: 8.9

 ARI: 9.4

 Coleman-Liau: 10.0

 Flesch Index: 67.8

 Fog Index: 12.0

 Lix: 40.5 = school year 6

 SMOG-Grading: 10.7

Not only were these ratings significantly higher than those given Slashdot’s contributors, and thus better than those given text from the PC sites, but the vocabulary was larger too. Without collapsing words to their root forms, but after removing punctuation (including capitalization) and numbers, the Macintouch stuff had 870 unique words to only 517 for the combined PC sites.

No real surprise there. But to be fair, conversely, I would confidently wager that a test measuring scientific/mathematical proficiency would produce results heavily skewed toward the Slashdot crowd. And a survey measuring artistic ability would most likely pivot results back favouring the Macintosh population. In reality, claiming “superiority” of any sort is a moot point since different tools are used for different jobs by different personalities. That being said, an interesting tangent would be to poll political affiliation and social/political activism amongst users ( Kerry,  Bush,  and… ahem Al Sharpton...use Macs). In either case, remember to vote and spell check!

In correlation to Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer’s iMac G5 announcement, an Apple Weblog reader pointed out that Apple has taken down the option to purchase the 15”, 17” or 20” iMac models from their online store. Instead of the option to purchase, online visitors will be met with the following surprisingly humble explanation:

Apple has stopped taking orders for the current iMac as we begin the transition from the current iMac line to an all-new iMac line which will be announced and availble in September.

We planned to have our next generation iMac ready by the time the inventory of current iMacs runs out in the next few weeks, but our planning was obviously less than perfect.

We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers.

*Note: the notification was posted at the beginning of this month, up for more than two weeks.

I’ve been on an ongoing mission to win a major online sweepstake prize the last couple of months (past prizes that I’ve won have been binoculars, a dial-up modem, a couple of DVD movies, candy, and home goods products). But I’ve noticed the popularity of iPods as grand prizes, since they make for an obvious promotional prize for music label sweepstakes. But this sweepstake sponsored by Jaguar for a limited edition iPod caught my eye because the “x-type” iPod is coloured black.

Chris Stephenson of Exposure, the marketing group handling the campaign reported ”[that] 72 percent of all our traffic [to the site] is using Mac OS X” after starting the 75 black iPods giveaway promotion. That’s an impressive feedback figure. One problem now: only one left. Good luck.

Although already expected for a long while now, id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead posted the following confirmation of an OS X port of their highly anticipated first-person shooter in his .plan update (alongside the announcement of Doom 3 going gold for the PC):

More remains to be done for the OSX version of DOOM 3 and that will take some time. We won’t release the OSX version until it’s just as polished as the PC version. The date for OSX DOOM 3 remains “when it’s done”, but I can confirm that it’s definitely coming.

Hopefully Mac gamers will see a demo version early in the same way id offered one before the release of Quake III Arena (since the smaller Mac gaming community offers a much more manageable group to test out multiplayer). Too bad many of us G4 owners will likely need an upgrade to really enjoy the game and its subtle, moody environments (Dual G5 and NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL seem highly recommened).