DIIA Blog

photo: www.gizmodo.com

Let’s all hope the rumors of Apple’s tablet computer are true or else there will be a lot of tech writers who will have to eat their lunch. The much rumored and speculated “iTablet” may make a debut sometime early next year, possibly in January. If such a device exists it will be one product launch that may out do all the others in recent memory, including the iPhone. Let’s hope Apple does not disappoint.

Along with the written speculation, there have been a number of artist mockups too about what the device will look like. These are are pretty much the same, a slab of technology with about a 10″ touch screen. What you don’t see in these drawings is the software and interface interaction. Sure, it will be some flavor of OS X obviously, but it will be how we interact and use the thing that will capture the imagination more than just an artists rendition of the physical device.

As the rumors swirl, its easy to try and imagine what the device would be like to use and I believe there are plenty of hints already out there in the form of your iphone and iPod Touch. Some may ask, just what will make the tablet better than an iPhone and even a 13″ MacBook or MacBook Pro? Why would one want one and what is the big deal anyway? Well, ask yourself that question too about the iPhone when it came out. We have had cell phones a long time and the new models rolling out never really got us all excited. I mean it was just another phone. But Apple showed us something quite different. I suspect they may do it again with the tablet. “See, now this is a TABLET!” is what the thing may scream. Its not just another netbook or laptop…its a new way of interacting with not only hardware, but software and all the media of today’s digital diet.

I think the big deal is going to be in the touch screen no doubt. Currently, there are no small form factor devices that have given users an adequate experience. Much as I love the iPhone, the screen does get a little small at times, but it is ALWAYS there. Pull it out of your pocket and bam, there is the web in your hand and 85,000 other things you can do with it too.   No, you are not going to put an Apple tablet in your pocket, but slip it into a small case and it can easily disappear in a backpack or purse without the bulk of even a Netbook. Hopefully Apple will find the sweet spot for screen size. All bets are it will be in the 10″ range. Such a device could give the Microsoft Surface a run for its money in the portable space.   

And while the iPhone is a great media consumption device, it does have its limits. Its not a great tool for editing media unless you like working on very small screens. And its not great a producing media, although its getting better with video in the 3GS and a better still camera. Typing out more than short emails is not a fun experience. Ditto for taking notes or any sort of long form writing. Also, editing video can be done on the 3GS but its not great at all. Same for photos and audio. Watching video is nice, but I don’t want to watch Lawrence of Arabia on it.

What I think will be so great about a tablet will be the opening up of the mobile world to larger touch screen devices and what this will mean for computing in general. In addition, I can see the value of a touch screen computer on your desktop. While Apple’s new Magic Mouse is quite cool and will pave the way for more touch versatile input devices it could be something like a remixed tablet that begins moving us further down this road. Our current input devices still work pretty well, especially the keyboard on desktop systems, but we need to move on to other paradigms in the next few years. However, its when you get a larger touch screen on a mobile device mobile that things get interesting, as the iPhone showed us in small, elegant ways. I personally like how easy it is to flip through home screens, open web pages, and even closing and launching apps is effortless (lets not talk about typing shall we), not to mention all the creative ways people have come up using the screen through the Apps. Unleash a larger screen space on developers and who knows what we will be flicking with our fingers. Its pretty easy to make the leap into what a slightly larger screen with the same touch capabilities as the iPhone will be like…it will be the same, only better.   

I can see an almost full sized virtual keyboard, some interesting touch screen multimedia editing capabilities and hopefully some nice integration with things like HDMI TVs and your desktop computer. Borrowing a page from Wacom’s Cintinq line, it would be cool too see the device as a small secondary screen for your laptop or desktop. An integrated iSight and possibly down the road, a LCD projector would be nice too. Essentially, the tablet would become a sort of sketchpad of the 21st century allowing one to both consume and produce media with ease. One intriguing possibility would be that the device can replace your keyboard on your desktop offering you a completely new way to interact with your desktop system (or home entertainment system) while giving you the freedom of mobility. This thing will change its use simply by what device you are using it with. This may be the device that starts to really pull us away from the mouse and keyboard. Look at the small wireless keyboard Apple sells for its desktops and Mac Mini and imagine that form factor as a touch screen device paired with your desktop. Now that would be interesting (and more comfortable). Imagine having several people with tablets being able to interact with each other’s desktops or a single larger display. It could be a very interesting collaborative device. And while its not doing anything it can be the ultimate portable digital picture frame on your desk, but I digress…

And of course, with all the ebook excitement, such a tablet would take the digital book and magazine experience to a new level making the Kindle and its E-Ink brethren look positively 19th century. One notable area absent from the slew of ereaders hitting the streets is of course color and screen resolution. This leaves glossy coffee table photo books out in the digital cold. A device like what Apple may bring to fruition could fit a niche for this content giving viewers rich color images (and hopefully HD video) paired with a super high resolution touch screen (iPhone screens have twice the resolution dpi of your desktop displays). Low resolution displays (and projectors) have long been the bane of presenters who can fit more on one piece of paper than on one computer screen (thank you Edward Tufte for that insight). Comic books too are perhaps an area that an Apple tablet could breathe new digital life into. And then there would be the gaming and all the cool potential of field based computing that could be done on a device with multiple sensors, and a high res color screen. Mobile mapping may never have looked so good…

So while we wait with baited breath for a new device from Apple that may (or may not) actually exist, ponder the possibilities of what it may offer by looking and thinking closely at its little brother the iPhone. Perhaps Apple has used it as the ultimate test bed for “the next big(ger) thing.” Only time will tell….and that time is coming soon.

Keene Haywood

Awhile back this DIIA blog featured a couple of posts about micro projectors (here, and here). Several models made their debut and the leader of the pack seems to be Optoma’s Pico Projector. We have one here in our offices and its been an interesting little gadget to hook up to an iPhone to project videos out out your iTunes to a 50 inch wide image onto just about anything you want. Well, Nikon has jumped into the fray and introduced a still camera with a projector built in. So you can take your pics and then instantly project them from the camera out into the world onto anything you want, just like the Pico Projector and similar other projectors. I suspect that we will see more of this in the future and perhaps see a small projector embedded in iPhones or even the next generation of tablets that seem to be on the inevitable horizon. Keep your eyes peeled for these new devices and soon we’ll be sharing our media in more places than just on screens.

Here are the specs for the Nikon camer/projector.

Keene

In July, Thomas Freedman of the The New Democratic Leadership Council published a short call to arms paper about outfitting every school child with a eTextbook reader. He heavily refers to Amazon’s Kindle, including it even in the title of the paper A Kindle in Every Backpack: a proposal for eTextbooks in American Schools. The paper outlines plenty of good reasons why our education systems should embrace eTextbooks and their associated e-readers. These are very clear. However, I think to get the impact Mr. Freedman is advocating, two things need to be addressed which are not mentioned in the paper. One is that instead of a particular device such as an Amazon Kindle, the focus should be on a universal, open source format. This format can deliver the textbook content to many different e-reader devices instead of just one or two that work with a proprietary format. And second, the technology Freedman mentions that kids want is not exactly ready for the e-readers of today. Let’s take a look at these two critical areas as they are important to this discussion.

Amazon’s Kindle format is fairly closed and the tight control Amazon exerts over it was evident recently when George Orwell’s 1984 was yanked digitally off the devices without the owners knowing it until after the fact. It caused quite a stir and had Jeff Bezos candidly apologizing for this. In this day and age, closed formats need to tread very lightly and e-books are no exception. Yes, I understand that we need to deal with copyright and rights management. Hopefully the lessons of the music industry can be applied to this nascent area of technology. The Kindle does support other formats which are more open as well in all fairness, but they are clear that they want you to buy your content from them.

As it stands now, there are plenty of proprietary formats already floating around from Amazon, Sony and soon, Barnes and Noble when they work with Plastic Logic to deliver e-books. Now, I can understand that distributors would want to seal off competiors by making their devices only read their proprietary format, but for educational purposes, this is not a good thing and so I think it should be clearly stressed that for such a national inititiative, an open e-reader format should be embraced and supported, perhaps with government support. Don’t let one tech company lock everyone into one format. Keep the eTextbook format by demanding, by law, that eTextbooks should be as openly accessible as possible. Just as paper textbooks can be loaned, shared and exchanged easily in the traditional book format, so too should an eTextbook. Learning cannot be proprietary.

Enter the Portable Document Format (PDF) that has become our ubiquitous digital document format. While it was created and is controlled by Adobe Systems, they have given the PDF format a long enough leash that it is supported on all major platforms and is quite portable in the digital domain. And while PDFs can have some embedded multi-media, this is far from the norm. Its mostly text and images that you get with a PDF. Many of the current e-readers do support the PDF format and can display their contents on the E-Ink screens. The viewing mileage you get out of looking at PDF on something like a Kindle or Kindle DX will vary. Its not great but it works on the E-Ink screens. E-Ink is developed by a private company and licensed out to the manufacuterers who want to use the E-Ink screens on their devices. The big problem with PDFs on e-readers, especially the smaller ones, is that the documents are static. The images and words do not flow to fit neatly on the small screen for reading. You have to zoom in on a page, then scroll around to read it, or you are stuck looking at the PDF at one size such as the case with the Kindle DX, which has a large screen, but you can’t resize a PDF to suit your viewing needs. One e-reader manufacturer does make a device that is specifically for looking at PDFs. It uses its own software to take a PDF and make it fit on the page nicely with text flowing around images and fitting on the smaller screen better. Its not perfect, but its a step in the right direction. But again, we are really talking about text and images, not other types of multimedia.

This brings up the other point related to Mr. Freedman’s article. He mentions the ability for students to take quizzes and have multimedia, etc on such devices. Well, that may take some time and if that is truly desired in the near future, then one needs to look at other devices such as laptops, netbooks or tablets that have operating systems (and batteries) capable of handling video, animation, web connectivity and interactivity (i.e. Flash). He points out that about half of students questioned about what they wanted in their classrooms responded with wanting access to real time data visualized like what you get with Google Earth. As a huge fan of the GeoWeb, I could not agree more, but you are not going to get a Google Earth experience on a Kindle or other e-reader (btw, Google Earth requires some high bandwidth connectivity and a decent graphics card to really shine). E-Ink is rumored to have color screens out perhaps in the the next year or so and is playing with them in their labs now. However, for this technology to support all the multimedia goodness we are used to on our full computers, this may still be out a few years. For now, the e-reader devices promise heaps of books in your pocket (see no backpacks needed) and the ability to have instant access to your personal library. But they are mostly still a passive reading experience. And that is fine, but don’t expect them to sing iTunes and do the Flash app dance. The Kindle does have a rudimentary web browser and its Verizon Whisper sync wireless technology is nifty for delivering books, blogs and newspapers, something the other devices are lacking to a large degree, but e-readers are not multimedia machines (yet). A possible exception to the multimedia dilemma is found on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch which are quite capable multimedia devices and decent, if not perfect e-readers too. I have found the iPhone Kindle app to be surprisingly good at reading Amazon’s Kindle books. The device is always there so I read at times I normally would not, such as waiting in line to get on a plane, see a movie, etc. Its there when the moment strikes to read a few pages. In addition several iPhone apps offer decent PDF viewing experiences too such as Readdle’s ReaddleDocs app or their new PDF Expert app. AirSharing and AirSharing Pro also offer some good PDF reading capabilities. And it is highly likely that Apple will release some form of a tablet like device in the next six months that will handle multimedia along with e-books so this could perhaps bring the future to us a little faster than E-Ink screens will.

So these are my words of caution for embracing eTextbooks for all school kids. I think this needs to happen and it will happen, I just hope it happens smoothly and those that make it happen keep formats open and embrace new technology that will merge the written word with the moving image and beyond. This perhaps will get people reading in an entirely new way while transforming the learning process and moving the venerable textbook into the age of bits and bytes.

Keene

You can read the PDF (perhaps with your e-reader!) of Mr. Freedman’s paper here.

How many ways can one write something in 140 characters or less? It seems more and more these days. As Twitter flits into the lives of just about everyone online, the challenge has been how to manage, organize and keep track of all the short attention span chatter. Initially, there was really just your plain vanilla browser and the Twitter.com website. You created an account, you logged in and you began posting snippets about whatever you could in 140 characters or less. People followed and you followed others. It all quickly became something like managing your email InBox without a lot of order. But this has changed and now Twitter users have many options to manage the micro-blogging tool. These tools give you the ability to better visualize the tweets, search, flag favorites, retweet something, send direct tweets etc.

So here is a brief rundown of a few Twitter applications that you might want to check out. Many of them are Mac apps but this is the platform I compute on so there is a bias here. Still, there are a few cross platform options. Please let me know if there are others I have missed or more options on Windows.

TweetDeck (Mac/PC) - This is the poster child Twitter app that was created with Adobe Air so its a cross platform offering. This app offers configurable multi-pane view of Twitter activity which you can see your friends, create and see groups, see search results, see twitter trends and even load up 12 second videos via 12seconds.tv. It also integrates into your Facebook page for status update monitoring.

TweetDeck for the iPhone - Quickly becoming the favorite Twitter app on the iPhone. Its unique in that it brings the multi column feature to the hand held device which is a nice touch (sorry for the pun).

Seesmic Desktop (Mac/PC) - Another Adobe Air app that is cross platform. Seesmic used to be a poster child for video sharing and posting but it is moving away from this to focus on its Twitter application which as become a favorite. It supports multiple twitter accounts and can hook into Facebook updates. It also supports multiple columns. Still, I find the Adobe Air app interface a little sterile but it works.

Twhirl (Mac/PC) - Another Adobe AIR app that can support multiple Twitter accounts and taps into other social networking sites. I have not experimented too much with Twhirl but it does support multiple accounts and supports various other social networking services. It appears Twhril is also developed by Seesmic.

Tweetie - This was the de facto standard on the iPhone but its losing some ground to the excellent TweetDeck iphone version. In addition, there is a desktop version of Tweetie which is nice, but it can’t display multiple columns of data the way some of the other apps can but it has a slick, modern interface.

Twitterific (Mac) - This was one of the first Mac Twitter apps and its still very good. There is a desktop and iPhone version. Its very minimal (sort of like Twitter!) but people like it because it got a minimal interface and does not distract you (as much).

Nambu (Mac) - This is a nice desktop app that lets you access your multiple Twitter accounts and configure things in one view with multiple columns, including popular posts, Favorites, etc. Nicely done. Early versions had bad memory leaks, but the developer seems to be actively patching these and issuing regular updates.

Beak (Mac) - Beak is fairly new to the Twitter app arena. It has some promise. I have not played around with it too much. The interface is very Mac modern, but it seems to lack some features of the other apps (but it looks nice!).

Twittelator Pro - This is a full featured iphone/ipod Touch only Twitter app that is well polished. If find it a little slower than other Twitter clients, but its got a lot of nice features. Its developed by Stone Design, an experienced and long developer who began developing for the NeXT platform.

Eventbox - EventBox is a great app for managing several different social networking applications such as FaceBook, RSS feeds, Reddit news, Diig, Flickr feeds and more. I like this app and use it fairly often. Its got good potential. The downfall again is that because it taps into multiple services, it does not really shine for any particular one. But if you use multiple services in addition to Twitter, it might work for you.

If I had to go and choose one app for Twitter, I would go with Nambu because its got a Mac like interface, supports multi-column views and multiple accounts. A close second is TweetDeck, but I am still getting used to the Adobe Air interface. I also like Tweetie and it might be included to use it more if it supported multi-column views.

Honorable Mention - Monitter is not a Twitter app but it is a great way to monitor (get it?) multiple Twitter searches. This is a great tool for researching trends on Twitter and covering breaking news or other time sensitive topics. Check it out. Its pretty interesting.

Double Honorable Mention- Twitter is not the only 140 character micro-blogging solution out there. Identi.ca is rapidly gaining some traction and many of the apps above support Identi.ca accounts now. You can go to their website for more info, but its basically similar to Twitter, with one big exception. Its open source unlike Twitter. Also, there is Yammer, a micro-blogging service like Twitter but aimed at the corporate business world.

This should be more than enough to get one Twittering away. And now back to old school blogging… ahh that oh so early 21st century technology equivalent of the chalkboard.

Keene

The wave. It paints a great image whether you are a surfer (real world, not web) or a football fanatic (you know, when everyone does the wave). The wave essentially forces you to participate, whether in a group or one on one. You wave and hopefully someone waves back. Google threw out their Wave at the I/O Conference in hopes of getting some developers waving back. And its unveiling has plenty of people talking about what this means for the evolution of online communication. So what is it?… Wave is basically a new Google service that allows users to combine email, IM, photo sharing and social networking into one seamless framework (and interface) integrating all the ways we mainly communicate online. In doing this, Wave has the potential to make us more efficient (or more distracted perhaps) by keeping all your comings and goings online together in one place. But its much more than this. Its a new way to think about how we communicate by blending together all the disparate communication tools and evolving it into something more. The service has a long way to go before its ready for public prime time (late 2009 release perhaps?). However, now that the APIs are going to be released to the developer public, Google has high hopes of getting feedback and more ideas of how to further develop the service. For a nice summary of Wave and what its all about, see this Cnet story. Incidentally, the folks who have given birth to Wave are the brothers Rasmussen (Lars and Jens) whose claim to fame is the creation of Google Maps, a service that was bought by Google thus bringing the Rasussens into the Google family.

Keene

As the newspaper industry endures the pain of transition to the brave new digital world and the age old tradition of college textbooks is challenged by the Web and a slew of new electronic reading devices, Amazon is answering the call by providing digital outlets for the publishing world. The original Kindle was launched in November, 2007 and then this past February, Kindle 2 was released to great fanfare. Tomorrow, Amazon will unveil a new Kindle that is supposedly bigger and will be more appropriate for reading things like newspapers and textbooks. Should the new device be all it is trumped up to be, it could definitely shake things around further on campuses and newsrooms around the nation. The e-reader revolution is upon us and Amazon is not sitting idly on the sidelines. While there is little information about the new Kindle features other than it will be larger, the device will definitely get lots of press. What remains to be seen is how well the public will take to it. The price point will have to come down, I would imagine, for students to really take notice. At $359 its not exactly pizza change. One report noted that a Kindle is about the same price as some Netbooks but without most of the functionality of a Netbook. Its a good point. Unless you just have lots of digital information for serious reading, e-readers may not be for you, but at some point in the not too distant future I think its a safe bet that some form of e-reader will become commonplace. As the new devices proliferate, they will take some getting used to. I know people who swore they would never read news online and now that is all they do ending their paper subscriptions. With textbooks delivered wirelessly to students’ e-readers, the whole textbook market stands to be shaken as well. Watch the news tomorrow and see what Amazon has in store. It should be quite a read.

On a quieter note, Amazon recently acquired the excellent e-reader software Stanza by buying its parent company Lexcycle. Stanza is probably the best e-reader software out there so it will be interesting to see what Amazon does with its new acquisition and how it will play into the Kindle initiative.

Keene

In an earlier blog post on Designing Change in America, we reported on the Web team that developed the whitehouse.gov site. In the media hoopla over the “First 100 Days,” only the most pressing topics were communicated by the mainstream media. A few reporters managed to examine how well the new administration is doing in technology and innovation. Timothy Karr writes in the Huffington Post about “Grading the Internet President,” giving Candidate Obama an A for his new media agenda (pdf). Entitled “Connecting and Empowering All Americans Through Technology and Innovation,” this fact sheet outlined plans for the digital age, and was released during his campaign.

Karr awards an A for intent in the first 100 days, citing the inclusion of $7.2 billion in the broadband stimulus package to ensure nondiscrimination and openness principles to make high-speed Internet access an opportunity for everyone.

Implicit in the new legislation is a commitment to education. Senator John Kerry, chair of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, is encouraging people from all walks of life to participate in brainstorming and goal setting. This is a great opportunity for educators to get involved on the ground floor for setting policy in education and technology.

It’s a good first step. We’ll be keeping an eagle eye on developments in education in the NEXT 100 days. For more commentaries on Obama’s tech report card, see Paul Berry’s “5 Tech Highlights From the First 100 Days,” and Art Brodsky’s “100 Days in Obama Tech Policy…“

For those who work with video and need to convert between formats, the exceptional VisualHub was the de facto standard for good conversion quality and low cost. However, the developer stopped work on this app late last year and people were wondering what would take its place. The developer released the source code (after pleading from the online community). Now a couple of folks have taken it upon themselves to keep the underpinnings of VisualHub alive, but under different application names. One of these is VideoVangelist. I am not sure if this developer is using the same source code but the app does what VisualHub did. A recent update was just released. I have not had time to fully check it out. It is worth trying if you are looking for a good tool to convert video but can’t drop the cash for the most expensive options out there. Its only $10. The other solution which utilizes the same open source encoder, ffmpeg, that VisualHub used is Handbrake, which is free but won’t give you as many output options. HandBrake now handles individual files (it used to handle only process video ripped from a disk). Another effort at reviving VisualHub is TranscoderRedux but its not as far along and requires some compiling code and experimenting. Its a not quite ready for prime time application. Oh and this is for the Mac BTW

Keene

This is a very interesting report about a new study and book about how excessive use of technology may actually affect the way our brains are wired. It focuses specifically on issues related to learning and education. The gist is there may be evidence that spending too much time online and interacting with technology may negatively impact the development of social skills and face to face learning and communicating. While the study is far from conclusive, I think it does help add a little perspective to things. We all need to get up from our desks and go say hi to our neighbors on a regular basis and I don’t mean virtually…

Keene

Scientists ask: Is technology rewiring our brains?

Good things do come in small packages. Its true for certain types of jewelry and also electronics, with the latter getting smaller and better all the time. The long awaited Pico Pocket projector from Optoma is finally making is public debut after months and months of conjecture about it and fears of vaporware. The 11 lumens LED bulb and innards are made by Texas Instruments. This is going to be very cool. I predict it may just do for presentations what PowerPoint has done (and I mean that in a good way)…or perhaps I should say Keynote instead of PowerPoint. This small bombshell of technology uses a powerful LED lamp to project a DVD quality image onto just about any surface up to 8.5 feet away and 60 inches across. It will run about $500. The lamp is rated at 20,000 hrs and is not replacable which is a minor downer. It runs on its own battery (2 hr. life) so power bricks can stay home. It has a speaker too, but apparently this is its weakest feature. Read on from Gizmodo and NYTimes’ David Pogue who are singing its praises. I would say its the perfect size for stocking stuffing this holiday season. Seriously, this has the potential to have lots of interesting uses, the first and foremost being able to show a small group a presentation, video, etc. on the fly. More gadgets like this are sure to turn up as computers get more and more uhh…mobilized. So people will ask if you have finally made it to the little screen yet. I want one!

Keene