Wednesday, January 8, 2003

On Opening The iLife Standards Adam Bridge has put together a good presentation for why Apple needs to open the hooks for the new iLife suite of applications. He's right. Apple's basing their system on Unix, an open standard. Keynote, also, an open standard. Address Book, an open API. Apple needs to open the hooks to all its stuff. It's opening the "You can do this" statement to increasing the value of Apple's own stuff. 8:18:45 PM    comment [] Expo Day Three Update Picked up a few things today, in addition to going to a few sessions. Bought an AeroNET wireless card for my bronze laptop, since it's OS X 10.2.3 compatible and the drivers work pretty well. Should be a quality thing to make that machine more usable. Also picked up a two button mouse from Adesso that's awesome: it's like the apple pro mouse, but it lights up blue in the scroll wheel and is two button. Also got a charger for my T68i charger that's USB based. It jacks into the USB port on my TiBook and charges. Slick, eh? The guys from Timbuk2 sold me a TiBook sleeve for my current El Ocho bag. Clips shut at the top, and provides good padding. Very excellent. Tried to go to the SF Bloggers lunch, but I think I missed them by about 5 minutes, it was disappointing. Next time, I guess. Tonight is the Online Tonight party down at Gordon Biersch. We'll head down there in a little bit. In town? Reading my blog? Drop a comment and we'll see if we can chat tomorrow. Tomorrow's Schedule: 10:30a Best of Mac Secrets Room 308 1:30p Mac OS X Disaster Relief: Prevention Room 308 or .Mac session Room 301 3:00p Mac OS X Disaster Relief: Cures Room 308 4:30p Jaguar Unleashed: Rendezvous Room 303 7:58:58 PM    comment [] Bluetooth Session Notes from Apple's User Con Bluetooth Session Ericsson developed Bluetooth in 1994, three years later they created the Bluetooth SIG with Agere, MS, Motorola, 3 Com, and the founders: IBM, Intel, Nokia, and Toshiba. Fee-based SIG membership allows royalty free use. Also has a qual board that makes sure Bluetooth devices do what the standard says. Bluetooth is a freqhopper. Makes it hard to break into, also encrypted. Devices are paired. You provide a passcode for two devices that is self-generated and user-created. Headsets and such have set access codes, but limited pairing capabilities. Profile inclues: intercom, cordless telephone, headset, dialup networking, fax, LAN access, file transfer, object push, sync, AV profile is coming very soon. What uses Bluetooth? Cell phones. T68i Ericssons. Headsets. Bluetooth Adapters for Laptops and Desktops. Portable devices: PDAs, tablets. Printers, Data Entry Devices. Storage Devices: Portable File Server anyone? Using Bluetooth Today: Connect to Sony T68i. Transfer contacts, graphics, sounds. Call from Address Book. Send SMS. Receiver Caller ID, Use GPRS for internet access. Phone to Palm stuff as well. IBM Whiteboard Tool. Clip it to the corner of the whiteboard, it will track all the pen sleeves. Will transmit to those w/ Palms or TiBooks or phones w/ the whiteboard content. Slick. Symbol Ring. Barcode Scanner goes via Bluetooth to a WinCE device on a belt that goes via WiFi to the servers. UPS spent 100 mil implementing this. Sony Ericsson Pen. This is SO damn cool. Write something down, write a phone number, it sends it as a graphic. Whoa. Bluetooth could end up in your car, both for phones, and THEN for the car diagnostics. The Potential of Bluetooth is pretty enormous, there's a lot that can be done with the little chips. Bluetooth is also used in Access Points, a la WiFi. Some are for ISDN or Dialup connections as well. Bluetooth serial is legitimate as well, both as printing serial and as a serial adapter a la Keyspan. Bluetooth seems to be an emerging technology that has a lot of potential. AT&T has a service coming up where they will allow unlimited data usage for $50/mo. With some big names behind the standard, it's going to have legs, but I think it will be interesting to see what happens next in terms of companies to use them. Links from the Presentation: Site Presentation Apple Bluetooth Info Bluetooth Site Bluetooth Community Valhalla Bluetooth Gear Carrier and Phone info 3:57:43 PM    comment [] Expo Update Day Two Expo Update, Day Two. Expo's not as heavily attended as I would have hoped, but in some ways, I'm glad it's not. The crowds are manageable, but not sparse, either. The booths are full, but the floor seems more dead than in the past. Notes from Expo: - The new 12" iBooks are separated at birth from the 12" TiBooks. - nVidia has the coolest booth tchotzke - DV Forge makes damn cool little things for holding stuff - there's cool stuff in the small booth - no one is giving away stuff this year - there are weird people here, like BofA and the IRS and Discover Cards - I'm still waiting for the first killer product - I love my TiHandle. More later. 11:16:48 AM    comment []

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