Nintendo Wii to have voice-over-IP support? Can you believe just how much cooler the $200 system will be than all others? The PS3 better have videophone functionality with EyeToy, for the price.

(And, yeah, I realize we have reached Apple levels of speculation around the Wii. Goes to show: all you have to do is cover your appliance with shiny white plastic and enjoy the free publicity.)

Ant Farm [via]. I had no idea that was possible at all, yet judging by the comments it seems almost common — must be a shocker, especially in the middle of a big, expensive Cinema Display.

Dropped by the Fnac today, to check out the MacBook. You can’t play at all with computers there (keyboards are locked under thick acrylic panes) but (a) gee, that’s too tiny a screen for anything serious, how could people ever really want to use a 12-inch PowerBook, and even complain that the 13-inch MacBook is too big? and (b) compared to a nearby MacBook Pro, screen reflections are insane. I don’t care how much brighter and more saturated images are (incidentally, the vertical viewing angle seemed rather poor), I don’t want that on my computer, ever.

Google releases Picasa for Linux. (Picasa is the iPhoto clone for Windows that Google acquired a year or two ago. Funny thing that nobody could ever really figure out why they bought it, and their strategy regarding it still evades me. Clearly, it wasn’t so much about using Hello’s technology in a hypothetical Google instant messenger.)

Okay, it’s more like a Wine-compatible edition of the Windows program (plus 200 hundred patches contributed to the Wine codebase), but still — wow, and, also, what the hell? Are they just throwing darts at a spinning wheel nowadays to decide which projects to give time and money to? Or are they really just placing their pawns to launch their great offensive against Microsoft? (If so, they should probably revise their strategy and not base it on Wine.)

Microsoft plans to take on JPEG with its own Windows Media Photo format. Ungh.

Microsoft and file formats, that’s a bit like… Microsoft and any other technology: scary. They lost the WMA vs. AAC battle because they had no leverage on the music player business (plus I suppose most Windowsians want to use anything but Windows Media Player to listen to their music — from what I’ve seen, the next version will lift enough UI from iTunes to remedy that); they only decided to (let a third-party) release WMV codecs for the Mac when they realized they just weren’t going to win that fight either (maybe because too many webdesigners were on Macs, hence using Quicktime to publish videos, which Apple hadn’t neglected to distribute to Windows users — and pirated videos used DivX, and now everyone uses web-based cross-platform solutions); even though they had not proprietary format to push on that front yet, they managed to block PNG adoption just by being too lazy to implement alpha channels in MSIE. Why aren’t I thrilled that they’re going after a new target now?

On the one hand, WMPhoto has even more reason to fail than WMV did, considering the stronghold Apple has over the webdesign market; but you can expect that format to be used in Windows Vista to save and publish a user’s photographs — not to mention Office documents. Sure, considering the tangled mess of image format patents, having a big player step in and define a new format for the whole world’s sake is nice — if it’s anyone but Microsoft, please!

Samsung laptop with 32GB flash drive. Sure it’s a $900 premium to end up with a 32GB drive, but given Steve Jobs’s obsession with all things teeny and silent I still don’t understand how Apple didn’t premiere that technology. Plus, they have a volume discount on flash memory — but then, Samsung is the one actually manufacturing the chips, so maybe it does make sense for them to try and get this market started. Anyway, for such sexy technology, their laptop is particularly fugly.

Black-and-white MacBook. “Now let’s see a lid color swap and we’ll call this project complete.”

DashCode? Isn’t it a bit too late for Apple to introduce their own Dashboard development environment? Seems to me what little excitement there may have been has passed now.

The making of Apple iPod+Nike Sport Kit: “Other technical challenges [designing the sensor embedded in the new Nike Moire] centered on the duration of the battery power (close to 1,000 hours).” What? How on earth does the shoe not convert the energy from running into electricity?

Mac Slapping: “I find it highly amusing that the sudden motion sensor in recent Mac portables, added to prevent damage to hard drive in the event of a drop, has lead to a trend of people slapping, swinging, and generally flailing their computers around.” Agreed — I’d never, ever consider playing with MacSaber if I owned a MacBook.

Email: an author’s guide [via]. A very good read; I’m quoting the most important excerpts here because I had to translate them for my French readers.

Short emails rule. When I get an email that’s several pages long, I have to make some decisions: do I have time to handle this now? Is it important enough to come back to? Can I pass it on to someone else? If I can’t say yes to any of these, I will probably never get back to it. […] Supporting material or other important info can be attached, but keep it separate from who you are, what your issue is, and what you want from me. […]

[If you’re] getting a lot of responses asking, “What do you mean?” context is your problem. When you’re asking a question, anticipate any missing details that could cause an extended back-and-forth. Each time someone sends you a reply, you’ve gone to the back of that person’s line. Do what you can to make your emails count the first time. […]

Make your requests clear. […] You should set them apart from the rest of the message by paring them down to one sentence, with white space before and after. […]

Don’t give people an excuse to misread you. If you’ve written a request at the end of a long paragraph, or been passive (“it’d be nice if somebody could…”), it’s likely to have been missed on the receiver’s end. If you sent an email, you have a point. Get to it.

Benefits of Removing ‘www’ From Your URL: I never really cared about the issue of redirecting ‘www.example.com’ to ‘example.com’, or the opposite, because I don’t agree with the general tendency in that matter and hence didn’t feel the need to waste CPU cycles on RewriteEngine, but that post makes the compelling argument PageRank dilution. So I just edited my httpd.conf to add ‘www’ for anyone who forgets to put it (and for some reason, unlike this blogger or John Gruber, I had to remove the trailing slash from before ‘$1’ — maybe an Apache version issue?).

Why do I prefer to homogenize on ‘www’ rather than without? Because, basically, people are already equating web and internet enough without adding that bit of confusion. How do you write your web page address on your business card / your T-shirt / a bar coaster? Writing just ‘example.com’ is imprecise; ‘http://example.com/’ is awkward; ‘www.example.com’ is just perfect, and anyone, as unexperienced as they are, instantly recognizes it for what it is.

(You’ll tell me that ‘example.com’ is clear enough, and who cares about users confusing web and internet? Sure — but how clear and fool-proof is ‘ff00aa.com’ by itself? Okay, there’s still dot-com, but what if it were another suffix? How self-evident would something like ‘ff00aa.tv’ be, for instance?)

Black GlossBooks don’t normally have crappy, flakey paint jobs; it’s just that there’s been a inordinate number of lemons among early production models. In a world where each customer is a reviewer with a potential audience in the millions, maybe it’s time for Apple to investigate that ‘quality control’ concept and quit having its hardware beta-tested by early adopters? Oh well, who am I kidding — as long as it sells…

Lovely Apple Store Fifth Avenue QTVR panorama. (No direct link because that page resizes browser windows.)

A leather case to protect the Apple Cube?

Infinite zoom. Cool. But it would be so much cooler if the zooming were seamless.

The latest evidence that Steve Jobs is as wacko as his detractors paint him: a mere three days after the iBook has been replaced by a 13-inch Core Duo laptop with a glossy screen and the first ever black paint job on an Apple computer, Apple’s home page prominently displays… the New York Apple Store (now with a neat time-lapse animation). You know, that place that’s just made to sell computers. (And iPods). Guess which of the two occasions was worthy of Steve’s presence?

But then, the store is a cube, whereas the MacBook… well, it has the right number of faces and corners, but it definitely doesn’t abide by the jobsian golden number.

A comment on The Mac Observer (on an article suggesting that the next top of the line will be a pizza-box media center — nevermind that nobody has a big CRT monitor to place on top of a pizza box, and incidentally the reason towers are so big is that professionals need expandability):

Come on people. This is Apple we’re talking about. Steve Jobs. You know, the guy who designed the NeXT cube. The guy who designed the G4 Cube. The guy who already showed his hand on what the next Apple desktop will look like when he designed this.

Got to wonder how the iPod, and particularly the shuffle, evaded that trend. Maybe, if Steve Jobs wore baggy pants rather than tight jeans…

[+15h] “Will you marry me?”

David Weiss:

Just a few weeks ago my Dad asked me why his buddy’s PC laptop had this shiny screen while his PowerBook’s screen was not. I explained that this was for in store sales. I believe that glossy sells better on the show floor, even though in actual use the reflection is worse.

John Siracusa:

Glossy displays have effectively taken over the entire laptop market. Why are they so popular? Here are three possible reasons.

1. They are better than matte-finish displays.

2. They are cheaper than matte-finish displays.

3. People are idiots. […]

Walking into the laptop aisle, your eye was immediately drawn to the glossy displays. Aside from the shine, there’s also a perceptible difference in sharpness and color saturation on glossy screens. These things stand out.

In “shopping mode,” this is all people see. Shiny, saturated, sharp. Customers aren’t trying to read the screens or move the laptops to different locations in different kinds of lighting. Shopping is almost always an emotional experience, not a rational one.

I’m not sure whether you should blame Steve Jobs’s personal tastes (which is always a possibility) or plain, sad market realities. Apple switching to glossy screens because they’d lose sales to PC laptops due to (erroneous) user perception of display quality. Stores having to display Pro laptops with the glossy screen option, too, to avoid customer complaints that the cheap one looks so much better. Matte screen eventually disappearing from the Apple lineup because nobody buys it. Sad. Sad. Sad. What happened to Apple stubbornly sticking to less popular choices just because they were convinced it was better? It was all true, switching to Intel was one of the first signs of apocalypse.

And I don’t even have theories to account for the keyboard. The more I look at it and read about it, the more it looks and feels like a toy’s keyboard. As cool as the black GlossBook looks, the Apple laptop’s designs is really going the wrong way. (And is the black version really a $150 paint job that tears off at the slightest provocation? I can’t believe that could be true.)

Damn, if only there were an Apple Store in Paris so I didn’t have to judge by photographs. Hey, M., when are you getting yours?

“So what if it were possible to hook [a Wii controller] to a Mac?” *drool*

A quick Google search tells me that the Wii has USB, so it’s quite likely the “wand” (the apparatus that you put on top of your TV and that seems to triangulate, or, uh… biangulate the controller positions, and likely also serves as an antenna) would be a USB device (worst case scenario, using a proprietary connector as a deterrent), so what would there be to prevent you from hooking it up to your computer?

I don’t know much about USB protocols, but hacking together a driver to interpret Wiimote data can’t be too complicated. Nintendo might as well embrace the market opportunity and release the drivers themselves, sort of their own version of Boot Camp.

It’s a damn shame that Steve Jobs loves Sony so much, or he’d already be all about licensing the technology for that ever-elusive Mac mini media center. Maybe he’ll be touched, though, by how Nintendo expressed their affection for Apple design when they gave birth to the DS lite and Wii.

Meanwhile… EyeToy Lemmings.

Meanwhile… Clié customers who felt abandoned by Sony are going to be feel quite an itch.

Ack. Bad software update, bad!

I hadn’t even noticed Mail.app was going to be affected by the update — but then, I don’t recall reading the release notes at all.

John Gruber:

I continue to believe that the best reason to believe that Apple is going to do a mobile phone is that (a) you know Steve Jobs uses a mobile phone; and (b) there’s not a single existing mobile phone that’s good enough to make Jobs happy.

Or does he? Imagine the chain of events: Steve Jobs agrees to license iTunes to Motorola; then Steve Jobs sees what crap a Motorola phone is, and decides to limit the iTunes licensed software to one hundred tracks, because the ROKR isn’t worthy of Apple. That hypothesis only works if the Motorola phone is the first instance of a mobile phone Jobs has ever been closely exposed to — otherwise he’d have known in all of ten seconds that Motorola was the worst possible partner for this endeavor.

Derek Powazek:

Apple thinks I am a whiny kid who looks like he sleeps under a bridge. A kid who murmurs snidely to himself. A kid who can’t grow a beard to save his life. Specifically, this kid.

Apple thinks I’m Warren Cheswick from Ed, Justin from Dodgeball, and Darry Jenner from Jeepers Creepers. All stammering awkward kids, played for a laugh.

Well, yeah. But he was cute in Jeepers Creepers, and he’s hot in those commercials. Perfectly fine with me. And, come on, you know he’s just the epitome of the Mac-using cool kid — and a young Steve Jobs’ slightly cuter, fitter alter ego. A perfect choice for the part.