Arranged Delirium

If you’ve been following some of my earlier posts on moving away from cable and satellite service, You might be interested in this article from the New York Times. It seems that television via Internet is going mainstream…

There’s an interesting essay in Wired that continues the discourse on Apple’s hypothetical tablet (which I think we’ll see in Q1 next year). The article takes an approach of considering what Steve Jobs brings to the process, but i thought it was specifically interesting in two regards:

1) The idea that it’s in Jobs’ agenda to save the media
2) The recognition that Apple may have a way to make money off of this

When I think of this theoretical device - given what we know - I do think that it could serve as a suitable electronic reader (there’s a reason why the Kindle has gotten larger). But I also think that Apple has the distribution model that could work. Folks are already buying music, television, and software “a la carte” in rather large numbers. Would it be surprising to extrapolate that they might also do so with text?

If you are working with Adobe Photoshop CS4, you may be encountering few annoyances - I certainly am. Some of these are simple, and I need to get over it; such as the exclusion of filters and plug-ins that I used to use. (The extract filter was nice, and I’ll miss it, but there are other ways to achieve the same thing.)

One annoyance that I cannot deal with is the enabling of trackpad gestures with no preference option to turn them off.

[/ rant]
Really?! We conduct usability tests for a reason…
[/ rant off]

Anyway, I rarely develop imagery on my laptop, but I frequently make minor corrections with it. Trackpad gestures males that practically impossible for me. Perhaps, I am clumsy, or maybe I’m just uncoordinated; but I’m obviously not the only one with this challenge. Adobe has released a patch (a plug-in) to disable this “feature.”

Although I’ve been slow to report it, Apple also released several updates to their product line this week while the Technorati were also caught up in the release of Windows 7. Specifically, they refreshed the iMac, Mini, and Macbooks. They also introduced the new Magic Mouse. Of particular note is the 27” screen on the larger iMacs (the low end is now 21.5”) and the power/price point of the Macbook. $999 is very good for what you get.

Windows 7 ships next week, and its a welcome update for a challenged Vista. Most of the reviews are very positive, and I think for good cause in most instances. I certainly think MS has been revisiting its position on forcing folks to do things in specific ways - it almost seems as though they are taking user feedback into consideration. You can read more via these articles:

Walt Mossberg’s take

BusinessWeek article

If you make movies on your PC, you’ll want to note that MovieMaker’s is no longer bundled, but must be downloaded separately…