Status-Q

Just outside a picturesque Hampshire village you turn off the road and go up a long drive through beautiful grounds to the campus. It's centred around a magnificent 18th-century house, and though this is rather dwarfed now by the extensive modern buildings which are home to the nearly three thousand IBM employees there, it must be very pleasant to stroll through the gardens at lunchtime. And I doubt many other technology campuses have their own cricket pitch.

It was also the first time I've given a technology talk in a former ballroom! I met some great people and had good discussions. But we stopped short of dancing.

When it's an iPod touch. Announced yesterday.

The first iPod with wifi, and a nice web browser. This is very cool.

It's interesting that they decided not to include an email app. Perhaps to keep more clear water between it and the iPhone?

Also, quite intriguing, is the new partnership with Starbucks which lets you buy the track currently playing (and anything else on the iTunes Music store) in a Starbucks outlet using their wifi network. A new icon appears on the iPod when you're in range. Howard Schultz says that he hopes Starbucks will become a key place for music discovery. Mmm. Is this what will replace the traditional high-street music stores?

The iPhone has also dropped significantly in price - now only $399 for the 8GB model, not including the contract of course - but that just makes the various unlocking projects look even more significant.

Steve Jobs keynote is here.

The Jan 5th episode was a very good one, I think, and if you're not familiar with GK's genius, I recommend grabbing the MP3 file.

A nice demo of a new interaction mode. I can't quite decide how useful it is yet, but they get points for innovation! (And for a good video)

Interesting - long after I had given up on there ever being further releases of SCPlugin, I discover that it's still being developed and there have been two releases this year. (The previous one I'd tried was in 2004).

SCPlugin allows you to access much of the functionality of the Subversion version control system directly from the Finder, and adds badges to your icons to show the Subversion status of the files concerned.

David Hopkin sent me this rather nice picture:

It originally comes, apparently, from Worth1000.com, a site which I found appallingly difficult to navigate but which has large numbers of examples of what you can do with Photoshop. They're of rather varied quality, but many are rather fun.

This is just the sort of thing at which the web excels: ParkAtMyHouse.com. If you have a parking space available near a station, airport, or other public venue, you can advertise it here, and if you're looking for one, this makes it easy to find.

Neat.

There are some interesting things for sale at Maplin. This, for example, looks like an ordinary UK mains adaptor. But it isn't. Oh no.

It's actually a cellphone. More information here.

If you're concerned, however, that your mischievous kids might start planting these things around the house, I should point out that each one costs about the same as the more expensive model of iPhone.

Michael has a nice comparison and likes the new one. I've only had a quick play with it, but I admire Apple's courage in breaking out of the traditional video-editing user interface model. There are some bits of it that are done very well, and if you've never used any kind of video-editing tool before so don't have anything to unlearn, it could be rather good. A major use of iMovie is in education; I'd be interested to know how that world takes to it.

I do most of my video editing in Final Cut Express and only use iMovie for quick stuff. I expect the new iMovie would do the quick stuff just fine, perhaps better. But it's less capable than the old one and I couldn't survive on it alone if I didn't have FCE, which I might have been able to do in the past.

A cynic might suggest that this is deliberate, that Apple want to push more people to upgrade, but I don't think that's their way. iPhoto keeps getting better and better, for example, despite the obvious upgrade path to Aperture. And if you wanted to smooth the path for those school kids to become eventual Final Cut Pro editors, you wouldn't introduce them to that world using a completely different paradigm.

No, I think the only real mistake here, as others have said, is calling it iMovie and selling it as an upgrade. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.