Fraser Speirs hits the nail on the head with his suggestion of an Apple Remote iPad application.  I only hope Apple is working on this and extends it so it can administer all Mac OS X and iOS devices.  Imagine installing an application on all your computers and mobile devices in one swoop!

The only thing I’d add to Fraser’s suggestions would be the ability to share a screen from an iPad to another device.  No need to worry about how to show the main interface on an iPad through a projector!  Just hook up one Mac (or iPad) to a projector and share the screen from whatever device you’d like to the projector.  Apple Remote Desktop can already do this with computers, so it’s certainly a possibility.

via Fraser Speirs – Blog – The iPad Project: Apple Remote iPad.

One of the things that makes me have to fire up the Terminal for in Mac OS X is to create symbolic links. In Snow Leopard though, it is possible to use Automator to create a Service so I can create the links using a contextual menu in the Finder.

Feel free to download the Automator service here.  Once downloaded, open it in Automator, then “Save as” to save it in your Services folder (which is in your home folder Library/Services).

I wrote a while ago about programming bookmarklets so that they would work as normal bookmarks or “smart” bookmarks depending on the context, such as searching Rotten Tomatoes for the selected text on a webpage, or just going to the site if no text is selected.

Since then I’ve gradually extended my collection of bookmarklets, and moved a few back to asking before loading a site (since my broadband is now capped I don’t load any page unless I have to!).  I’ve found the Bookmarklet Builder at SubSimple.com to be really useful for building these, and I’ve shamelessly copied many from around the web.

I confidently predict, based on Apple’s new invitation (see below), that the new Apple Tablet will be called … :

iPalette

And while I’m at it, let’s say it will be able to be used as a drop in graphics tablet replacement for a computer as well as a standalone app.  And Apple will have finally cracked handwriting recognition for real this time and made it usable.

Alright, why not, here’s the more ridiculous ones:

• 3D without having to use glasses
• Full support to use it as a input device (touchpad/keyboard) for a computer
• Support for detecting objects placed on it (nicked from the Microsoft Surface)
• Great frisbee action
• Apple will start using it straight away in retail stores

Update:

Not that anyone will believe me in the light of recent suggestions, but straight after I blogged about it being iPalette I thought “it looks like canvas… could the name be Canvas?”

Whilst we’re talking about a couple of possible iPhoto features and overhauls, how about extending Faces by making it actually a bit more useful?  Whilst it’s great being able to tag people, the only way to use this information is for uploading to Facebook or when searching.  There’s a few things that could be done to exploit this information, especially when combined with other metadata from the photographs.

For example;

• Being able to select multiple Faces in iPhoto and seeing photos that contain all of the selected people.
• A graphical view of a person’s timeline over their lives, either;
  • A graph of time (using the datestamp from the photo), or;
  • Time combined with a travel map for a certain period of time (using the Places tag)?
  • These could also be used with multiple people, for example people who commonly holiday together shown on a travel map over time.
• Being able to customise the Faces view, for example to sort by Surname, change the background etc.
• Better Address Book integration;
  • Being able to open an Address Book entry from iPhoto.
  • Setting the image in Address Book from a Faces entry.
• A graphical view of relationships between people (as can be set up in Address Book).  This is a quicker, easier version of family tree functionality in iPhoto I suggested before.

I’ve been looking into my family history and have been trying to find a decent genealogy application for the Mac.  Ideally it would need to have a graphical representation of the tree and relationships between family members, support for photos, dates and locations.

That got me thinking; I already have an application that supports photos, dates, locations and people.  iPhoto.

Recently I suggested that panorama stitching support may be the next big thing to hit iPhoto, but what if Faces in iPhoto was extended to include relationships between people, and more metadata like datestamps (such as birth/death/important events, which of course could be linked to photos) and locations like photos already have.  This would make it a fairly full featured genealogy application.

It could be fairly trivial to define relationships using drag and drop, and Apple already has applications that do something similar: Quartz Composer forms connections between modules like this, as does Interface Builder in Xcode.

It may seem like a strange direction to take, but if you consider that Apple has developed iPhoto and the whole iLife package to draw consumers to the Mac, and in my experience at least, more and more people are getting interested in their genealogy.  It could also integrate with online genealogy services as it already does with FaceBook and Flickr.

A few years ago I found myself wishing that iPhoto had facial recognition and location tagging.  They were subsequently added with Faces/Places.

Recently I have been thinking that I’d love iPhoto to have the ability to create panoramas stitched together from multiple photos.  Going on my good record of predicting features I’m hoping I get three out of three and iPhoto adds this in the next couple of years.  This could be relatively easy to do the basics at least, using an open source project like autopano-sift or something similar.  Then it would of course need the traditional Apple polishing and ease of use to make it a good iPhoto citizen.

Whilst researching a possible notification system for Eject Disks to intercept and replace system eject actions it turns out that the general system events notification system Kicker.bundle was removed from Leopard! A replacement system called crankd is being developed, but frankly due to the complete lack of documentation I gave up!

Download Eject Disks 0.4

Eject Disks version 0.4 is released! Get it from the link above.

Changelog:

• Fixed drag and drop and Finder selection.
• Added more timely dialog boxes using CocoaDialog.
• Changed Finder selection options so you can choose to do a normal scan if there is an inadvertent Finder selection.
• Fixed bug parsing optical volumes with spaces in the name so they don’t appear twice.
• If a disk and it’s subvolume(s) are selected for ejection, now subvolumes are skipped instead of throwing errors.
• Removed official Tiger support since I no longer have a Tiger test system.
• Drag and drop is now fixed for all types of disk.
• A new bug in drag and drop means disk images are not detected unless they are the only item dropped.

More info on the Eject Disks product page.

Tested on:

• Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
• Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
• Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

I recently predicted that FireWire would eventually be replaced by Light Peak on all Macs, and that FireWire was only back on the MacBook temporarily. Little did I know then that only a couple of days later Apple would announce the new MacBook and kill off FireWire so quickly (on the MacBook at least).

It’s a shame, I shall miss it. The fast peripheral bus is dead, long live the fast(er) peripheral bus!