MacBooks and ports

The new MacBook

The big news from Apple’s announcement of the new MacBooks today is the single USB-C port. This could be the beginning of the end for not only MagSafe power connections, but thunderbolt too (although presumably Thunderbolt will remain on high-end devices such as the Mac Pro since it has 20Gbs of throughput compared to USB3’s 5Gbs).

Using USB-C connectors looks like it might finally enable single-cable docking station like functionality for Mac laptops, either through canny third-party manufacturers offering USB/display hubs and chargers or through display manufacturers offering one-cable USB-C connections that can charge your computer, pass audio/video to the screen and offer USB/Ethernet hubs too. For example, the Thunderbolt Display may end up being a USB-C Display instead (5K let’s hope!).

Apple Remote iOS

Mobile and Remote

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.

New Apple Tablet

Name that slate

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?”

Extra Faces

More possible iPhoto features

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.

Family Photos

Getting Genealogy

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.