SAN FRANCISCO--The staff of Beyond Binary has been working hard, so I decided to take the whole crew on a field trip Thursday night to hear our favorite author--David Sedaris.
Sedaris was in San Francisco Thursday to read from his latest book, When You are Engulfed in Flames.
Sedaris was at a local bookstore to read from his latest tome, When You are Engulfed in Flames. There wasn't time before his reading for in-depth questions, but I did manage to get in a short one while he signed a book for a co-worker.
I went for the obvious one--Mac or PC?
"Mac," he told me.
In the audience question and answer session, he went into more detail about making the switch from IBM (a Selectric typewriter, that is) to a Mac.
Although he liked his typewriter, he said that he quickly learned it was not a good idea to show up at an airport with anything the security guards weren't used to seeing.
"After September 11, it became so difficult to travel," he said, referring to going places with his typewriter.
His first computer was a candy-colored Mac, a gift from his boyfriend Hugh. More recently, he said, he switched to a MacBook Air because he wanted something lighter to accompany him on his frequent travels.
But the relationship to the ultrathin laptop got off to a rocky start. Less than a week after buying the pricey portable, he spilled about a third of a cup of tea on it.
Rather than not being able to turn the thing on, he found he couldn't get it to shut off.
"It just had a mind of its own," he said, noting that for an entire day it would keep turning itself back on. The next morning, though, it was back to normal, he said. A computer expert told Sedaris he was lucky he was drinking his tea black--a spill with coffee or sugar would have likely ruined it.
Also of note, Sedaris said he still types with just one finger. I guess that would be the hunt or peck method.
It's one thing to lose a gadget and know where you lost it. It's another thing to have the thing seemingly vanish.
Such was the experience I had last December with the iPod Touch I had shelled out $400 for just a couple months earlier. I had it one night and went to look for it the next day and it was gone. For weeks, I thought it might be somewhere in my house or the friend's house I was at that night. But it never turned up either place.
Missing: One iPod Touch, last seen somewhere around here...
(Credit: Apple)Newsweek's Steven Levy recently had a similar experience with a MacBook Air he had on loan from Apple.
Now, it's not that losing tech products is anything new. I'm sure the value of cell phones, cameras and other gadgets left in taxis alone would be enough to build a lot of schools and libraries.
The only thing that I think Apple's products have added to the mix is a thinness that makes it possible to lose the things without even knowing you have lost them.
It's not the first time the thinness of Apple's products has wreaked havoc in my household. There was an incident a couple years back where an iPod Nano was left in a back pocket of some jeans and went through the washing machine. It's still a sore subject, so I won't go into details. Suffice to say, it is the cleanest, whitest, nonfunctioning Nano you've ever seen.
Now, I'm not blaming Apple. And I freely (or expensively) admit that I am more forgetful than most. I just think that the next time you see the ad and lust that the MacBook Air is small enough to fit in a manila envelope, remember one thing: it is small enough to fit in a manila envelope.
LAS VEGAS--I was in the Mix '08 press room Thursday chatting with Directions on Microsoft analyst Greg DeMichillie, and somehow the subject came around to the MacBook Air.
It turns out we've had the exact same reaction to Apple's waif-like laptop. Every time we see or touch the MacBook Air we decide it's the perfect laptop for us.
Then, with its seductive thinness more distant, we think about its specifications: its slower processor, small hard drive, and lack of connection ports.
"It's a left-brain, right-brain thing," DeMichillie said. It wouldn't have to be perfect to win us over, but maybe just a little faster or a little cheaper. I think a price cut or the addition of a couple of ports in the next revision would probably be enough to push either of us over the edge.
"The iPhone's flawed but I bought one of those," DeMichillie noted.
On that front, my reasons for not buying an iPhone also got shorter on Thursday as Microsoft added Exchange Server support for the device.
Incidentally, there are many more Macs here at Mix than a typical Microsoft conference, although a fair number I saw were booted into one or another flavor of Windows.
From the moment I played with the iPhone and Microsoft's Surface tabletop computing technology, I have been waiting for pinch-zooming and other motions to make their way into mainstream PCs.
The wait is essentially over.
Although it's the MacBook Air that's been getting all the ink for adding such gestures, Synaptics announced at the Consumer Electronics show last week a version of its touchpad for Windows notebooks that will also support a range of gestures, including methods for continuous scrolling, zooming in and out, and trackball-like movement.
And that's just the start.
"There will be more gestures forthcoming," said Mark Vena, vice president of Synaptics' PC business unit.
Gesture touchpads do everything that ordinary touchpads do, of course. What they add is the ability, through software, to translate finger movement into on-screen motion. For instance, the touchpad on the MacBook Air translates a twist of the fingers in the rotation of a photo on-screen.
It will take a little time before Windows PCs with the new gesture-capable touchpads hit the market. Vena said that the first models should ship in late March or early April, though he wouldn't say which computer makers have signed up for the new version. Vena said the MacBook Air announcement is helping his business, particularly with computer makers that were on the fence about redesigning models to include the new touchpad.
"None of them have been dismissive of gestures," he said. "Some have been a little more, shall we say, deliberate."
Gestures have been slowly making their way onto PCs for a while, mainly via the notebook's trackpad. For some time, Mac and Windows laptop owners have been able to scroll up and down a page by swiping their fingers along the pad.
Microsoft included support for gestures in its earliest plans for Vista, but was primarily focused on using a pen, not touch.
Toshiba showed off PCs and laptops at the Ceatec trade show in October that could be operated by gestures. Flick your wrist to the right, the page goes forward. To the left, back. Also at Ceatec, Sharp showed off a gesture screen that takes commands from three fingers. Pioneer has a GPS car unit that can be operated with gestures: touch the hologram for parking and the GPS unit tells you where the nearest lot is located.
Vena gives a lot of credit to Apple for getting consumers excited about the concept.
"The iPhone has done a great job of educating the marketplace on the benefits of touch technology and what you are able to do with it," he said. "There's just a lot more (understanding) in the minds of consumers in terms of what gestures are capable of."
Adding such gestures should be a no-brainer. It's just a better experience, much like the graphical user interface was eminently more enjoyable for most people than a character-based system. Die-hard DOS fans might have a point that command-line interfaces can be more efficient for those who like memorizing commands, but most people prefer a more natural way of navigating through a computer.
Such is the case, I believe with gestures. Take zooming in and out of the screen. Apparently, there is a feature in Windows, using the control key and the scroll wheel, that enables zooming. I didn't know about it until Synaptics mentioned it Wednesday (although I'm sure my educated readers have been doing this for years). But any product that lets me pinch to zoom in and out leaves an indelible impression in my mind.
Whether it's Surface, the iPhone, or the new MacBook Air, they all make me want to do the most important gesture--reach for my wallet.
CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos contributed to this blog.
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