The main difference is a “current projects” folder, which I’m calling sandbox/ and which lives in my Dropbox folder. Everything I’m working on goes in there, one subfolder per project. When I finish a project, I move its folder to the archives.

As I mentioned in my minimalist desktop post, I’ve cleaned off my desktop and switched to using an inbox/ folder, which lives in my home directory. All my downloads and other temp files (quick HTML prototypes, etc.) go there.

And finally, we have the archives, which are the standard Mac folders: Documents/, Pictures/, Movies/, and Music/. I’ve sorted Documents/ into general categories (Art/, Design/, Books/, Writing/, Receipts/, etc.) which contain finished projects/files.

That’s that. With the sandbox/ folder, I can see exactly what projects I’m working on at the moment and access those files no matter where I am. Oh, and did I mention the peace of mind of knowing that my current work is always backed up in a handful of different places? (My two computers, my external hard drives at both home and work, and the cloud. That’s five places. Mmm.)

My initial reaction? Disappointed. The science fiction nerd in me wanted the tablet to be full of the new technologies Apple has patented — haptic feedback, solar-powered battery, individual finger detection, etc. — and I felt disenchanted, disillusioned, all of that dis- stuff. (Ironic, since I said in my initial tablet post that “I do expect some cool, glamorous new technology in the tablet, but the more exciting thing (for me, anyway) will be the re-envisioning of how we use computers.” Sometimes I think I need to read what I write.)

The iPad was more evolutionary than revolutionary, I thought. Wrong. The revolution is more subtle, but it’s definitely there, and it’s exactly what I talked about at the end of that post (duh, Ben). But we’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s look at those speculations.

Speculations

• Canvas. iPad. The name is awful and I’m sure most of you have heard all of the female hygiene jokes already. It’s also a bit too close to “iPod.” But that’s what it’s called, so whatever.
• 10″ screen. 9.7″. Close enough.
• New multitouch gestures. Some. At first I didn’t think there was anything new on this front, but watch the Gizmodo video on the new gestures. They’re mostly natural enough that I didn’t even realize they were new.
• A brilliant new input method. We got a big virtual keyboard instead. I originally thought this was lame, because who wants to type like that standing up? Then I realized that it’s mostly not meant to be typed on while standing. And that’s okay.
• Amazing battery life. Not solar-powered and not infinite, but ten hours isn’t bad. We’re getting there.
• New OS. Apparently it is iPhone OS, from what I’ve heard.
• Both 3G and wifi. I was wrong about no plan being necessary, but there are no contracts, which is cool. As for the 250mb/month thing, I checked my iPhone and found that I’ve been using around 170mb/month on it. Streaming video, though, would need unlimited (or wifi).
• $1000 price tag. $499–829. I’m happy to have been wrong here, and yes, I’m planning to get one (the $499 model).
• Books. Yes, indeed. More on this shortly.
• New section of App Store. Not quite. Letting the iPad run iPhone apps is smart, I’ve realized, for two reasons: new iPad owners can use all of their iPhone apps from the get-go, but it’s also a spur to developers to make their apps iPad-ready. (iPhone apps look kind of lame swallowed up in that vast sea of black. And no, pixel-doubling is not a real answer.)

iBooks

When Steve mentioned that there’d be an iBook Store and that the books would be using the ePub format, I got a little giddy. This could potentially be really, really big for ebooks. (It could also fall flat. We’ll have to wait and see.)

First, the iBooks app. The page-turning animation is nice eye candy, sure, but the typography on the book in the demo was pathetic. Rivers of whitespace running all over the place. Seriously, Apple needs to learn about hyphenation. (And this from the company who first brought beautiful typography to computers. Sigh.)

Brief semi-related tangent: As a ebook designer, I’d prefer users to be able to read books the way I typeset them, but if they really want to change the typeface or the font size or whatever, then I say let them do it. If they make it worse, it’s their own fault. My job is to set sane defaults (since most people don’t change the defaults anyway). Similarly, as a reader, I’m willing to stick with the default settings if they’re beautiful, but if they’re hideous, I want to be able to change things till I get something I can stand. Apple, if you can’t get the justification to look good, at least let us turn it off. Please.

Also, the font choices (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times, and Verdana) wouldn’t have been at the top of my list, but I’ll reserve judgment there till I see them in use on an actual iPad.

I hope the iBooks app doesn’t mean Apple will be restricting other ebook apps (like Eucalyptus, Stanza, and Classics) on the iPad. Probably not. Will I be able to load my own ePubs into iBooks? Hard to say, but iTunes does let you add your own music and videos to it, so there’s precedent for that. I’m crossing my fingers that the iBooks infrastructure will be available on the iPhone and Mac as well. The iPad might be the ideal way to read iBooks, as far as form factor goes, but it’d be nice to switch devices when I’m away from my iPad (the way you can read Kindle books on your iPhone).

Speaking of the Kindle: Its display is ugly and the slow refresh rates turned me off from the beginning. Yes, I know that e-ink is supposedly easier on the eyes and all that, but I’d rather have a crisp, colorful, fast display, and most people are used to reading off screens anyway. (And if you’re planning on reading for long periods of time, go get a real book. The iPad/iBook isn’t meant to replace paper books — at least not yet.)

iBook Store

This is the more exciting part for me, being a publisher. In the keynote, Steve Jobs said that they’d be opening the floodgates to every publisher in the world, which is great. I’m wondering what their requirements are for who they consider to be a publisher, though. Will it be a yearly fee (like the App Store, where you have to pay at least $99/year) or something else? No clue. I don’t really know what the process is for getting music or videos into the iTunes Store. (Podcasts are relatively easy, though.) Unless Apple’s requirements are unnaturally stiff, I plan to sign up and try it out.

This is great for ePub, I should add. Apple’s backing could help it become the MP3 of books. And ePub is itself a decent ebook standard (it’s HTML/CSS zipped up, basically, with some XML metadata attached — nothing too proprietary).

Will there be DRM? I hope not. Apple is already moving away from DRM for the music on iTunes, but I don’t know if the book publishers would sign on if there weren’t DRM. My guess is that there’ll be Apple-specific DRM, like there was in iTunes, and in a few years when the publishers see how they’re selling way more ebooks through the iBooks Store, Apple will press them to drop the DRM and they’ll comply. ~fingers crossed~

What the naysayers are saying

Two of the biggest complaints I’ve heard so far are about the iPad’s lack of multitasking and Flash — both of which are complete non-issues to me.

Multitasking: First, it’s detrimental to productivity. Seriously. Not only that, but you can switch between apps on the iPad (and iPhone) fast enough that it doesn’t really matter, and the apps remember what state they were in before so it’s almost like you never even quit the app. Not allowing multitasking also really does result in more stability and better battery life. People who keep begging for multitasking are missing the boat. For more on multitasking and the iPad, read Milind Alvares’s article.

Flash: Honestly, who cares? I’ve never, ever missed having Flash on my iPhone. Ever. And believe me, it won’t be long before content creators whose stuff only works on Flash (Hulu, I’m looking at you) make iPhone/iPad apps using H.264 instead. Flash is dying. Let it die.

For more on Flash and the iPad, read John Gruber’s post. Also read Zeldman’s piece on how “lack of Flash in the iPad is a win for accessible, standards-based design.” (And HTML5 video is coming along nicely: check out the new SublimeVideo player. Only works in Chrome and Safari right now, but Firefox support is coming soon.)

My brother-in-law brought up a point that I hadn’t really considered so far: if someone emails me a document, I can’t easily save it to my iPad, edit it, and then email it back. A central Document Library (ala the Photos Library, which apps like CameraBag and Brushes can access and save to) would be nice.

The revolution

It began with the iPhone. Millions of iPhones sold, millions of customers saying that yes, they really do want a more human computing experience. They don’t want to tweak. They don’t want to fiddle. They don’t care about open v. closed. They just want something that works.

And you know what? They’re right. This is what most people need: a computer that’s easy to work with, that abstracts away all the details that don’t matter, that’s as stable as, say, a car. And on that note, check out Gruber’s comparison:

Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.

That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.

Why the iPad matters: people who aren’t “good with computers” will be able to use the iPad without having to call their tech-savvy nephew or granddaughter for help. It’s computing for the masses.

Don’t believe me? Read On iPads, Grandmas, and Game-changing, Old World and New World Computing, The iPad is the iPrius, and Future Shock.

Sure, techies who like tinkering will still be able to get old world computers. You can still buy cars with manual transmissions. But within, I don’t know, five to ten years, most computers will become like the iPad. And yes, there will be more open solutions as well (running Linux or what have you). Give it time.

This is huge. It’s perhaps one of the biggest steps we’ve ever taken towards making computers more human-friendly (and not just geek-friendly). Until the iPhone, computers were the province of magic and wizardry, or so it seemed to everyone else. No longer. And again, the iPhone has shown that this is what people want, and the iPad is going to give it to them.

Whence the excitement? This is going to revolutionize the personal computing world. It’s going to turn things on their head. It’s going to change everything.

I don’t know how, but there’s electricity in the air and my bones are telling me that this is way, way bigger than the iPhone. Steve Jobs has apparently said, “This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.” It’s Steve’s magnum opus, even more so than the iPhone or the iPod or iTunes or the original Mac. That’s saying a lot. And he’s extremely happy with it, which is also saying a lot.

Man oh man, this is better than Christmas. (Don’t tell my wife I said that. ;)) And yes, I’m saving up to buy one. (Oh, I’m also expecting iPhone OS 4.0 to be announced on Wednesday, with new multitouch gestures, some new way of organizing apps, and a new lock screen. That’s exciting too, but the tablet is the big kahuna.)

Since half the fun is in wild guessing, here, dear reader, are my speculations. I’m prepared to be wrong, but I’m also prepared to be blown away by whatever it is Apple has come up with. Blind faith? No. Apple’s recent track record gives me confidence. (Even in spite of the Apple TV.) Seriously, people, this is going to be big. Huge. This is a turning point in technology history.

Without further ado, then, here are the new Apple tablet specs…as in speculations. ;)

• Canvas. If it’s not called Canvas, then I have no idea what it’ll be called, but there’s no way it’ll be the iSlate or iPad or iTablet. Apple has better taste than that. (Granted, they do have a product line filled with iThings and MacThings, but I think this will be revolutionary enough to warrant its own new naming scheme.)
• Either a 7″ or 10″ screen. 10″ sounds more likely from what I’ve been reading on the interwebs, and it’s still small enough to carry around easily (though not in your pocket, of course). I don’t think it’ll be a phone, at least not the kind we’re used to.
• New multitouch gestures. No idea what these will be like but I’m excited to find out. I’m betting they’ll be using the fingerprint technique they patented, though.
• A brilliant new input method. I think it’ll be new but simple and, in retrospect, completely obvious. I’m not counting on a full virtual keyboard (typing on one while holding the tablet with your other hand would be a pain), definitely not on a slide-out physical keyboard or a stylus. Maybe they’ll have a small virtual keyboard slide out of the side of the screen like the OS X dock. Probably not. It’ll probably have something to do with those multitouch gestures.
• Amazing battery life. This might be solar-powered (Apple has already patented the idea) or something else, but for a tablet to really become ubiquitous, the battery life has to be a lot better than anything we’ve seen before. They might not be quite there yet, but I’d bet that within five to ten years we’ll have infinite battery life. No more charging — your phone and computer will always have power. Mmm.
• New OS. By which I mean something that isn’t OS X and isn’t iPhone OS but has a shared core. It’ll probably be more similar to iPhone OS than to OS X. It has to be if they’re going to reinvent computing for the masses. (It’ll sandbox things so users don’t have to worry about where files are saved, for example.) It’s not just going to be a Mac tablet. It’s going to be something new.
• Both 3G and wifi. In 2010, constant access to the Internet is a must. Since free wifi isn’t ubiquitous yet, I’m betting Apple’s worked a deal with Verizon (as has been rumored for a year or two now). No plan necessary, just like the Kindle.
• $1000 price tag. While I wish it would be cheaper ($300–400), it’ll probably start out expensive. (I’m betting part of this will be the packaged 3G plan price. More expensive in the short term but far more cost-effective in the long.) But to become ubiquitous, and for normal people to justify buying one if they already have a computer and already have a phone, it almost has to be cheaper. We’ll see.
• Books. With the larger screen, books can be beautiful. I can’t wait. And Apple has apparently been in talks with HarperCollins, so they’re obviously thinking about books on some level. I see this going one of two ways — either they come up with a specialized ebook file format (hopefully based on EPUB) and sell books directly on the iTunes Store just like music, or they go the App Store route and let publishers package up the books themselves and sell them as apps that happen to be book readers (as is currently the case on the iPhone). I’m hoping for the former, because I think that would do a lot more good for the ebook world (giving more weight to the EPUB standard and hopefully making it the MP3 of books), but I’m betting on the latter. I’m wondering if iTunes LP is also connected to this somehow…
• New section of App Store. They’re not just going to scale iPhone apps up to tablet size. Microsoft would do that, but Apple won’t, because Apple has good taste. No, tablet apps will have to be written specifically for the tablet. There might be a lot of shared functionality (so it won’t be that hard to port apps over), but you won’t be able to just press a button and have your app work on the tablet.

Are they going to use the new haptic feedback technology? Probably not, but dang, it would be cool.

Speaking of cool, I do expect some cool, glamorous new technology in the tablet, but the more exciting thing (for me, anyway) will be the re-envisioning of how we use computers. The iPhone paved the first part of the road, making a pocket computing device that normal people can easily use. The tablet is the next big step.

Will it be as powerful as, say, a Mac? No. But it doesn’t have to be. The tablet isn’t going to be aimed at those of us who live and breathe computers (though we’ll use it, too), and it’s not going to do everything that a full-blown computer can do, but it’s going to do the things that matter, and it’s going to do them in a simple, easy, enjoyable way that normal people can understand. It’s going to make using a computer as easy as using a toaster.

That’s why the tablet is going to change the world.

Update: If you want the wallpaper image I used here (which I made in Photoshop), you can get it from Flickr — I’ve posted it in 1920×1200 (which I use on my iMac) and 1440×900 (which I use on my MBP).

Less really is more here. This feels so much less cluttered and so much more productive than it did when my desktop was full of files.

What I did

I’ve turned off all desktop icons (no more using the desktop as a storage area), gotten rid of as many menubar status icons as I could (I’m keeping battery, clock, and Spotlight because I use them, but I haven’t yet figured out how to get rid of Dropbox or JustNotes), and trimmed my dock (which has been on autohide for a while now) so it’s just a list of apps that are running.

Also: I used the Secrets prefpane to move the default screen capture location from the desktop to ~/Documents/Screenshots. Works like a charm.

How I get by

To launch apps and get to folders, I use Quicksilver and Finder. I also have Visor, which lets me pull down a terminal at any time (I’m using Control-. for the shortcut) (I’m also using Control-< and Control-> to move between tabs in Visor).

The future

I wish I could autohide the menubar the same way I do the dock. (MenuShade looked like a solution until I realized it doesn’t work on Snow Leopard.)

I also want to figure out how to get rid of the menubar icons for Dropbox and JustNotes. Update: I used Dock Dodger to get rid of the JustNotes dock icon and set JustNotes to hide the menubar icon. (Thanks to Wade Shearer for the tip.) Second update: I found a screencast on hiding the Dropbox menubar icon. But I’m not sure anymore that I actually want to get rid of it — it’s useful for seeing if things are fully synced. Hmm. We’ll see.

I’ve thought about using GeekTool to put a clock straight on my desktop, but that really just goes against the whole minimalism philosophy. If I can get my menubar to autohide, then I don’t want to see anything on the desktop.

Next on my agenda: figure out a file organization scheme that actually works.

(And no, silly, this isn’t the most important consideration on my list. But it’s up there. And who said I have a list anyway?)

TweetDeck

The deck idea is cool, but I’m a minimalist, and even when you collapse the decks down to a single column, it’s still too big for me. I do really like the search feature, along with being able to group your followees, and of the three clients, TweetDeck was fastest on the updates. It’s an AIR app, by the way. There didn’t seem to be too much of a footprint other than in screen real estate, which helped. I like my Twitter apps slim and lean. The reply/d/r/f buttons didn’t really do it for me, though, and while the typography wasn’t bad, it still wasn’t great. Too much information.

twhirl

Also an AIR app. It’s smaller than TweetDeck and has support for multiple accounts, both of which are nice. But there were just way too many buttons. That killed it for me. Too much noise, too many options, not enough hierarchy to show me which ones are important and which aren’t. Bzzt. I didn’t really care for the typography at all — too messy.

Twitterrific

And we come to the final contender, which I’ve been using since I got serious with Twitter. Twitterrific is the smallest of the three (screen-wise) and the cleanest and simplest. Sure, you can’t do everything you can from the others (or from the website), but that’s okay. Twitter is small by nature (140 characters and all) and Twitterrific feels like it fits that mentality the best. It also has the best typography, in my opinion — clean and clear. I don’t really need to know when the tweet was or where it came from. I really just don’t care.

My three beefs with Twitterrific, however, are that (1) the “What are you doing?” entry box is so small that you can only see part of your tweet at a time, (2) updates sometimes take a little while to show up, and (3) you can only use one Twitter account at a time. You really need to be able to see your whole tweet at once, especially when you hit the 140-character limit and need to rewrite. And when you’ve got multiple Twitter accounts, it isn’t fun having to log out and log in again each time.

In spite of these three issues, Twitterrific is still my favorite, and I’m standing by it. (And hoping they’ll fix the problems. :)) I’ve got it on my iPhone as well. It’s small, simple, and fast (other than the updates), and it fits me like a glove. Vive la Twitterrific. ;)

Michael Birkeland was arrested on Friday after police say he stole a computer from Utah Valley University. The man, who is used to being in front of the camera, was actually caught because of a camera built in the computer…. Two days later, the victim logged onto Skype and, thanks to the built in camera in his MacBook Pro computer, he could see exactly who was using his stolen computer over the Internet.

Kind of sad to see even LDS actors messing their lives up, but really, who are we kidding — we’re not invulnerable to all of that. We’re human just like everyone else, and if we let go, we fall, just like the rest.

On a lighter note, three cheers for Macs and their built-in iSight cameras! That part was awesome. :)

The only significant downside I’m seeing with the phone right now is the battery life. Not sure what to do about that… Anyway, I’m sure that’ll get better, somehow. And in the meantime I’m laboriously transferring my contact list over to Address Book so I can sync it with the phone. (I could do it automatically, yes, but by doing it manually I get to do some spring cleaning as well, getting rid of contacts I really don’t need anymore. It feels good to chloroform the inner packrat.)

[tags]iPhone[/tags]

Other rumors include Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6, for more see Daring Fireball), Mobile Me (the renovation of .Mac, and Apple did buy me.com last week, so this is likely), and a Mac tablet of sorts. Along with a new MacBook Pro or something. Even if just one or two of these things are true, life in the Mac world will be good. Man, I can’t wait!

And for those non-Mac people who think all this hype is hogwash, well, you may be right (and you may not :)), but you have to admit that WWDC and MacWorld Expo are a heck of a lot of fun. It’s like Christmas. (The presents part of Christmas, that is. :)) There’s something giddy and goosebumpy about events like these — people care. Yes, Apple’s main goal is to make money. But we Mac people are a community, a family. And Steve’s got surprises up those black turtleneck sleeves. And both of those are what makes WWDC so exciting. Mmm.

[tags]WWDC, Apple, Mac[/tags]

One last thing: if you’re on a Mac, check out Fluid. Very cool. (I use it for Gmail and Facebook now. Be sure to get the nice icons.)

[tags]New Play Project, Fluid, Mac[/tags]