I don’t think it has Apple too worried — it won’t be a direct competitor to the iPad, as much as a different way to make use of the tablet form factor. Amazon understands a few things that all of Apple’s competitors have so far missed: simplicity, value and a complete ecosystem (read: iTunes Store) are what people want in a tablet.

Imagine: a Kindle for movies/TV/music, as well as books. If Amazon can follow through and produce, say, a lightly-subsidized $199 tablet that performs a few media-consumption-related functions very well, makes media purchasing easy, and is actually complete upon release… It will fly off the shelves. (And Amazon will finally get a finger into Apple’s media-sales pie.)

Interestingly, this will position the iPad and its app ecosystem (which the cram-an-entire-PC-into-a-Tablet crowd views as hopelessly limited) as the *high* end of the popular tablet market. The Amazon device will suddenly fit the popular “but it’s only good for media consumption” mantra that keeps being leveled at the iPad; which will make the iPad look like a productivity workhorse in comparison.

[Nigel Dessau, Chief marketing Officer of AMD] is similarly skeptical about Ultrabook as a separate category, but acknowledges AMD will be working with customers to build ultra-then portables. “We are all going that way,” he said.

— WSJ Blog

I’m sure it would suit Apple just fine if AMD created ultra-then portables.

Matt Neuburg’s post expressing frustration at OS X Lion’s Automatic Termination (John Siracusa explains) is well-reasoned, and correct. Lion is behaving badly.

I’m honestly not sure what to think about Lion’s Machiavellian Automatic Transmission push these days. But just to play devil’s advocate for a moment:

What if Lion’s problem is actually that it  hasn’t enforced its dictatorship enough?

I agree that Lion’s decision to take the reigns, terminate TextEdit unasked (though only kind’ve), and remove it from the alt-tab UI and dock is over-reaching… But maybe instead of throwing the whole idea out, Apple needs to push the UI farther.

Ever since it was introduced by Windows 3.0, alt-tab has been used to cycle through open applications. iOS’ version of a task switcher flipped the script, instead showing us recently-used applications, open or not. It seems to me that if the command-tab interface were updated to show those applications that were recently used, it wouldn’t matter to the user whether Lion in fact had them in memory at the moment. Command-tabbing to TextEdit would simply ‘re-open’ the program, lickety-split — with everything as it was when it was terminated. It would feel as though the user had ‘switched’ back.

(Of course, this introduces new questions: What trigger, aside from a manual Quit command, would remove an application from the alt-tab interface? At what point, if ever, would a hibernating application disappear from Mission Control?)

Lion is a transitional OS, firmly planted between Apple’s past and its future. We see this in other awkward Lion moments: pages in Safari move with the user’s gesture, while system preferences panes are still navigable using in the old “Leftward Swipe Mean Backwards” abstraction.

Could this be a similarly half-baked implementation that will make better sense as Apple more firmly asserts its unibody aluminum fist?

I like this photo. Something about the light and shadow restores Hoboken Station to its former glory and nostalgia.

Dude needs to be wearing a fedora, though.

Now that I have a decent camera in my pocket at all times, I’m going to begin posting a picture-a-day. Or at least, a picture-on-most-days. As a rule, my pictures-a-day will come straight out of the camera, with no Photoshop or other strange magic (except resizing) applied.

I’m stoked to have a macro lens now! Even flies in coffeeshops can be pretty with a macro.

Not such a problem for long shots, but it requires a bit of premeditation if your shot will change depth of field over the course of filming.