Alessandro Vernet's Blog

XPath: First Weekday Following a Given Date

2008-07-18T12:03:00.000-07:00

You are given a date d. If that date does not fall on a weekday, you would like to find the first weekday date that follows d. The following XPath code will do the trick:

for $start in xs:date('2008-07-19') return
    (: Get date plus two following dates, i.e. candidate dates :)
    (for $i in (0 to 2) return 
        $start + xs:dayTimeDuration(concat('P', $i, 'D')))
    (: Only keep date on week dates :)
    [number(format-date(., '[F0]', 'en', (), ())) le 5]
    (: Take first possible date :)
    [1]

In the above expression, the date (7/19/2008) is just provided as a string, so you can quickly test this, for instance in the XPath Sandbox. The expression uses the XSLT format-date() function to find the day of the week for a given date. Unfortunately this function is strictly speaking not an XPath function, but some engine will bend the rule and still expose it to you for convenience, as does Orbeon Forms.

TextMate Keyboard Shortcuts

2008-06-09T17:15:00.000-07:00

Those who have been reading this blog know that I like IntelliJ and blogged about it a number of times in the past. But let's admit it: IntelliJ is a big guy. It is heavy. Starting IntelliJ takes minutes. Even alt-tabbing to IntelliJ after not using it for a while can take minutes. And all this on a fairly top-of-the-line laptop. This led me to experiment with other editors, in particular TextMate.

TextMate compares more to Emacs or SlickEdit. So it won't replace IntelliJ for everything, but I have been using it for a week and it worked quite well for simpler tasks. For those of you who would also be starting to use TextMate, I put below a list of the keyboard shortcuts I use the most. I hope you will find it useful, and if you have other suggestions please post them in the comments.

Bundles

Subversion: ^⇧ A
Diff: ^⇧⌘ D

Line/block operations

Duplicate: ^⇧ D
Delete: ^⇧ K
Move: ^⌘ up/down
Indent: ⌥⌘ [

Find

Find in project: ⇧⌘ F
Copy to find buffer: ⌘ E
Go to file: ⌘ T
Go to symbol: ⇧⌘ T

Copy/paste

Paste previous: ⇧⌘ V
Paste stack: ⇧⌥⌘ V

Reveal

In project: ^⌘ R
In Finder: ^⇧⌘ R

Misc

Completion: Esc
Disable/enable check spelling as you type: ⌘⌥ ;

Twitterrific Wishlist

2008-04-08T13:32:00.000-07:00

Twitterrific is a great little program. If you are a Twitter user and have a Mac, I can wholeheartedly recommend it to you. But it could be even better, so here is my wish list for Twitterrific:

New feature: A new search or filter, so we can quickly see all the twits with a certain keyword, or from/to a certain person.
Consistency: Show outgoing direct messages in the timeline. Incoming direct messages can be shown, but the messages you send are never shown.
Bug fix: The text field looses its focus when alt-tabbing to another application and then coming back to Twitterrific.
New feature: Support for multiple Twitter accounts used at the same time. (From what I read this one is coming.)

Basecamp new Feature: "Reply by email"

2008-04-07T16:05:00.000-07:00

37 signals launched a new feature in Basecamp: the ability to reply to messages posted on Basecamp directly with your email client. This is great; in principle it should make Basecamp messages more useful, and I always like to see more features added to the products we are using (and paying for every month!).

I gave it a try this morning. My assessment so far is that it doesn't work well enough to be useful. Until at least some of the issues are taken care of, I will not use this feature and I will not recommend that our clients use it either. Here are few show stoppers:

It doesn't deal well with end of lines. See for instance what other users will see when I post a message by sending a reply from Gmail:
When you reply to a message from your mail client, in most cases the mail client will quote the message and add before that something that reads: On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 2:51 PM, such and such wrote. This line isn't removed by Basecamp. It will stay there at the end of all your messages.
If you try to get around this issue by just removing the entire quoted text before typing in your message, your message won't back posted. You will receive an email from Basecamp telling you your message wasn't posted, but that reply does not contain a References header so it can be recognized as part of the same thread by your mail client, and it does not contain your message. So essentially you don't know which message didn't go through.

Screen Sharing Software: Some Are Good, Most Are Bad

2008-03-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

I recently tried a number of screen sharing applications and have been generally disappointed:

Yugma has been my favorite for a while, until Yugma came out with version 3. When it version 3 was first released I had a number of problems, which I finally managed to solve, but others I am using this tool with are having similar problems, and when they do it is in general the end of the story. Verdict: failed.
Yuuguu, despite the ridiculous name, worked more often than Yugma. Unfortunately it has been very unreliable: the connection to the server is dropping on a regular basis, forcing all the participants to rejoin the meeting. Verdict: failed.
DimDim doesn't support screen sharing on the Mac. It also does so many things, like providing document sharing and a shared white board, that I am worried they won't focus enough on screen sharing. I tried the it on Windows and found a number of refresh issues. Verdict: failed.
Vyew is comparable to DimDim. Screen sharing didn't on a Mac from Firefox (the whole interface got locked up) but it worked from Safari. They have a page with known bugs, which was unaccessible at the time of this writing. It works from Windows, but people on the other side see a resized view of the screen with is always either too large or too small depending on the size of your browser window. (There doesn't seem to be a "show in 1:1 button".) Also the interface is way to cluttered for my taste. Verdict: close.
WebEx MeetMeNow is WebEx "affordable" offering ($50/month per account), but it doesn't work on the Mac. Verdict: failed.
GoToMeeting, like WebEx MeetMeNow is priced at $50/month, and like WebEx also doesn't work on the Mac. Verdict: failed.
Glance does just screen sharing (I like that!). It is simple and works smoothly both on Mac and Windows. Pricing is reasonable at $50/month. It just lacks one crucial feature: the ability, as a host, to make one of the attendees the presenter. If you don't need this feature, this might be a good solution for you. Verdict: close.
LiveLook is very much like Glance, without the need to install a software, but with the same limitation: the host can't make an attendee the presenter. You pay 2.5 cents per minute per attendee. So a 1 hour meeting with 3 other people will cost you $4.50. Verdict: close.

The best I have found so far is WebHuddle. Here is what I like about it:

It works both on Mac and Windows.
No installation is required; it runs entirely from your browser.
It is based on open source software; it you wish, you can install WebHuddle on your own servers.
You can schedule meetings, send a link to participants. Participants don't have to register; they just need to enter their name and email to join.
You can switch to a full-color mode (called "JPEG mode"), so participants can see your screen exactly as you do.
You can make other participants the presenter, at which point they can share their screen.

WebHuddle isn't perfect: the UI has room for improvements, and you can't let another participant control your mouse and keyboard. Still, if you use screen sharing, you should really give it a try.

If you are using other screen sharing tools not mentioned here and that work well for you, please let me know in a comment below.

Better Technology, More Facts, Better Politics

2008-03-27T10:03:00.000-07:00

TUAW writes:

The iPhone transforms people like me from insufferable know-it-alls to insufferable know-it-alls with the entire Internet in our pants. (Or fashionable handbag.) (Or manziere.) (BRO!) Google and Wikipedia don't equate to wisdom and understanding, but they provide inexhaustible streams of on-the-spot factoids. End those "Who's right?" arguments fast.

Most phones today are using GPRS for data, which is painfully slow. GPRS still does miracles when you are on the go and don't have any other option, but it is not "Internet at your fingertips". Because of this, you still rarely see people, and even geeks, take out their phone to check a fact during a discussion.

All this of course will change with 3G, faster processors, and cheaper phones. We can now be confident that a few years from now we'll all have a phone in our pocket or purse that will enable us to very comfortably access the Internet.

Will this change the nature of face-to-face conversations? Will the phone succeed in becoming a tool that enhances our face-to-face experience?

Twitter: A Few Things I Like About It

2008-03-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

It is simple. It doesn't impose much on you. It provides a layer of social network / public IM on top of what you already use. Unlike Facebook, it doesn't try to replace a lot of the tool you already use; it doesn't try to be the your only destination to do everything online.
It is public. Most of what is going on on Twitter is entirely public. It isn't siloed; it isn't made available to circle of friends you choose. The fact that every twit is public, archived, and searchable keeps people honest.
140 characters forces all us to be concise, to go directly to the point.
It is open: you can access or post on Twitter from a number of different software and devices. Use text messages, www.twitter.com from your desktop browser, m.twitter.com from the browser on your phone, or an application like Twitterrific (native on the Mac) or Twirl (AIR).
You only see twits from people you decide to follow. People can direct message you (send you a private twit), but only if you follow them. This keeps spam out of the system.

Yuuguu: Screen sharing, Free and Easy

2008-03-20T15:19:00.000-07:00

Yes, Yuuguu is a ridiculous name. Do you picture yourself asking a client to join you for a meeting on... Yuuguu? But it has some great features compared to many other similar tools I have used in the past:

Signing up is super-fast. Download the tool (they have Windows and Mac versions), run it, register with the service, and you're up and running.
When you are sharing your screen with other people, Yuuguu tells you what the current delay is before viewers see an update. This way you can pace yourself, without having to ask people "have you seen that? do you see now my screen with X on it?"
By default, Yuuguu reduces the number of colors for the images it sends, to reduce bandwidth usage and improve speed. But sometimes colors do matter. Yuuguu lets you choose if you want to use "real colors" or not, and you can switch back and forth during your presentation.
If you just want to share your screen with someone who won't need to share back their screen with you, you can just point them to a web page, ask them to enter a PIN, and they will see your screen in their browser, with no registration required on their part.

Give it try, and let me know what you think.

iPhone SDK and the Single Application Policy

2008-03-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

Apple announced last week that you will be able to run only one application at a time on the iPhone. This means you won't be able to have applications that run in the background, maybe keep a connection open to a server and notify you when appropriate.

I see really two classes of applications that will be in great demand:

Games. Obviously.
Push applications.

By push applications, I mean applications that always have the latest information for you ready to use. (That information can be pushed through a connection which is left open, or the application can poll the server from time to time to download the latest information is almost an implementation detail as far as this discussion is concerned.)

Consider these examples:

An IM client;
A Twitter client that notifies you when one of your friends have posted a new message;
A Podcast application that downloads shows over the air (say at 3 in the morning, so it doesn't bother anyone);
A New York Times reader, which always have pre-downloaded for you all the latest articles from the New York Times;
A Skype client, which notifies you when someone is calling you.

It looks like Apple's policy will prevent developers from creating this type of applications. Talk about a missed opportunity!

Troubleshooting Yugma v3

2008-03-14T10:47:00.001-07:00

I have been using Yugma for a while but recently had some problem, like many other, when upgrading to Yugma v3. My understanding is that when you go to the Yugma home page and click on start a session, the site checks through an applet if you have Yugma already installed:

If Yugma is installed, it starts it.
Otherwise it asks you to download the Yugma installer.

Somehow my machine must have been stuck between the two, with the applet thinking that Yugma was installed, but then failing to run Yugma. Symptoms for this are errors like "Application cannot run without client.properties file" or "Error number 1". Here is what I did to install Yugma on my Mac:

Download Yugma SE. This is still based on Yugma v2, and installs just fine.
Start Yuma SE, login into Yugma, make sure that everything works as expected.
Download the Yugma Mac Installer. (Thanks Erik for the link!) (If you are on Windows, you need the Yugma Windows Installer instead.)
Run the installer. At the end it will complain about a missing client.properties. Acknowledge; this will exit Yugma.
Copy the file /Applications/YugmaSE/properties/client.properties to /Applications/Yugma/properties.
Now start /Applications/Yugma.app. If everything works, you're back in business!

On Pride

2008-03-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

Instead of putting down on paper (that is, virtual blog paper) some philosophical considerations on pride, I though I would just share with you a few quotes on the subject. Enjoy.

Avarice, envy, pride,
Three fatal sparks, have set the hearts of all
On Fire.
- Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321), The Divine Comedy
Pride sullies the noblest character.
- Claudianus
Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918 - ), The Gulag Archipelago
Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
- Bible, Proverbs xvi. 18.

Installing BEA WebLogic on Mac OS X

2008-02-27T07:42:00.000-08:00

WebLogic Server is not supported on Mac OS X, but you can still run WebLogic on Mac OS X and here is how. (Of course I wouldn't doing this in production, but doing this in development should be fine.)

Download WebLogic Server listed in the Package Installer section. In the Select OS drop-down, choose IBM AIX. This will give you the WebLogic generic package.
From the command line, run: java -Dos.name=unix -jar server922_generic.jar. Follow the wizard to complete the installation.
Edit the file ~/bea/weblogic92/samples/domains/wl_server/bin/setDomainEnv.sh look for the line where the MEM_ARGS environment variable is set. Add this declaration: -XX:MaxPermSize=128m.
Start WebLogic: ~/bea/weblogic92/samples/domains/wl_server/bin/startWebLogic.sh. Once the server is started you will see the following message on the console: Server started in RUNNING mode.
Access your instance of WebLogic at http://localhost:7001/. You should see the WebLogic "getting started" page.

To deploy a web application (war file):

Uncompress the war file in the directory where you would like the application to be deployed.
Go to the WebLogic Administration Console from http://localhost:7001/console/. The default login/password is weblogic/weblogic.
Click the Lock & Edit button (top left).
Under Deployments select Install.
Select the directory you created in #1. Two screens later, under Source accessibility, make sure you select the radio button I will make the deployment accessible from the following location. This way WebLogic won't copy your web application to its own private directory but will instead use directly the files in the directory you mentioned.
Finish the deployment, save. Under Deployments, start the application.
Access your application from http://localhost:7001/orbeon/, if orbeon was the name the directory you choose in step #5.

Once your application is running, you might want to monitor the following log files:

~bea/weblogic92/samples/domains/wl_server/servers/examplesServer/logs/examplesServer.log - The main WebLogic log file.
bea/weblogic92/samples/domains/logs/orbeon.log - If the application you are deploying is Orbeon Forms, then this will be the location of the Orbeon Forms log file.

References:

Gmail IMAP + Apple Mail + lots of messages = Constant disk activity

2008-02-26T11:16:00.000-08:00

I am a long time Gmail user, but have started using Apple Mail with Gmail over IMAP just a few weeks ago. Lately I noticed that:

The disk activity is almost constant while Mail is running.
Mail is constantly synchronizing and downloading messages from the
server.

The almost constant disk activity is the most annoying issue, as all the applications feel sluggish when Mail is heavily using the disk, as if the machine was swapping. I can see the constant activity of Mail with fs_usage -w -f filesys Mail.

Message synchronization is causing lots of downstream network traffic (constantly about 20-30 KB/s). As annoying as this is, with a pretty good connection, this level of network traffic doesn't have as much immediate impact as heavy disk activity.

A few data points:

My All Mail contains more than 110,000 messages, about 2.4 GB or 35% of the Gmail quota.
My ~/Library/Mail folder weighs a little more than 5 GB.

I haven't found any good solution to this issue yet. If you also have this problem, here a couple of workarounds:

Exit Mail when you are not using it. (I had to state the obvious.)
To avoid exiting and starting Mail, you can stop the process and resume it. To stop it run killall -STOP Mail, to resume it run killall -CONT Mail. Some applications don't like being stopped and resumed; I haven't noticed any negative side effects with Mail, but use this at your own risk.

And of course, if you have a hint or advise, please post a comment here. I will make sure to update this post if I hear about a solution.

Online Advertisement: How Can It Make So Much Money?

2008-02-14T17:20:00.000-08:00

I am consistently amazed by how much money is being made through online advertisement.

Question: How much money do you think Google or Yahoo is making per search?

Answer: According to TechCrunch, it is 9 cents for Google and 4 cents for Yahoo.

This is much more than most of the people I have talked with would have expected. And frankly, I find it hard to comprehend how this amount can be so high. As far as I can remember, I can't recall ever clicking on an advertisement shown by Google search. Granted, most people out there are not using the Web the way my friends and I do. But still, 9 cents per search?!

This is for search. Now let's look at blogs. Russ has been documenting how much he has been making through advertisement on his blog. Recently he mentioned that when his blog had 10,000 page views per day he was making about $100 per day with Google AdSense. That gets you to 1 cent per page view. 1 cent isn't as good as 9, and evidently searches are easier to monetize than page views on a blog, but this is still pretty darn good. Surprisingly so.

* That tells you how good Google is compared to Yahoo at picking the right advertisements.

PayPal Facebook Application

2008-02-13T12:41:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, by mistake I typed "x" in the URL bar of my iPhone and pressed the Go button (that Go button is just below the backspace button; go figure!). I watched the phone go www.x.com and started to aim for cancel, as I expect some p0rn page to show up. Thanks to WiFi (or to me being utterly slow), the page loaded before I got a chance to hit cancel.

Surprise: x.com is owned by PayPal, who is now using the domain for their PayPal Labs site. (I should have known that as my bank account was with X.com at some point, before PayPal gave up on that line of business after their merger with X.com.)

One interesting bit came out of this: the PayPal Money Request application for Facebook. It seems to give you a nice and simple interface to send money requests to your friends, say to split the bill. It certainly looks much better than what you get by going to the PayPal site. And maybe, just maybe, that will be the first Facebook application that I would really find useful.

Microsoft, Yahoo, and Goodwill Value

2008-02-03T15:31:00.000-08:00

The term goodwill value is accounting term. It is also used more loosely to refer to that part of a company valuation created by the positive perception of the company from clients, customers, and the general public.

This reminds of a test that was performed by AOL to compare the quality of their search engine to the one of other companies, like Google. They gathered people in a room, and asked them to rate how well the results given by different search engine matched what they were looking for. The verdict of the people was clear: Google was better. There was only one issue: AOL Search was always returning the exact same results as Google, because AOL Search was using the Google search engine. So why did people like better the result from the "real" Google? Most likely, because they trusted Google more. That trust has a real monetary value.

Good mergers create value; they create a whole which is greater than the sum of the parts. But I fear that if Yahoo gets acquired by Microsoft, a lot of goodwill value that has built by Yahoo over the years will lost. This would be bad for the people at Yahoo who worked all those years to build this value, and for the web as a whole.

Or as Russ puts it, more succinctly:

Anyone who stays after a MS purchase won't be working there for the love of the company, that's for sure.

Memory Settings for IntelliJ

2008-01-28T10:50:00.000-08:00

By default IntelliJ is setup to use a maximum of 192 MB of heap. The JVM memory settings are as follows:

-Xms16m -Xmx192m -XX:MaxPermSize=92m

I have found this to be almost always too low, systematically resulting in OutOfMemoryError. So every time I install a new version of IntelliJ, the first thing I do it to change this setting with:

-Xms16m -Xmx392m -XX:MaxPermSize=92m

If you are on a Mac, you can do this by editing the following file* and searching for -Xms in the file:

/Applications/Selena-7670.app/Contents/Info.plist

* Replace Selena-7670 with the name of your the IntelliJ executable, which, if you are using regular releases instead of EAP builds, will look more like IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.

The Right Title

2008-01-26T16:01:00.000-08:00

Aircraft Crashes on Los Angeles Freeway. This is the headline of an article I see today on the New York Time home page. Sounds like a major event, doesn't it?

Click on the link, start reading the article, and you will see that the aircraft wasn't a plane but and helicopter. This is a tragic event: the pilot died in the crash, and I can't help to think that whoever crafted that title made it imprecise on purpose to lead people into thinking that this is a bigger story that it really is. Is this ethical, especially since this is a tragic event?

Reformat XML with XML Spy

2008-01-25T13:43:00.000-08:00

If you wouldn't think of IntelliJ when looking for an XML editor, think again: IntelliJ is a great XML editor. As a matter of fact, it has been my XML editor of choice many year now.

But I have to admit: IntelliJ isn't perfect; in particular, it is very slow at reformatting XML on large files. Say you have a document that weighs a few MB and you want to reformat it to make it more readable. This happens to me frequently when dealing with XML generated by Microsoft Word, which likes to put pretty much everything on a single line. Going through a few MB of XML all in one single line not what I would describe as an enjoyable experience. So here is the trick:

Open your large XML file in XML Spy, reformat it, and save it.
Open the newly formatted file in IntelliJ (or your favorite editor).

XML Spy is able to reformat large XML files in a breeze. So refreshing!

Delete All Files With Exceptions Using find

2008-01-24T12:11:00.001-08:00

Gavin suggested a clever trick to recursively get the list of all the files in in a directory, except those under .svn. It goes like this:

find WEB-INF -path "*/.svn" -prune -o -print

I used this quite a bit, but never thought about how this really works, until today:

The -o is an or operator. So either -path "*/.svn" -prune or -print is true. Let's look at each part.
The first part -path "*/.svn" is true for the .svn directories and with -prune we skip the content of those directories.
If you just had the first part, you would be skipping over the content of the .svn directories, but not over the directory itself. The second part -print prints what isn't matched by the first part (because of the or). So it won't print the .svn directories.

For sure, this is not the most intuitive expression I have ever seen! Now we can extend this to do other things. For instance the expression below will delete all the files in the current directory, but it won't delete:

directories;
files in the CVS directories.

find . -path "*/CVS" -prune -o -type f -exec rm {} \;

This can be useful for instance when you have files checked out from CVS or Subversion and want to replace all your files by a copy of those files that you receive from someone in an archive.

Twitter: No Usable RSS Feed

2008-01-23T16:06:00.001-08:00

Twitter is simple. It lets you do only two things:

Post a 140 character status message.
See the status of the people you are following (to use the right Twitter terminology).

How to do that?

Updating your status must be one of those operations you can do really fast. I don't want to go to a web site for that. I imagine a dashboard widget would work nicely. I tested two (Twitterlex and Twidget). They both are not quite usable. IM is another option, but only GTalk/Jabber is officially supported, and it works only if you have a single Twitter account.
Twitter provides an RSS feed with the updates of those you are following. But you need to be authenticated to read it. So that feed won't work online feed readers, such as Google Reader. Bummer.

What's the opposite of so far so good?

Happy Employees Are More Productive, or Are They?

2008-01-22T14:56:00.000-08:00

You would think that happy employees are more productive. At least I would. On that premise, companies are spending quite a bit of money to improve the workplace.

While there indeed is a correlation between happiness and productivity, increasing happiness does not necessarily increase productivity. Read what Nathan Bowling has to say about this, as quoted by Freakonomics:

My study shows that a cause and effect relationship does not exist between job satisfaction and performance. Instead, the two are related because both satisfaction and performance are the result of employee personality characteristics, such as self-esteem, emotional stability, extroversion and conscientiousness.

Or said otherwise: both happiness and productivity are causes of other factors, themselves not necessarily well known and easy to identify or quantify. So just increasing happiness independently of those factors does not necessarily influence productivity.

What is the most interesting about all this is to see how easily we mistake a correlation for a causality. Because two factors are correlated does not automatically mean that one is the cause of the other. If there is one lesson to be learned from Freakonomics, it would have to be this one.

Google Drive (GDrive) Coming Soon

2008-01-21T17:32:00.000-08:00

I have been surprised to see how quickly the free storage capacity on Gmail has been increased during the last few month of 2007. Wikipedia has some numbers for us:

On 12 October 2007, Google ramped up the storage counter to 5.37 MB per hour. Approximately a week later, the counter went back down to 1.12 MB per hour. This adds up to about 806 MB per month or over 9.8 GB per year. From 4 January 2008, the counter went back down to about 3.35 MB per day.

While some people will end up using a significant portion of this space, most people, even power users, won't. So what is the point of increasing the storage capacity to those level? Maybe Google is just doing it because they can. I will be optimistic here and predict that Google is drastically ramping up their storage infrastructure to get ready for a new file storage service, often referred to as Google Drive or GDrive, that they are planning to launch later this year.

More Features not Announced and the $20 Upgrade

2008-01-16T12:18:00.000-08:00

Listening to MacBreak Weekly's Keynote Analysis made me realize how many iPhone features were not announced at the keynote. Even some that we expected to have in the iPhone when it first came out, as most modern phone have those capabilities:

Take video video clips
Send and receive multimedia messages (attaching photos and video clips)

Of interest was the $20 upgrade for the iPod touch. Andy noted, somewhat sarcastically, that this must be a way for Apple to test their upcoming iPhone/iPod touch software store accessible though iTunes.

It could also be the beginning a a trend for Apple: I have been wondering how Apple would deal with software updates to the iPhone. Should they make the updates available only on the latest iPhones, or should they make them also available for free for older iPhones? Maybe Apple will pick a way which is somewhere in the middle: make the updates available to existing iPhone, but for a charge. This is somehow similar to what Apple is doing with new releases of Mac OS X.

Steve Jobs Keynote: What Apple Did Not Announced

2008-01-15T14:07:00.000-08:00

This morning, the MacBook air was the big thing: a super-portable laptop, both cool and expensive. It is innovative, but maybe not as much as the "tablet iPod touch" some imagined (like an iPod touch, but with a much larger work surface).

For those of us interested in the iPhone, Steve's keynote this morning was almost a non-event. We had a minor upgrade to the iPhone software; really nothing earth shattering. I (any many others) expected Apple to announce at least a couple of items from the list below:

A new 3G iPhone to be released in June, maybe also equipped with a GPS and tactile feedback
A new Apple Bluetooth stereo headset which you can use with the iPhone (A2DP)
A new ultra-small Bluetooth keyboard for the iPhone (or maybe this one is more wishful thinking on my part than a prediction)
Some of the new iPhone applications created by vendors who go an early access to the iPhone development kit

I am not sure that we tend to underestimate what technologies can do in the long term, as Ray would argue, but for sure we overestimate what they can do in the short term.