I've pretty much given up making predictions when it comes to
Macworld (in public, anyway). My last attempt resulted in a
decidedly split decision (see Pass the Crow, Please). However, I
won't be shy about offering up a few suggestion to Steve and the
crowd in Cupertino. I'm not saying we will see these things anytime
soon, but we sure could use them.
1. Tablet Mac
The Windows world has had Tablet PCs available for some time.
While available from a variety of manufacturers, only Fujitsu and
Hewlett-Packard have true tablet PCs; that is, a PC that looks like
a tablet you write on.
Most of the other manufacturers of Tablet PCs produce
convertible notebooks. These are essentially regular notebook
computers with the screen attached at a pivot point so it can be
positioned in the conventional manner and used as a notebook or
have the screen swing around and become more of a tablet.
Regardless of the model, most allow input directly onto the
screen with a stylus.
As I was writing this article, I received a press release
announcing that, at Macworld, a new product (would you believe a
tablet Mac!) would be released! Much to my surprise, this
announcement was not from Apple, but rather from Other World Computing
in partnership with Axiotron.
This raised far more questions than answers. First, how exactly
can they do this? Unless I've missed something, Apple hasn't been
licensing OS X to third-party manufacturers for almost ten
years. Unless that's about to change (which I doubt), the most
likely scenario is that OWC and Axiotron have modified an actual
MacBook or MacBook Pro, converting it into a tablet Mac and calling
it the Modbook.
From a technical standpoint, this wouldn't be too difficult.
Just remove the screen at the hinges, substitute a touch-sensitive
screen, reaffix it to the base of the MacBook in such a way to be
conducive to input directly on the screen, and install the
appropriate driver.
I could see this being done either as a convertible or by
actually removing the entire top of the notebook, including the
keyboard, and replacing it with a touchscreen. I personally prefer
the one-piece design that looks like a tablet over the
convertibles, but it looks like the convertible models are a more
popular with users in the Windows world, so my bet is that this is
the way OWC and Axiotron have gone.
This may turn out to compete with Steve for buzz at
Macworld.
2. Improved Spam Control in Mail
First, let me say that this feature has come a long way. I have
an email address that I have used uninterrupted since 1996. With
over ten years of probing, more than one spammer has found this
address. On any given day, I receive a couple hundred unwanted
email messages to this account - and maybe 10 or so legitimate
emails.
With a couple of years of diligent training, I have gotten Mail
to the point where, on a typical day, I only see 3-4 spam messages
in my inbox. The rest are automatically moved to the junk folder
and deleted when I exit Mail. That's more than acceptable to me,
and if that were the end of it, I would have no complaints.
However, the problem is that, on any given day, a couple of
legitimate messages wind up in my junk folder. This means I have to
scan through the junk folder to retrieve the good messages before I
allow the spam to be deleted. To a large extent, this defeats the
purpose of the spam filter. A spam filter should be so reliable and
accurate that you don't need to open the junk folder. You can allow
all messages there to be deleted, sight unseen.
Mail isn't there yet.
One small improvement would go a long way toward this goal,
however. As an example, I point to Microsoft Outlook, which I am
forced to use at work. One of the few redeeming features of the
latest version of Outlook is the way it handles junk mail. It uses
its own built-in filter to decide what is junk and what is
legitimate. It then places junk mail in a junk folder. However,
when it makes a mistake, rather than just reclassifying the message
as with mail, Outlook allows you several options to tell it exactly
why the particular message is or is not junk.
By far the most typical mistake I find with Outlook is
wrongfully marking wanted email as junk. In the eight months I've
been using this version of Outlook, it has only allowed one piece
of spam into my inbox. On the other hand, it has classified a lot
of good email as junk. When I tell Outlook it has made a mistake,
it allows me to elaborate on why this was a mistake. For example,
by right-clicking on the message and selecting "not junk", another
menu appears where I can select: always allow email by this sender,
always allow email from this domain, create a rule, etc. (among
other choices).
This tends to improve the accuracy much more quickly than with
Mail. As far as I can tell, when you tell Mail it has made a
mistake in classifying a message, it's left up to mail to decide
why it was a mistake. And it's slow to learn. I may have to
manually change several messages from the same sender until Mail
figures out what's going on.
One feature that strikes me as absolutely essential when it
comes to filtering junk mail is the ability to scan the Internet
headers as part of the evaluation process rather than relying on
fields that are filled in by the sender. I honestly have no idea
whether Mail or Outlook - or any other program - actually does
this.
For example, a spammer may send an email with a forged return
address of "accounts@ebay.com". This is simple to do - the spammer
just places that return address in the email program and clicks
"send". When the message arrives, it appears at first glance to
actually be from eBay. However, when I view the headers of the
message, I can see that it was actually sent from some domain and
ISP in Russia.
Every time I receive a message similar to this, I cringe when I
reclassify it within Mail. Does Mail really know that this message
didn't come from eBay? When I mark it as junk, am I just asking
that legitimate email from eBay be marked as junk as well? Am I
confusing Mail?
I don't know the answers to any of these questions, and if
anyone with a better grasp of the way things work under the hood in
these programs knows, drop me an email and I'll publish the
information in a future column. And please don't mark the subject
line of your message, "10 ways to make money"! I would like to
actually see your email.
3. Beef up Print-to-PDF Functionality in OS X
The ability to save any file that can be printed as a PDF
without using any third-party software was a welcome addition to
OS X. However, the control the user can exercise over the
creation of the PDF is very limited. Pretty much all you can do is,
well, create a PDF. All the details seem to be left up the OS.
As a result, the PDFs created by OS X are not optimal for
all uses. For example, they're often problematic if you want to
send the resulting PDF file to a professional printer requiring a
press-ready PDF. You can't control the size or color palette of the
PDF.
Of course, anyone regularly creating press-ready work would
probably already own Acrobat Professional or a similar program.
However, the occasional user should also have some degree of
control over the creation of PDFs. Apple could add a few options to
significantly improve this experience:
- Give the user control over the process of embedding the fonts
in the PDF.
- Allow the user to control color creation. For example, convert
the output to grayscale, black-and-white, RGB, CMYK, etc.
- Allow the PDF to be a different size than the original document
- say, scale your 8.5" x 11" word document into a 6" x 9" PDF.
- Control the PDF optimization. It would be nice to tell
OS X whether I want the output PDF to be of higher-quality
(and larger file size) or whether I want a small file and am
willing to sacrifice some quality to get it.
4. Better Integration of the Core Applications
The other redeeming quality of Outlook is how seamlessly it
integrates email, address book, calendar, and to-do list. Apple
needs to do the same with iCal, Mail, and Address Book.
I can flag a message to follow up in Mail, but all it does is
place a flag beside the message. It's up to me to do the rest. I
should also be able to, in the same step, set a follow-up reminder
in iCal.
5. iTV and an iPod Phone
Never mind. I promised this article would focus on things we
needed but were not likely to see....
