More thoughts on the MacBook Air

Earlier today, in the “bit” regarding the MacBook Air announcement, I discussed briefly my immediate purchase of it, and I wanted to expound on that a bit more.

For me, the Air will be a secondary machine — a complement to a blazing-fast Mac Pro — and that, I think, is how it’s being positioned (if not explicitly); indeed, the dearth of ports almost demands the conclusion. I think I, like most people that have been waiting around for this thing (or some approximation of it) for as long as we can remember, would have preferred something smaller (please, everyone, stop conflating “smaller” with “thinner”), but this will do until that something comes along, if ever.

When it comes to notebooks, the one thing on which I refuse to budge is the keyboard (oh, right, it also has to run Mac OS X) — I want a full-size keyboard, and nothing less. The Air gives me that, albeit flanked by more metal than I wanted or anticipated.

Personally, I probably would have been completely satisfied with an all-specs-updated version of the 12” PowerBook (i.e., I’m totally willing to sacrifice screen real-estate for decreased width and depth), and if they came out with that a month from now I would probably dump the Air in a second. That said, in my case, the whole width debate is probably a pragmatic wash given the way I plan to use the Air.¹

Finally, and in light of my consumer electronics track record, I’m taking a lot of flak for not getting the SSD, but like I said before, I just can’t justify the additional $1000 for a subsidiary machine; were it my main machine, and I didn’t need more than 64GB, I would probably pony up for the next-gen storage. I’m curious to know why they aren’t offering a 32GB SSD; I really think that would have hit the sweet spot for a lot of people, including myself.

Notwithstanding everything I’ve just said, I’ve a good feeling that come two weeks from now, when this marvel of engineering is sitting in my lap and I’m typing away on it, I’m going to forget all about the fact that it’s a bit larger than the dream machine I’ve had in my head for the last couple of years, and will simply enjoy using it.

Skate (or how I relapsed and reverted to age 13)

Skate is, without a doubt, one of the most amazing games I’ve ever played, and certainly the greatest skateboarding game of all time. In fact, playing it while back home a couple of weeks ago compelled me to finally pull the trigger on an Xbox 360 Elite.¹

As I’ve discussed briefly here before, I haven’t really owned a console since ~1998,² mostly because of my addictive personality, perfectionism, general competitiveness, and preternatural gaming skills which demand that I be great at the games I play.  ;)

Allow me to elaborate. Though I don’t talk about them much here, video games used to be a pretty big part of my life (like every kid growing up in the 80s/90s I suppose), and it’s always been too easy for me to get wrapped up in being the very best at any game that catches my interest (umm, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, 19XX, any and every racing game, Killer Instinct, anyone?). Fully cognizant of this predisposition, over the last many years I have usually resisted altogether the temptation and desire to play video games, lest other attention-demanding interests suffer.

To put it quite simply, gamer regret kind of consumed me at some point a few years ago, and if I wasn’t learning or producing something, I felt I was wasting time.

Alright, enough with the defense of my video game dry spell, let’s get back to Skate. This game just works, mostly because it totally rethinks the control scheme (i.e., most everything is accomplished through the “flicking” of one joystick, combined with the movement of the other), and in a way that is as analogous to real skateboarding as anything I’ve ever seen, which is all the more impressive in light of the fact that the controller has nothing to do with your legs and/or feet.

There is definitely a steep learning curve, but once you’re on the other side of it, the possibilities are endless, and the technical control you have over the skater is mind-blowing. It’s nothing short of brilliant. When you bust, you’re OK with it, because you know that you, not the game, screwed up. It’s hard to put that sentiment into words, but trust that it’s a neat feeling.

As I said to a friend not long after getting the hang of the game, I may actually use it to create movies of tricks I could do as a teenager³ (you know, to show to whomever I can convince to feign interest in them). Speaking of movies, the replay/movie-making system is fantastic, and the control you have over the replay video really lets you dissect the physics of the game, which are about as spot-on as you could want (though, admittedly, the falls could be much more realistic, but I guess that’s kind of a moot point).

If you’ve ever had any real-life interest in skateboarding and have a predilection for video games, you almost have to buy Skate.

Oh, before I forget, I have to mention that the best part about me picking up an Xbox is that the girlfriend is really excited about yet another demand on my time! Poor thing, she really has no idea the volume of this can of worms.

Gmail for BlackBerry now “talks” to the OS

I’m not quite sure when it happened,¹ but the Gmail BlackBerry client now interfaces directly with the device. In other words, the BlackBerry knows when I receive an e-mail through the Gmail client. In fact, after you install the client, you’re given Gmail-centric options in the profile settings (e.g., you can define a particular tone for messages received through the client, etc.).

The client works so well that it hasn’t even crossed my mind to setup the BlackBerry e-mail client to receive my Gmail e-mail (I go back-and-forth on the need/desire to have my non-work e-mail pushed). If you’d like, it will even add a “Sent from Gmail for mobile” signature to the bottom of e-mails sent through the client (unfortunately, however, the language currently can’t be changed).

Other things worth mentioning are its overall speed, the lightning-fast auto-completion of contacts in the to/cc/bcc fields (it works just like regular Gmail!), the pre-fetching of e-mails in anticipation of your opening them, and its general robustness.

If I have to complain about something, it would be the seemingly will-nilly background polling for new e-mail. There are no options to specify with regard to how often the client will check for new e-mail, and I can’t figure out its apparently random schedule. There’s a manual solution to this (i.e., just click “refresh”), but I’d prefer a frequency I can modify. Also, support for contact groups would be nice.

I think it’s safe to say that Rui is onto something:

As far as I can tell, despite [Google] regularly churning out standard MIDP versions of their apps for other phones, there are actually more Google applications for the Blackberry than for any other mobile device. And I don’t mean icons with shortcuts to the browser, I mean actual running code.

Which is, in my mind, doubly interesting when you consider that Android is, for all practical intents and purposes, a Java platform (you code in Java, even if the end result doesn’t run in a “normal” Java VM).

So yeah, they might just be using the Blackberry (definitely the best Java-based platform out there right now) as a prototype/playground of sorts. (emphasis mine).