Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

I got the following advertisement in my inbox just now for an Apple mac. It’s part of their student campaign, so I receive the emails to my old Cornell address. At first glance, it seems innocuous, but think carefully about the contradiction inherent in the panels:

A free iPod touch. Another reason to get a Mac for school.

Reminder: A free iPod isn’t the only reason a Mac makes sense.

1. Runs Office, Vista, and XP.
2. Has built-in WiFi.
3. Doesn’t get those PC viruses.
4. Comes ready to video chat.
5. Does so much more with photos and movies.
6. Delivers course materials and more via iTunes U.

Let’s put this together. According to Apple, the number one selling point for marketing their Macbook computers to students is that existing Microsoft software–Office, Windows Visa, and Windows XP can all be run on the Macbook. Don’t tell me that somehow magically, when Windows is running on Apple’s hardware, that all the malware, viruses, worms, and spyware written for Windows will suddenly stop working or infecting your PC. Yet their #3 point is that the Macbook “won’t get those PC viruses.”

Sorry Apple, the Macbook will definitely get PC viruses if it’s running Windows–which you suggest it should be.

If your iPhone is broken and won’t turn on because you dropped it in water, got it wet in the rain, or spilled your favorite drink on it, don’t worry it may be repairable. The first thing to try is drying it out. Don’t try to turn it on, don’t plug it into anything, that may only increase the damage, or damage another component, or electrocute yourself. Instead, dry it out with a hairdryer for a while, and then spray compressed air into the earphone hole at the top, and the dock-adapter hole at the bottom. If you’re lucky, at this point it will turn itself on automatically!

If this doesn’t work, follow the instructions here to open the base of the iPhone and proceed to dry out your internals. Note that this is a dangerous procedure and will void your warranty. Please don’t open up your iPhone! It’s probably a better idea to just take into the Apple store and let their geniuses figure things out.

(Note: the iPhone can be “reset” by holding the top power button and the circular “home” button at the same time for a while)

Today at work I found myself reading Mac Rumours Live for the latest iPhone news from Steve Jobs’ 2008 WWDC Keynote, and as expected, he announced the iPhone 2.0, with a huge number of new features:

• 3G network and GPS support
• Improved battery life and performance
• Applications via iTunes (including Spore, Monkey Ball)
• Chinese language input and handwriting recognition
• Support for opening Microsoft Office files
• Enterprise features, including encryption, authentication, email, activesync, exchange, and remote-kill
• The previously announced iPhone API stack
• Improved audio, flush headphone jack
• $199 for 8GB, $299 for 16GB

The Apple Store is touting the iPhone 2.0 as “Twice as Fast at Half the Price,” with an expected release date of July 11th. Also note that if you bought an iPhone after May 27th you can exchange it for an iPhone3G for free!

This is pretty impressive news; except for MMS support, video chat, a red iPhone, 32GB of storage, and a better digital camera, it seems like Apple has incorporated all of its consumers feedback into making a better and more appealing product.

Don’t download the Hitman movie with Bittorrent when Apple will give it to you free on iTunes. Just hit “Browse” on the Quick Links on the right side of the main iTunes home page. Then, select “Movies” and “Thriller.” You’ll see the title “Hitman” for free, just 1.1GB away:

You might not want to watch it, Rottentomatoes gave it a 15%.

The more I look at visual search engine SearchMe, the more I like it. In a way that text-based search engine Google has never done, SearchMe brings thumbnails to search results without losing any of the textual indicators we need to process relevance. SearchMe is also innovating in clustering search results into categories or topics, something Google has experimented with their sets demo but never implemented into the larger search engine. Perhaps the best way to show you how much more relevant SearchMe can be is through a short example, searching for “Obama.”

The first thing I get, as I type “Obama,” is a list of categories that SearchMe finds relevant. I click on “Politicians” and it takes me to the next screen, the main area for exploring search results:

There are a few features you should note that set the SearchMe results apart from their competition. First, they keep the list of categories you’re interested in just one click away from instant filtering at the top of the results. Second, all of the available space of the page is filled with a gigantic preview of the search results. The title of the website is shown at the bottom, along with the site URL when you mouseover the results. Essentially, their search results are a better version of Apple’s coverflow, applied to websites. Clicking on a preview will take you directly to the page of interest, in the same tab, just like most search engines do today.

Their dynamic snippets code is nice, as well, highlighting the search terms you used in multiple colours. It appears to have been implemented directly in the coverflow-like flash engine, or behind the scenes is coming back as a new layer of image, as it loads only after the high resolution preview has loaded. An unfortunate side-effect of their highlighting algorithm is that when searching for multiple words, like “Calderon de la Barca,” the words will be highlighted separately, even if found next to each other.

Not all their results work well; for example, searching for “China” leads me into irrelevance, regardless of the category I choose, and also brings up this half-rendered view of NBA China, that my own browser renders properly. Other search terms also return odd categories and funny previews, but I imagine that this is something that will improve over time. The big problems for a search engine, responsiveness and interface, are already solved as SearchMe is both lightning fast and beautiful.

If you’re interested, you can go check out their blog or signup to the private beta. Apparently, the venture is Sequoia backed, according to Techcrunch, which probably means it’s serious about being a big web search contender in the future. According to Louis Grey, the searchme spider is aggressively hitting his blog, too. It will be interesting to come back and a year and see how SearchMe has evolved. The most likely outcome for this is being acquired by one of the big four–Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft–since it’s hard to imagine unseating any of them in the popular mindset.