Nonsensor.

Well, Engadget kicked ass again, thanks in part (let's get humble, here!) to the hot liveblogging tool that Christoph and I whipped up, and in part to all the under-the-hood stuff that he and Celly have been working on over the past couple months. We can still say that we run faster, on less hardware, than anyone else.

MacBook news was not quite as impressive, but not bad either. To me the biggest plus is that there is now a middle ground between the plastic, $1000 MacBooks and their beastly cousin, the Pro. That's probably a reflection of the ground that Apple's been consistently gaining in the market. They can now compete pretty well in that $1000-$2000 range.

I like the unibody construction idea, but let's hope Apple's minimized the sweltering waves of fury radiating from their metal laptops - I'm sorry, notebooks, putting them on your lap will only reduce your chances of procreating.

One of my personal biggest inspirations, Edward Tufte, the king of information design and one of those old farts who apparently just can't grasp why they'd want to use RSS, has a review up on his website about the iPhone's interface. He also references some of his earlier work that reinforces his opinions.

The verdict is, he mostly likes it a lot, although he criticizes the weather and stock apps for mis-utilizing the high-res screen by showing too little information. I can dig it.

The main points seems to be:

1. eliminating "computer admin debris" from the interface, letting users directly manipulate the content, has allowed the tiny screen to contain the maximum amount of data possible.
   
2. Changing the paradigm from "temporal stacking," which becomes instantly tough to manage and navigate on a small screen (enter Exhibit A, Windows Mobile) to a sideways navigation on the same "surface" helps users keep track of "where they are."
   

My favorite takeaway, though, is something that is central to much of Tufte's work.

"Clutter and overload are not attributes of information; they are failures of design."

I love that quote. It's a principle Apple occasionally struggles with: they'll rip out functionality you might wish you had, in the name of simplicity. That being said, though, they do get it right much of the time, and the iPhone proves that.

MacWorld is usually a pretty fun and exciting time, when swanky new products are announced that I'll never buy. Usually it's two stupid announcements paired off with one really cool one, and then an iPod update.

But this MacWorld gave us a lot of fun stuff. At least one of those things, the overdue Google Map locator for iPhone, was free (unless you're an iPod touch user, in which case they'll extort you for $20) so I already got it. It's lovely. Now Google not only knows what I'm doing, they know where I'm doing it! Exciting.

The Time Capsule is cool, but the MacBook Air is of course the flagship announcement. Alex likens the mixed response to the release of the iPod, or at least to the original floppy-free iMac. But the floppy drive was way dead when I got my first bondi iMac. I very much doubt that real life will happen for a lot of people without an optical drive; Apple is taking a very Microsoft approach in which convergence happens fantastically and your life is totally easy as long as you drink ALL the Kool-Aid instead of picking and choosing the parts of the Apple Experience you want. I mean, why insert a CD/DVD when you can buy the album/movie on iTunes, right?

I'm sure there's plenty of speculation (there definitely is in my mind) that the recently-surfaced patent application for an iMac-like docking station that a thin laptop slides into has something to do with this. That would, of course, make things even more absolutely perfect. In fact, I could probably get behind that if the total package wasn't going to run somewhere in the neighborhood of eight zillion dollars.

And to wrap it all up, here's a video my friend sent me yesterday of David Lynch expounding on his iPhone opinions. I suppose I see his point, but here's a man who makes Movies with a capital M, whose films don't even belong on the television. I don't even like it when people are eating popcorn when I go see a Lynch movie. But the sad truth is, part of what makes David Lynch great is that he still carries around a lot of romantic notions about movies - and Stomp The Yard is not Blue Velvet. It's real sweet that the idea of someone watching a movie on a small-ass screen makes him sad, but the idea of someone watching the latest Uwe Boll movie at all kind of makes me sad, so to each his own.

Alex pointed me to a couple of great free Mac tools. Growl gives you notifications for pretty much everything, given the right software or plugins -- from the next song in iTunes, to messages in Adium.

And Google's MacFUSE, which I'd been reading about but hadn't tried, lets you mount different kinds of filesystems. Plug SSHFs into that and get an SSH server on your desktop. Save web graphics straight out of Photoshop to your server. Get a GmailFS plugin and save files to your extra Gmail space. Mount NTFS drives on your Mac. Hot!

And via the always-awesome TUAW, I found Chax. With Chax, a lot of the things you want in an IM program that iChat doesn't have suddenly become available to you. Think tabs (and Growl). Yeah, you could use Adium, but the lack of AV in Adium keeps you from being able to do really dumb amazing stuff like this.

Having bitten the Apple of wisdom offered from the tree of knowledge (by Lucifer, the "light-bearer," surely referring to that flash from Photo Booth), I've had to re-acquaint myself with Apple's OS and keyboard. I haven't used a Mac since OS 8.6 (the .6 releases were always the best, shout out to my dot-sixes), on the original Bondi blue iMac. That was the beginning of Apple's resurgence in the world of simplicity, heightened aesthetics, and affordability. They couldn't stay down in price apparently, but two out of three have just kept going. Opening up any Apple product, from an iPod Shuffle to a MacBook Pro, is a sense-pleasing experience that doesn't end when you start up the computer. The Mighty Mouse takes a bit of time to get used to, but I'm really digging it now. It provides a quick shortcut to both the Dashboard and Expose, and you can get that right-click without opting for a mouse that your aesthetically-minded Apple will look down on.

Some great tools I've found so far:

• Quicksilver: how does anyone live without this thing. With the flick of two fingers (you decide which two), the entire Mac (and your del.icio.us bookmarks, Backpack pages, etc etc) are all within reach. It's not just a launcher, it's a totally new way of thinking about how you should use the computer. It would actually be even more apt for Windows, because Microsoft's primary OS issue is not "hiding" enough parts the average user doesn't need to see. With Quicksilver, you could easily forget where you put anything, but it's really outstanding. I predict a lot of people may be using these "computing boxes" in the future, and Quicksilver may aid that.
  
• BBEdit: The ultimate, really. I'm trying it next to Dreamweaver, and while the Macromedia editor lets you use your Home key (Possibly my biggest "little" problem with OS X is the lack of consistency: command+left cursor or Home key? Which is it? And why do neither work in FCK Editor?), BBEdit just seems like it's doing something awesome. I don't know what it is. I have found myself working faster and wondering why things are done already. I used an ancient version of this a while ago, and I'm impressed that very little has been updated outside of syntax. This was a case of ain't broke, didn't fix.
• Fireworks: Not strictly a Mac offering, I just never had it before. I'll bet for the average (or even above-average) designer, it's perfectly reasonable to get the job done, and priced much differently from Photoshop. This must explain the explosion of diagonal lines that started a few years ago and has yet to really end. Clearly, it's the diagonal lines that people like. Adobe should just import all those slick patterns into Photoshop and be done with Fireworks, or sell it as the "budget" raster+bitmap-in-one web graphics solution. Packaging it in the web bundle is silly, since Adobe's answer to it (ImageReady) is always included with Photoshop and squashes it feature-wise when used in tandem with Photoshop and Illustrator.
• OmniOutliner: I have yet to play with this much, but it seems really wide open. You could organize just about anything. I probably will never spring for the Pro version, but the prospect of using Kinkless GTD to implement that ever-popular David Allen system for fixing your busted-ass life is tempting.
• Entourage: I have finally discovered Microsoft's problem, and the ultimate reason why they should never be allowed to take over the world. If you make life easy for them, they'll take it easy. Windows users are MS customers by default; Mac buyers are the hard sell. They don't fit into the whole "compatibility and standards are unneccessary if you own everything" philosophy. So what do Ballmer/Gates and co. do? They try harder. For sheer usage value, Entourage blows Outlook out of the water. I have been saying for a while it would take a lot to get me off my Thunderbird, I never suspected it'd be a Microsoft product.
• Missing Sync: Now that's real cleverness for you. While I haven't picked this up yet and won't until they support Windows Mobile 5.0 (which should be fairly soon), I'm chomping at the bit for the ability to sync Entourage with my HTC phone.
• Xyle Scope: Haven't gotten this either, but $19.95 for an advanced HTML/CSS/DOM explorer, it can't be beat. I've been using the great SlayerOffice Mouseover DOM Inspector for a while now, and it definitely rocks, but I'm looking for something a little more detailed and fancy that doesn't have to connect to an overworked site in order to function.

I'm also really excited about playing with iMovie to capture my DV camcorder's video and edit it into the best wedding video ever! Jefferson Starship soundtrack for sure.

Certain peeves will probably get to me eventually, but this little number made my day, and Googling for solutions to most problems yields similar fruit. Wow, I totally came full circle.