Author: Jesus Diaz

In case you had any doubts, the iPhone SDK reveals the obvious: A new iPhone in the works, by the codename of N89, following the current N88. What do you think N89 will have? Tell us in the comments. [Engadget]

Hubble has discovered a mysterious X-shaped object traveling at 11,000mph. NASA says that P/2010-A2 may be a comet, product of the collision between two asteroids. Or a Klingon Bird of Prey. Either way, UCLA investigator David Jewitt is excited:

Click above to see the full resolution image

This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets. The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies.

OK, David, we will believe you until Jerry Bruckheimer finish his next movie, in which a “comet” suddenly stops, turns to Earth, and starts firing anti-matter rays against our underpants.

The weirdest thing, however, is not only the prettyful X-shaped debris pattern, but the fact that its 460-foot-wide nucleus is outside the dust halo and separated from the trail. This behavior is something which has never been seen before in a comet or any other solar-system-swooshing object.

The images—taken by Hubble between January 25 and January 29—lead NASA to believe that this is a product of the collision of two asteroids. The nucleus would be the “surviving remnant of a hypervelocity collision:

“If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight. The filamentary appearance of P/2010 A2 is different from anything seen in Hubble images of normal comets, consistent with the action of a different process.

In other words: They have no clue about what this is, and they are still speculating about how this object was formed. Maybe it’s time to call Dr. Zarkov. [NASA]

I still freak out every single time I see the BigDog quadruped robot doing its thing. That’s probably the same reaction that enemy soldiers will have when they see its final version coming towards them, carrying 400-pound of gear.

Darpa has finally approved the contract for Boston Dynamics’ LS3—which stands for Legged Squad Support System—for the US Marines. Like BigDog, it will travel autonomously for 20 miles without refueling, carrying 400 pounds of equipment for the soldiers in its squad.

Mark Raibert, the president of the company and the principal investigator for the program, is excited:

If LS3 can offload 50 lbs from the back of each solider in a squad, it will reduce warfighter injuries and fatigue and increase the combat effectiveness of our troops. The LS3 program shows just how serious DARPA and the Marine Corps are about building practical, legged robots to offload our dismounted troops.

Makes perfect sense. Let’s hope that the brilliant engineers at Boston Dynamics—who are not only doing amazing robots for the military, but amazing robotic systems, period—can bring their amazing developments to other aspects of human life beyond war.

Steve Wozniak has commented in Gizmodo about his problems with his beloved Toyota Prius, its faulty acceleration software, and his problems reporting this to both Toyota and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. He’s frustrated, and completely right.

Here’s the latest news I just got.

Once again, thanks for your time. We called Toyota with your issue, and so far the spokesperson’s comment is that they haven’t heard anything to do with cruise control in Priuses. The story is still in edits, and if and when it runs, I will email you a copy at this address.

This response is what I’ve been coming up against for 2 months, and it doesn’t indicate that I’ll even be contacted about my problem. I sure am thankful now for the good attention I get at the normal Genius bars!

Then he added this about how frustrating the whole process is:

I have expensive cars but prefer to drive my Segway and Prius’s for many reasons. I have had many models of Prius and enough family members and staff to keep them all in use.

I have a very busy schedule and I’m usually free at midnight to deal with things like this. The NHTSA online reporting form doesn’t fit my case. It asks things like the date of an accident. On the phone they refer me to a second number. At that number they need my VIN and mileage before they’ll listen. The person on the phone sounds like a typical very low paid clerk who can ask specific questions to type things into a database, and have no interest in the urgency and connection of my problem to the crashes/deaths/recalls/halted sales. In fact, they make it clear that they are just taking data and not doing anything themselves to remedy a safety issue. That’s the government.

Toyota is difficult too, but after some phone calls I managed to express some of my situation. Unfortunately my iPhone dropped the calls twice and I never got a reference number but they may have some sort of ticket open.

It’s been 2 months trying to have all the data and freedom, trying to get to someone high enough up to give this some attention. You can’t easily find phone numbers to companies online. I’d give anything to have had the phone number of Toyota’s legal department. They’ll see that I stated my discovery in writing 2 months ago but a local dealer couldn’t understand the significance of it and sort of thought my wife was nuts. I was out of town, as usual, at that time. It’s not easy to be heard on something like this. But today I addressed an education group (Sausalito Discovery Museum) and somehow a brief form of this story came out and I believe that someone there contacted CNET.

Tonight I heard from Bloomberg news in Asia that they are following up on it with a story and that they will contact Toyota directly about it. I wouldn’t be surprised to get a call from Toyota tomorrow, but I’ll be on the road in that car all day.

No, my problem is not deadly. It’s not a sticky accelerator pedal, for sure. It’s sticky acceleration that is scary the first time but has a good work-around.

What I find amazing is that someone—being Steve Wozniak or John Doe—is having these problems, and nobody in the company is doing anything about it, pronto. It may not be deadly, as the Woz puts it, but two months to get a response from a car company on an issue that affects the safety of their cars is inexcusable.

While I’m the first person who wants a webcam on the Apple iPad, this is just ridiculous: A Kansas-based repair web site is claiming that they just got the iPad’s frame part, which shows a hole for the camera. Really?

The question here is: How some obscure repair shop got parts for the Apple iPad when nobody has the Apple iPad itself? The fact is that, while some China part wholesalers start offering parts before the product becomes available, it’s highly unlikely that this is the case here.

The iPad has been kept under extreme secret until now. The production just started ramping up now to avoid any kind of leaks, which is the cause of the 60 and 90 day availability timeframe. For that reason alone, I doubt that anyone will have access to any repair part at this time, much less to ship them to a random repair site in Kansas only a few days after the JesusTablet was revealed.

That is, unless some Foxconn employee risked his life to smuggle a whole 11-inch frame out of the factory. Up his butt.

We will see what happens when the usual suspects get the iPad for dissection. [Mission Repair]

Trumpets playing, bloody moons, seas of fire, cats cohabiting with dogs, and Windows 7 running on the Apple iPad right on the day it launches. That’s how the Universe ends, my dearly beloved, and you can blame Citrix for it:

It turns out the 9.7 inch display on the iPad with a 1024×768 screen resolution works great for a full VDI XenDesktop. Windows applications run unmodified and securely in the data center, and even multiple applications at once.

The iPhone restrictions of screen size and small keyboards are overcome with the iPad. The iPad looks to be an ideal end-point device that can empower users to be productive wherever they are and IT will be able to safely deliver company-hosted virtual desktops and apps without worry.

Those are the wet words of Chris Fleck, the vicepresident of virtualization and remote software company Citrix. And what you are seeing above is Windows 7 running on the iPad SDK simulator, thanks to Citrix Receiver and XenDesktop 4—running meaning that it’s executed on a server and remotely displayed on the iPad at full resolution.

Fleck sounds excited on his blog, and points out that the software will be ready for the launch of Apple’s JesusTablet. Personally, I can’t wait for other remote desktop applications to be adapted for the iPad full resolution. [Citrix via PC World]

Do you know why this guy is singing? Because he’s happy. And do you know why he is happy? Because he won an Apple iPad in our Apple Tablet Sweepstakes. His name is Chris Kratzer.

Like we said in the sweepstakes rules, we eliminated the questions that didn’t have a clear answer. In some cases, like the screen size, we took the the closest answer as the correct one (10.1 inches is near enough 9.7 inches).

Only nine people out of 37,382 were right. We put those in a list sorted by date, and then ran a random number generator, which gave us the number three. Chris was in that position.

Chris works in ITS at Auburn University-Montgomery, where he’s also a senior in Marketing. I asked him what was his answer process and he said that he “went with my gut on most of them, and rumors that you guys posted that seemed likely.” He believes the is “gorgeous, and the ten hour battery life is really amazing.” Like many, he was “really shocked that it did not support background apps” but, also like many, hopes that “will come with the next OS update.”

The tablet “is nothing that I need, but everything I want…” he says, but at the end, he wants it mainly for “watching movies and reading books.”

Congratulations Chris, and thank you all for playing!

I like the current wave of unusual stop motion animation. This clip is not as crazy and amazing as the heasploding Videogioco, but I like its simplicity. It was recorded using a webcam, with no post-production whatsoever. [Pink Tentacle]

Spanish blog MuyComputer claims that Microsoft will present the “Zune Phone” this February, at the MWC in Barcelona. According to them, it’s 100% confirmed. Since the phone will use Tegra, Nvidia will team with Microsoft for the anti-JesusPhone debut.

Talking to the blog editorial director Javier Pérez Cortijo, he told me that “the Zune Phone presentation at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress 2010 is 100% confirmed.” I’ve been a close friend of Javier for a couple of decades—he was my first editor—and I completely trust his sources and his judgement, so this is a good one.

As we’ve heard before, this isn’t actually going to be a “Zune Phone” in that it’s Zune, with a phone attached. It’s going to be Windows Mobile 7 with Zune software, just like how the iPhone has iPod software on it. The presentation of the Windows Mobile 7 at MWC 2010, which we’ve been hearing about for a few months now, seems to be inline with the mention of three phones in the Zune software last week, and previous rumors about its introduction.

MuyComputer says that the phone will have a 480 x 272 screen, HDMI video out, and weigh around 2.45 ounces (70 grams). [MuyComputer – In Spanish]

The image is a mockup, not the real thing

Is this a lunchbox? A boombox? Actually, the Mu Space music player is a bed box. Its body carries a soft bed inside, doubling as an audio pillow thanks to its rotating speakers. This is how it works:

You just have to open it, unfold the bed, turn the speakers inside, and get to sleep listening to slumbering songs. Simple. Even while the Bondi iMac color scheme is a bit passé for my taste, I wish I had one of these while I was waiting at the—horrible—Goa airport to get back to NYC from my—lovely—hunnymoon. [Yanko Design]

This man—looking as badass as Ed Harris in The Right Stuff—is Felix Baumgartner. He actually has The Right Stuff: The cojones to reach the edge of space in a weather balloon. Up to 120,000 feet—and then jump.

Baumgartner will join United States Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger as the only man to jump from near space altitude. Kittinger jumped on August 16, 1960, from the Excelsior III balloon, which at the time was flying at 102,800 feet—that’s 19.47 miles or 31 kilometers up in the sky. Compared to Baumgartner, however, Kittinger’s suit looks miserable:

In fact, his right glove failed in the descent, and his hand dilated to twice its size. Absolutely crazy.

Hopefully, Baumgartner won’t have any of Kittinger’s problems. He will jump sometime in 2010, after a few test jumps at lower altitudes, as part of Red Bull’s Stratus mission. Kittinger will be assisting Baumgartner from the ground control, while the mission team monitors his position and body state as he plummets down to Earth, surpassing the speed of sound.

I love these nutty people.

Watch as this bad boy—the Humvee-mounted Laser Avenger that destroyed a drone in January 2009—obliterates bomb after bomb during a test at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. It just takes a few seconds, and boom.

Not exactly Star Wars material, but this will save a lot of lives in the future—and destroy others too, I’m sure. [Danger Room]

Nick Veasey is not superman, but he has one of his superpowers: X-Ray vision. Veasey spends his time taking stunning X-ray photographs, including this Boeing 777 and its twin GE90-115B turbofan engines, which took three months and 500 separate x-rays.

TED just posted this talk by Veasey, in which he explains how he does his stunning images:

Basically, a lot of patience, talent, and too much radiation in his own bones. [Nick Veasy via TED]

You know, I have this friend of a friend who actually said “I need whatever it is right now” and “I’m hard. I’m ready now” while referring to the magic Apple tablet. A friend of a friend, ok? [Penny Arcade]

Gadgets don’t get any more simplerer and usefuler than the GeoSkeeper, a wrist cellphone that only has GSM/GPRS, a speakerphone, GPS, and six buttons, so the “elderly, chronically ill, children or lone workers” can instantly communicate in case of emergency.

That’s all it does. The user calls pre-programmed numbers using the buttons, turns on the emergency alarm if necessary, and gets tracked using the GPS, even alerting when the user gets out of a certain area to whoever has the control. Available in[Aerotel via Engadget]

I thought this Ballmer’s autograph on a Macbook Pro was fake, but according to this video of the big man scribbling it, it’s not. Somewhere in a dark place, Jon Ive is bracing himself and sobbing. With a British accent.

[The Guardian]

I’m liking Bing more and more every day. Not only it looks and feels better than Google, but its specialized searches are great. Like the new food recipe search. Check out the nice results, and the useful criteria bar.

As a long-time amateur chef, I see myself using this on a daily basis. If I weren’t so lazy and there weren’t so many great restaurants and bars around me, that is. But since I’m getting married next week, maybe it’s time to start organizing food at home again.

ISS Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer has sent the first tweet from space. Did he use his pointy nipple antennas to transmit data back to Earth? No. According to NASA, he used the “ultimate wireless connection”, which actually is quite clever.

The new network is called Crew Support LAN, a software update that allows astronauts to personally use the internet as they will use it from their own home. This can only happen during times in which the ISS is transmitting data to the ground stations at high speed, using Ku-Band communications. However, it’s not as simple as firing up Firefox from space.

The astronauts get into a remote desktop program on their laptops to control a desktop computer on the ground. So, while the computer on the ground access the internet openly, but the ISS’s astronauts don’t really “touch” the internet with their laptops. A simple, but very smart way to avoid security problems on board the space station.

This connection is purely for personal use, as the crew already has e-mail, IP telephone, and videoconferencing. According to NASA, the personal use “will be subject to the same computer use guidelines as government employees on Earth.” So no porn or torrent for the space dudes. [NASA]

Harvard postdoctoral fellow Samuel Arbesman has created this beautiful subway map of our home galaxy, based on the original modern subway map—Harry beck’s London tube. Can you spot the Sun? Zoom in.

Yes. We are Sol, a small station with no transfers. Arbesman, who designed the map after re-reading Carl Sagan Contact’s references to a cosmic Grand Central Station, thinks that this map gives us “a bit more familiarity” with our galaxy that we don’t normally have. Like modern subway maps, it clearly lays out our relation to other stars and nebulae:

Our galaxy is unimaginably vast, and we really have no idea what is out there. We are discovering new planets in other star systems all the time, learning new facts about the galactic core, and even learning about whole new portions of the galaxy. This map is an attempt to approach our galaxy with a bit more familiarity than usual and get people thinking about long-term possibilities in outer space.

I agree. It’s a great way to show it. I’m kind of pissed off at the idea that I have to go to Eagle Nebula to catch the Sagittarius line, then down to Carina to get on the Express to Cygnus, where they have this amazing blues bar—called The Groovy Swan—on the corner of Wolf-Rayet star and Epsilon Cygni. But then again, Sol is such a nice area to live in. Except for those damn hipsters. [Arbesman]

Some people want the Apple Tablet to run Mac OS X’s user interface. Others think its UI will be something exotic. Both camps are wrong: The iPhone started a UI revolution, and the tablet is just step two. Here’s why.

If you are talking hardware, you can speculate about many different features. But when it comes to the fabled Apple Tablet, there are basically three user interface camps at war. On one side there are the people who think that a traditional GUI—one built on windows, folders and the old desktop metaphor—is the only way to go for a tablet. You know, like with the Microsoft Windows-based tablets, and the new crop of touchscreen laptops.

In another camp, there are the ones who are dreaming about magic 3D interfaces and other experimental stuff, thinking that Apple would come up with a wondrous new interface that nobody can imagine now, one that will bring universal love, world peace and pancakes for everyone—even while Apple and thousands of experts have explored every UI option imaginable for decades.

And then there’s the third camp, in which I have pitched my tent, who says that the interface will just be an evolution of an existing user interface, one without folders and windows, but with applications that take over the entire screen. A “modal” user interface that has been proven in the market battlefield, and that has brought a new form of computing to every normal, non-computer-expert consumer.

Yes, people, I’m afraid that the tablet will just run a sightly modified version of the iPhone OS user interface. And you should be quite happy about it, as it’s the culmination of a brilliant idea proposed by a slightly nutty visionary genius, who died in 2005 without ever seeing the rise of the JesusPhone.

This guy’s name was Jef Raskin.

The incredible morphing computer

Raskin was the human interface expert who lead the Macintosh project until Steve Jobs—the only guy whose gigantic ego rivaled Raskin’s—kicked him out. During his time at Apple, Raskin worked on a user interface idea called the “information appliance,” a concept that was later bastardized by the Larry Ellisons and Ciscos of this world.

In Raskin’s head, an information appliance would be a computing device with one single purpose—like a toaster makes toast, and a microwave oven heats up food. This gadget would be so easy to use that anyone would be able to grab it, and start playing with it right away, without any training whatsoever. It would have the right number of buttons, in the right position, with the right software. In fact, an information appliance—which was always networked—would be so easy to use that it would become invisible to the user, just part of his or her daily life.

Sound familiar? Not yet? Well, now consider this. Later in his life, Raskin realized that, while his idea was good, people couldn’t carry around one perfectly designed information appliance for every single task they can think of. Most people were already carrying a phone, a camera, a music player, a GPS and a computer. They weren’t going to carry any more gadgets with them.

He saw touch interfaces, however, and realized that maybe, if the buttons and information display were all in the software, he could create a morphing information appliance. Something that could do every single task imaginable perfectly, changing mode according to your objectives. Want to make a call? The whole screen would change to a phone, and buttons will appear to dial or select a contact. Want a music player or a GPS or a guitar tuner or a drawing pad or a camera or a calendar or a sound recorder or whatever task you can come up with? No problem: Just redraw the perfect interface on the screen, specially tailored for any of those tasks. So easy that people would instantly get it.

Now that sounds familiar. It’s exactly what the iPhone and other similar devices do. And like Raskin predicted, everyone gets it, which is why Apple’s gadget has experienced such a raging success. That’s why thousands of applications—which perform very specialized tasks—get downloaded daily.

The impending death of the desktop computer

Back in the ’80s, however, this wasn’t possible. The computing power wasn’t there, and touch technology as we know it didn’t even exist.

During those years, Raskin wanted the information appliance concept to be the basis of the Mac but, as we know, the Macintosh evolved into a multiple purpose computer. It was a smart move, the only possible one. It would be able to perform different tasks, and the result was a lot simpler than the command-line based Apple II or IBM PC. It used the desktop metaphor, a desk with folders to organize your documents. That was a level of abstraction that was easier to understand than typing “dir” or “cd” or “cls.”

However, the desktop metaphor still required training. It further democratized computing, but despite its ease of use, many people then and today still find computers difficult to use. In fact, now they are even harder to use than before, requiring a longer learning curve because the desktop metaphor user interface is now more complex (and abstract) than ever before. People “in the know” don’t appreciate the difficulty of managing Mac OS X or Windows, but watching some of my friends deal with their computers make it painfully obvious: Most people are still baffled with many of the conventions that some of us take for granted. Far from decreasing over time, the obstacles to learning the desktop metaphor user interface have increased.

What’s worse, the ramping-up in storage capability and functionality has made the desktop metaphor a blunder more than an advantage: How could we manage the thousands of files that populate our digital lives using folders? Looking at my own folder organization, we can barely, if at all. Apple and Microsoft have tried to tackle this problem with database-driven software like iPhoto or iTunes. Instead of managing thousands of files “by hand,” that kind of software turns the computer into an “information appliance,” giving an specialized interface to organize your photos or music.

That’s still imperfect, however, and—while easier than the navigate-through-a-zillion-folders alternative—we still have to live with conventions that are hard to understand for most people.

The failure of the Windows tablet

As desktop computing evolved and got more convoluted, other things were happening. The Newton came up, drawing from Raskin’s information appliance concept. It had a conservative morphing interface, it was touch sensitive, but it ended being the first Personal Digital Assistant and died, killed by His Steveness.

Newton—and later the Palm series—also ran specialized applications, and could be considered the proto-iPhone or the proto-Tablet. But it failed to catch up thanks to a bad start, a monochrome screen, the lack of always-connected capabilities, and its speed. It was too early and the technology wasn’t there yet.

When the technology arrived, someone else had a similar idea: Bill Gates thought the world would run on tablets one day, and he wanted them to run Microsoft software. The form may have been right, but the software concept was flawed from the start: He tried to adapt the desktop metaphor to the tablet format.

Instead of creating a completely new interface, closer to Raskin’s ideas, Gates adapted Windows to the new format, adding some things here and there, like handwriting recognition, drawing and some gestures—which were pioneered by the Newton itself. That was basically it. The computer was just the same as any other laptop, except that people would be able to control it with a stylus or a single finger.

Microsoft Windows tablets were a failure, and they became a niche device for doctors and nurses. The concept never took off at the consumer level because people didn’t see any advantage on using their good old desktop in a tablet format which even was more expensive than regular laptops.

The rise of the iPhone

So why would Apple create a tablet, anyway? The answer is in the iPhone.

While Bill Gates’ idea of a tablet was a market failure, it achieved one significant success: It demonstrated that transferring a desktop user interface to a tablet format was a horrible idea, destined to fail. That’s why Steve Jobs was never interested. Something very different was needed, and that came in the form of a phone.

The iPhone is the information appliance that Raskin imagined at the end of his life: A morphing machine that could do any task using any specialized interface. Every time you launch an app, the machine transforms into a new device, showing a graphical representation of its interface. There are specialized buttons for taking pictures, and gestures to navigate through them. Want to change a song? Just click the “next” button. There are keys to press phone numbers, and software keyboards to type short messages, chat, email or tweet. The iPhone could take all these personalities, and be successful in all of them.

When it came out, people instantly got this concept. Clicking icons transformed their new gadget into a dozen different gadgets. Then, when the app store appeared, their device was able to morph into an unlimited number of devices, each serving one task.

In this new computing world there were no files or folders, either. Everything was database-driven. The information was there, in the device, or out there, floating in the cloud. You could access it all through all these virtual gadgets, at all times, because the iPhone is always connected.

I bet that Jobs and others at Apple saw the effect this had on the consumer market, and instantly thought: “Hey, this thing changes everything. It is like the new Mac after the Apple II.” A new computing paradigm for normal consumers, from Wilson’s Mac-and-PC-phobic step-mom to my most computer-illiterate friends. One that could be adopted massively if priced right. A new kind of computer that, like the iPhone, could make all the things that consumers—not professionals, or office people—do with a regular computers a lot easier.

This was the next step after the punching card, the command line, and the graphical desktop metaphor. It actually feels like something Captain Picard would use.

Or, at least, that’s how the theory goes.

Stretching the envelope

For the tablet revolution to happen, however, the iPhone interface will need to stretch in a few new directions. Perhaps the most important and difficult user interface problem is the keyboard. Quite simply, how will we type on the thing? It’s not as easy as making the iPhone keyboard bigger. You can read our analysis of the potential solutions here. The other issues involved are:

• How would Apple and the app developers deal with the increased resolution?
• How would Apple deal with multitasking that, in theory, would be easier with the increased power of a tablet?
• Where would Apple place the home button?

The resolution dilemma

The first question has an easy answer from a marketing and development perspective.

At the marketing level, it would be illogical to waste the power that the sheer number of iPhone/iPod Touch applications give to this platform. Does this mean that the Apple Tablet would run the same applications as the iPhone, just bigger, at full screen?

This is certainly a possibility if the application doesn’t contain a version of its user interface specifically tailored for the increased screen real state. It’s also the easiest one to implement. The other possibility is that, in the case the application is not ready for the extra pixel space, it may run alongside other applications running at 320 x 240 pixels.

Here is a totally made-up example of home-screen icons and apps running on a tablet at full screen:

However, this would complicate the user interface way too much. My logical guess is that, if the app interface is not Tablet-ready, it would run at full screen. That’s the cheapest option for everyone, and it may not even be needed in most cases: If the rumors are true, there will be a gap between the announcement of the device and the actual release. This makes sense, as it will give developers time to scramble to get their apps ready for the new resolution.

Most developers will like to take advantage of the extra pixels that the screen offers, with user interfaces that put more information in one place. But the most important thing is that the JesusTablet-tailored apps represent an opportunity to increase their sales.

From a development point of view, this represents an easily solvable challenge. Are there going to be two applications, one for the iPhone/iPod touch, and another one for the tablet? Most likely, no. If Apple follows the logic of their Mac OS X’s resolution-independent application guidelines—issued during the World Wide Developers Conference in June—the most reasonable option could be to pack the two user interfaces and associated art into a single fat application.

How to multitask

Most rumors are pointing at the possibility of multitasking in the tablet (and also on the iPhone OS 4.0). This will bring up the challenge of navigation through running apps that take all over the screen. Palm’s Web OS solves this elegantly, but Apple has two good options in their arsenal, all present in Mac OS X.

The app switch bar or a dock
They can implement a simple dock that is always present on the screen or is invoked using a gesture or clicking a button or on a screen icon. This is the simplest available method, and can also be made to be flashy and all eye candy.

Exposé
This is one of those features that people love in Mac OS X, but that only a few discover on their own. Once you get it, you can’t live without it. I can imagine a tablet-based Exposé as an application switcher. Make a gesture or click on a corner, and get all running applications to neatly appear in a mosaic, just like Mac OS X does except that they won’t have multiple windows. The apps could be updated live, ready to be expanded when you touch one of them. Plenty of opportunity for sci-fi’ish eye candy here.

A gesture makes sense for implementing Exposé on the tablet—as you can do on the MacBook Pro—but they could also use their recently-patented proximity sensing technology. In fact, I love this idea: Make the four corners of the tablet hot, making icons appear every time you get a thumb near a corner. The icons—which could be user customizable—could bring four different functions. One of them would be closing the running application. The other, call Exposé and bring up the mosaic with all running applications. The other could invoke the home screen, with all the applications. And a fourth one, perhaps, could open the general preferences. Or bring a set of Dashboard widgets that will show instant information snippets, like in Mac OS X.

Here’s an illustration—again, totally hypothetical—of what this sort of Exposé interface might look like:

The trouble with the home button

The physical home button in the iPhone and the touch plays a fundamental role, and it’s one of the key parts of the interface. Simply put, without it, you can’t exit applications and return to the home screen. On the small iPhone, it makes sense to have it where it is. On this larger format—check its size compared to the iPhone here—things are not so clear.

Would you have a single home button? If yes, would you place it on a corner, where it could be easily pressed by one of your thumbs, as you hold the tablet? On what corner? If you add two home buttons, for easier access, wouldn’t that confuse consumers? Or not? And wouldn’t placing a button affect the perception of the tablet as an horizontal or vertical device? This, for me, is one of the biggest—and silliest—mysteries of the tablet.

What about if Apple decides not to use a physical button? Like I point out in the idea about Exposé, the physical button could be easily replaced by a user definable hot corner.

Revolution Part Two

With these four key problems solved, whatever extra Apple adds—like extra gestures—is just icing on the iPhone user interface cake that so many consumers find so delicious. The important thing here is that the fabled Apple Tablet won’t revolutionize the computing world on its own. It may become what the Mac was to the command-line computers, but the revolution already started with the iPhone.

If Apple has interpreted its indisputable success as an indication about what consumers want for the next computing era, the new device will be more of the same, but better and more capable.

Maybe Apple ignored this experience, and they have created a magical, wondrous, an unproven, completely new interface that nobody can imagine now. You know, the one that will bring universal love, world peace and pancakes for everyone. I’m all for pancakes.

Or perhaps Steve Jobs went nuts, and he decided to emulate el Sr. Gates with a desktop operating system.

The most logical step, however, is to follow the iPhone and the direction set by Raskin years ago. To me, the tablet will be the continuation of the end for the classic windowed environment and the desktop metaphor user interface. And good riddance, is all I can say.