Hope the holidays treated you well. Mine did too. However, I should note that my own Christmas gift-receiving glee was dimmed by the fact that the computing and electronics industries have yet to bring a few items to market yet, such as:
* A new Palm handheld that sells for under $300 but includes built-in WiFi. (Almost eight months after a PalmOne marketing rep showed me a slide in a presentation touting WiFi as one of the core technologies it supported, this still doesn't exist.)
* A 30-in. LCD or plasma HDTV or a bigger-than-40-in. microdisplay HDTV -- each with a built-in over the air "ATSC" digital tuner and a street price of under $2,000. (I'm probably three months early for this.)
* A desktop Mac that sells for under $500 and lets me use any old external monitor. (For years, Apple has said it's had no interest in pursuing this market, but if the latest rumors are true, I'm probably two weeks early for this.)
* A home-theater receiver that includes HD Radio support to pull in high-quality digital FM and AM broadcasts, and which doesn't cost over $500. (HD Radio support has been confined thus far to car stereos, on account of some marketing rationale that eludes me.)
I'll be on the lookout for gadgets like those and many others over the next two weeks. First I'm flying to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, four days of nonstop marketing hype, traffic, schmoozing and receptions. I expect to leave the show with a clearer sense of where things like HDTVs, digital video recorders, high-definition DVDs and other high-tech, high-budget items are headed.
My next stop will be San Francisco, where Apple will host its annual Macworld Expo trade show starting Jan. 11. Macworld is unlike every other trade show, in that a big chunk of what happens surprises everybody. No computer company is more secretive about upcoming products than Apple -- and unlike its competitors, Apple usually knows how to keep its secrets. (Much to the annoyance of journalists everywhere, as well as buyers who sometimes find their new purchases have become suddenly obsolete.)
Over that week, I also hope to visit a few companies in the Bay Area. I just don't get my fill of traffic around here, so a few hours running up and down 101 and 280 ought to suffice.
Be sure to check back at washingtonpost.com for regular updates from CES and Macworld. My plan is to file a few Web-only updates from both shows, and two of my Post colleagues will be filing updates from CES.
iPod-mania
While I'm at Macworld, I also figure I'll be seeing plenty of iPod-related products. I think the iPod is a pretty good music player, but I had no idea it would spawn such a variety of accessories and related products.
I found out about the strangest iPod tie-in yet only weeks before Christmas -- a site called iPodMyPhoto.com. It will take any picture you send in and process it to make it look like one of Apple's signature ads, with the subject of the shot in black, the background in a solid color and a brief headline above in white sans-serif text.
I suppose I should have seen that coming, though. IPod ad parodies have been bubbling up across the Internet for some time now, including this poke at the New York Yankees.
Building Better Browsers
On a completely different topic ... I've written a lot about Web browsers in the past year. It's exciting to see innovation flourishing in this category of software again, which is why I found this essay by Scott Berkun to be fascinating.
Berkun, a former Microsoft developer who worked on Internet Explorer for years, discusses the various ways that people use browsers ("There has never been an 'organize your bookmarks' party or drinking game. People don't want to do it, and unless it's easy to do, most people won't.") and how browsers might better adapt to that behavior. Consider, for instance, bookmarks management, in which he makes some intriguing suggestions:
"Frequency of visitation. Sounds like part of a prison sentence, doesn't it? What I mean is that every time I go to a url (regardless of how I get there) the system should add to a counter for that bookmark. This allows me to sort favorites by frequency of use. It also allows the system to know when I'm returning to a particularly important place, and perhaps behave slightly differently while I'm there (think better/smarter caching, or other non-invasive smartness)."
Not all of the ideas here seem necessarily applicable off the bat, but they all strike me as the kind of thinking that I hope software designers can find time for every day.
(A tip of the hat to Slashdot, which pointed to this page in mid-December.)
-- Rob Pegoraro ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
** Two last words: Just give! And if that list isn't long enough for you, check out Google's Tsunami relief page.
