How often do you use the Caps Lock key?
Now, how often do you use it deliberately?
Thought so.
To disable the Caps Lock key on your keyboard so that you never accidentally ENABLE IT AND START TYPING LIKE THIS, do this:
When you encounter an unfamiliar word while reading online, what do you do? Maybe it’s a term you’ve never seen before, or maybe you think you know what it means or how it’s pronounced, but you’re unsure.
While reading offline, you probably skip over such words after having scanned the surrounding words for context.
But online, on a Mac, you can look up the word in place:
The new Find feature introduced in Safari 3 Public Beta delights us with Apple’s famous attention to detail.
Even its initial appearance onscreen reveals surprises. When you invoke Find in Safari, a banner slides down from above. Other animated user interface elements also slide down from above: sheets hover above but do not disturb the page content, while overlays like Safari’s RSS reader replace the window contents entirely.
But because Safari’s Find is modeless, the find banner pushes the window’s contents downwards by the height of the banner, allowing both banner and content to coexist within the window and remain selectable.
Straightforward enough in concept, but there’s an elegant touch in the implementation. A simpler effort might have pushed the content down by the height of the banner, and slid the banner into the resulting gap, something like this:
Last week’s iPod refresh and controversial iPhone price reduction obscured one of Apple’s more interesting announcements: Starbucks Music. You walk into a Starbucks, hear a song you like, pull out your iPod touch to visit the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store (iTWFS), and there on the bottom-left of the screen, you see a Starbucks icon, ready to tell you about the song you’re hearing right now.
Locale-based services like this benefit users and businesses alike. In this case, you get to learn more about and possibly buy songs you like, and Starbucks gets to sell them to you, via iTunes. And because you don’t see the Starbucks icon until you actually visit the iTWFS, the resulting experience is restricted to the marketplace—you don’t see the icon when you’re listening to your own music, for instance.
Technically speaking, locale-based services require careful coordination between the various players. Regarding the iTunes-Starbucks service, a server within participating Starbucks probably broadcasts its service via Apple’s Bonjour, which the iPod looks for once you enter the iTWFS. The software support for the Starbucks presence within the iTWFS probably ships on the iPod.
But imagine this approach extended to other locale-based services. You’re in the airport and wondering which carousel your luggage is headed for, so you pull out your iPod, touch Airport, and ah, Carousel 3. Or special dishes in a restaurant. Or sales in a store. Some of these can be done as a Web page as well, but the experience of seeing the service is far more compelling and useful.
The Starbucks experience is probably built right into the iPod, but there’s no reason other locale-based experiences couldn’t be downloaded on-demand. They could be coordinated within a section devoted to them, perhaps accessed via a Services icon.
And GPS in later models will only make these services more useful. You’re in a museum and standing in front of a painting, wondering about the artist.
Locale-based services like these are now a reality. Expect Apple to announce more of them.
by John Blackburn
