(Notes taken while watching multi-touch in Microsoft’s next OS release, Windows 7, being demonstrated for the first time.)

Don’t perform the demo yourself. Bring someone else onstage to distract the audience while making the demo appear complicated enough to require a specialist.

Wear distracting clothing. It’s a small thing, but remember to wear clothing that calls attention to yourself. Bright colors are better than muted, shiny better than flat, and choose a color that contrasts with the microphone you’ll be wearing. Jewelry is good; a large watch is a given. Bonus points for décolletage.

Speak quickly. The faster you talk, the more you can say. Simple, really. And speaking quickly will keep your audience struggling to keep up and less able to understand your message.

Encourage interruptions. If people ask you questions mid-sentence, stop what you’re saying to respond. Fragmenting your presentation like this will make it harder to understand your message, as will the back-and-forth between speakers.

Wave your hands in front of the screen and camera. Motion attracts the human eye. Move your arms around to keep people looking at you rather than the screen.

Use technical terms. The audience doesn’t have to understand.

Focus on the technology, not the solution. Make the technology look like another bullet item you’re adding to the product. Look, we have feature X!

Use uninspiring examples. Focus on obvious ideas the audience has already seen. Avoid glimpses of an intriguing future.

Reveal other features, but refuse to talk about them. This is a great way to distract the audience from your message.

Above all, don’t enthrall. Keep the presentation dry. Show the technology and nothing more. Don’t show excitement or anything else that will raise the audience’s interest.

Apple’s new agreement with Stockholm-based TeliaSonera will bring the iPhone to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland—which already have iTunes Stores—and Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which don’t.

That takes care of half of the countries with iTunes Stores but which hadn’t yet announced iPhone carriers, and raises the number of announced countries without iTunes Stores to 29, as noted earlier.

It’s possible Apple might use the App Store alone to register all these international customers, since creating that many new iTunes Stores would be a tremendous amount of work. But rolling out the App Store to all those countries will also involve a tremendous amount of work. Either way, Apple’s about to get very busy. (Good thing they’ve been taking it easy lately.)

Update: Added Hong Kong and Macau to the list. 5/29/2008

Here’s the updated list of countries, carriers, and whether those countries already have iTunes Stores:

(more…)

iChat in Leopard supports animated icons, but they’re a bit quirky.

First, make sure they’re enabled:

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Apple’s contextual menus violate every one of the Contextual Menu guidelines established in the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. You don’t need to look far to find the violations, either: a glance at Safari and Mail is enough.

Safari

Safari displays PDFs in the browser window with a handy contextual menu to control how the PDFs are displayed. But most of the commands are only available in the contextual menu, violating the following guideline:

Always ensure that contextual menu items are also available as menu commands. A contextual menu is hidden by default and a user might not know it exists, so it should never be the only way to access a command. In particular, you should not use a contextual menu as the only way to access an advanced or power-user feature.
— Contextual Menus, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, Apple Inc.

No equivalent menu commands  Safari’s PDF support may have started as a plugin and may still be implemented that way, which might explain why none of the PDF-specific menu items are available as menu commands. Nevertheless, many users have no idea this functionality exists because they’ve never thought to examine the contextual menu for PDF-specific actions.

Recommendation: add these items to a View > PDF submenu in the menubar. They’re too numerous and too infrequently used to place within a top-level menu, but a submenu would make a perfect fit.

Inconsistent names  The top three commands also differ inconsistently from their menu counterparts. The Guidelines don’t say that contextual names must match those in the menus, but where they differ they should at least be consistent. Safari’s commands don’t agree on the use of the word “Page”:

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For a fee, Forrester Research will tell you their predictions of Apple’s product strategy through 2013, including the kinds of products they believe Apple will create and how they tie together into a coherent vision. $279 U.S. buys you a PDF containing their analysis of Apple’s drive to become “the hub of the digital home”, the “American Sony”.

What kind of products do they envision?

Among the new products Forrester predicts Apple will create are wall-mountable digital picture frames with small high-definition screens and speakers that wirelessly play media, including photos, videos and music, stored on a computer elsewhere in the home.

— Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2008

Digital picture frames?

For the bedroom, Forrester envisions an Apple “clock radio” that pipes in music and other media across a home network.

— Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2008

Clock radios?

Sounds like someone thought “what would Apple do if Apple were Sony”, and took it from there:

Well, Sony makes clock radios, so what value-added would Apple bring there? Easy! Media + wi-fi. And digital picture frames, no question—just a small flatscreen and a wi-fi chip and you’re good. Wait, why not video, too? It will need speakers…

If those predictions fairly represent the quality of Forrester’s analysis, save your 279 bucks. Apple isn’t Sony, and you can’t extrapolate what Apple will be creating in 2013 by imagining Sony with wi-fi and media added. Sony doesn’t do software; Apple does. Software changes things, and software elegantly integrated with hardware changes things a lot.

If you want to imagine Apple products in 2013, start with processors that are faster, cheaper, smaller, and cooler than those we have today, then seat them in devices that are wirelessly networked, auto-discovering, and auto-configuring. Now—and this is the important part—imagine real-world problems these devices might solve so well that you’d happily pay a premium for. Those are the products Apple will be building.

It’s possible that Apple might build simple products like clock radios and digital picture frames, but like the iPod Hi-Fi, they would be curiosities rather than cutting-edge. Handy? Perhaps, but hardly worthy of inclusion in a forward-looking product strategy analysis.

And then there’s the truly strange:

Forrester also thinks Apple could extend into the home the technical assistance currently offered by “Genius Bar” personnel in Apple retail stores. Apple in-home installation services will become especially important as its array of products for the home grows.

— Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2008

Yeah, imagine an Apple Genius talking to you over video chat: “Ma’am, I can’t quite see the connectors. Can you shine a little more light back there, and move the camera in just a bit closer?”

iChat’s conversation bubbles capture the back-and-forth of chatting nicely by positioning you on one side, and the person you’re speaking with on the other side. The bubbles are different colors for the different parties.

But the status messages shown centered in the window really help the conversational flow, too. They tell about important events that occur during the conversation, like people leaving and changing status, and when these events occur. The limitations of the protocols iChat supports—AOL and Jabber—occasionally cause odd behavior, but iChat does what it can.

In this conversation, Boo starts things off, appearing on the right. A conversation always starts with a clear declaration of who you’re speaking with, including the other party’s address, which is important because, unlike online names, addresses can’t be faked.

Mike responds 17 minutes later, appearing on the left. iChat inserts a timestamp when a response occurs more than a few minutes after the previous one. Notice that Mike’s following post doesn’t have a timestamp, so you know he posted it right after the previous one.

When you leave a conversation window open overnight, iChat inserts a new day status message to let you know the conversation is now spanning multiple days. (It’s odd that the new day status messages appear formatted as “5/11/08″, while the normal timestamps appear in the format “May 11″. They should agree in format.)

You also see when encryption is enabled and disabled, although this is a bit buggy because, as shown below, you don’t always see when encryption has been disabled. If it’s enabled twice in a row as the screenshot indicates, it’s reasonable to assume it was disabled in between at some time—something you’d like to know.

iChat also tells you when a Direct Instant Message starts, though this is not only buggy, it’s confusing and seems unnecessarily technical in nature. Usually, when you’re chatting with someone, your messages are routed through a server somewhere. With a Direct Instant Message, your messages travel directly to the other party without passing through an intermediary. This is useful when sending files, for instance.

But it’s sometimes confusing why a Direct Instant Message starts. In the chat below, there was no file sent or anything else but normal chatting, yet a Direct Instant Message session was initiated. And apparently the Direct Instant Message session never ended, since no status message to that effect was ever added to the chat.

iChat also tells you when you leave a chat, whether by logging out or by being disconnected. It’s not clear why it can’t distinguish between the two, though it’s probably something to do with the AIM or Jabber protocols.

At any rate, despite a few very minor issues, using iChat is a delight. And it keeps getting better.

You know those times when you go online to chat with Lois, and Jimmy says hey Clark, howsitgoin? You’re not in the mood, but Jimmy’s sensitive, so you politely chat for a moment, though you’d really rather chat with Lois.

Next time, go invisible. Before you sign on, set your status in iChat to invisible. Now you can see your friends, but they can’t see you.

Now you’re free to initiate a chat with Lois without Jimmy knowing you’re online.

The iPhone’s keyboard changes layouts to match the task. When you’re typing a URL into Safari, for instance, the keyboard lacks a space key because spaces aren’t allowed in URLs.

This is usually quite helpful, but it’s not perfect. The default keyboard layout you see in Notes and Contacts lacks a period, which makes it harder to type complete sentences.

Fortunately, Apple designers added a shortcut to work around this limitation: double-tap the space bar to insert a period followed by a space. You can disable this in Settings > General > Keyboard, but it’s quite handy.

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