See the link below, Morph Pad was a part of a UI
for one of technology previews Apple did at NAMM
in January.

http://namm.harmony-central.com/WNAMM04/Content/Emagic/PR/Sculpture-Amp-UltraBeat.html

Well, I guess this is the end of the Gray/White thing for Apple.

This whole tablet Mac thing reminds me of the time when Apple placed an order for many 60 gigabyte drives. Shortly after that, Apple said that they would not be using any 60 gb drives 'anytime soon' in the 3rd slot of their iPod line. If in fact they did order these drives, they would most likely be used for something (duh). A device the size of a tablet Mac would be ideal for a 60 gb drive. After all, it is not advisable to Apple if they lied about the iPod-it would loose customers. So I am expecting those 60 gb drives in the iMorph or whatever it will be called in probably Early September along with the iMac G5. Hey, at least I'm optimistic...

Apple isn't going to make a tablet PC. They're just not selling as well as people hoped, and Apple isn't going to delibirately make an unprofitable product.

I think a chameleonic iMac would be a hit with both neophytes and nerds. On the ond side, the obvious sex appeal would attract the more fashion-conscious. On the other side, the ability to program your computer's freakin' COLOR would provide geeks like me hours of amusement as we write programs to use this new ability in cool ways. Who could resist the sheer Cool Factor of such a feature?

I can already see a new generation of iTunes visualizers.

Think of the forthcoming new iMac model. Now if Apple had a display stand holding up a computer panel at the back of a detachable display, one scenario would be that a user could just take the display off and hang it on a wall for example, needing only airport express to power and stream movies and slideshows to the display from the panel stand.

My dream come true!

I posted this as my idea years ago

With minimalism so important to Ives et al,
and this forcing us to make do with fewer
indicator lights etc. than other brands offer,
I thought these hidden lights and touch-sensitive
switch/zones would allow Macs to keep the elegant
minimalist designs and still communicate with us
as needed.

I have also wanted to see a large spherical CRT that displays
the globe and by touching the globe, a window expands
showing actual video of all sorts of anthropological info,
historical, TV programming, etc.

A spinning image would be virtually indistinguishable from
an actual globe spinning. Talking heads, planets, moons,
etc. would be portrayed nicely. A few years ago I read that
a huge, externally-projected version of this was being built
somewhere.

I notice how elegant the sleep light on my 12" PB is -- white
on silver: maybe too much color/glitz would discourage
buyers like the clamshell iBooks and some of the CRT iMacs.

Whether subdued or flashy, I think shine-through lights are
coming to stay as a necessity.

---gooddog

Wow they'll need one heck of a good lossless compression algorithm to stream your video signal wirelessly! Heck uncompressed video at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 60Hz refresh rate would need over 1.5Gb/s of throughput!

You're an IT manager, looking across the vast expanse of computers in cubicles. You notice some machines are orange and one or two are red. Better get the techs to the red machines first to fix the problems before they move on to the orange ones. Leave the green ones be.

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Anonymous wrote:
You're an IT manager, looking across the vast expanse of computers in cubicles. You notice some machines are orange and one or two are red. Better get the techs to the red machines first to fix the problems before they move on to the orange ones. Leave the green ones be.

LOL!
"Dayum! Your computer is really RED today. Dude! What did you do?"

If you really want to be fancy, you make a LCD case with small cameras that look at the nearby environment and then adjust to blend in. A true chameleon computer. Visual stealth.

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Biff wrote:
Wow they'll need one heck of a good lossless compression algorithm to stream your video signal wirelessly! Heck uncompressed video at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 60Hz refresh rate would need over 1.5Gb/s of throughput!

You really don't understand how your interface is displayed on your screen.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/

I would guess thing more along the lines of.
http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/

Don't they have no other things to do ? So what - it's the apple-illness...

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Anonymous wrote:
Now if Apple had a display stand holding up a computer panel at the back of a detachable display, one scenario would be that a user could just take the display off and hang it on a wall for example, needing only airport express to power and stream movies and slideshows to the display from the panel stand.

This is actual a cool idea and something that I had wondered about. With some of that "pc media center" fad, maybe apple has decided to get in on it too. Like the post said, a detachable monitor that could be wall mounted, so when it's not being used as a computer, would be like a picture frame w/ slideshows or a monitor for movies, and all the keyboard/mouse type stuff could be small enough to hide away somewhere else. And of course the color changing thing would be freaking awesome.

The bandwith would be a nightmare

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AFCdtLoeb wrote:
The bandwith would be a nightmare

I dont think thats what would happen...im thinkin more of a builtin HD that would store the info.......and all transfers would be either wireless or firewire 800

Quote

ennerseed wrote:

Quote

Biff wrote:
Wow they'll need one heck of a good lossless compression algorithm to stream your video signal wirelessly! Heck uncompressed video at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 60Hz refresh rate would need over 1.5Gb/s of throughput!

You really don't understand how your interface is displayed on your screen.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/

I would guess thing more along the lines of.
http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/

I guess that you don't understand it (fully) either.

What if you want to listen to a DVD or simply a Quicktime movie full screen?

Quartz Extreme and Remote Desktop can't do magic with those, all the pixels in a video image must be transmited. What about games? Most games don't write to the screen using Quartz, they use their own routines to write to the 3d card or a screen buffer. So these would have to be transmited on a pixel basis too.

There are many other instances where this could happen and it's just not obvious to know what application would be problematic. Once an app window is displayed full-screen and doesn't use Quartz vector graphics it's just like having to transmit lossless bitmap versions of the whole screen.

Anyway have you ever tried to watch a DVD remotely using Remote Desktop?


As for the chameleonic cases, personally I like the idea. It could also be usefull. For example you could make you case change color depending on the outside weather (ie: temperature). You could make it flash or change to a specific color when you have new email or when the Mac has finished a long task. I wish I had a Snow CRT iMac instead of Blueberry so I could try to implement it myself.

Quote

ennerseed wrote:

Quote

Biff wrote:
Wow they'll need one heck of a good lossless compression algorithm to stream your video signal wirelessly! Heck uncompressed video at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 60Hz refresh rate would need over 1.5Gb/s of throughput!

You really don't understand how your interface is displayed on your screen.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/

I would guess thing more along the lines of.
http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/

Yeah dude seriously what are you talking about? You make a statement that I don't know what I am talking about, then you throw a couple of links and don't elaborate.

Quartz takes care of rendering your user interface. What does that have to do with the video signal? The video signal doesn't care what is being displyed, it only cares what resolution/color depth/refresh rate you are running at.

A wireless remote desktop client is completely different than a wireless video monitor. That's a thin client computer. Graphics performance sucks for things like Terminal Services and Remote Desktop. They just chuck screen shots across the network as best they can. They tried something like this in the Windows world. It was called the Mira. Based on its failure, I would have doubts about Apple rushing out to do the same thing. Sorry man.

Quote

Guest wrote:
See the link below, Morph Pad was a part of a UI
for one of technology previews Apple did at NAMM
in January.

http://namm.harmony-central.com/WNAMM04/Content/Emagic/PR/Sculpture-Amp-UltraBeat.html

An addendum has been added with a link to the official Apple press release. It's way too much wishful thinking on my part. Thanks again for the tip Guest.

oh well, even if it look dumb now, steve can make anything look cool!

A pixilated case? Could someone program designs, simulate movement, etc? Could we bear to look at it if they did?

Slightly random: Have you guys heard of the camo technology used (or being developed, i don't know) in the military where fiberoptics are like, placed on or wrapped around an object/vehicle/person or whatever, and the cables take light from the back of the object and shoot it out the front, so the person is cloaked in an image of what's behind them. (If I'm way off on this, someone tell me, cuz I'm remembering this from a possibly crazy high school phyx teacher 4 years ago).

If they could do this with a computer, so that it appeared invisible, or that you could still look out your window, even if your computer is "in the way", that would be freaking awesome. </popular mechanics-themed daydream into the future!>

You are describing a suit from William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' novel from 1984. Maybe your physics teacher was a fan?

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Anonymous wrote:
You are describing a suit from William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' novel from 1984. Maybe your physics teacher was a fan?

Didn't they do this with Bond's car in Die Another Day, too? Meh (the movie and the execution, not the concept so much)

So Apple crossed the Ambient Orb (see www.ambientdevices.com ) with the Apple Case. Cool, but what is innovative on it to make it patentable?!?

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Biff wrote:
Wow they'll need one heck of a good lossless compression algorithm to stream your video signal wirelessly! Heck uncompressed video at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 60Hz refresh rate would need over 1.5Gb/s of throughput!

Indeed. 1.5GB/s for lossless.

However, HDTV streams at a little over 19MB/s

I am sure HDTV would satisfy anybody.

Quote

Engine Joe wrote:

Quote

Anonymous wrote:
You are describing a suit from William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' novel from 1984. Maybe your physics teacher was a fan?

Didn't they do this with Bond's car in Die Another Day, too?

Yea, I think it sounded like the thing with Bond's car. And as for the book, I have no idea, but I clearly remember him talking about it in reference to military camo...

So, it would be easy to stream HD video over WIFI with the advent of Pixlet. Read about it in the OS X section of Apple.com. Jobs made a big deal out of it at DevCon in `03, but I don't know anyone who's used it yet.

how can they hope to patent this? the idea (and actual implementations) of color changing cases already exists. go to any case modder site & you'll see examples. go to fry's and you'll find kits for converting plain-jane boxes to do this. will apple be sending cease-n-desist letters to all these existing product manufacturers?

Apple's biggest problem these days isn't it's technology or even ability to convince people to 'switch' to apple. The biggest problem apple has today is the ability to deliver. I know so many impulsive people, when it takes 6 weeks to get a computer they put it on the back burner. We live in the days of instant gratification. That was Steve's main argument for the success of the iTMS. Consumers want instant gratification of purchases. Apple has claimed themselves a hardware company. The software is just to entice people to buy the hardware. Being this the case, their software solutions are readily available while their hardware is almost impossible to attain in resonable time frames.

I think the changeable light colour is a good idea. It can appeal to the fashionable - I can see bloggers having their Mac colour on their posts - and a few uses spring to mind:

How about a traffic monitor - you put in your route to work, and in the morning your Mac is red if the route is blocked, or green if everything is clear.

Linking in to games - a first person shooter can blink the computer red when you get shot, or gradually turn more and more red when your health goes down. An RPG could give you hints about the area linked to context-dependent music - a soothing colour when the area is safe, a dark colour when it starts getting dangerous.

I can see people wanting an app to track through the day - going through a sunrise, yellow day through to a sunset and down to black, or whatever the neutral colour is.

Given the window you can reveal in the G5, I suppose it's no surprise Apple are investigating other areas of case modding. I think if a computer comes as standard with controllable lights, some of the applications that come out to use the lights will be more interesting than the hacks you get when people are adding lights to their own box. Knowing the lights are there gives the developers another interface element to use, as long as you can over-ride what individual applications want to do, I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with.

spxyu02,

Maybe the military's on it, but so are the Japanese universities. They first posted this about a year ago...

http://projects.star.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/MEDIA/xv/oc.html

They have some vids, check out their latest:

http://projects.star.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/MEDIA/xv/images/oc-wired.mpg

It's not Predator, yet, but, pretty neat. You could camo your computer, and, you could camo your ceiling so you can see the sky in the day and the stars at night. And, camo the inside of you car so you could see everything around you. And camo your head so you don't block others at the movies...

- b

here's a slashdot article as well (links to a bbc news article):

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/14/2252247

With the links, I think he was suggesting that Remote Desktop uses the GUI instructions that Quartz would normally processs and instead send them to a remote client. It's a lot more efficient than actually streaming an active screen capture. Games and movies still wouldn't be too smooth, but that's not really what tablet devices are for anyways (just a side note: this is what current Tablet PCs already work). I don't know what Mira is, but there is an alternative to the Remote Desktop of Macs and Windows called VNC which does stream whatever is being displayed. The advantage is that it easily works on multiple platforms, but in return it's somewhat slower and laggy. Of course, it doesn't send the whole screen across with every frame either, but only what is actually moving with the help of lots of compression and optimization techniques.

Quote

Biff wrote:

Quote

ennerseed wrote:

Quote

Biff wrote:
Wow they'll need one heck of a good lossless compression algorithm to stream your video signal wirelessly! Heck uncompressed video at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 60Hz refresh rate would need over 1.5Gb/s of throughput!

You really don't understand how your interface is displayed on your screen.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/

I would guess thing more along the lines of.
http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/

Yeah dude seriously what are you talking about? You make a statement that I don't know what I am talking about, then you throw a couple of links and don't elaborate.

Quartz takes care of rendering your user interface. What does that have to do with the video signal? The video signal doesn't care what is being displyed, it only cares what resolution/color depth/refresh rate you are running at.

A wireless remote desktop client is completely different than a wireless video monitor. That's a thin client computer. Graphics performance sucks for things like Terminal Services and Remote Desktop. They just chuck screen shots across the network as best they can. They tried something like this in the Windows world. It was called the Mira. Based on its failure, I would have doubts about Apple rushing out to do the same thing. Sorry man.

I don't know where the idea came from that the pictures in the patent indicate that Apple ever intended for the whole case to change color, though that might be interesting (or cheesy, or both)--it clearly shows that a small cluster of LEDs would be used to generate a status color panel at a specific spot on the Mac's case. Using LEDs to change the whole case's color could be done, with the proper plastics to pick up and transfer the light throughout the plastic case--this might be cheaper than the alternative, which would be to coat the inside of a translucent case with a layer of organic LEDs, which is a technology starting to gather steam (some cell phone displays use color organic LED display panels), but it's expensive right now.

I saw something about this a few years ago on The History Channel or some such show.

During WWII the USA experimented with a row a lights of across the leading edge of an aircraft wing. During daytime the lights were adjusted to closely match the intensity of the background sky, this made the aircraft very difficult to detect by sight from someone ahead of the flight path. As the aircraft got close the lighting trick would not no longer work, but by then the enemy was caught by surprise. It was to be used by patrol aircraft to search for submarines on the surface. If I remember correctly improvements in radar made the technology unnecessary.

Quote

spxyu02 wrote:
Slightly random: Have you guys heard of the camo technology used (or being developed, i don't know) in the military where fiberoptics are like, placed on or wrapped around an object/vehicle/person or whatever, and the cables take light from the back of the object and shoot it out the front, so the person is cloaked in an image of what's behind them. (If I'm way off on this, someone tell me, cuz I'm remembering this from a possibly crazy high school phyx teacher 4 years ago).

If they could do this with a computer, so that it appeared invisible, or that you could still look out your window, even if your computer is "in the way", that would be freaking awesome. </popular mechanics-themed daydream into the future!>

Quote

Anonymous wrote:
I don't know where the idea came from that the pictures in the patent indicate that Apple ever intended for the whole case to change color, though that might be interesting (or cheesy, or both)--it clearly shows that a small cluster of LEDs would be used to generate a status color panel at a specific spot on the Mac's case. Using LEDs to change the whole case's color could be done, with the proper plastics to pick up and transfer the light throughout the plastic case--this might be cheaper than the alternative, which would be to coat the inside of a translucent case with a layer of organic LEDs, which is a technology starting to gather steam (some cell phone displays use color organic LED display panels), but it's expensive right now.

Isn't that sorta what the power ring on the iBook does? Changes color based on the state of the charge.

ah @#$^ where did my mac go?

It's the ring around the power cable that charges your PowerBook. It's the light on the front of your computer that seems to "sleep" while it's sleeping.

It's just filing that same concept under a bigger patent, so that it covers every possibility of the patent itself.

Don't expect "mood macs" soon.

[quote="spxyu02"]Slightly random: Have you guys heard of the camo technology used (or being developed, i don't know) in the military where fiberoptics are like, placed on or wrapped around an object/vehicle/person or whatever, and the cables take light from the back of the object and shoot it out the front, so the person is cloaked in an image of what's behind them. (If I'm way off on this, someone tell me, cuz I'm remembering this from a possibly crazy high school phyx teacher 4 years ago).

Yeah, well, I remember this series called Future Fantastic (1996), with Gillian Anderson as hostess. In one episode, there was a story about military's project to create a chameleon-like camoflage. It had too many references to "predator" and the camo itself looked bulky and uneffective. Of course, if one goes to the forest wearing one of these, his color will be the same as environments color. If you stand in fron of a tree, viewer really can't see the tree because of all the distortion.
Yeah, and then there's the weight issue.

Kinda offtopic...

- Piski

Apple should concentrate on making their operating systems reliable - we all know how awkward it is changing operating system versions and getting broadband not to mention programs to work!

Actually, more like 180MB/s

1024 x 768 = 786432 pixels
each at 32bit (4 bytes per pixel) = 3145728 bytes per frame
at 60 frames per second = 188743680 bytes per second
divide by 1024 for KB/s = 184320KB/s
divide by 1024 for MB/s = 180 MB/s

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AFCdtLoeb wrote:
Apple isn't going to make a tablet PC. They're just not selling as well as people hoped, and Apple isn't going to delibirately make an unprofitable product.

True. But portable MP3 players weren't selling too well globally until Apple brought out the iPod. If any company can re-invent the wheel and turn a proffit, this one can

Mathmos, makers of the original lava lamp, have a selection of LED powered colour-changing lights/ornaments/groovy things, some of which pulse or change colour in time to an accoustic pick-up.

Could we see a "lavaMac" sometime in the future?

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Anonymous wrote:
Could we see a "lavaMac" sometime in the future?

I can just see the drop in productivity as people, instead of using their macs, just sit around and drop acid while staring at their lavaMac. "Dude, my mac, it sings like a cheeseburger!"

Make an app that changes the case colour according to CPU load or memory usage. Mapping it to heat could prove useful for overclockers..

I saw it on some future tech show about 5-6 years ago...it was ofcourse, a not perfected prototype. I guess the end product would resemble the predator's suit...lets hope that its IR can see thru more then a thin layer of mud, lol.

Looks like that commercial I did over a year ago may have been more correct that I ever would have guessed.

http://www.gomotron.com/imac.html

lol

Has anyone thought about power consumption of this light morphing system? I dont think apple will apply it to Powerbook or any kind of hand held device due to this... unless they get some super kind of battery.