The first thing that was obvious is that un-boxing it in the office was a little underwhelming, initially. That might sound a bit radical in light of it’s “magical” reputation, but it was just the context. Surrounded with iMacs and MacBooks humming with Adobe and HTML, it seemed a little lightweight. But after I got home and had a while to play with photos, video, email, and a few choice apps, it seemed much much more to my taste – simple, beautiful and obviously just the tip of a digital iceberg. Some wag on Twitter said it comes with a built in work-life balance; but that’s exactly it, it does feel happiest away form work.

The obvious bits: the screen is gorgeous (bright with a huge viewing angle). The battery is phenomenal (although charging is slow through iMac/MacBook). The touchscreen feels a level above in accuracy. It never gets warm, and is completely silent. The speaker is not too shabby. And it feels unbelievably fast, so much so that you wonder where all that weight, power and short battery time is wasted in a laptop.

Ergonomically, it has a few problems in this incarnation. The weight makes it tiring to hold in one hand, plus the shape of the casing makes it both slippery to hold and digs into your hands slightly. But you have to hold it most of the time because unlike a laptop screen, it isn’t pointing at you unless you hold it that way. Plus, the curved back means it rocks or spins when you try typing on it flat on a desk, and you never feel comfortable typing in your lap despite two handed typing being easy and fast. Most (not all) of these observations are true of any tablet.

The question of 3G vs wifi is a conundrum. My logical side says that I’ll probably hardly ever use it in a place where I don’t have a wifi password. At the same time, I took a ride on a train, and the ingrained experience of using an iPhone left me confused that this uber-iPhone was network dumb away from a router. I still don’t think I’ll ever be without wifi enough to justify another phone payment plan, but it’s a thought, having a possible 3g plan sign-up in reserve if I ever needed it. The GPS in the 3G model could clinch it for some.

For a geek like me, the “single window” interface is kind of liberating, but will always be frustrating until OS4 brings multitasking in November. I’m too used to doing a task – be it browsing, email or watching video – and monitoring something else at the same time such as a Twitter stream or an IM buddy list. Until I can jump in and out of other programs and have them update me at any time, the iPad is going to only fill a part of my needs.

The context of using this in the uk, especially before the official launch is interesting. Although the uk iPad itunes store hasn’t launched, you can easily download lots and lots of apps just by searching the apps store for “iPad”. But the omissions from that list are the apple iWork productivity suite, plus iBooks, and a few others (the BBC news app for one, the fault of BBC trust beaurocracy I suspect – pretty ironic as it’s available in the states). On top of that, no access to US specific apps like ABC tv cuts down on the magical media tablet feeling, and although reading the NYT is fascinating, it’s still not what I’m likely to look forward to every morning.

The iPad will be more essential to a UK audience when we get localised content, which I guess will come around the uk launch date. Give me a Guardian or Times app and I’ll be subscribing. Give me a BBC iPlayer app that allows me to temporarily download and watch shows offline and I’d be overjoyed. But the BBC trust is under commercial pressure to not provide content for free as it could skew the market for other content providers (even though that content is free on the BBC website – sigh), so an ipad iPlayer or news app from the BBC might take time, at least until 4OD or ITVplayer apps surface. Even the iphone iplayer website doesn’t work with iPad (browser sniffing snafu) so I just hope that points to the BBC wanting to do a decent job on an iPad web interface rather than the trust putting the kibosh on it.

In the meantime, you CAN watch UK tv through iPhone.tvcatchup.com – phew. And the Amazon kindle app does e-reader duties brilliantly.

I make websites for a living and the current iPad gives and takes away. Looking at websites in portrait on a beautiful screen is wonderful. It really does change my perception of a site. And building sites with the JavaScript touch gestures and webkit html5 features is really exciting. I’m trying to envision web projects as glossy magazines, not as conventional two column HTML – although it’s very early days and we’ve all got a lot to learn there. The lack of flash doesn’t bother me a huge amount as I understand why it’s missing (even if I don’t completely agree) although it does severely limit most peoples’ web experience – they’ll simply ask why they can’t see the beautiful website they see on their computer.

More problematic to me are the little things in the browser. Rich text editors don’t work – so you can log into wordpress but not click on the text area to write a blog. CSS Overflow:auto doesn’t give scrollable areas, a trick that is used all over the web. The viewport style of page rendering means fixed positioning isn’t possible (eg facebook’s chat bar). We kind of forgave the iPhone browser of these things as we still saw it as trying to make the right decisions about a user experience on a small screen, but on the iPad there’s no excuse, and it leads to a little bad experiences here and there that will just annoy people, and possibly turn them off using iPad. Here’s hoping for rapid updates to iPad safari.

The most positive aspect to the iPad is that the form & hardware is essentially right for a tablet. Everything else that niggles me can be fixed in software. UK tv, newspapers, multitasking, browser bugs, support for clip-on cameras for Skype calls, it could all just be an iTunes sync away.

As it is right now, it makes me look at my girlfriend’s white MacBook – heavy, dark screen, expensive, short battery life – and think how much better a replacement it is for her needs already. For me, I’m not sure I currently have that need for a third device between my iPhone and my MacBook, I find myself just carrying a heavier bag with all three. But I suspect that at the end of the year, this same device will have grown in capability so much that I’ll hardly even need to think about if I need it or not.

Ok, this is the last time I whine about the Blue & Me media player in my Abarth 500.

It’s a shoddy piece of kit. In some ways it reminds me of some windows/nokia smartphones. It has a great spec list, and demos really well, but in-use it’s so awkward and buggy that you give up and just go back to CD or radio. It should be a source of shame for Fiat, who have described the 500 as the “iPod of cars”. It’s useless. Crap.

I’ve previously gone through the technical reasons why it is of no real use to an iPhone user (no AAC support, no iPhone support, no non-FAT formatted drive support – see my other post “Day 2 with the Abarth”), but it doesn’t even do what it’s specs say it should do.

I still plug-in a USB stick with music and podcasts (as I previously talked about), and use an applescript to update the MP3s from iTunes. It seemed a bit of a cludgy way of doing it, but by-jove the script does exactly what it should. Actually, I abandoned doing it for music, just doing it manually seemed simpler for a collection that isn’t updated regularly, but it still works like a charm with the podcasts (well, those that aren’t AAC of course, because Blue & Me doesn’t play those…).

The trouble is that the Blue and me system doesn’t always spot the changes to the content of the USB stick. That means that when I select the podcasts folder it often shows podcasts that I know are no longer there (selecting them gives a “no media” error), while not showing the files that I know are there.

Being the sort of person I am, I’ve tried figuring out why. Maybe the old files were still in the hidden “.trashes” folder on the stick (which happens on Macs when you throw something away without flushing the trash). Nope, not that. Maybe the Blue & Me system was creating a hidden tracklist on the stick that wasn’t being updated. Nope, no extra hidden files. Maybe if I insert the stick before the ignition is on? Nope. Maybe if I remove the stick and re-insert it after the ignition is on? Nope.

Hopeless. I’m left with a unintelligent system that can’t read a simple filesystem correctly. Then almost randomly, you’ll start the car or insert the stick and press play, it’ll tell you it’s “reading the catalogue” and when you try again a moment later, hey presto, the MP3s are available to be played. But sometimes only a few appear (maybe it can’t see all of the 8GB stick?).

There are also other niggles, like the crappy use of interface (MP3s only show the title on the dashboard, not the artist), and the lack of any fast forward/rewind (if you hold down the skip, it just skips, a pain when you want to scan through a hour long podcast). It also randomly decides whether you want to listen to the tuner or the media player when you start up the car – it makes no difference how you left it when you turned the ignition off – and it will start where it left off if it starts straight away, but won’t if it starts with the tuner and you have to tell it to play.

In all, it’s buggy as hell. If I was Microsoft, I wouldn’t even want my little logo on it.

I can muddle on with it, but the USB stick was only a viable solution while it worked as advertised – it was already a bit of a pain because I carry and sync music with the iPhone, not some stupid stick that’s still in the car, so it’s already a compromised workflow to get around a problem.

So I’m back to thinking about playing the content on the iPhone through the stereo. As Fiat in their wisdom didn’t put an AUX 3.5mm jack into the Fiat 500 (unlike manufacturers like Ford), Blue & Me doesn’t support A2DP bluetooth streaming, and it seems I can’t find a sneaky CD-disc-changer to 3.5mm jack cable like I used in the Smart, I’m thinking about using old-tech radio transmitters, where the iPhone broadcasts like a very local radio station and I tune the Abarth’s radio into it. It’s not perfect either as I’ll need to click the iphone to skip tracks instead of the steering wheel controls, but at least it would mean access to ALL my music (MP3/AAC/Protected AAC) and start off podcasts/audiobooks where I last left them.

I could wait for the new generation of iPhone/iPod radio transmitters that will properly interface with OS3.0 with on-screen controls, or I could get the belkin variety that plugs into the cigarette socket and charges the iPod at the same time. A more pro alternative would seem to be the DICE electronics Fiat RDS box, which does the same job as a radio transmitter, but direct into the radio antenna socket (so no interference), and shows track info on the radio’s RDS screen, all while charging the iPhone. Seems neat, although it would mean a wire to the iPhone, so where would I put it? And it doesn’t seem to talk and about passing through the existing aerial so you can listen to normal radio. A little more investigation needed.

There is some good news on the technical front – the iPhone (OS3.0) is finally bluetooth connected to the hands free system. It didn’t work for ages (I had a “call failed” response every time I made or received a call). Un-pairing and re-pairing it made no difference. I even restored the iPhone from a backup to rebuild it from scratch but no dice. Then suddenly, one day it paired and copied the address book across as normal and ta-da, it worked. No explanation why. Sigh. Anyway it seems to work pretty well, the only problem being that it makes a deafeningly loud buzzing sound just before it dials a number. Still, compared with the rest of the Blue & Me system, that’s a win.

Away from the “car-as-computer” stuff, the Abarth is a hoot, it’s not had any problems (save kerbing the front nearside alloy a bit – surprisingly easy to do – but still makes you feel like an arse), it’s done a couple of weekends away and been practical, comfortable, quick and above all, fun. Loving it.

And one last thing – random thoughts on the abarth come out at twitter.com/abarth500/

One of the first things you notice is how high you sit in the Fiat 500. It feels quite SUV-like, although again you must consider that I’ve spent four years with my bum on the floor in a Smart Roadster, so it is sort of relative.

I’ve figured out the digital media player, and the controls are a bit fiddly, but no more so than many mobile phones. A surprise is the voice controls – which do help if you don’t get embarrassed by talking to a car again and again – but I still get “Call failed” when I try to use the hands free to call someone, although I’m sure it’s something simple I’m missing. It could even be that the reception around Highgate is rubbish.

The air-con is alright – every review of the car I’ve seen has the optional “climate control” package, but the standard stuff has nice chunky plastic rotary “tonka toy” style controls which I rather like.

For once, I can’t wait to have a few long drives up and down from Portsmouth to Highgate, to get used to it all. The turbo shove is quite intoxicating, although with a light foot it’s a pussy cat around town.  You need to keep the turbo spun-up to get the most out of it, but in normal traffic that’s just plain reckless, so I’ll be a good boy for the foreseeable, just squeezing it to get a kick now and then.

The grip is fantastic, chucking it into roundabouts under power gives you understeer of course, but it never feels like the horses are running away from the carriage. Hoofing away from a stand-still gives a little scrabble, then the tyres plant the road and you’re thrown forward. But that’s all just boy-racer stuff. On regular roads you know exactly how big a gap you can go for, the knowledge that the throttle can get you out of trouble if you need to is enough and the brakes pull you up with no fuss. It’s great fun.

And for a jumped up shopping trolley, it doesn’t half get noticed. People are still looking at Fiat 500s as cute and a bit new, but one with chunky spoilers and stripes turns the odd head – men and women. Amongst a sea of Minis in London, the Abarth is not for the shrinking violet. I can’t say I’m normally an extrovert, but after the Smart Roadster and the Honda Beat, I’m used to being a bit disappointed if no-one at all turns a head over the course of a journey. So this little car seems to be right at my level – people look interested, but don’t appear to mouth the word “tosser” back at me – or at least I hope.

Sitting in the back seat is interesting – it’s really tight – anything over 5ft 9″ will require a bit of a slouch in the seat to fit your head in. The headlining drops towards the back – possibly for the high-level brake light, but you wonder if a little bit of extra design time could have given an inch extra there. Legroom is small, but the front seats are designed so that the centre back of them is squashy, so it’s not awful. It’s true, it’s not a car for carrying four tallish people on long journeys, but hell, it’s not so bad. It’s a novelty for me to carry two extra people anyway.

And timing being what it is, now I’ve got this uber-toy, I’m off on holiday for a week, so I’m going to have to forget about it for a while. That might not be so bad, by the time I get back, it’ll be new all over again, and I’ll finally have the opportunity to break out of the north-circular stranglehold, and get some air into the engine.

Can’t wait – but I’ll have to.

I’m getting used to the Turbo lag a bit. Rather than a sudden gush of push, it’s a builder, so after the initial disappointment when you stomp on the gas, you find yourself surprised at the way the it seems to get stronger as the revs grow faster than you expect.

Not that I’ve actually managed to get it into fith gear yet, dropping M at work in Finchley is hardly a prolonged test.

On the techy side, it’s pluses and minuses. The Sound system is really very good, although the lack of engine noise and crashes helps (compared to my Smart Roadster – YMMV). With Bass and treble set to +-zero, it does seem to be tuned as if it has a loudness button, in that it has plenty of treble and decent bass (if a bit flat), but not much mid-range. Not hi-fi, but definitely a happy sound. I need to stick more music through it to figure it out some more.

I managed to get the iPhone (3G, firmware v2.2.1) to sync up via bluetooth fine with the car, and it attempts to call, but hasn’t managed it so far, so a little testing to go there (just a warning, iPhone firmware v2.0 broke compatibility, but v2.2 brought it back). The iPhone (connected by USB) isn’t recognised as a music source at all by Fiat’s Blue & Me car media system, and that seems to be for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Blue and Me only recognises Windows formatted FAT drives, which means if you have an ipod, you’d have to have set it up on a Windows PC initially (rules me out straight away). Secondly, although windows formatted iPods do supposedly work, iPhones apparently do not anyway (as of this post anyway), probably because the Blue & Me system was built to interrogate the old style iPod OS, while the Apple OSX Touch OS in the iPhone and iPod Touch are radically different.

The truth is, even if I was able to plug-in my iPhone to the car and play the music, I wouldn’t be able to play much, as it doesn’t support AAC, only MP3 and WMV, and as I only went back to ripping CDs in MP3 a short while back (for just this reason), and have bought many tracks from the iTunes store in AAC, I’d be a bit stuck for big chunks of my collection. Time to do some re-ripping.

It seems a completely ridiculous state of affairs that even though it’s a modern Windows CE branded system, it doesn’t support the open AAC standard (like many windows music players do), it can’t read an iPod filesystem, and can’t interface with the most common smartphone/music player on the market, but there you go. The Blue & Me system is software upgradable, so I suppose this state of affairs could change, but I’m not holding my breath. A £20 iPod dock is smarter than the Blue & Me media player if you are part if the iTunes economy.

The work around is pretty simple, although finessing the details took a bit of investigation. The simple answer is to use a standard USB stick/thumb drive, format it in FAT32, load it up with MP3 files and leave it in the car.

Of course, I don’t find it *that* simple, as the main point of playing digital audio in the car is to listen to the latest podcasts that I might have downloaded just as I’m leaving the house. This would be fine if iTunes could sync to a thumb drive just as it can with an iPod, but it can’t, and although there’s a windows itunes plug-in to do just this (allegedly), there’s nothing on the Mac.

But that wasn’t going to stop me.

I set up a couple of smart playlists in iTunes (one for podcasts – ie, Podcast=true, and one for music), gave them a limit (3GB for music while podcasts couldn’t exceed 1GB and had to have been downloaded in the previous two weeks), and copied the contents onto corresponding folders on the USB stick. Then I’m using an applescript:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=syncplaylistfilestofolder

…to sync up the smart playlists with the folders USB stick. It takes a little bit of editing and it’s not as fast as natively syncing to your iPod, but it might just work for my purposes. For reference, it seems to be able to check through 1GB of podcasts in about a minute, but checking through 3GB of music is more like five minutes on my Macbook. We’ll see if it works out for me, having to sync my iPhone AND a thumb drive might be a bit over-awkward. If only there was a simple 3.5mm headphone jack for the header unit. An alternative I thought about was trying to source an old style iPod shuffle first gen – the stick one – if that worked with Blue & Me, I could let iTunes sync the podcasts with it as normal, plug it in and go…

The day to pick up my shiny new Abarth 500 (it really doesn’t say Fiat anywhere in the car). Rather than rack up the options list, it’s flat white with the normal red stripes, split rear seat and a fixed glass roof. It would have also had 17″ “petal” style alloys, but a snafu in making the decision to change too late meant it never happened.

And it looked great the first time I saw it. In a crazy move, I hadn’t test driven it before, partly because with modern cars there just aren’t any deal-breaking flaws any more, partly because all the reviews were so overwhelmingly positive (and I read them all), and partly because I wanted it to really feel like a new experience when it was actually mine. It didn’t dissapoint. Tucked around the back of Fiat Marylebone, it had all the cuteness of the Fiat 500, but with all the chunky detailing of a mini racer, just tetering on that edge of “cool” before it falls into “over the top Max Power chav puller”.

It all felt solid and screwed together – no creaks, crashes or bumps (more than can be said for my dear Smart Roadster), and everything you touch feels like quality, which reminds me of my BMW Mini bugbear. So much time has been spent of the Mini interior, there’s no doubt that it looks quirky, works well and is true quality. And then you reach for the door pull, and in every mini I’ve sat in, it’s cheap plastic with a rough seam. Huh?

After being frustrated at not getting the 17″ wheels I wanted, the standard 16″ rims don’t look cheap by any means, and the ride on them is firm and maybe bobbly on forever-chewed-up city streets, but never feels like it’s crashing into potholes or rattling the dashboard. It was surprisingly quiet too – not what I expected, although the exhaust does make a lovely burble on tick-over.

In the rush hour traffic, I barely got out of second gear, it was easy to drive although the clutch is re-assuringly hefty – although that could just be years of driving a semi-auto – and fun was had trying out the sport mode button.

The button feels less like it turns on superpowers when you hit it, and more like it restricts the car when you take it off. The steering goes super-light, the torque drops appreciably even for a layman like me, and most noticable is the “change-up” light, which suddenly blinks at you all the time as it tries to teach you to drive economically rather than on the red-line.

The change light brings up one interesting story. It’s in the centre of the turbo boost gauge unit, which on the right-hand drive UK model it sits high on the dashboard in a slightly distracting fashion (very distracting if sport mode is off). Back when I first looked at the Abarth, I noticed that all the videos and images of the LHD cars had it in a much more reasonable place at the four o’clock position on the side of the speedo.

Querying it with the salesman, he said that no-one was sure why it was different, but the confident rumour was that it was because the lead on the back of the unit wasn’t long enough to reach all the way across on the RHD model… And the thought that rather than just add a longer lead, they re-engineered the dashboard to put it in a crazy position makes me smile that it is still a very Italian car!

image from Autocar.co.uk

But then what Gordon Murray is trying to do is create a bit of a revolution, not just in car design, but in manufacturing and car industry organisation. That could be called “risky” – cubed. It brings to mind the way the Sinclair C5 was pitched, as well as the Segway, 60′s microcars and even the original Swatch vision for Smart, so here’s hoping that his decades in the industry has made him smarter than that lot, or at least hire a damned convincing lobbyist (and stylist). It’s should be too small for packaging, safety and people’s vanity, but it comes from the man that has better ideas before breakfast than I do in a lifetime. And it comes at a time when the industry is in financial and eco crisis, and because of the their size and tradition, they can’t possibly promise any quick solution without years of expensive development. If I were GM, I’d be banging on his door.

Maybe an ipod of small cars could work, imagine an Amazon branded car with the realism of four-seats and an internal combustion engine (for the near future).

But the aim is to do something while we can, before the powers that be decide that cars are killing the planet (it’s all about perception), or the industry collapses into a super dense monopoly. As Gordon says: ‘How can we protect our mobility before the big stick comes out?’

Type25 – Autocar sneak peek
Type25 – Gordon Murray’s website

The glacier-like way that these things happen is already the complete opposite of how the web works, but the fact that the commission completely misunderstood the implications of what they’ve done is the most disappointing part.

I guess they think that the way that all the big TV stations are playing with these funny little websites for streaming their programs is fine, and the more variety the better. Sticking the beeb, ITV and channel four together in an easy to use website would mean people wouldn’t venture further to find the smaller guys. They would “suck the oxygen” out of the market.

What they’ve done is fragment the whole UK IPTV business. Now there will be many delivery mechanisms, many pipelines to get content onto the web, many codecs, many DRM schemes and of course many different websites to visit.

When I turn on the TV, I push a single button to scan through lots of content. With IPTV, I could spend most of my time playing with computers to type in different addresses, navigate past the adverts, and hope that my version of flash/QT/WMV/DRM will play it all, which as a mac user means I only have the BBC to watch anyway. By moving away from the BBCs production pipeline that Kangaroo were offering, the commission have removed choice – not given it – and made the IPTV landscape more complex for every average punter to use.

It also kills the “10 foot” (ie, sitting on your sofa, not at a keyboard) interface. No media centre software will bother to work with all the different systems to bring these disparate websites into one media centre/Frontrow like interface.  Boxee works with the BBC iPlayer brilliantly. But would they bother wasting development time integrating ITV, CH4 and CH5, especially with their DRM’d formats? No, you’ll have to sit in front of a keyboard and watch it on a small expensive screen with tinny sound.

For the “good of everyone” the commission are making it more difficult to get legit IPTV, when they forget that unprotected, better quality versions are out there on bitTorrent sites, and the magic of software often makes it easier to get pirate versions than legit ones. iTunes is surely a pointer to the fact that if you make it easy for the punter, they’re less likely to bother going pirate, more likely to view your adverts, and more likely to make the business work.

But it’s not just the killing of kangaroo that is the worry, it’s the precedent. Does this mean that if Hulu offered an outlet for UK TV content, it too would be turned away because of the monopoly? If so, does the commission understand that unlike a TV, people are free to choose whatever they want on the web, and if 90% choose to take their TV through one portal, the rest are still free to browse more uncommon web video?

Kangaroo was by no means a perfect bullet, in comparison with Hulu it smelled of red-tape and limited vision, but by aggregating content in one place it had the chance of making a working business model. And by using the BBCs pipeline as a basis, it could have reduced the cost barrier for anyone coming on board while standardising the delivery mechanism. Within five years we could have been buying TVs or set-top boxes with interfaces that let us pick out recent or archived TV, alongside other web content like youtube, just like TVs are coming out with Freeview+ or Netflix built in today. Call it FreeNet to complement FreeView+ and FreeSat+.

The end of Kangaroo and any other aggregation service for UK IPTV puts us well behind the US, and takes all the intelligence out of web “catch-up TV”, making the user search for it themselves.

Looks like if you want to watch TV on the web, you’ll have to be a geek for the foreseeable.

For me, I just remember my first encounter. It was 1990, my first year at university and my introduction to computers in general, or at least those bigger than a ZX Spectrum. We were being taught Wordperfect, Lotus 123 and Paradox DB on MS DOS personal computers. Most had green screens and huge beige cases the size of a suitcase. I was rubbish at it. The alternative for us engineers was a campus wide VAX/VMS mainframe system – which is possibly the most arcane thing I’ve ever seen.

One of my friends in halls was a humanities student, who asked why I wasn’t using the Macs to write up my project instead…

huh?

He took me down to the computer centre, bought a system floppy disk from the front desk (mac plus’ didn’t have a hard drive), scribbled something flippant on it like “craigypoos disk”, stuck it in a mac plus and turned it on.

Bong.

A paper-white screen appeared, with greyscale icons in the shape of the floppy disk and trash-can. Ten minutes of help later, I was using the brick like mouse to get onto servers, write my report and was looking to print it (and for the first time I knew what the result would look like before I pressed the button).

It’s all so common now that learning how a windowing GUI works is like learning your first nursery rhyme. And I know it’s a cliché, but back then it was a real revelation moment for me.

It made everything easy enough to figure out how to do a task without the need of a tutor and a keyboard overlay. It made me think about fonts, graphics and dazzling tutors with presentation, especially if my report content was weak. It was the very definition of a good tool – it didn’t get in the way of the task.

But the big thing that really sparked interest was the personality. It encouraged my friend to rename my first system disk. Students changed their desktop patterns or added stupid stuff like eyes that followed the mouse. Even non-technical users decorated their floppy system-disks as if it was their favourite pencil case. It encouraged a plafulness and even emotional attachment that made it a friendly work tool, not a technical mountain to climb. And although that is not just a Mac idea any more (thank god, the rest of the world caught up), it made a clear impression and definitely had an effect on my future direction.

I for one am glad that the democratisation of personal computers – that started with the mac – eventually broke the barriers between geeks and average people.

Today we’re all part-geek.

1. Normal Otto cycle petrol combustion engines. We’re getting better and better at making four-strokes (and catalysers) cleaner. Really pretty clean. Shame about that whole “peak oil” thing.
2. Other petrol combustion technologies (eg Miller cycle). Good effort, but there’s still that oil thing going on.
3. Diesel and it’s future combustion methods. I don’t need to mention the oil thing, although I guess at least you can use other types of oil. Could just be replacing CO2 with Nitrous/soot instead.
4. Bio-diesel, Bio-Ethanol. Don’t make me laugh, even I can see that takes more food-crop acreage, time, effort and fertiliser than the benefit we get out of it, and rape-seed sucks nutrients out of the ground like a hoover – hardly green.
5. “Hybrid” (combustion & electric). The name has been so hijacked into actually equalling “eco-friendly”, it makes me cry. The word has so much power that people don’t notice that manufacturers increasingly use it to hide the fact that the preceding words are something like “Lexus 3.5l turbo-barge… HYBRID!” (oh, so it’s green – that’s ok). The Prius is such an icon that Honda have made an exact copy, ‘cos that’s what a green car looks like (sigh). It’s a great step in the right direction, but paying £20k for Focus class car that does the same MPG as a diesel? Not exactly the revolution I’m looking to sign-up for – I’ll pass.
6. Heat Engines/Stirling Cycle. I wish people would stop saying these are incredibly efficient when the truth is no one has got one working in a real world application. And something still needs to create the heat to drive it…
7. Electric. Loads of Torque, loads of weight. Oh and the whole waiting for hours when it’s run out. I say we use mighty big capacitors instead of chemical batteries, instant charge, and chance of instant death!. Shame there wasn’t some other method of storing energy – like some big flywheel… (NB one friend is in exactly this field) Yes, it just pushes the CO2 generation to the power stations, but at least it gives us the *option* of switching the way we generate that power (oh for a nuclear fusion breakthrough…)
8. Hydrogen/Fuel Cell. Many say it’s the future, but until we come up with some miraculous way of easily turning H2O into H and O, most hydrogen is produced from an energy heavy offshoot of oil and gas, and then needs even more energy to compress and cool it so that it can arrive in your fuel tank. Not looking like a silver bullet so far…
9. Other. Steam? Funnels on cows sucking the methane out of them? Bacteria turning turnips into 95 Octane? Making cars the size of hanger doors and covering them in solar cells? Mr Fusion? Am I grabbing at straws?
10. We all ride motorbikes. And we all die young (and cold and wet). And most nice bikes do less mpg than my car. And it’s funny when you get two bikers in a room they always talk about that “near miss” they had the other day But, yes, yes, other than that they’re rocket ships for mini metro money. And lovely looking bits of kit.

I’ll be interested to see what their opinions are on what the future is for the personal car…

Phill Schiller ran a tight ship of a presentation, no slack, a few nerves, but a good scorecard. The 17″ macbook was everything they said it was and we’re already feeling the backlash of the sealed battery debate. Frankly if it can get close to 8hrs and a thousand charges, there’s not much to complain about.

iWorks was a decent upgrade, and the stuff they rolled out for iLife was not only nice dressing, but seriously clever and appropriate technology. The big news, almost hidden, was the fact that a little compromise on tiered pricing seemed to loosen the labels enough to allow DRM free music across the iTunes store.

I didn’t expect Snow Leopard to take centre stage, but the more I think about the fact that microsoft will show the very well reviewed Windows7 only a day or so after Macworld, it does seem a bit strange to waste the opportunity to shout about your latest and greatest first.

Still waiting for that illusive mac mini, and the AppleTV is still looking like an orphened product, or at least as having absent parents. It leaves so many questions still answered. But I guess that’s what press announcements in February were invented for…