Between CES and MacWorld I got to see lots of neat things last month...
My CES top ten for Tom's Guide including the Casio EXILIM Pro EX-F1, a camera that does more with being digital than replicating film
The MacBook Air is shiny in both senses but there was something smaller at MacWorld I liked more

Two pieces up on Tom's Hardware today; mobile search and mapping tools and a notebook buying guide - so you could pick the notebook you want and get directions to go buy it ;-)

When you're on the move, do you want to search the Web the way you would on a PC, or rather look for what's around you? Sometimes you'll want to look up a Web page and read it, but often you want to know more where a movie is playing rather than who was in it, where to get good sushi rather than how to make it, and how long it will take to get to the theater after you've eaten. Read the rest of Simplifying Mobile Search...

Need a bigger screen? Thin and light or mobile workstation, basic budget or high-powered business features, Macs or tablet PCs; today we’re going to tell you how to choose the right notebook for whatever you need. We’re going to go through business, general-use, budget, gaming, ultra-portable, tablet and Mac laptops to show you what to look for and offer some suggestions. Pick the Perfect PC for You...

If you want to try out most Apple kit, you can do it in the Apple Store. Unless it's an iPod Shuffle when you can press the buttons but not hear what it sounds like as none of the units have headphones. If you go to the wrong Apple store - in the local mall, say - you'll be told that you don;t need to listen to it because 'it sounds like an iPod'. If you go to the right Apple Store - Palo Alto say - an employee will scratch their head and suggest that you unplug the Bose headphones from the iPod next to the Shuffle display and plug that instead, and if you find the one Shuffle in four that actually has any charge, you can hear what a $79 player sounds like with $200 headphones. If you want to hear it with the headphones that come in the box, you can find a Shuffle and a Nano that are close enough together that you can pull the headphone half out of the security tag so that they reach the Shuffle. At this point I had to fold forward from the waist, lean on the display case of iPod Nano boxes and lay my head on the table in order to get the headphones to fit in my ears. Or I could have bought one, taken it out of the shop and come back in five minutes later saying 'actually, no, I don't think it does sound like any other iPod'. Could be they've left on the auto-convert down to 128kbps setting in iTunes; I haven't yet found if you can actually turn that off - further investigation on the review unit. Until then, I'll be bending over the counter...

I completely agree with Passionate Users today (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/07/we_cant_leave_i.html) that you can't leave it up to users to know what they need or ask for it. Finding out what they want is hard enough and it's not a user's job to know what system would improve their life and work properly for the business.

It goes for little things; I didn't know I wanted a running word count in the status bar until it showed up in Word 2007. I thought I wanted word count on demand, but actually ambient word count is more useful. Of course there are things we users know we want; I've been telling people at Microsoft in detail what I wanted for timezones in Outlook and lo, Outlook 2007 has a Timezons button for appointments. It goes for big things; I might say I want a macro to export an Excel table to ICS format so I can import it into Outlook's calendar, but what I'm really asking for is an integrated accounting and time management system.

But I'm going to take Passionate to task for saying "The world never needed the iPod until Apple created it". One; I needed it. Two; Apple may have created the iPod but it was neither the first MP3 player (Eiger Labs branding of Saehan) nor the first hard-drive based MP3 player. That was the 5GB Hango Personal Jukebox (PJB-100), designed by Compaq, abandoned to a Korean company without the distribution or marketing to get it out there. Back in 1998 you might have seen me testing the anti-skip on the hard drive by hurling it across the table at lproven in The Lamb, or being dragged back onto the pavement just before I got run over by a taxi I didn't hear because I had headphones on. I was copying MP3s from my PC, making playlists, browsing my library with an easy to use menu system and generally making like I had an iPod. (The PJB site has become a shop but CNET remembers and so do I http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6450_7-5622055-1.html)

What Apple did was take an existing product, design it beautifully, make it with the cheapest possible components engineered to an inch past their predicted life and market it superbly. That's what Apple does. Their innovation is all in the implementation; it's all in the delivery. That's OK - that's often what the user needs to realise that this is something they really do need. A geek will have hunted out the first version (and probably written a macro to get around the problems that Apple will smooth over in the design). Just don't tell them they didn't know they needed it till someone prettied it up.

Last night after wandering through Santana Row (it's very Stepford Wives but I do like the decor and the Gaudi mosaics and the fountains) and dinner with ocean-song and rob (yummy thai at the only Thai Pepper neither Google nor the GPS knows about) we enjoyed another hot tub in the rain with mr_kurt and saffronrose and Stephanie. This morning Marina treated us to hot cross buns Santa Cruz style - spicey and fluffy and fruity, with the cross icing rather than pastry. Then we stuffed the car (technically, the honking big SUV with surprisingly good gas mileage) with our suitcases, did a little roadtrip snack shopping at Trader Joes (mmm; dried white peaches) and drove up to Cupertino to have lunch in the Apple canteen (mmm; sushi) and talk iWeb (publishing for the rest of us) with an old friend Marc who now handles marketing for the software. No sign of a plateless Mercedes (in the handicapped space or otherwise).

We stopped in Capitola to buy more lovely pottery and take pictures of the beach and eat ice cream from Cafe Violetta. Down the coast to Moss Landing where we saw a sea otter floating lazily around the marina, white herons (both smooth and fluffy) and huge crashing waves on the beach, with a side order of halibut and chips at Phil's Seafood Market. Then through Monterey and around the point to Pacific Grove and the lighthouse on Ocean View Boulevard (the poor man's 17 Mile Drive) watching the surf roll in and almost wash the seals off the rock, then down to Carmel. Walking around Carmel in the rain wasn't as nice as coffee and cake at the Red House Cafe (and Mrs Trawick's Garden Shop). Driving back round the point in the dark, we saw the surf roiling and swirling onto the rocks and beaches in the moonlight.

Favourite road signs of the day; a leaping deer balancing an added red ball on his nose and the people crossing sign on the way into Carmel where the little people are all carrying shopping bags.
 

As Macs become more popular, they become more of a target for hackers (old-school bragging rights and new-style theft both go best with a big pool of targets), but Apple's dismissal of the Oompa Loompa trojan reminded me of the old joke about the Unix virus (read the mail, forward the instructions to a friend and then format your hard drive): they say it "requires a user to download the application and execute the resulting file".