My favourite Apple moment

In light of today's news here's my favourite Mac, the original iBook.

In many ways, it wasn't the machine itself so grabbed me (cool as it was), it was the experience of unpacking it when it arrived in my office over a decade ago. In the box with the computer and the mains cord was a disc about the size of a hockey puck (on the right in the image above). I looked at it and wondered what on Earth it was. It looked like a giant yo-yo, with cable wrapped around instead of string. Then the penny dropped — it was the power supply. You plugged the mains cord into the yo-yo, then unwound just as much cord as you needed (oh, and when you connected it in to your iBook the plug glowed orange if the battery needed charging, green if it was fully charged). The child inside me squealed with delight (being a grown up I laughed out loud, rather than actually squealing).

The iBook still works (the battery is long dead, but plug the yo-yo into the mains and it still works), and it manages to run an early version of Mac OS X.

If anybody has to ask why people love Apple products, it's not because of the "brand", or the "exclusivity", it's because of the joy they can invoke. Someone cared enough to make the most mundane task — plugging a laptop into the mains — into a thing of beauty.

Why I want an iPad

OK, first of all, I want one, I want one real bad.

There's been a general sense of disappointment about the iPad, which I suspect is only natural given the enormous hype leading up to the announcement, as well as the fact that the applications shown were fairly conventional. Personally I don't think book reading is where the action is. For time-sensitive stuff like newspapers, and rich, complex documents such as scientific papers, sure, but physical books strike me as a piece of technology that we're not really going to improve on, rather like knives and forks.

But some grasp that this is magic. What I hope the iPad will do is finally move some visualisation tools into the main stream (as much as phylogenetics can be thought of as mainstream). The challenge of visualising large phylogenies has yielded some cool tools which, sadly, remained under-developed, such as TreeJuxtaposer, which seems clunky and counter-intuituve when using a mouse, but with a touch screen would just be awesome.



Tools such as Paloverde would also be more intuitive to use, as would the magnifier feature in Dendroscope. Imagine "pinch and zoom" in TreeJuxtaposer or Dendroscope, or for viewing large a sequence alignments.

Then there's the existing tabletop tools that I blogged about earlier:



And of course there's Perceptive Pixel's view of a taxonomic classification:



There would be some work involved porting these tools to the iPad (e.g., porting code from Java to Objective C in the case of TreeJuxtaposer and Dendroscope), but the person who does this is going to have an impact on this field comparable to Maddison brothers when they released MacClade in 1986.