See, I started in this business because this is what I wanted to do. I knew I wasn’t going to write the great American novel, but I also knew there was more to life than buying something for a dollar and selling it for two. I’d hoped to create something, something which could be held to the highest standards. And what I realized was I wanted to give the news to the world, and I wanted to give it unvarnished. The more we all know about each other, the greater the chance we will survive. Sure, I want to make a profit. You can’t exist without one. But John Bontecou is all profit. Now if we give him license to absorb Parrish Communications, and he has his eye on a few others after us, in order to reach the world you will have to go through John Bontecou. And not only will you have to pay him to do this, far more important, you’ll have to agree with him. Reporting the news is a privilege and a responsibility, and it is not exploitable. Parrish Communications has earned this privilege. John Bontecou wants to buy it. As your Chairman, I urge you to agree this company is not for sale

William Parish, Meet Joe Black. I guess they didn’t watch the movie at the Huffington Post.

Everybody these days is chatting about the forthcoming iPad 2. In particular, people are wondering whether it will have a new higher resolution display. There seems to be three classes of people.

1. The ones who say no.

2. The ones who say yes, it will have a 2048x1536 screen (four times as many pixels, doubling the pixels in both dimensions)

3. And finally the ones who say yes, it will have a higher resolution, but the number of pixels will not be doubled.

The guys from the second group were initially supported (tenuously, perhaps) by Engadget. The tech blog heard from a trusted source that the next iPad will indeed have a higher resolution. Since the only way to prevent anti-aliasing¹ is to double the resolution, the rumors of a “Retina” display started. This way the iPad would inherit the gorgeous screen from the iPhone 4, making the individual pixels invisible from the distance at which we use our devices.

But then people from the third group announced “Hey, that’s not gonna happen, because RAM and GPU needed to support such a display are too pricey.” Therefore, since Engadget source didn’t say retina, the guys from the third group started with “It will have a higher resolution, like 25 or 50% more”. At this point, Apple prophet John Gruber also said no retina.²

But he also said that it will be either the same, or nothing. He bet on the same resolution. I tend to believe him, but I’ll come back to that later.

The saga doesn’t finish here though. Someone found 2048x1536 px images in the iBooks bundle in the iOS 4.3 beta. The retina display crowd (our second group) was, of course, very happy. John the prophet at that point, having heard enough of these rumors about the tablet, clearly said that was an oversight by a designer who knew who eventually the iPad will go Retina.

So who’s right? As I said, I tend to believe John, but for different reasons — I don’t think is a matter of RAM, or GPU, or battery consumption or display price. After all with the iPhone processor, Apple already showed the world amazing things. Also the battery is not a great issue. I think people would give up a bit of battery for such a good display. And they would probably pay some more for it (like they do with the current Macbook Pro HD display).

So, why on earth is Apple not introducing retina in the next generation iPad?

I think it has to do with competition: no one is good enough yet. Why have higher prices slow down the growth of the product, when there’s no one capable of doing anything similar? The others tablet maker will need a year, if not more, to be competitive with the iPad in terms of price and appeal (if they ever get there). Because if competitors could only come up with the pricey Samsung Galaxy Tablet, then Apple can wait, most likely another full year.

Probably when Google will present the Nexus T(ablet) with the revolutionary resolution of 1920x1080 px, produced by HTC with 2 cameras, Android 3.1415, 4G connectivity, because you cannot ever get enough, 5 hours of battery life and six speakers, because you know you’ll need them, all starting only at 799$…

And then Apple will announce that the iPad 3, with retina display, longer battery life³, iOS 6 and starting at 499$ (with, thank God, only one GPS and two speakers).

As Tim Cook already said

I think some enormous percentage of people are going to select an iPad there.

I know I would.

Latex Style

Check this out if you use LaTeX. A lot of insightful tips.

If you have problems with Illustrator and PSfrag, that’s probably because you can’t have psfrag replace tags with more than one character, once you saved the EPS with Illustrator. I think I found the solution, at least using CS5, and if the file is not too complicated. When saving the EPS, choose for Version the Illustrator 3 EPS. In this way you’ll be able to replace tags with more than one character.

Art is a generous action—it’s when a human connects to another human and makes a change.

Seth Godin

Well, why would I wanto to do that? Because in general djvu’s take up less space. Anyway, if you have a Mac with macports, issue from the terminal

    sudo port install pdf2djvu

and then use it with

    pdf2djvu -o name_of_the_file.djvu  --monochrome name_of_the_file.pdf 

where I used

    --monochrome

because I just had a black and white pdf. For more options,

    man pdf2djvu

Presentation zen

Nice article by Garry Reynolds on presentation openings. Must read if you care about your audience.

Shawn Blanc on writing

Very nice article by Shawn. Take home message: re-writing, re-editing. And repeat. Repeat. Repeat. With respect to this, very similar to Gruber’s view on how Apple Rolls.

Presentation zen

Just as the meaning of Japanese cuisine goes far beyond sustenance, the significance of the bath goes far beyond merely washing.

Presentation zen

Great article from Garr about the lessons we can learn from bamboo. Be sure to check out it’s blog for a lot of other great articles