I ran across this gizmodo article on e-book development. (And snazzy video too!)
While I someday dreamed of owning a study that smelled of rich mahogany and old leather bound tomes, I guess I'm pretty excited with this trend. Kindle is something I'd like to take for a spin, but I can imagine that it would be a bit intimidating for the average reader. (Especially since there's a stigma against reading materials on computers/electronics. Small text size, eye fatigue, etc.) But perhaps introducing something like the Berkley/ Maryland model will bring some familiar elements of old fashioned books to the traditional reader.
I guess I can't do much about the old leather smell. Perhaps there will be a scented add on. And I'm going to have one empty library with a lone e-book on the shelves... but it would still be nice to have a literal "page turner" that reacts in the same way as paper. Thoughts?
Firefox 3 is being released later today. This Webmonkey article urges us all to download it immediately. The article lists a number of new features that sound pretty good - including the ability to click on a mailto link and have it open Gmail (or whatever) instead of a desktop mail client. And the ability to work offline with online apps, syncing up when you next go online. All pretty cool if you're making a move towards online apps.
But what scares me is that I downloaded Firefox 3 beta for the mac a couple of weeks ago and did not have a good experience - the mac didn't seem to like it at all, with kernel panics, freezes, shutdown woes and cpu running at 50% with no apps open. I ended up doing a restore with Time Machine (which works great, by the way, and only took an hour to restore a 60 GB system; the downside to doing too many of these is that the next TimeMachine backup after a restore takes a while because it backs up everything again, taking up another 60 GB of my backup drive).
So someone with a Mac running Leopard - test Firefox 3 for me and let me know if it's safe to go in the water again.
I've enabled reCaptcha on this blog, to try to cut down on comment spam. At the same time I removed the need to sign in to post a comment. Until we see how well this works, I am not allowing any comments to get automatically published.