News for Thursday, 1 September 2005

Imagine a large trackpad, on which you place your hands while using all your fingers simultaneously. This is a new system developed by Tactiva.

The TactaPad, as it is named, use a camcorder that will communicate in real-time with the system and the computer to indicate the location of your fingers/hands; while the touch surface will move vertically when pressed, providing force feedback and also a 3D-like sensation when acting on object displayed on the screen.
The demo movies performed with MacOSX demonstrate the strength of such an input device.

It is like using a 3D-touch-screen!!
The link to demo movies:
http://www.tactiva.com/demo.html.
The company is looking for partnerships to develop this input device. The current estimated price might be a problem : 1000$

While LightScribe is facing problems to be turned into a blockbuster product as well as convincing DVD burner manufacturers to include this feature in their future models, NEC is preparing a new system to compete directly with HP's technology. The name of this new standard : LabelFlash.
LabelFlash is almost identical to a technology developed by Yamaha in the past, and known as Disc T@2. With such a system, it will be possible to burn image in 256 Grayscale mode on specific CD type. In addition it will take only 5 minutes to burn an image, versus 30 minutes currently with LightScribe.
The first burner featuring this new system will be the NEC ND-4551A and should be available soon. But there is no information related to the price of this drive neither to the compatible media.

Nec has officially announced the availability of the first HD-DVD drive for October 2005.

This device will of course play HD-DVD at x2, but also DVD at 8x, DVD-RAM at 5x and CD at 32x.
The expected price will be around 500€.
Of course one will have to wait to be able to use this drive since there is no date for a real availability of HD-DVD media.
In addition, Toshiba has just announced today that the official launch of HD-DVD (drive and media) might be delayed, and instead of Q4 2005 it could rather be for Q1 2006; in other words at the same time than the expected date for Blu-Ray.

During an interview with CNET, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen has confirmed that Creative Suite for MacIntel should be available by the end of 2006, beginning of 2007; so it should be named CS3.
Chizen was also mentioning how difficult it was to port Adobe applications to MacIntel, a point of view quite different to Steve Jobs comments during the WWDC. But the reason could lie into the fact that Adobe applications are built on Carbon library and low level language currently dedicated to PowerPC. So for sure it required more work for them, but not all applications are coded this way, so what is true for Adobe is not true for all other applications.

Less than 24 hours after its launch, Apple has pulled off the Mac mini Test Drive offer.
It remains unclear why the offer has been removed, for sure it was not meant to be available only for 24 hours.
Apple must have been surprised by the huge reaction driven by this offer on Mac-dedicated and news networks. Apple might have been afraid of a higher than expected number of customers wishing to sign up for this Drive Test; and even that most of them will send it back after the 30-days trial period.
This could have generated in and out hardware traffic which could have made Apple financial results for current quarter difficult to finalize.

While people who only go to visit the Apple expo itself, and will have to print an electronic badge, those who asked to attend to the Keynote shall receive theirs by postal mail.
As on this picture, the first ones are arriving.