Status-Q

A very generous friend today gave me an iPod Touch. It is, perhaps, the most beautiful bit of technology I’ve ever owned.

It’s not the most powerful, or full-featured, or exciting, necessarily. But as an example of design it is amazing. In particular, it doesn’t have many of the features of an iPhone, with which I’ve also played. But it’s also significantly thinner, which is hard to convey in photographs: lying on my kitchen table it was about the same thickness as the coaster on which my wine glass sat. You can just about see how they fit a screen, backlight and touch sensor in that space. So where’s the battery?

Almost every aspect of this seems to be very nicely thought out, and I’m very impressed. Who would have thought, a decade ago, that Unix machines could look like this?

Wraparound is an interesting free utility for those with multiple displays, or very large displays. I sometimes have a 4-screen setup at work and it can take some time to move the mouse from the far left to the far right. With Wraparound, you just keep going left and, well, you guessed it.

Mmm… Now I’m dreaming of a desk which surrounds me completely, with 360 degrees of screens, and I could sit in a hole in the middle, a bit like a model railway enthusiast…. Then I’d really want this! Of course, I’d also really want a wireless mouse…