I feel that desktop operating system maturity is reached. Think of all the new features that Steve Jobs announced today for Leopard. None of them is to “die for” (even for the impressive Time Machine, most users don’t care about backups).

This is not to say that all the new features of Vista and OSX are not welcome. On the contrary. But I don’t see most of these features being as important to the usability of a desktop as features arriving with Win95 (even if the OS was unstable) or OSX 10.3. Instead, most are nothing but “brush ups”, clean ups, refinements, beautifications, and in some cases, useless eye candy and pure cpu suckers. I feel that for the current computing model, keyboard-mouse-monitor, OSes are pretty close to the best they can be in terms of desktop experience. Which is good, as it will be easier for less fortunate OSes to catchup on desktop experience, e.g. Linux distros.

Maybe the next big company in technology, in 10 years from now, instead of showing off their brand new shiny animated UI, they will show us a completely new way of using a computer.

“Speaking with OnMilwaukee, actor Brad Beyer answered suggestions that the plot of the show was too slow by saying that the real problem with Jericho is that viewers weren’t watching it as it was broadcast.” […] Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment, told the New York Times that if fans want the show to live, they need to watch the broadcast because that’s how the money gets made.”

Sorry guys, but if the plot in the second season will be as slow as it was, I will continue using my DVR and watch “Jericho” whenever I have nothing better to do rather than watching it live. “Jericho” didn’t deserve to get canceled, but it wasn’t “Lost” either. It was slow and boring at times, but granted, overall not a bad show. But if Nielsen Ratings can’t count towards DVR/TiVo views, well then, don’t use Nielsen as your guide to do your business. Start an awareness campaign for your advertisers regarding which shows are mostly viewed on DVRs rather than live. Besides, a further renewal of “Jericho” should not depend on me, but on you: make the show interesting so I would want to watch it live. Just make sure you don’t put it at the same timeslot as “Lost”.

In one word: boring.

Except the new Leopard UI stuff, everything else we already knew pretty much. Nevertheless, a good release and I will get it with a new Powerbook.

But the iPhone stuff really put me off. Jobs hinted about “running some sort of apps” on the iPhone and everyone assumed the “some sort” of apps would at least be widgets. But instead, it’s an even lower form of a widget: apps are simple web sites, run under a hidden Safari (with no UI shown), built with no SDK and with obviously not enough hooks to the underlying OS, and possibly — quite possibly– you would need to be online at all times to use these apps. This is not only underwhelming, but it’s a CHEAT. This is Apple bending to Cingular here, nothing more, nothing less. Users with a clue, also agree. Update: Well said.

And no new Macs or other hardware? This specific keynote sucked overall.

…is difficult. I was listening to my iPod Mini two nights ago in Squaw Valley and the album that was playing was Caesars‘ “Paper Tigers”. I love every single song from that album, and that’s a feat because I am mostly a “singles” person rather than an “albums” person. Overall, it’s a great album. And yet, they are not well known, even after Apple used their song for one of their iPod ads. Caesars tried to make it big in USA but they failed. They severed their ties with their label and PR person who were responsible for them here, their main web site went dead and they returned to Sweden.

And that made me think. If Caesars with label support and good-enough music couldn’t make it big, what does drive all these small Indie bands out there that live with the dream?

Samples of Caesar’s music at YouTube, let me know what you think of their music.

I just came across this and it brought back memories. This is one of the best Greek songs ever in my opinion. The video is from the performance in Eurovision 1991, unfortunately with a terrible saxophone performance (the original saxophonist fell ill prior to the competition) and sound control going bad on top of all this. Nevertheless, that was an amazing performance by the singer on an amazing song — that’s how Greek music should have always been. Pre-recorded version of the song here (despite all the problems, her live performance was better than the recorded one), and a cleaner version here.

* I just published an interview wtih Geoff Reisner, the winner of this year’s DramaFest, with his short movie “Heritage”. Geoff recently moved to Hollywood, and we discuss about a lot of cool things, check it out!

* Came back from Squaw & Nevada tonight, we had a great weekend with JBQ. We rented a condo and it was heaven up in the mountains, fresh air and all. We stayed in the Village at Squaw Valley, home of the the Winter Olympics of 1960. JBQ shot there some amazing pictures!

* Did you know that iMovie ‘05 won’t import video from any random firewire port but only the one that it wants, even if it can control the camcorder through any other? Yes, it’s as crazy as it sounds and it took me 30 minutes figuring out why I couldn’t capture the videos I shot this weekend.

* I am putting together a 5 minute short video of our vacations this week, will publish by the end of the week. Some of my pans are not smooth though as our tripod needed greasing…