MacWorld wishlist

John Gruber says "all Mac-related web sites must publish pre-Macworld Expo predictions regarding what Apple may announce at the show."

What I have is not so much predictions as an "I hope they've been thinking along the same lines I have" wishlist.

• An HD or better laptop. 17" if you must, but I'd like a 15" or smaller. The iPod Nano has 204 pixels per inch and a beautiful display. A 1920x1200 screen at that density would be 7" diagonal, or at iPhone's 163 ppi it would be 8.8" - there's plenty of room. You could get the 30" display's 2560x1600 into a 13" screen at iPhone ppi.
• Come to that, a 7" diagonal HD iPhone/ iPod Touch would be lovely too. Not just for video, but for reading the web and facing-page PDF's on. Give it Bluetooth keyboard support.
• Obviously, a new Mac Mini. I have a big shiny Sony HD TV and I want a little Mac to drive it (are you getting the HD theme here yet?)
• Separate out the phone crap. I don't like phones, and holding screens to my ear is daft anyway. Make the earpiece separate naturally. Come to that, negotiate me a data plan without a calling plan with your carrier buddies. Amazon did it for Kindle. And for goodness sake ship iChat for the handhelds. Put a camera on the top of the screen like the Macs all have.
• Drop DRM already. For videos too. And HDCP. 
• Extend your lovely bluetooth keyboard to have a trackpad too. Make it work with iPhones and the new 7" HD iPod too.
• one more thing -  Phil Schiller, stop charging for QuickTime Pro. Admit the mistake you made ten years ago and make video editing natural again.

Patent Trolls

I broadly agree with Paul Graham's essay on Software Patents, but I do think he underestimates the damage from patent trolls, and from what he calls the mafia-like behaviour of some patent holders.

Paul has been lucky in the field he has worked in, but in the Audio and Video area there are many patent thickets. Perhaps it is the history of Farnsworth's victory over RCA that makes video engineers patent hungry.

My first startup, The MultiMedia Corporation, was a spin-out from the BBC in 1990. One of our products was a program called MediaMaker that combined video from tape or videodisc, CD Audio, Pictures, digitised audio and Director animations into picture icons on a timeline for making presentations. It was demoed on stage at Macworld by the CEO of Apple, and we got Macromind to publish it.

Then the patent troll showed up. A company called Montage had made a video editing system that included several video monitors showing edit points from tape. The company had gone out of business but a lawyer had bought up the patents, including one on using a still image to represent a video sequence. The troll was working his way round the video companies, and he caused enough trouble to stop work on the product while we worked on a legal defence instead.

Later, while I was at Apple on QuickTime, there was a steady stream of patent trolls claiming that Apple should pay them royalties; enough to keep several lawyers busy, and a lot of engineers spending time working on prior art evidence demonstrations.

Several potential features were excluded from QuickTime due to patent thickets. The obvious one was the Unisys LZW patent that encumbered GIF, but there were other more subtle pressures that meant adopting open source codecs was discouraged. Working on the patent license agreements for MPEG meant that technology ready to ship was deferred pending legal agreement on more than one occasion.

So I'm much lass sanguine than Paul about this. I think software patents should not be granted, and the European Union's banning of them is the right decision. I hope the Gowers Review in the UK makes this UK law as well.