Macworld Round-Up: Stuff I Bought

I'm back from Macworld 2011 and as usual, it was a lot of fun. Also as usual, it was a lot of walking but this year I wore tennis shoes instead of cowboy boots. It took a while but I'm getting smarter.

There was plenty of cool stuff to look and play with and you can read about some of it here, here, and here. Rather than describe every interesting item I saw at Macworld I'm going to tell you about the things that I bought. You know I had to like it if I spent my own money on it. Here, then, is what I bought.

Camera Plus Pro (iPhone app for cropping/fixing/enhancing photos), $1.99. Share your modified pictures via email, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Picassa with just a couple of taps. You get a lot for your money with this one.

Here's a picture I took with my iPhone 4.


Here's how it looks after cropping and sharpening and a little "warming" using Camera Plus Pro. I could touch that triangle in the lower left-hand corner and post it to Facebook in a jiffy if I wanted to.


Here's what the interface looks like for cropping. Easy enough to do.


L5 Remote (iPhone app combined with an infrared transmitter), free app, $49.99 for the transmitter. Use your iPhone as a custom universal remote control for TV and stereo. Create multiple remotes (swipe to move between them) for different rooms. I can make one for controlling Mom's TV and another for controlling my own stuff.

Here's an example of what you can do. Note the buttons at the bottom for various stations-- Tennis, Golf, ESPN and ESPN2, etc. Set those up and you'll never have to remember that ESPN is channel 417 and ESPN2 is channel 429.


Two things I'm going to buy soon:

Kensington "SoundWave" Sound-Amplifying iPhone mount (for use in the car-- attaches to windshield with a suction cup or to an air vent with a clamp), $29.99 with free shipping (via Amazon.com). I've decided to use my iPhone as a GPS, but I need to attach it to the car somehow. This Kensington device is the ticket. The part that makes this thing special is the sound from the iPhone comes out of its bottom speakers and is routed through some tubes into a couple of flared-out openings, and it makes the sound louder-- a very important thing when using a GPS in the car. Without some sort of amplification the iPhone isn't loud enough to be heard in the car. This holder's design approximately doubles the iPhone's volume. And you don't have to take the iPhone's case off to make it fit.


IRIS "Scan Anywhere 2" scanner. List price is $199 but the people at the IRIS booth told me it will go on sale at Frys.com with a $75 mail-in rebate starting February 1st. They expect the price to get down to about $120 after the rebate. This scanner is about as big as a box of aluminum foil so it is very portable. It connects to your Mac with a USB cable and you can shove paper into it a sheet at a time and it scans just fine. The really big news: you can do it even without being connected to your Mac. The Scan Anywhere 2 has rechargeable batteries in it, and it has built-in memory, and it has an SD (camera card) slot, AND it has a USB port for attaching a USB "thumb" drive. So, you can use the Scan Anywhere 2 on an airplane, or in a hotel room, or really just about anywhere. Then, after doing your scans, you connect it to your Mac (or pull the SD card or USB stick and connect that to your Mac), and it mounts on the desktop like an everyday drive, and from there you can drag the scans to wherever you want to drag them. Very neat, especially at $120.

Here's a picture.

Macworld/iWorld Report

I'll be speaking at Macworld as part of the RapidFire session. It's a lot of fun for everyone: each of ten speakers gets 5 minutes to demonstrate something cool. I'll be covering Moom, Desktop Curtain, and Typinator (and speaking very quickly). Here's a link to my PDF handout.

Macworld/iWorld 2013 runs this Thursday through Saturday. I'll be on the Digital Village radio program on Saturday at approximately 10:15 AM discussing the best (and worst) things I saw at the show. You can listen at 90.7 FM in Los Angeles (KPFK FM). You can also use this link which on an iPhone or iPad should start streaming whatever's currently on the air. On a Mac it should launch iTunes and start streaming things over the internet (if it doesn't happen automatically, look in your Downloads folder for something called "listen.pls." Double-click that. Bingo.) They do record the show and in a day or two you should be able to find the interview in the Digital Village archives.

UPDATE: time changed from 10:30 to 10:15.

UPDATE 2: Archived interview available here.

My Top Five FREE iPhone Apps

Here are five free iPhone apps that I use all the time. Click the links to get more info via the Apple iTunes Store.

Christian Boyce's Top Five FREE iPhone Apps
NYTimes (Best app for news, reviewed by me here)
Mint (Best app for keeping track of your credit card and bank balances, reviewed by me here)
eReader (Best app for reading books, many of them free, reviewed by me here)
Rimshot & Crickets (Best app for doing "ba-doom-boom, kishhhh" after you say something funny)
BigOven (Best app for recipes)

This list does not include any of the very excellent set of standard iPhone apps (Maps, Mail, Calendar, etc.). I use those apps all the time too.

Interesting Dock Behavior

Pictured above: a Dock with the magnification feature turned on. This feature, which makes Dock icons squirm as you move your mouse over them, is absolutely adored by some people, but not by me, because a squirming target is harder to click on.

Tonight, for some reason, I thought it would be fun to experiment with the Dock (which was better in OS X 10.5 than it is in 10.6), and I found an interesting shortcut: if you hold the Control and Shift keys you will temporarily switch the Dock's magnification feature ON if it's set to be off, and OFF if it's set to be on.

Armed with this knowledge, you're now able to very gracefully and surreptitiously and temporarily turn the Dock magnification feature off when you use Macs with Dock magnification set to "on." This will be especially useful for those of you who make a living helping others with their Macs, double-especially if the Dock magnification "feature" drives you nuts. Oh wait, that's me. Never mind.

iLife 09 report

I mean to try every part of iLife 09: iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, and Garage Band. Hard to do it all in one sitting so we’ll take it a piece of a time. Tonight’s installment: iPhoto 09.



iPhoto 09 retains the familiar look of iPhoto 08 (and others) so if you’d used iPhoto before this new version won’t be hard to navigate. You’ll notice two new features right off the bat: Faces, and Places. Faces helps you organize your photos based on who is in them. Places helps you organize your photos based on where you took them.

Try this link for a video intro to iPhoto 09, courtesy of Apple. It covers everything you need to know. Click here for a list of video tutorials for iPhoto 09, also courtesy of Apple.

The installation of iLife 09 and the conversion of my existing iPhoto 08 database took over an hour. Not bad. I made sure I had a backup of my iPhoto database before I did the installation, of course. So should you.

How to Use iPhoto's Batch Change feature

This is another one for Dad, but I'll bet it helps a zillion other people too.

Sometimes in iPhoto you want to change the names of a whole bunch of photos. For example, you might want to number them sequentially, with a prefix indicating the name of the album they're in. That's a great idea: a name like "Texas Barbeque Contest-001" is a lot more descriptive than "IMG_001.jpg" but who wants to do the work of renaming more than a couple of photos by hand? No one, that's who. That's why iPhoto has a Batch Change feature.

Here's an example.

A few weeks ago I had the bright idea of weighing myself more or less daily and using my iPhone to take a photo of the readout on the scale. Thanks to Photo Stream the pictures magically appear on my iMac, where I put them into an album. Here's how it looked a few days ago. Yes those are my toes.

Nice collection of photos but the names are not helpful at all. I wondered whether I could rename them to reflect the date that the pictures were taken (and of course the photos know when they were taken because the iPhone stamps that information into every photo it takes). Turns out it was easy. First, I selected all of the photos in the album. Then I went to the Photos menu and chose "Batch Change…", like so:


That led to a box, which I configured as shown below.



Then I clicked OK and that was it. Here's the result. So much better!


Very powerful stuff and it only takes a minute. You should try it.

Apple iPad Info

You may not have heard but Apple introduced something called the iPad today. There are plenty of places for you to read about the not-shipping-for-two-months iPad, and I haven't had my hand(s) on one yet, so rather than write about it myself I'm just sending you a few links.

• Apple's iPad pages
• Engadget's iPad pages
• MacRumors' iPad pages

It certainly looks like an interesting device. Two things that jump out at me: Apple used its own chip to power the iPad-- they did not use an Intel chip, nor an AMD chip, nor any other kind of chip. I've always liked apple chips, by the way, though I prefer banana.

The other thing that jumps out at me is the lack of a camera. I sort of think it ought to have one. So much for doing video chats with it.

I wonder if it can print. I'll try to find out.

UPDATE: here is the video of Steve Jobs introducing the iPad. 93 minutes.

UPDATE AGAIN: I should have included a link to John Gruber's Daring Fireball website. Go there now and read everything he had to say about the iPad.

Save Time and Trouble with Tripit.com

You know that feeling you get when you suddenly discover that there's a much easier way to do things? That's the feeling I got when I "discovered" Tripit.com, because Tripit makes one of my more tedious tasks go away. Which task is that? The one where I type flight information into my calendar so I have it when I need it.

Anyone who's done it knows the routine: you make your travel plans online (typity-type, clickety-click), then you get to type even more into the calendar, trying very hard to be careful, but take it from me, it's hard to be perfect.

Enter Tripit.com. Go there and sign up for a free account. Then, when you make plane reservations and subsequently get a confirmation email from an airline, you forward the email to "plans@tripit.com." Tripit reads the email, puts the information into a handy little private space for you on their site, and then-- the best part-- they put your trip information into an iCal feed, which you subscribe to ONCE, and all of the information about the flying out and flying in is automatically part of your iCal calendar, forever and ever amen.

I made a Rule in Mail to automatically forward my Southwest Airlines "Ticketless Confirmation" emails to plans@tripit.com, and by golly it works. My calendar has ALL of the information-- flight numbers, departure times, arrival times, confirmation numbers, you name it-- and of course I can subscribe to the same iCal feed on my iPhone, so my iPhone's calendar is up to date too. You can change the information if you'd like, so the trip that Tripit titles "Oakland, CA 2/11/2010" can be retitled "MacWorld Expo SF 2010." That's what I did.

Tripit has a "pro" account but the free one is great as it is. If you fly frequently this is a no-brainer. Go to tripit.com now and sign up. You will save yourself a lot of typing, over and over and over. I wouldn't do any of the stuff that asks you to upload your email address book-- that will just irritate your friends-- but that's not required anyway. Just do the minimal free stuff, and you will reap the benefits time after time.

If you can't figure out how to subscribe to your Tripit calendar let me know. I can help you.

Bonus: if you use the USA Today's free iPhone app called "AutoPilot" you can connect to your Tripit calendar information very easily. Give that a whirl too.

Macworld Expo This Week!

Macworld Expo 2011 begins today in San Francisco. Historically the largest annual Mac-related love fest held near a large body of water, Macworld has evolved over the years to a smaller show, with iPods and iPhones pushing Macs aside. However, it is still held near the same large body of water.

I think I've been to every Macworld Expo, which means something like 25 of them, which also means that I'm not 22 anymore. Hmm. I expect to see a lot of iPad-related things at the show, but one thing about Macworld Expo is you really can't predict it. One other thing about Macworld Expo is you can "do" Macworld in thirty minutes by listening to my Macworld Expo Report on KPFK-FM radio this Saturday at 10:30 AM. Click here to listen (or tune to 90.7 FM in Los Angeles). Not now, silly-- Saturday at 10:30 AM. Of course it is OK to practice in advance.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a recording of my Macworld report. Twenty-two minutes and 46 seconds.

Hear the Christian Boyce Macworld|iWorld Report on the Radio

I'll be giving my annual "State of the Mac (and iPad, and iPhone)" address this Saturday on the Digital Village radio program, hosted by Ric Allan and Doran Barons. The show starts at 10 AM this Saturday, January 28th, 2012 and in Los Angeles you can listen to it live on the radio, 90.7 FM KPFK. If you aren't within range of KPFK, listen over the internet using this link. And, if you miss the show, listen whenever you want by visiting Digital Village's Audio Archive. My part of the show will probably start around 10:20 AM but I'd tune in at 10 and listen to the whole show. Ric and Doran always have an interesting show, even when I'm not on it.

Safari Bookmark Tips

You probably think you know all about making bookmarks in Safari, and maybe you do. But, do you know know all about editing bookmarks in Safari? You will in a minute.

Let's start with making a bookmark. Click the plus sign to the left of the URL, or go to the Bookmarks menu and choose "Add Bookmark..." Or use Command-D. There are a couple of other ways too-- more on that later.



Whichever you choose, you'll end up with this box:


So far, so good. Pay attention to where you put the bookmark. For this example, we'll put our new bookmark into the Bookmarks Bar because there's something we want to do with it.



If you're following along your Bookmark Bar will look a lot like this. Except yours may be so full that there is no room for more bookmarks in the Bookmarks Bar. That's OK-- that's the problem we're going to solve here.

By default, Safari names your bookmark using the name of the website. Sometimes it's a little long, and that can crowd the Bookmarks Bar. If you're right on top of things you can shorten the name before you click the "Add" button. But, if you're that good, you'd be writing this blog, not reading it. And nobody's perfect anyway. Here's how you shorten the name of a Bookmark Bar bookmark after the fact.

Step 1: Control-click on the bookmark you want to shorten. You'll get a menu like this:

You want to edit the Name of the bookmark, not the Address. The Name is "The Boyce Blog." The Address is "http://ioperating.blogspot.com." Totally different.

Here's the box you get. Shorten the name as desired. Maybe just take off the "The." That's Step Two.

What you're doing here is purely cosmetic. The link goes to the exact same address. It just has a shorter name. You can change the name to anything you like. But shorter is better-- that's the whole point here. And there is no Step Three.

OK, that was easy. Now let's do one that REALLY needs shortening: Amazon.

Note: Amazon.com offers your humble blog writer a TINY referral fee when you start your shopping via a specially-coded link. Here's the link-- let's click on it, and then we'll add the bookmark, and this time we'll pay attention when we add the bookmark so the name's not so long.

You can tell that the name is going to be LONG-- you see it at the top of the window. "Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVD & more"-- that's going to take up half the Bookmarks Bar!


(Actually, Safari will shorten the name for you automatically but it's messy. Do it yourself instead.)

Step One is add the bookmark-- click the plus, use the Bookmarks menu, or Command-D. Be sure it goes into the Bookmarks Bar.

Step Two: let's shorten the thing right now, getting it right the first time. Just change it to "amazon" as shown here. Click OK.

So now you have a bookmark/shortcut to Amazon that doesn't take up half your Bookmarks Bar. Yay. And when you use that shortcut it adds a few pennies to the Christian Boyce Coffee Fund. Double-Yay.

Now... let's say you want to rearrange things on that Bookmarks Bar. That's easy-- just click a bookmark and drag it around! Drag left or right and the other bookmarks make room for it. Drag it DOWN and you'll throw it away, with a very nice puff of smoke effect. Make a few bookmarks that you don't really want so you can practice this-- it's fun.


Firefox users: guess what? It works almost exactly the same way for you! Control-click on a bookmark in the Bookmarks Bar and you'll get this menu:

Choose "Properties" as shown here and you'll get this box, which you can edit as desired.


Way back at the beginning of this I told you that there are other ways to add a bookmark. If you know another way, email it to contests@ioperating.com for a chance at an Official Christian Boyce Economic Stimulus Coffee Cup. Entries must be received by midnight, January 31st 2011.

You want this. Good luck.

Apple's iBooks Textbooks Announcement

Apple's out to fix another broken industry, same as they did with music and cellular phones. This time it's textbooks, and I'll let Apple tell you why it's needed, and why the Apple solution is the right one. Here are a couple of links that tell the story: this one is a promotional video, and this one is the entire introductory event from last week.

One very interesting part of Apple's plan is that just about anyone can publish a book in Apple's iBookstore. You don't have to be a big-time publishing company, or even a small-time publishing company. You could be, for example, a Mac, iPhone, and iPad consultant with cowboy boots who wants to publish a book of Mac, iPhone, and iPad tips. You can sell your books or you can give them away (or both). It's up to you. Read all about it here.

Apple's created a Mac application to help you create beautiful books. It's called iBooks Author, and you can download it for free by clicking here. The app looks a lot like Pages, so if you know how to use that one, you're going to have no trouble making books. iBooks Author is loaded with great templates and a lot of other stuff that will help you make beautiful books with minimal trouble. You will need Mac OS X Lion to run iBooks Author, by the way.

iBooks Textbooks could be a game-changer. It's way better than a PDF, partly because PDFs can't be re-flowed when the reader changes the font size or rotates the page. It's also way better than "publishing" materials as web pages, mostly because web technologies are not suited to precise layouts and ease of use. With iBooks, you feel as if you are directly manipulating the pages, and that's way better than reading something in a browser. So, people who used to publish books as PDFs and web pages now have a better platform for their work. There's no reason to shoe-horn a beautiful book into PDF or web page form, not anymore.

It happens that I really like "real" books. But, having read several books on my iPad, I'm already seeing the value and advantages of digital books. Apple's iBooks Author is going to help a lot more people get on the digital book bandwagon. It's not the end of books as we know it but it might be the beginning of the end of textbooks as they've been for generations. File this away and let's see how things turn out a couple of years from now.

In the meantime: if you have an iPod Touch, an iPhone, or an iPad, click here to get the new iBooks 2.0 app. While you're at it, try this link for an eye-popping collection of iTunes U courses, made for the iBooks app. Don't know about iTunes U? Click here to read my article about it, and click here to read what Apple has to say. Warning: if iBooks Textbooks doesn't make you want an iPad, iTunes U will. It's that cool.

How to Use Dropbox's Previous Versions feature

Or,
How Dropbox Saved the Day when My Customer Somehow Lost a Very Important Document
You probably know about Dropbox, the best way to keep your files in sync across Macs, iPhones, iPads, and even PCs. I put all of my current projects into my Dropbox folder and that lets me access my stuff from any of my machines. I can work on something from my MacBook Pro while I'm out, then continue the work on my iMac when I get back to my office, without sending files around by email or by USB thumb drives. I like Dropbox a lot. Steve Jobs liked Dropbox so much that he tried to buy the company! If you're not using it, go find out about it. Here's a link to my write-up on Dropbox from a couple of years ago.

Turns out there's another reason to like Dropbox: besides making sure that all of your devices have the latest versions of your documents, it also saves a copy of previous versions. This is fantastic, and last night it saved the day when one of my customers somehow corrupted a document that she'd been adding to for years. She didn't know about this special Dropbox feature and she thought she was doomed, but luckily she asked me for help, and double-luckily she mentioned that the file had been on Dropbox. That made recovering her document super-easy. This is going to bail you out one day too so pay attention over there.

Here's how you do it.

Go to www.dropbox.com and sign into your account. You'll see your files and folders, something like this:

Locate the file you're interested in and click NOT on the name of the document, and NOT on the icon, but rather anywhere else in the that line. In this example, we'll bring back a previous version of the document called "Macworld 2013 Talk.pages" and I'm going to click in the white space between "Macworld 2013 Talk.pages" and "document pages". It will look like this:

Notice the toolbar that appears, and especially notice the "More" button. When you click on that you'll see a little menu, like this:

Select "Previous Versions" and you're on your way! Here's how it looks:

From this screen it's a simple matter of choosing which version you want to roll back to and then clicking the Restore button. The restored file will replace the current version in Dropbox, so be sure you want to do this. (Or, make a copy of the current version somewhere else, like on a USB drive.) That's all there is to it.

A couple of other points:
1. You can control-click on the file's name at www.dropbox.com and get a contextual menu, from which you can choose "Previous Versions." Save yourself a step next time.

2. You can even recover deleted files! Look for a little trash can at the top of the Dropbox window. Here's what it looks like. The rest you can figure out on your own-- totally obvious.

3. You might be wondering, "why not just use Time Machine." Well, yes, that would be another way to get an older version of the document. Remember, though, that Time Machine backs up hourly, while Dropbox backs up every time you save. Look again at the Version History screenshot above and you'll notice that many versions were saved within just a few minutes of each other. Time Machine wouldn't have that kind of detail. So, in this case, Dropbox is the better choice.

Apple's still in business

By now everyone’s written about Steve Jobs taking a little break for health reasons. Two themes have been repeated:

1. Is Steve OK?
2. Is there life for Apple after Steve Jobs?

The answer to number 1 is “we don’t know.” Rumors have him considering a liver transplant. No truth to the rumor that Apple is developing the “iLiver” in several colors.

The answer to number 2 is “yes, at least for now.” Apple is going great guns, selling more stuff than ever. Their earnings report for the first quarter of the fiscal year (which is the last quarter of the calendar year) impressed the socks off of the “analysts.” By the way, in case any of you are looking for the easy job of all time, be an “analyst.” I think I might try it myself.

How to Compress Movies for Email

I wrote a couple of days ago about Photo Booth and how you can use it to record a movie and then email it. It's easy, and it's fun-- so easy, and so fun, that just about all of you recorded a movie and emailed it to me. That's the good news.

The bad news is that these files are a little on the large side. But, there's more good news: you can easily compress a movie to less than half its original size while retaining almost all of the quality. All you need is "iSquint," a free download available by clicking here.


When you start iSquint the first time you'll get a sales pitch to upgrade to another program. Just say no. You'll then get a window that looks like this:

The settings are important. When you Optimize for iPod you get a movie that fits an iPod's screen just perfectly (that is, it's 320 pixels wide by 240 pixels tall). When you Optimize for TV you get a movie that's 640 x 480. Tiny Quality gives the smallest file size, while "Go Nuts" Quality gives the largest file size. I like "Standard." I also like "H.264 Encoding." I could explain what H.264 means but Wikipedia's already done that, so click this link and read all about it. All you really need to know is that H.264 is a kind of compression, and it works great. There's nothing better.

iSquint is really easy to use. Just drag a movie file into the big box (the one under "Drag files below."). Then click "Start." Your original movie will be untouched; a compressed copy will be created and saved in the same location as the original. In my experiments, my movies compressed almost in half under "Standard" Quality and almost by a factor of 4 if I went "Tiny." Choosing "Optimize for iPod" gives another 4x compression since iPod screens are 1/4 the screen dimensions of a Photo Booth-generated movie. Note the "Add to iTunes" button-- that will put your movie into iTunes, handy if you want to eventually get it onto your iPod or iPhone.

You can email the compressed movie using the drag-it-to-the-Mail-icon method I wrote about here.

Be aware that compressing a movie results in some reduction in quality. Here, for example, are three versions of the same frame in a movie.



First is from the original movie, the second is from one compressed with "Standard" settings, and the third is from one compressed with "Tiny" settings. Look around the eyes and the hair-- the original is sharper and has more detail. (The sound is better too, though you can't tell by looking at the picture.) You will have to experiment to find settings that work for you. Keep in mind that the settings that work great for one movie may not be so great on the next one. It's a case-by-case thing. Luckily, all you have to do is move the slider and click "Start" to see another variation.

(Note: if you've recorded a movie in Photo Booth it will be easiest to drag the movie to the Desktop, and from there into iSquint. The compressed movie will be put on the Desktop when the compression process is complete.)

Looking forward to seeing your new, smaller movies.

Apple's new i-thing

Everyone's asking me about this new "thing" from Apple, so I thought I'd answer all of you at once. First of all, no one outside of a select few at Apple know anything about Apple's not-yet-announced thing. We don't know what it's called, we don't know what it looks like, we don't know when it will be available, we don't know what it will cost. And we don't know what it will do. All we do know is that Apple sent out an invitation yesterday (I didn't get one) and that Apple will show their "latest creation" on January 27th, 2010.

Here's what the invitation looks like.

People are trying to find meaning in the colors, in the splashiness, etc. but all of it is guesswork. All of it.

My advice: wait until the 27th. Then we'll all know. However... I do have some thoughts.

1. If Apple does introduce a tablet-style computing device it will be far more than just an Apple version of Amazon's Kindle book-reading device. FAR more.
2. I would expect Apple to try to leverage the vast universe of iPhone apps, probably enabling you to run more than one app at a time on the tablet, to drag them around on the screen, and to resize them arbitrarily.
3. We already have great Apple products for when we have a desk or a table to work from (iMac, MacBook), and we already have iPhones for those times when we're on the go. There seems to be no need for something in between. You can bet that Apple has thought of this too. I expect Apple's tablet to include something very cool, which you and I will want desperately-- and it will not be available on any other device, including the iPhone. That will give you a reason to buy the tablet. My guesses: live video chatting, tablet to tablet-- or streaming TV and movies. Or both.

Calendar synching with your Mac? Of course. Address book synching with your Mac? Double of course. Weather/stocks/maps/wireless-- yes/yes/yes/yes. Something really incredible that I haven't thought of? Almost certainly yes.

A couple of years ago, my friend Dave asked me what I thought Apple would introduce at MacWorld Expo. I told him I didn't have any idea-- but I wanted two of them. That's how I feel about this January 27th Apple product intro. I can barely wait.

Steve Jobs Can't Read Your Mind, but He Doesn't Have To

Steve Jobs is a lot of things, but he's not a mind-reader. I mention this because article after article tells us:
• "For years, and across a career, knowing what consumers want has been the self-appointed task of Mr. Jobs" (New York Times)
• "Jobs' greatest gift hasn't been for invention as much his uncanny ability to anticipate what people want" (The Associated Press)
• "He is perhaps singular in his ability to know what people want" (The Christian Science Monitor)

I say bah.

Steve Jobs can't tell what people want. But he doesn't have to. He knows what he wants, and he knows that when he shows it to you, you're probably going to say "I want that."

I am willing to bet that you NEVER sat around thinking "You know what I want? I want some raw fish. And wrap it in seaweed. And make it expensive while you're at it." And then someone introduced you to sushi and you said "I want that." You didn't know you wanted it because you hadn't thought of it. And if the person who introduced you to sushi had asked you what you wanted to eat you sure as heck wouldn't have said "raw fish, wrapped in seaweed, very expensive." No chance-- because it would never have crossed your mind.

Henry Ford said "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse.'" Steve Jobs has cited that quote a few times, usually when someone asks him why Apple doesn't use focus groups to help design products. More to the point, he's put it this way:

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

That makes sense to me. The point is that a lot of us don't really know what we want-- but show us something, and we'll know whether we want that particular thing or not. The hard part is in the imagining. There is nothing magic about this, and it happens in other fields, notably writing (hardly anyone can start with a blank page and put something good on it, but almost everyone can tell whether someone else's writing is worth reading). Steve Jobs has done a great job of putting ideas on paper and turning them into products. And, when he shows them to us-- and that includes me-- we all say "I want one!" Actually, I usually say "I want two!"

Knowing that people WILL want something (once they see it) is different than "knowing what they want." Lucky for us, Henry Ford and Steve Jobs didn't ask us what we want-- because if they had, we'd all be riding a faster horse, and though horses don't have charging ports for iPhones it wouldn't matter because the iPhone wouldn't exist.