On Tuesday Apple announced their redesigned MacBook and MacBook Pro, as well as an updated Cinema Display. The new lineup is undoubtedly gorgeous, streamlined, and a good step forward for the consumers.

What’s conspicuously absent in Apple’s new lineup is any new matte screen option. Despite the fact that 17″ MacBook Pros and older Cinema Displays are still available, it looks like soon there won’t be a single Apple product without a reflective display.

Glass covered displays have brilliant color saturation and deep blacks, but I feel they have three major issues for use in my work:

1. Color Accuracy – I’m skeptical that even with hardware calibration that they can be as accurate as a matte display.
2. Glare – A notebook is a mobile machine, one that will undoubtedly find itself in a variety of lighting conditions. It can be a huge disadvantage to have a reflective screen, and certainly makes working outdoors nearly impossible.
3. Non Standard – Granted this is a pretty arbitrary issue, but it’s something I feel strongly about. When preparing work for web delivery – whether that be photography or general web design, I want to use the monitor that most closely represents what an average reader will be using. Glass covered displays might become the norm, but they aren’t now.

Only time will tell, and I’ll admit my experience with Apple’s newer glass displays has been limited to two days work on a current generation iMac. It’s possible my fears are overblown, but it seems just as possible that the next time I’m in need of a display upgrade Apple’s displays won’t even be considered.

Tomorrow I’ll be off to lovely Victoria for a bit of work and a bit of fun. There’s a Drupal Workshop I’ll be attending, which apparently delightfully coincides with the Great Canadian Beer Festival. Aren’t coincidences lovely?

If you want to keep up with me, I’ll likely be twittering. Twitter.com/TK421

Apologies for the following—buzzwords used indiscriminately:

The introduction of location based services – specifically social networking tools integrated into mobile devices – is leading toward new battle lines being drawn between consumers and social software developers.

(Read this NYT article from last year for background information, or check out this recent Information Week article about a related privacy kerfuffle.)

The basic questions here are ones that have been asked for decades, and certainly have been hotly debated in the midst of web services in the past few years. Everyone is concerned about what’s on their Facebook profile, but that’s still a representation of a person, a construction of their making, a personality meant for a special purpose hosted and shared via remote servers.

Contrast that with social services that connect people on the ground. All of a sudden, the buffer established by your web persona is non-existent. When you’re sitting in a bar and others have access to your location, they can walk up and chat with you physically, which is obviously much different than leaving a casual comment on a blog.

Unless software developers are very cautious about making privacy features that are self-explanatory and effective, there will be widespread concern. It’s happening already, and it will continue. (And what I really mean is, there will be media sensationalism and unnecessary panic en masse.)

The physical disconnect of social web communication is non-existent in meatspace, you don’t communicate with a constructed persona, but your own self in person. (Which is all well and normal, it’s what we all call humanity I believe.) But we now have the tools to receive information boosted by web, GPS, and cellular technologies that overlay a data layer upon that good old meatspace. There you have the power of interconnectedness and instantaneous information retrieval just like the web as a platform, but with the ability to reach out and touch someone physically.

It’s a problem that will be solved. Eventually, but not without a few bumps along the road. Most people today are more comfortable leaving tracks and signs, leaving data in their wake than they are broadcasting it in the flesh.

Candidates for office leave signs on the roadsides to advertise themselves, they don’t stand on street corners proselytizing. (There’s a certain stigma attached to standing on a street corner with a sign isn’t there?) Leaving information about what you’ve done and where you’ve been is much different than broadcasting your location. Layers of trust must be built into the interactive platform and utilized sensibly by the consumers. It will be fun watching the sparks fly.

I just got all my 17mm thumbnails correctly propagating for this Dig Deep redesign. Now you can check out 120-some thumbnails for all the photoblog pics. Huzzah!