11.18, Wednesday 5 Jan 2005

As is traditional in the new year, let's play "what will Apple release next week?" (It's their big trade show.) Current rumours are a cheap monitor-less iMac and an office application suite. That's no fun. How about:

The iSAN, easy to use home storage. Plug in into your home network, and put it next to the boiler or the laundry machine, perhaps in the basement. Run a service to do trickle backups to a .Mac service online, providing 1Tb of backup space for a yearly subscription. People have loads of data now. It should integrate with iTunes and your stereo (naturally, like the Elgato eyehome), give your TiVo extra storage, and, in fact, provide extra storage to anything in your house that needs it. Paul chipped in (we were talking a little less than a month ago): You should put your laptop down and have it sync, like your iPod does with iTunes. Ah yes, he's right, so we went with that idea for a bit: and that's iProject, archiving your older, less-used files, and keeping the fresh files on your computer (and of course, because it's all networked, you have access to all your files from anywhere, so long as you're on the internet: if you want to pull up a decade old document, it just takes a little longer: the index is on your laptop, and the file flows over to your from your home iSAN, encrypted).

We also talked about active kitchen tiles you could put down and dance over.