• No Apple 27″ LED display for massive screen real-estate
• No Wacom Intous 4 drawing pad for logos
• No ergonomically correct chair nor desk
• No 120+ GB of music
• No movies, TV series, nor the will to download it over 3G
• No Nespresso coffee machine

What I do have is my light travel gear:

• 11″ MacBook Air with charger
• iPad and iPhone, with iOS cable and charger of course
• A stylus pen for said iOS gadgets
• Mifi 3G router with USB charger cable
• Battery for charging USB powered devices
• The X100 camera
• USB flash drive

That’s it, not counting clothes and stuff like that.

What does these circumstances really mean for my ability to get work done?

Not much, it would seem. Most of my work at present is either light coding (no worries, not even on the 11″ screen) and/or writing (the Air is the best typewriter available) which means I can do that right here. I even have all the necessary data thanks to Dropbox (aff link), where I store everything, and the 3G connection is fast enough to keep it snappy.

I did find fixing a logo took longer than expected on the Air, but that was because the source files were for Adobe software and I’m keeping the Air free of those bulky beasts, relying on the excellent Pixelmator. And then I realised we had screwed up with extension cords for MacBook chargers so there were no extra ones here, but that’s really not an issue.

I had planned to be here for two, maybe three nights, a long weekend. Now we’re looking at perhaps as many as ten.

And work won’t suffer.

Circumstances, sometimes they just don’t matter much.

This is a shame. As mobile devices in particular improve, I’d like to be able to update using them. This is only truly possible if I stay away from custom taxonomies, custom post types, and post formats. Or, in other words, if I stick to a pretty basic site built the way we did it before these CMS-like features came along.

That’s just not right, we have to do something about that. The natural first step would be to make the WordPress admin interface truly usable on smartphones and tablets. However, since mobile web browsers rarely support uploading images through the browser, apps are needed. And these are behind, so let’s do what we can to make them keep up better. I for one would pay for both desktop and mobile apps that featured all these things, but the choice isn’t there yet.

Will you be the one that makes it available? You’d be doing the community a favor, and possbly make some money as well.

Mobile is important for the future of WordPress, and it is yet another feature that can further set the platform apart. Let’s try not to forget about that, shall we?

Might be one to watch. Props for the name are in order, no matter what!

Wow.

Now, I wrote all those Apple gadgetary things to tell you I love Apple products. I work on a 17″ MacBook Pro, write on my beloved MacBook Air, own three (3) iPhones, and am totally in love with my iPad. In fact, the only non-Apple things on my home network are a gaming PC, the PlayStation 3, Wii and Xbox 360.

Apple does it best, the whole ecosystem product thing.

Which brings me back to the netbook. In my mind, the iPhone killed the netbook with the 3G edition. I’ve owned a bunch of netbooks, and the only thing that made me to actually keep one (I’ve had a bunch at the same time) when I got my iPhone 3GS was that coding on the go was just about impossible on the Apple phone, whereas it works well enough on the netbook. And it still had a reason to exist side by side with my Air, since the netbook still was smaller, albeit just as heavy/light.

But today? The iPad with a bluetooth keyboard is just about all I need when I’m on the go. Some widely quoted study, which I really can’t put too much weight on, says that a fourth of the Americans are planning on buying an iPad.

That will slash the netbook sales for sure.

So. Again. I was reading up on the gadget blogs, and saw a bunch of netbook posts. Two things:

1. What decent computer company would release a netbook in the wake of the iPad?
2. Gadget blogs earns money by getting a ton of readers, but who wants to read about the netbook today, post iPad?

The answer? A bunch, on both accounts.

The netbook’s not dead, but the craze is over. Apple’s iPad and all its upcoming competitors, along with more visual interfaces, will force the netbook makers to position their products even more as a low budget alternative.

That’s OK. I just don’t see a reason to buy one anymore. I used to have a bunch at the same time, as I said before. Not so anymore. In fact, even the Air is in question when it comes to the iPad and the needs when on the road.

Computing will be an interesting concept in the years to come.

You see, I write somewhere between 20 and 50 emails a day from my iPhone, I tweet and connect on Facebook, I read up on news and I entertain myself. It is a brilliant multi-purpose device that saves me time, something that is really valuable to me.

Realizing that, I would be a fool not to be the least curious, nay, thrilled about the prospect of an Apple tablet.

There are a ton of more or less likely predictions out there. Some I truly believe, like the fact that this will be a kick in the Amazon Kindle’s nuts because Steve Jobs wants to rule the media industry and newspapers, books and magazines would look and work great on a nice touchscreen interface. I also think that it is a no-brainer that the tablet will play games, and the success of the iPhone means that the developers are onboard. Jus don’t expect it to be a game changer just right now, it’ll most likely cost more than two PlayStation 3s and that means that the install base for gaming will be a lot smaller than for iPhone and iPod touch. That being said, obviously it’ll run games and it will do it good.

Moving on, I do believe we’ll get cameras so that we can Skype, and this thing without 3G would be a crime. Most likely we’ll also get some sort of iLife package with great multitouch support, and everything we got in our iPhones, only more Macish.

All that is pretty uncontroversial stuff. You’ve heard it before. I want all that.

Now here is what I really hope for, but really can’t believe will happen. Still, one can dream right?

I want the tablet to be no bigger than 11″, hopefully smaller so that it will be really portable. I want it to have an onscreen keyboard, obviously, but also support Bluetooth keyboards. Maybe that is one off the reasons Apple made the wireless keyboard so small, for portability? Hardly, but it is an encouraging albeit unlikely thought for my reasoning. Anyway, the tablet needs a stand so that I can put it on a table, in both landscape and portrait mode.

Now here’s the killer: I want the tablet to replace the MacBook Air!

“What? Why? And don’t you love your Air?!”

I most certainly do, but I would love a stronger oversized iPhone with multitasking, decent image editing, video viewing, hyper portable Mac with an optional keyboard even more! I don’t care if the tablet is priced as an Air, or worse – that I would buy. As a writer, that Is the ideal machine to take on the road and to use at home. I could set it up on the living room table, lie down on the couch and type away on my wireless keyboard, now wouldn’t that be grand? It would for me at least.

Here’s hoping my dream will come through, however unlikely. Until then I’ll have to make do with a jailbroken iPhone, the BTstack Keyboard driver, and the Gorillapod to top it off. But it just isn’t quite enough.

Please Apple? Pretty please?

Footnote 1: First image swiped from CrunchGear’s unicorn post, and the second from Gizmodo’s post on Apple Bashful, which I would’ve loved by the way…

Footnote 2: I wrote this whole thing in WriteRoom on my iPhone. That might tell you how much I’d love an Apple tablet geared toward me as a writer…

Check out Kevin Rose’s demo of Square in the video below.

Really cool, as I said, but I think stand-alone devices doing this will be a bigger player in the personal charge by credit card field.

The background is this. I’m running a Swedish game blog called Spelbloggen, which in turn has a YouTube channel where we upload trailers. These trailers are supplied by the game companies for us to share with our readers.

The trailers can be viewed on YouTube, are always linked from our Twitter account, and at times embedded on the site. We went with YouTube for our video hosting, rather than sorting it out ourselves (which we could have just as well), because that means that our site will work perfectly well on an iPhone. Also, with the support for HD video, YouTube is a decent enough solution for this.

That will have to change, with threats like this being made:

The video has obviously been removed by YouTube, which is in within their rights. Consequently, the scheduled post on Spelbloggen have also been removed since it now contains no video. And frankly, that’s as much of a loss for Activision as it is for our readers, because this means we won’t show their trailer.

See how stupid this is? You feed the press with material, then you make sure they can’t use it. What’s even more ridiculous is that this would not have been an issue if we hosted our videos ourselves, no one would’ve complained since the whole idea is to get the video out there, this is just some stupid filter put on YouTube by Activision (in this case, mind you) unwittingly.

Stupid.

As for Spelbloggen, we’ll continue to use YouTube since that is the easiest solution to get videos to work on an iPhone. However it will probably not be a viable solution in the long run, since we’ve got content relying on embedded video and we could theoretically get our account removed, along with all the videos in it. That would perhaps not be devastating, but annoying and force us to go through a lot of work moving the videos to a new solution.

Right now I don’t care too much about not showing the Transformers: War for Cybertron trailer. In fact, we’ll even tell our readers why we don’t show it. They deserve to know a little bit about how the game companies that get their hard earned dough works.