Ok, Apple have just announced their new laptop, the Intel powered MacBook Pro. Overall it looks good, those speed claims are certainly impressive, however there are a few unanswered questions that, well, need answers.

1. How long does the battery last? There is a total absence of any estimates on Apple’s site.
2. Where has the Firewire 800 port gone? Is that it for Firewire 800?
3. Where is the s-video out? I use that! Any adapter gonna be available to take it from the DVI? The graphics chip is capable of doing it supposedly.
4. What the heck is a ExpressCard/34 slot? And what did it do with the body of PCMCIA?
5. It’s a little bigger no?
6. Why isn’t it cheaper!? (OK, that’s just my stupid fantasies)

Any thoughts?

Happy New Year! For my first post of the year I’d like to tell you all about a little project I’ve been working on. It’s called Chatsum, and it’s the brainchild of my old friend George Grinsted. For years now George has wanted to create a way to let people who are visiting the same website communicate with each other, and contribute to the content itself.

Recently users have been given new ways to interact with websites through commenting, trackbacks and wikis. However all of these forms of interaction require that the website itself chooses to implement them. So although the opportunity for the reader to become the author has increased, it’s still pretty limited and is only really ‘the norm’ on blogs like this, or on more technically orientated sites. There are of course many notable exceptions such as Wikipedia, but I think you get the point. Well we’re hoping that Chatsum will change that, let me tell you a little more about it…

Chatsum is a free service that allows you to chat with other users who are looking at the same website as you. There are two interfaces currently in development, the first takes the form of a sidebar extension for Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is the worlds most popular open source web browser and is widely regarded as the best browser available for Windows and Linux users. The Chatsum sidebar lives in the side of your browser (big surprise) and houses a fully-fledged chatroom. The clever bit is that the chatroom is specific to the page you’re looking at, and all the other users in the room are also viewing the same web page. When you navigate to a different page the Chatsum room changes too, automagically! Open a page in a new tab? No problem, Chatsum will keep pace with whatever you’re currently viewing, no matter how many tabs you’ve got open. There is the option to switch between a page level room and a site level room, and you can also see what rooms/pages are popular with other Chatsum users.

And I did mention that we also have a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X 10.4 in development…

We’re currently inviting people to join our beta test and hope to release the Firefox sidebar within the next couple of weeks, with the Widget soon after. We have lots of exciting features planned and intend to take a pretty aggressive approach to adding them. I’m particularly excited by all the extra community stuff we’ll be doing on the site and by some new possibilities that are emerging in relation to bringing Chatsum to an even wider audience. If you want to keep up-to-date with the development then check out the development blog, and also please do sign-up to the beta test, we really need your help, and the sooner we can get going with the beta test the sooner we can start implementing all the new stuff!

Chatsum Site
http://www.chatsum.com

Chatsum Development Blog
http://www.chatsum.com/blog