There is something really fucking cool about making demos and there is something even more cool about making the hardware it runs on as well.
I should point out that I came across this video when reading Make Magazines RSS Feed.
I added a second DVD drive to my MacPro today. Because I can't make my SuperDrive region free I just plumped for putting a second drive in. Now you may or may not know this but there is no CD eject button on the MacPro (or any apple machine). I have a single key on the keyboard.
So I wondered how I was going to eject the second drive. After installing the drive and rebooting this is what I discovered.
A new menubar tool has appaeared with a familiar eject logo on it. When it's clicked on you see this
So now I can eject the two drives either via the menu option or option-eject it. I'm not sure why it says F12 as I have an eject key on my keyboard. Maybe because it's not an apple keyboard something has gone wrong.
What I love about this is that the interface for all of this is hidden from me when I have one drive. I don't need to know how to eject a second drive when I have one.
This sounds obvious but if you use KDE/Gnome/XWindows/Windows machines you start to feel like there are options for EVERYTHING even if you don't know why they are there. Often they are there and they don't even do anything with no feedback to the user. This where apple excel. Vista, LDE and Gnome all look nice but their vendors don't go as far as Apple to hide meaningless interface options. More choice is not a good thing it's just noise. Sure you tune it out over time but it still takes hidden brain cycles to work with.
I'm not certain of why Apple succeeds where others fail but I can tell you what they do is hard. Any vendor can make a menu, decide on keyboard shortcuts, work with standards groups to decide on a code for eject. But it takes lateral thinking, time and space to be able to sit back and say "You know what: when the user has got one drive, let's hide all the work we've done". Maybe that's the key. If you've spent a few weeks making a menu. You, as an engineer, want the world to see it. You have after all slaved over the details. You have lovingly crafted a piece of code, submitted yourself to code reviews, checkin reviews, standards compliance tests and internationalization reviews. After all that 'they' want to HIDE the menu! Maybe Apple's design isn't driven by engineers. Maybe that's why it works. For once maybe it's not about you but about a greater good?
It's really hard to keep the dream alive as you get older. Other priorities like family and friends increasingly take you time and attention. The feeling that nothing is new creeps in. Nothing feels exciting any more. All the adventure of life just disappears. Steve Wozniak seems to have defied these negative forces for the last 50 years. Here is a really interesting and long interview of Woz by Guy Kawasaki