The Flip Mino HD is the latest tiny video camera from Flip.

What the heck is it with Mac-oriented folks and the Flip video camera? OK, it’s simple. I grant you that. But, guess what, it’s Yet Another Freaking Thing to carry around and it’s not very good at what it does. While having just one button is pretty nice, there’s the whole 4s power on. Here’s a very simple alternative — the Panasonic Lumix TZ-5. You’ll need to learn to flip its shooting mode to video (complicated I know) but its rather slow 2.5s power-to-record time gives you 1.5s to find it.

The Lumix TZ5 is Panasonic's latest "Travel Zoom". It is the latest in a series of what have consistently been the highest rated "point-and-shoot" cameras on respected review sites.

• Price: you can get a TZ5 for $220; the Flip Mini HD is $229. You’ll need to pay a few extra bucks for SD cards for your TZ5; the Flip has 4GB of internal memory and an internal LIon battery.
• HD Video: both shoot 1280×720; the TZ5 shoots motion JPEG, so you can import straight into iMovie while you need to convert Flip’s “PureVideo”. On the other hand, MJPEG files are bigger and there’s a limit to the length of videos, but unless you’re trying to reshoot “Rope” you should be OK.
• Quality: the TZ5 has a tiny 1/2.33″ CCD; the Flip Mino HD has a tinier 1/4.5″ CCD. To my eye the TZ5 video I’ve seen looks significantly better than the Flip Mino HD video I’ve seen even though the Flip Mino HD video is being shown at 50% scale.
• Audio Quality: neither is brilliant, but the Flip’s microphone at least points forward.
• Lens: the TZ5 has an f3.3-3.5 28-200mm (35mm equivalent) Leica-branded zoom lens. The Flip has a fixed focus F2.4 lens with 2x optical zoom.
• Dimensions: the TZ5 is 103.3 x 59.3 x 36.5 mm and weighs 214g. (It’s made of metal.) The Flip is 100 x 50 x 16 mm and weighs 93g. (It’s made of plastic.)
• Other notes: oh, the TZ5 can take very good still pictures, has a built-in Flash, 

Summary: the Panasonic wins in every category except (arguably) price, audio quality (maybe), and (unarguably) size and weight (it’s twice as thick and weighs twice as much). Notably, it’s actually Mac compatible, it’s a very good still camera (basically the highest-rated “point and shoot” around) and, as a bonus, a more useful video camera than the Flip (which is useless for anything requiring a telephoto lens, such as a sporting match or a recital).

So, enough about the Flip already. If I’m going to carry Yet Another Freaking Thing (aside from my iPhone) it will be a TZ5 (actually, I have a TZ3, but the TZ5 is the current version).

After over six months, I’ve finally got my act together (and waited for Apple to get its act together) and can build my own iPhone apps. So far I’m using Unity’s iPhone Advanced tool rather than the “bare” SDK (Unity essentially builds an iPhone project for you, you still need to build the final app in XCode).

Using Apple’s tools, and I don’t think I’m violating any remaining components of the NDA by saying this, makes it clear that the SDK was released on a highly accelerated schedule. The amount of silliness involved in getting “Hello World” working on your iPhone is pretty amazing. It’s all a consequence of Apple wanting to make the iPhone world as safe and secure as possible.

In essence you have to jump backwards through a bunch of hoops to produce encrypted digital signing certificates and registering all your developers, testers, and so forth and their iPhones and iPod Touches before you can do anything. I won’t go into gory details because it probably is covered by the vestiges of the NDA and it’s boring, but take my word that the process involves a lot of non-obvious (even with a step-by-step checklist) steps that involve telling your left hand what your right hand is doing (i.e. stuff that should be automatic). It’s all very reminiscent of using Lotus Notes. (If you don’t know me, that’s worse than comparing it to Blender 2.3.)

The purpose of all this is to prevent people from installing “any old app” on their iPhone, and to allow Apple to flip a “kill switch” and disable any app which proves to be toxic to users (e.g. steals/destroys data or violates user privacy) or violates Apple’s unstated rules (e.g. don’t build anything vaguely related to web browsing or email) or Apple’s relationship with AT&T (e.g. don’t facilitate people using their iPhone as a cellular modem/base station). I have no objection to the purpose served by all this annoying cruft, but I do think the annoying cruft should be much easier to handle. Basically, all I should need to do is associate my iPhone with my developer account and click OK to have all the necessary crap stored in my keychain and I am done. Instead it’s 25 steps disguised as 12.

Unity’s iPhone tool is simply amazing. (This is amazing above and beyond Unity itself, which is plenty amazing.) During testing you can run your app in the Unity IDE as normal and use your iPhone as a tethered controller/display — Unity sends compressed video to the iPhone and receives the iPhone’s state over USB via a small app that comes with the dev tools. The only downside to testing this way is that your app is running on your Mac, so you don’t see the actual performance you’ll get on the iPhone, and the video can be a little artifacty (woohoo new word!).

So far it looks like you can have around 7,000 triangles visible and still get action game performance, or up to 25,000 triangles for more sedate games. The shader support on the iPhone is limited so blowing out the video hardware’s performance with fancy shaders isn’t really an option, so expect to see a lot of lightmapped scenery.

Anyway, MANTA (which I conceived of as an iPhone game) weighs in at 100-150k triangles visible on screen right now, so it’s not going to be running on the iPhone without some major surgery. I would still like to get it out this year, but my original planned Nov 30 release is impossible. (I’ll try to release the Mac version on time.)

Two rumors: Apple building a carbon fiber MacBook Air, and Apple building (or needing to build) a NetBook (i.e. an ultralight and ultracheap MacBook that is net-centric). Well, Apple isn’t going to sell a $400 notebook any time soon, but it might sell a $600-800 notebook similar to, but smaller than, the Air, and to keep costs down it might use plastics — I mean Carbon Fiber — and such a notebook would be smaller and lighter than the MacBook Air, so it might be called the “MacBook Helium”.

I’ll laugh out loud if I’m right. I was right about Apple releasing its NeXT-based OS as OS X way back when — I predicted they’d release a stopgap OS 9 which would make them a ton of money and keep people satisfied while they polished Rhapsody which they could then call OS X. Of course, I also wanted them to call the Mac “se/30″ the Mac “sex” for similar reasons.

If Apple does release a $400 micro-notebook, I hope it’s basically a super iPhone and not a crippled Mac (or that it dissolves the distinction between the two).