This screen grab from the promotional video shows some lighting and screen choices controlled via an iPad.

Getting an MRI — that is, being conveyor-belted into a claustrophobic tube that makes a seemingly endless series of obnoxious clanging noises — is no one’s idea of a good time. So the folks at GE and PDC are looking at Apple’s iPad as a way to bring a sense of control and calm to the patient experience.

As part of what the company is calling the MR Suite, patients are given an iPad that has an app tailored to the experience. From the app they can adjust the lighting levels in the room as well as choose the music. Or, if patients don’t like the selection, they can dock their own iOS device to the MR Suite iPad. They can then stream their own music, video and photos from their own device through the MR Suite’s docking station. Playing Words with Friends to pass the time, however, isn’t sanctioned quite yet.

“We have not yet tested third-party apps, but plan on doing so soon,” David Knuth, PDC project manager, told me. “Typically the patient needs to lie still, so they can’t play their apps in the room.”

On the ceiling above the MRI machine is an LED panel that can show images like nature scenes and videos that are meant to be calming, which the patient can swipe through to choose via the iPad. Springwise, which pointed to this project, has a video explaining more about the intent behind the project.

Of course, this is not meant to suggest a touchscreen tablet will magically make MRIs a desirable experience, but it could certainly help make them somewhat less unpleasant.

This is yet another avenue Apple’s tablet has found into the world of healthcare. Apple has heavily promoted apps for workers in the field of medicine and their patients, and doctors are big fans of being able to check charts and get work done when not in the office.

More doctors in training are also learning their field with an iPad in tow: a report in Reuters on Tuesday illustrated how hospital residents were more efficient in providing care when carrying Apple’s tablet to patient bedsides.

This post was updated with Knuth’s quote and information about streaming media.

Thumbnail image used courtesy of Flickr user phil41dean.

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The fitRAIL is billed as an “exercise mount” for both the original iPad and the iPad 2. It’s a sturdy, collapsible aluminum and steel gadget that manages to be both portable and secure when holding your iPad, and it’s an elegant solution to a problem I’ve been trying to solve since getting my first iPad.

Your screen, your stuff

The fitRAIL is basically a harness for your iPad that folds out so as to clamp down perfectly on the display consoles of most upright cardio equipment — ellipticals, treadmills, climbers and the like. It folds down to a small size and comes with a pouch for convenient carrying, and features sticky (albeit easy to remove) pads to keep your iPad securely in place, along with a hook attached to a neoprene strap to make sure it won’t pitch forward. The stretchiness of the neoprene strap and double grooves in the base make the fitRAIL easily compatible with any generation iPad.

It hooks over the top of the machine’s console (and seems to work with every variety I could find), and then hangs there, buttressed by rubber bumpers in the back to keep it from bouncing around too harshly. That way, you can watch or read whatever you want as you work out (so long as you downloaded it before to your iPad or you have internet access at your gym) instead of being beholden to whatever your gym chooses to play on its televisions.

Not just a gym rat

The fitRAIL also works remarkably well outside of the confines of the gym, which is good news in case you’re not often the type to stick with your New Year’s resolutions. It can be configured to work as a display stand, or as an angled prop for typing, in which capacity it easily outperforms other devices with similar purposes, like Apple’s own Smart Cover. You can also hook it over a door for hands-free viewing in a pinch.

Smart design that avoids too tight a niche

My office is virtually a graveyard of iPad stands. Too many of these were single purpose devices that quickly outlived their usefulness when something that not only acted as a stand, but did something else, too came along (the PadPivot comes to mind). The fitRAIL is a stand, yes, but it also offers a very specific function that satisfies the demands of many like myself who’ve been looking for a simple, easy-to-install way to mount an iPad to cardio equipment. It’s smart design that avoids being too precious, and that’s why it’s got a permanent place in my gadget bag.

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Fit and form factor

The Jawbone UP is actually quite an attractive piece of hardware. It’s a simple, unadorned band (black in my case) with a slightly rubberized finish [Ed: as per the Jawbone UP forums, the material used for the Jawbone UP's skin is actually a thermoplastic elastomer, which means even those with a latex allergy should be able to wear the UP] that helps keep it from moving around on the wrist (so long as it’s sized right), while also not feeling sticky or messing too much with arm hair, a plus for lycanthropic beasts like myself. All control of the device is handled through a simple button capping one end, while the other has a sheath hiding the mini stereo connector, which handles the double-duties of charging the UP and reporting back to your iPhone.

A word of warning: The UP fits comfortably and securely for most activities, but I found out the hard way that since it doesn’t have a clasp or other locking mechanism, it will fly off your wrist, if, say, you’re hurling a dodgeball as hard as you can across a gym. This is inconvenient if you play beer league sports, where the activity tracking features would obviously be appreciated, but keep the UP on your non-dominant arm, if you’re too concerned about flinging a $100 piece of kit at high velocity into a wall or leave it on the bench. In the future, hopefully Jawbone thinks about some kind of locking mechanism to make sure the UP can withstand even vigorous activity.

The UP iOS app

The app that gathers and presents data collected by the UP wristband is a bit of a mixed bag. It looks great, with visually attractive graphs and charts to show you how many steps you’ve taken, how your sleep patterns are turning out, and whether or not you’re meeting your food goals. Having to plug your UP into the iPhone via its stereo headphone jack actually isn’t that annoying, and since omitting wireless connectivity saves battery life, I actually think it’s a worthwhile trade-off. But there are some quirks that make it occasionally unpleasant to use.

Turning your device from profile to landscape, for instance, automatically activates a timeline tracking view of your activity that can be difficult to interpret, and won’t deactivate until you tilt it back. It activates by accident too often, and sometimes doesn’t turn off when you right your device again.

The UP’s social aspects are a high point, however. In the app, you can search by name for friends that are using UP, and add them to your “team.” Watching your teammates’ daily progress is actually one of the best parts of UP, and the most entertaining. Still, there should be a way to scan your contacts or check your social networks for people to add, since searching manually is both exhausting and extremely hit-or-miss.

Challenges are another nice element of the UP app. You can browse challenges and choose to participate, including things like daily walking goals, sleep targets for a month, and more. It’s a nice way to add some additional motivation to your activity goals, and it can score you rewards through Jawbone’s partners.

The UP experience

Just like the app is so-so, the experience of living with and using the UP wristband has both major flaws and big advantages. First, it’s not terribly accurate; since it resides on your wrist, it tends to mistake a lot of arm movements for steps, which resulted in some pretty inflated step counts for me.

Second, it requires just enough user input that it can be hard to remember what you need to do. Taking pictures of my meals, for instance, was something I remembered only once a day, at best. And switching from day to night mode, and from day to activity mode was also a chore that resulted in a few missed opportunities to gather data. These things might become habit over time, however, and indeed, by the time a week was up, I was already remembering to do them more frequently.

I’m not sure how accurate UP’s sleep measurements were, but they were in line with what I estimated in terms of length of sleep, and they mirrored how I felt in terms of their quality ratings. Accuracy is a complaint I see often in forums and discussions related to the UP, but for the average user, this issue is overblown; UP may not be 100-percent accurate, but it achieves the goal of making users more aware of their daily activity levels, sleeping and eating habits, and provides a lot of impetus to improve all three.

Final thoughts

The UP isn’t perfect, but for $100, it sure does get a lot of things right. I personally didn’t run into problems with battery life, or with the unit dying on me after a certain amount of time, but those are both issues that seem like early hiccups to be rectified through returns and hardware revisions. As an unobtrusive, motivational device that provides better feedback about your daily lifestyle choices than just sitting around reflecting on your own ever could, the UP is genius. It could get much better, too, so I can’t wait to see where Jawbone takes this next.

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Calorie Tracker – LIVESTRONG.COM ($2.99)

Last year I evaluated calorie counter apps for the iPad and decided Livestrong was simply the best. After a year of usage, I still think so. The program has an extensive database of every food imaginable. No matter how exotic or ethnic, it’s in there. No guessing how many calories your meal had: Livestrong knows.

Not only does the app track the calories eaten, but also has a database of exercises to take off the pounds. The app calculates the intake and expenditure of calories so you can accurately predict your weight loss.

The best feature for me was the seamless syncing of data across devices. iPhone, iPad, and website all synchronized so I simply had no excuse not to record what I ate. For me personally, simply recording what I ate made a huge difference.

Meal Snap (and previously the Camera app) ($2.99)

Before Meal Snap, I would take pictures of everything I ate. That made me accountable, keeping a visual record of what I’d eat throughout the day. The camera was also handy for those times where doing extensive calorie analysis was awkward or inappropriate; take a picture and figure out the calories later.

Once Meal Snap came along, my pictures had a whole new meaning. Not only did I know what I ate visually, but Meal Snap would guess the calories. Talk about being lazy. Snap a picture and you’re done. Later in the day when I would have time, I entered the data into the Livestrong app or website to record what I ate.

Some of the interpretations of the meals are funny, and reveal that actual human beings, likely with a cultural bias are viewing the pictures. I learned about some interesting Indian dishes along the way that had absolutely nothing to do with the actual pictures I snapped.

Bodymedia FIT Armband ($249 plus $6.95-$12.95 monthly)

Bodymedia is truly the future of technology that makes us healthier individuals. This is a monitor you wear 23 hours a day, taking it off only to recharge or when you come in contact with water.

The device monitors movement, heart rate and sweat to determine how many calories you’ve burned. I hate to throw buzzwords around, but this really is the “gamification” of weight loss. At the end of the day you can track how much you’ve walked, how much moderate and vigorous exercise you performed, and even how much you slept. The device communicates with your iPhone via Bluetooth, or via physical docking for recharging and advanced data computations. At the end of the day, you can see if you met your calorie burning goals.

What I really liked about this device, despite its high price, is that with the iPhone you get your calorie burning in real-time. And while many fitness machines will give you a count of “calories burned,” that doesn’t account for your personal metabolism. I was amazed at how off those can be. They also don’t account for potential cheating like leaning on the railing or skipping steps. The Bodymedia simply doesn’t let you cheat.

To embark on a quality workout, you can ask the Bodymedia to track your exercise by calories burned, not by time. So instead of saying “I’m going on the treadmill for 30 minutes” you can instead say “I’m going to burn 300 calories on the treadmill.”

The app has a rudimentary food diary, but it was severely lacking and pales in comparison to the Livestrong Calorie Tracker, but you can use the apps in concert with one another.

Each day I used the Bodymedia, I’d try somehow to break the previous day’s goal with one of the metrics: more sleep, more calories burned, more steps, etc. It was like a video game, but instead of points earned, it was calories burned. Win win!

When people ask me how I lost my weight, I can tell them I owe nearly 100 percent of it to my iPhone. It kept me completely accountable for my calorie intake and expenditure, and it can for you as well.

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Zeo Personal Sleep Coach $199

With the Zeo, you wear a headband to bed each night that communicates wirelessly with an alarm clock base. The band determines your “optimal” wake period within a certain window of time. The data is stored on an SD card, which you must then upload manually to Zeo’s website after each night.

While it was nice to know the quality of my sleep and how often I woke, uploading the data each morning was cumbersome and I’d frequently forget to do it. The headband was very uncomfortable and would often slip off. After a few weeks, I had to return the unit since it was completely useless to me, but at least it came in handy for benchmarking other devices (yes, at one point I had no less than four devices attached to me during sleep).

Best use: Hard to find one, unfortunately.

BodyMedia Body Sync $249 plus $12.95 a month

This device is primarily a weight loss monitoring tool you wear 24 hours a day, seven days a week, taking it off only to recharge and shower. You wear this device near your tricep on your upper arm, and it’s about the size of a iPod nano. It monitors how much time you were in bed, but doesn’t take into account how restful that sleep was and doesn’t have an alarm function. Unlike other devices, you don’t have to set it. It’s always watching you and syncs via Bluetooth.

After wearing it during a work out, I was able to figure out the optimal time to exercise in the evening so that I’m not too “revved” up before bed. I’d monitor my metabolism in real-time and figure out how many hours it took for my body to go from calorie burning mode to relaxation mode. I also liked knowing how many calories I burned while sleeping.

This device isn’t cheap, and the monthly monitoring adds to the cost, but if you want to see how sleep (or lack thereof) impacts your weight loss goals, this is a great product.

Best Use: Sleep monitoring in conjunction with weight loss.

Lark $129/$189 w/ coaching

The Lark is a wristband you wear while sleeping. It comes with its own charging station that also serves as an iPhone stand, although you can also charge it using any mini USB cable.

The Lark monitors your sleep to analyze how many times you woke and how “restful” the sleep was. It gives you a rating such as fair, poor, OK and good. For an additional charge, you can pay for sleep coaching, which will use the results to suggest better sleep habits. The Lark is unique in that instead of initially waking you up with an alarm, it vibrates silently. This enables you to wake yourself without waking your sleep partner and the rest of the house. My spouse was quite pleased with this and so was the dog. If you don’t awake from the vibration, the iOS app will use a failsafe alarm sound to wake you “gently” with the sounds of birds tweeting.

During testing, I often found the vibration rather jarring, and sometimes more disturbing than the actual alarm. I felt like someone was shaking me awake as if there were some kind of emergency. Over time I got used to it and learned that vibration meant it was time to wake up, but still was caught off guard some mornings. Sleeping with the device on was no problem. It was quite comfortable and felt like I was wearing a watch.

The failsafe alarm sound wasn’t changeable and on occasion I didn’t always hear it. While the coaching was interesting, it was hardly worth the extra $60 in my opinion. The advice wasn’t personalized, but simply took aspects of my sleep and offered suggestions (even some contradictory ones).

The iOS app wants to be in the foreground at all times, which made it difficult to use music apps such as Ambiance. If another app presented a notification while sleeping, it was confusing to get the Lark app back to alarm mode. If you want to snooze the alarm, you can’t set a specific time but are given a menu of choices in five-minute intervals.

Best Uses: Waking up without disturbing the household, nominal sleep monitoring and suggestions.

Wakemate $59.99

Wakemate has had a long rocky road to market: constant delays, hardware defects in initial release and buggy iOS apps. Luckily, the device seems to have overcome its difficult beginning and is now stable and reliable.

The Wakemate is a small Bluetooth USB device wrapped in a fuzzy terry cloth band that you wear around your wrist to sleep. It doesn’t vibrate like the Lark, but simply records your sleep movements and then uploads them to your iOS device and the Internet when it’s time to wake up. The iPhone (or iPad) stays safe on your beside table.

Wakemate’s unique feature is that, similar to the Zeo, it claims to monitor your sleep patterns and wake you up at an optimal time in your sleep cycle. I didn’t experience any perceived benefits from this, but did notice that the Zeo and Wakemate woke me generally at the same time. Wakemate’s iOS app allows you to customize the ringer to a song or one of its selected melodies. The default alarm was quite pleasant and not the blaring klaxon of the typical alarm clock nor the too-gentle sound I experienced with the Lark. Since it wakes you at an “optimal” time, you can’t snooze the alarm. It forces you to get up plain and simple. Personally I liked that rigidity.

Sleep result numbers were nearly identical to that of the Zeo. The “sleep score” was within 10 percent, and I felt it accurately recorded my wake and sleep times. Even though I might be in bed more than I thought, I realized a lower sleep score meant a lack of quality in my sleep. The app gives you the ability to tag your sleep in order to analyze patterns such as what you ate or drank before bed or your stress levels. You can even post your results to Facebook and Twitter.

During my test period I was disappointed with all the device problems and the manufacturer was very slow to respond. Although there was a known defect in their product, they still required owners to pay the shipping back to manufacturer. One mistake can be safely ignored, but I did see a pattern of problems and sincerely hope they get their house in order because I really liked the product.

Of all the devices I used, this was the most economical. A one time investment of $60 covered the device and there were no subscription fees to continue using it. Of course, that could change and the device isn’t usable without the app.

Best Uses: Detailed analysis of sleep patterns.

What will I be sleeping with now on? The Wakemate now has a trusted position in my bedroom. The times I forgot to charge it, I truly missed the analysis. I do like the Lark for those times I have to wake up extra early and don’t want to disturb the house. Who says I have to sleep with just one?

Disclosure: Bodymate, Lark, and Wakemate provided samples and service for this review.

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The app represents somewhat of a departure for DailyBurn, the company behind its creation. DailyBurn, which was acquired by IAC  in 2010, is a social network that focuses on fitness and diet tracking, with an emphasis on community involvement and granular detail. Meal Snap, however, represents a slightly different approach, and one which DailyBurn CEO Andy Smith thinks will be easier to swallow for customers the company’s other products may have had more trouble reaching.

Smith says Meal Snap is part of an effort to create “fun, engaging products that help with behavioral change,” and DailyBurn has found, in taking the pulse of users, that’s the way to go in the future when it comes to health-focused apps. Health tracking is hard to maintain longterm with a high level of detail. Meal Snap is only one of a lot of different apps in the pipeline from DailyBurn based around the idea that simple, fun, focused apps are what customers are looking for, according to Smith.

Meal Snap, which sells for $2.99, doesn’t really tie-in much to DailyBurn’s own iPhone app or the site itself, but that’s sort of the point. It simply offers the ability to take a photo of food, add a caption (optional) and let the system find out how many calories it contains. The app also automatically keeps a daily log of your tracked meals, but there’s no sign-up process, and no real settings to fiddle with, although you can sign in to Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare to share your snapped meals with those social networks. The photo logging element taps in to the recent success of apps like Instagram and Foodspotting, while still providing health information at the same time.

Meal Snap succeeds because it has few barriers to usage, and does one thing very well. Social networking features are a nice bonus, but they aren’t central to the app and no login is required at any point if that’s what a user prefers. Everything happens from one central screen, and meal identification can happen in the background after you exit the app. Smith thinks “apps that do one thing, and do them very well” best represent the direction we’re headed with mobile software, and after a few days using an app as simple, impressive and intuitive as Meal Snap, I’m inclined to agree.

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This is the email from Steve Jobs, which was released by Apple in its entirety as a press release:

Team,

At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.

I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.

Steve

This isn’t the first time Jobs has had to step away from the company due to health concerns. On Jan. 14 2009, Jobs stepped down as CEO temporarily, also citing health issues. The news also came in the form of a personal email from Jobs to Apple employees. This second leave comes almost exactly two years after the first. At the beginning of that earlier leave, Jobs anticipated a summer return to the company. This time, his plans seem much less definite.

It was later revealed that Jobs left to have a liver transplant in April of 2009. Critics argued that by keeping the specifics of his health issues hidden, he was hiding material information from investors and damaging the company. Stock prices initially suffered following the news of Jobs’ first absence, and the same can probably be expected this time around. Stock values are already down in European trading.

While this is most definitely bad news for the Apple CEO, we wish him a speedy recovery.

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However, revolutions in user input technology can result in unforeseen consequences, an emblematic example being the spike in repetitive stress injury that resulted from the switch from traditional “springy,” raked typewriter keyboards to flatter, often “clicky,” and frequently hard-landing, computer keyboards back in the ’80s.

Analogically, little is yet known about long-term stresses that using multitouch input systems may inflict on our muscles, nerves, and tendons.

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Arizona State University Biomedical Informatics Department assistant professor Kanav Kahol is team leader of a research project to measure the amount of stress placed on hands and wrists of individuals using multitouch electronic devices like Apple’s iPad. Researchers will use cyber-gloves to measure kinematic phenomena produced in users interacting with multitouch systems with finger-flick gestures.

Prof. Kahol’s team, supported by a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation, includes computer interaction researchers, kinesiologists and ergonomic experts from both ASU and Harvard University, engaged in developing a tool kit that could be used by designers as they design and refine new multitouch systems.

The ASU project’s aim is to develop best practices and standards for human/machine interface interactions that are safe and cause minimal user stress, while allowing users to fully benefit from the new levels of immersion that multitouch interaction facilitates.

“We Are All Part of a Large Experiment”

“When we use our iPhone or iPad, we don’t naturally think that it might lead to a musculoskeletal disorder,” says Prof. Kahol commenting in an ASU media release. “But the fact is it could, and we don’t even know it. We are all part of a large experiment. Multitouch systems might be great for usability of a device, but we just don’t know what it does to our musculoskeletal system.”

In a project abstract, Prof. Kanol notes that the researchers’ principal focus will lie in developing a methodology and process for selecting ergonomically appropriate gestures and mapping them relative to tasks employed in human computer interaction, such as the multitouch technology that has reached maturity in products like the iPhone.

Prof. Kahol observes that as we move toward a world where human-computer interaction is based on various body movements that are not well documented or studied, we face “serious and grave risk” of creating technology and systems that may lead to musculoskeletal disorders (MSD), and that many of today’s multitouch systems give no consideration to eliminating gestures already known to lead to MSD injuries, or to eliminating gestures that are symptomatic of a patient population.

For example, he points out that the gesture for zoom function with the iPhone is exactly the same gesture used for detection of Parkinsons disease (PD), since people in early stages of PD can’t execute this gesture, which means that iPhones are not usable by PD patients or people who may go on to develop PD — just one example on how gestures wrongly chosen for multitouch interaction can alienate certain populations or cause muscle fatigue and other ergonomic issues. Kanov contends that it is important to address this issue before we create another man-made diseases like carpal tunnel syndrome — which he calls “a hallmark of bad interaction design.”

The overall methodology to develop ergonomic gestures involves development of accurate multi-digit hand movement simulations that can predict muscle fatigue due to gestures. This enables developers to select a vocabulary of gestures that can be mapped onto task hierarchies derived through task analysis.

The project’s initial focus will to evaluate the impact multitouch devices have on the human musculoskeletal system. Users will be fitted with electromyography (EMG) equipment to measure muscle forces, and cyber-gloves to measure kinematic features produced while users interact with multitouch systems. Researchers will then evaluate the impact of those stresses.

Part two of the study will develop biomechanical models where users will be able to, as Prof. Kahol explains, “enter the motion of a gesture, and the system will produce the forces being exerted through that motion, like a specific movement of the hand. We would then take this data back to the Microsofts, the Apples and other manufacturers so they could use it when they are designing new devices.”

The system the team develops is to be built with off-the-shelf components and provide device designers a new tool to use when developing new multitouch systems.

“The designers, the computer scientists, the programmers, they know little about biomechanical systems, they just want a system that they can employ in a usable manner and tells them if a gesture causes stress or not,” says Kahol. “So our major challenge is going to be developing the software, the tool kit and the underlying models that will drive the tool kits.” He notes that the last time designers developed a fundamental interaction system with computers they modified the standard keyboard — a transition that as noted above, was not without its share of drawbacks.

“When we developed the keyboard, we didn’t think through how working with it would affect the hands, arms, etc.,” Kahol said in a statement earlier this month. “As a result, it created a multimillion dollar industry in treating carpal tunnel syndrome. That is what we want to prevent with multitouch systems. We are going for the preventative, rather than the curative. Multitouch systems might be great for usability of a device, but we just don’t know what it does to our musculoskeletal system.”

Now, hopefully we will.

As the Journal notes, Tennessee has a more liberal policy regarding waiting lists and residency requirements for transplants. This results in a median wait of 48 days for a liver transplant, vs. 306 nationally. As to why Jobs needed a liver transplant, it’s possibly associated with his pancreatic cancer from 2004. The five-year survival rate for all liver transplants is around 75 percent.

When contacted by the Journal regarding the status of Jobs, Apple spokeswoman Katie Cotton would only comment that “Steve continues to look forward to returning at the end of June, and there’s nothing further to say.” Actually, there is.

Back in January, Jobs sent an e-mail to Apple employees announcing his leave of absence. In the letter, he talked about his weight loss, about “getting to the root cause” of the problem, and reversing it. According to Jobs at the time, the cause had been determined.

Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause — a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.

While it is possible that there was a misdiagnosis in January, there was no announcement regarding the updated status of Jobs’ health, and the question then becomes whether there should have been.

Unlike in 2004, when Jobs hid his illness from all but a few people close to him for nine months before surgery for pancreatic cancer forced him to reveal it, at least some members of the Board of Directors were kept informed. More importantly, Apple COO Tim Cook was officially running the company during Jobs’ illness this time. It appears the company has adapted internally, if not externally, to the problem of Jobs’ health. While the public has no right to know about Jobs’ private life, perhaps a blanket policy of “no comment” would be better than questionable answers.

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But not everyone is happy about these developments. In fact, there are even reports that suggest use of glossy screens could increase the risk of health issues down the road.

Some Not Happy With Glossy

Contra-glossy display blogger macmatte demands that Apple restore a matte screen option for iMacs and all MacBook/Pro models, contending that this is an issue that won’t die down with passage of time.

CNET’s Dan Ackerman has the lack of a matte display option leading his list of five remaining MacBook Pro deficiencies following the recent WWDC upgrades.

Eye Strain?

Macmatte argues that glare from glossy screens causes eye strain for many people, and says matte screens solve this eye health issue. He claims that the physiology of the human eye causes some to be more prone to eyestrain when staring for hours at reflective surfaces, although others are not bothered.

He thinks Apple’s rationale for dropping matte displays are flawed, that notwithstanding Steve Jobs assertion that most people prefer glossy, a Google search for “matte glossy polls MacBook” suggests that around 40 percent prefer matte. I’m not sure how accurate the metrics derived from a meta-composite of Google search info would be, but there’s no disputing that a sizable proportion of laptop users do prefer matte displays.

Nearly Everyone Used To Use Glossy

Personally, it’s a non-issue for me. I can be quite happy with either matte, which my first dozen years of Mac laptops all had, or the glossy display on my 13″ unibody MacBook. After four months, I haven’t noticed any eyestrain. I’m also constrained to observe that up until the wholesale switch to LCD/TFT flat-screen monitors began about a decade ago, only laptop users had matte displays and virtually everyone else used glassy, glossy-surfaced CRT monitors that usually had curved screen surfaces to boot. I actually did experience eyestrain from using CRT desktop monitors that I found happily disappeared when I switched to using a laptop in 2006, but I’m not noticing any issues with the glossy MacBook display after four months use. Perhaps it’s the flatness rather than the “matte-ness” (or lack of) that’s key for me.

Macmatte suggests that if Apple finds it unprofitable to offer two types of screens, perhaps they could charge a premium for a matte option (which they already do with the 17″ MacBook Pro’s sort-of “matte” screen option). Indeed, there seems to be little logical reason not to offer a similar choice to 13″ and 15″ MacBook Pro and iMac users except that I suspect the stumbling block is not so much cost as increased inventory management and stocking complexity. The workaround for that would be to offer matte as a build-to-order option.

Are Glossy Computer Screens Really A Health Hazard?

Interestingly, macmatte gets some scientific validation for his contentions from academics Down Under. The Queensland University of Technology at Brisbane, Australia, has posted a page on its Health and Safety web site with considerations for Apple Macintosh and other glass or high-gloss monitor screen users, warning that glossy displays could cause operators to adopt “awkward postures” when viewing the screen that may in turn lead to injury.

The university suggests users of high-gloss monitor screens should assess the area where the laptop or monitor will be used to ensure that sources of reflections and glare are eliminated or minimized to reduce potential for injury based on the following points:

• The amount of time that the monitor will be used during a workday. If the screen is only used for short stretches, some of the control options may not be necessary, while if the monitor is being used frequently or continuously, potential for injury increases and should be managed.
• Place the monitor so that the glossy screen is at a 90 degree angle to overhead lighting to minimize glare and reflection; and/or adjust the monitor screen tilt slightly so reflections from both internal and external sources are minimized. It’s also suggested that venetian blinds or shades be closed to reduce glare and reflections from windows.
• Adjusting the screen contrast to a low brightness setting can help increase readability for the user.
• Consider positioning the glossy monitor on another section of the desktop where it won’t be affected by reflections and/or glare.
• Consider consultation with a building lighting engineer to determine if overhead lighting can be modified, such as by removing fluorescent tubes, while still providing adequate light levels.

The university also suggests considering the purchase of other types of computers or monitors that offer matte screens, and has posted further information on recommended use of screen based equipment.

What do you think? Are you bothered by glossy displays, love ‘em, or have no particular preference?

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