Tech wish list

Things I'd like to see:

1. Silverlight for Wii. This is sort of a 'hold your nose and deal' wish item. Silverlight forms the underpinnings of Netflix Instant Watching functionality, so any browser where Silverlight is available should support WatchNow. That would be nice.

2. The Roku box to grow a browser. Clearly the box has enough horsepower for one. The UI might be painful, but to be fair, the UI on the Wii Internet Channel is pretty bad too. Ouija board navigation is painfully slow, but if you can make do with it to enter a WPA pass-phrase, you can use it to enter URLs. Ironically, this points out a trend towards the resurgence of WebTV, which it turns out was simply a product released before its time. With the introduction of HD TVs, the TV finally now has sufficient resolution to show a web page properly, and with modern broadband connections there now is enough bandwidth to properly stream video to the TV. There's simply no reason for the Roku box developers to add "modules" for other content providers to the Roku box. All they have to do is give it a browser with enough plugins (flash and Silverlight would probably do) and have done with it.

3. An Apple desktop multi-touch trackpad. I've talked about this in the past, but now with increased stridency. Apple should take the nice glass skating rink they've put on the new Macbook Pros and put it into a small aluminum case designed to attach to the side (either side, of course) of the Apple desktop keyboard. For extra credit, they should figure out how to make a bluetooth version of the same thing to go along with the bluetooth keyboard.

4. Blu-ray support for the mac. I actually don't envision buying a Blu-ray player or Blu-ray pre-recorded media. But support for burning recordable Blu-ray disks would mean being able to back up all of my home directory - including all my movies, music, etc in iTunes - on a single disk.