Will Thunderbolt be Apple’s answer to Docking?

A while ago I wrote about how much I miss a good docking solution for Mac laptops. With their presentation of the new MacBook Pro models, they might have presented the answer. The new Thunderbolt interface could be the one interface to rule them all.

Just imagine Apple’s Cinema Display featuring a Thunderbolt cable instead of a MiniDisplayPort and a USB cable, with a newly added Ethernet port and a USB hub with at least 4 USB ports (I like my keyboard and mouse wired) and the solution is almost perfect. We’d only have to plug in two cables (Power and Thunderbolt) and everything is connected properly from Network to USB and Display.

[Update: it’s even nicer to imagine third party products that allow for connecting all that stuff like 1 or 2 displays, Ethernet, a resonable number of USB ports (>= 4) and such per one single Thunderbolt cable. I am not sure if beautiful messages like “you can connect everything simply by using an adapter” will really stand the test of reality. My guess is that there is a certain role for drivers in the game, which will make the game much more complicated that Intel and Apple wants us to believe now]

Nice quote from Gilad Bracha

Unit testing was part of the overall introduction of extreme programming/agile development, which is just one of the major trends Smalltalk has brought to the world. Along with refactoring (which we all know can’t be done without static types, which is why it was invented in a dynamically typed language), IDEs, reflective OO APIs, GUI builders, pop-up menus and bitmapped GUIs in general.

The rest of his article gives an overview of the Minitest framework in Newspeak, a language designed as a next-generation Smalltalk. Well worth a read, like the majority of what Gilad writes.