Apple has gotten a Bluetooth trackpad approved by the FCC. So, what would you possibly do with this? You don’t need it for one of their laptops, they already have a trackpad. Potentially you could use it with an iMac or Mac Pro, but why bother with Bluetooth?
I’m picturing this as a remote for an iOS-based Apple TV, or an HD version of the iPod Touch that has a TV cable. Either combination would let you run iOS apps on a TV and control them from your couch.
All the rumors about a new AppleTV with limited storage based on iOS sound more and more like an iPod Touch with an AppleTV app. It actually makes some sense — you could buy or rent the movies you want, put them on this device, and actually take your movies over to a friend’s house to watch on their TV by plugging in an adapter cable. A 16GB iPod Touch could hold 4 or 5 feature films in about a third the space of a Blu-Ray movie box, and of course the chips are out there for higher capacity. Even better, the WiFi connection could let you serve streamed content as well, like the tons of podcasts and YouTube already available, or cloud-based iTunes video. It’s not a stretch to think of an iPod Touch HD that could play full 1080p over HDMI.
This Apple TV app could just run on an iPod, iPad, or iPhone, too. You just bring the remote and the adapter cable for your friend’s TV, and it’s Movie Night.
Now all Apple needs to do is get content owners to get real about TV and movie pricing on iTunes, and they could have a real business instead of a hobby. The technology for these and even cooler services is not the challenge, it’s getting content owners to agree to reasonable terms for the selling of content that is still often available for free on broadcast TV, or can be rented for $1 from RedBox.
On Android, Myspace is the number one social networking app. Seems that the facebook client on Android doesn’t measure up to the slickness of their Blackberry and iPhone versions.
Apparently 80 million Farmville users is not enough.Facebook games head Gareth Davis thinks that the ‘Mario’ of social gaming is still out there waiting to be discovered.
Uh-oh. More App Store approval drama. Really, though, there’s a lot of shovelware on the App Store, and asking developers to at least tryisn’t so heinous. Templated apps aren’t all bad, but if you are going to just hook up some RSS feeds, why not just use Dashcode to make a web app and avoid Apple’s approval process entirely?
The wi-fi only iPad may be a back door to drive sales of MiFi devices at Verizon and Sprint. So far prices aren’t so hot, compared to AT&T’s new no-contract plan; even though the wi-fi iPad is $130 cheaper, these plans more than make up the difference, and all require contracts.
You’re doing it wrong. I can see AT&T hedging their bets by offering an Android phone, but removing Google search and locking the phone down pretty much misses the point, doesn’t it? Even Verizon got this one right by letting their Android phones be.
We know Android is going to be significant, but when? Android’s growth is still building, doubling over the last quarter. Is it inevitable, or will there be a ceiling, as fragmentation and carrier interference (see above) take the luster off of the open-source OS?
It’s the night before the Big Announcement, or for many no doubt the Big Disappointment when it turns out not to meet everyone’s fanciful expectations. I fully expect that the hype has gotten so big that whatever is announced will cause a drop in Apple’s stock price. It is the way of things.
I’m pretty sure the device won’t:
- Be made of gold
- Have an OLED screen
- Run Windows 7 (though I wouldn’t bet against it entirely)
- Run on AT&T exclusively. Apple has made it clear they aren’t completely pleased with them as a partner.
- Be called iSlate. I’m expecting iPad, myself, but it could just be called iPod Tablet or something like that.
Other than those things, all bets are off.
I’m hoping the device has:
- Front-facing camera, and a mobile implementation of iChat.
- Some form of iPhone OS — tablet PCs have been around for years, but a touch device has to work differently from a mouse device. Gestures and touch, not mouseover and click and drag. I’d hope there are a few new UI constructs that use the real estate better, but the current iPhone OS really has a lot of elements that will absolutely *sing* on the new device.
- No carrier tie-in. I’ll gladly forgo a carrier subsidy for a device that can be used with any carrier or even just wi-fi for now. The ideal would be for the device to accept some sort of wireless card in an SD card form factor, using the case as an antenna. Then, let the carriers compete to offer deals on the cards and plans.
- Really good reading software.
- Don’t make me sign up for a new developer program, sandwich this device into the current iPhone program.
- Inexpensive.
- Color calibration — don’t make a device that screams to be used by artists and photographers, then fail to put color management in it. I still don’t know if there is any color management on the iPhone.
- An implementation of Apple TV on it.
- Support for Bluetooth peripherals, like a portable keyboard.
No matter what the device is, however, if it indeed is meant to be a game-changer for magazines, newspapers, and textbooks, this release has got to be accompanied by a major retooling of iTunes. iTunes has had so many types of content and commerce grafted onto it, it needs to be overhauled with a classification scheme that lets the individual consumer browse content efficiently, do well-targeted searches, bookmark or compare products, and support additional business models like subscriptions, gifting, etc. Don’t staple e-books and magazines onto the current thing, it’s gotten downright Byzantine.
Let’s see what it does, and hope that people judge it by what it does rather than what it doesn’t. This type of device is still the product of a lot of engineering compromises. People don’t seem to understand the hurdles that were overcome to bring the iPhone to market — the iPhone is a far more powerful computing device under the hood than its accessible exterior would suggest. I expect the new device to be no less. I do have to say that I still haven’t used cut-and-paste on my iPhone, even after Apple did put a very nice implementation in place. They generally have some sound thinking behind their feature priorities, based on what will serve the majority of users best. This sometimes leaves out your pet feature, but more often then not these features are worked around in an elegant way.
Since I’ve been studying how to optimize web pages for the iPhone, I decided to quit procrastinating and finally install WPTouch, a WordPress plug-in that generates a very iPhone-friendly version of your Wordpress Site.
WPTouch provides some very elegant UI attributes, including a search panel that slides in, Google Adwords for Mobile support, and the whole presentation is very configurable. Also, you have a switch that will let you go to and from the standard browser layout, so you aren’t stuck with the theme. WP Touch is considered a theme, but is installed as a WordPress plug-in, since it has to inject some code into your pages in order to do the theme-swapping.
Obey the foot. See how happy it will make him?
So, you may be asking, “how do you get one of those neat-o icons that you can put on your iPhone home screen to jump directly to the web site?”
This blog post has a great tutorial of how to set up your icon app if you are using the plug-in. Normally in a static web site, you just create a 57×57 pixel PNG file and name it icon.png, and link to it in your HTML header:
Oddly enough, the apple-touch-icon link is not part of standard wordpress themes in general. I guess that’s not so weird considering the themes are designed for desktop rather than mobile, but it is annoying that the iPhone plug-in can do this but the standard view of the site can’t be saved with your custom icon to the iPhone home page.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this mobile page looks on other devices, apparently the user agent sniffing done by the plug-in can also supply the page for Blackberry, Android, and others.
Fresh new rumor about the upcoming Apple tablet, this one from one of Apple’s telecom partners in France.
Basically, they are saying that the tablet will have a camera on the screen side, so that it can be used for videoconferencing, and that Apple will include a videoconferencing app for live streaming.
This is definitely credible — Apple has supported videoconferencing out of the box for years in Mac OS. Their video chat feature in iChat maintains a relatively high frame rate over AIM, much better frame rates and video quality than the video chat on Yahoo IM, for example. This feature runs very nicely on even the older Power PC laptops, it ran great on my old 1.33 GHz Powerbook G4 over a WiFi connection. The only question is how well it would run on the slower mobile networks, though the current version of iChat does have the ability of adjusting the video for lower bandwidth. A more refined version of this would detect the bandwidth available and throttle back image quality and frame rate as needed.
This does suggest that the tablet will definitely have WiFi connectivity and that it should have a beefier graphics system than the iPhone 3GS, though it wouldn’t need something as powerful as the graphics on current Macbooks.
Elisabeth Ronson from O’Reilly just started a new webinar class today through creativetechs.com, called “Learn to Build iPhone Web Apps.”
It’s not too late to sign up, it’s a 2 hour webinar every Tuesday at 11am PST. Viewing the webinar is free, and the course videos can be purchased at a nice price if you are enrolled now. Find more info here. The first class was today, but that was more an overview, so you could easily jump in on the next session.
One thing that Elisabeth touched on that I think needs more amplification is the question “When should I consider a Web App, and when must I build my App natively?” It turns out that for many types of informational apps, a Web App makes a whole lot of sense, and few people realize just how powerful the iPhone browser is. So many people who want iPhone apps for their businesses or services could actually get by very nicely with a well-written Web App, it’s just that there isn’t much awareness of that option, and there aren’t a lot of designers who are savvy about Safari’s Webkit/HTML5 features.
You *can* build a web app that:
- Has a tab bar interface to separate sections of the app.
- Can play video.
- Can use the accelerometer.
- Can accept simple gestures, like a swipe.
- Can animate UI display and interaction (acceleration, crossfades, etc.)
You *must* build a native app if your app:
- Needs to be able to run standalone without a data connection.
- Uses the iPhone camera for stills or video.
- Is intended to be sold on the App Store, and/or has additional content you want to offer through the App Store.
- Requires more sophisticated animation than WebKit provides, or uses OpenGL.
- Has complex gesture interactions.
If your app can be done as a web app instead of a native app, you get some immediate benefits:
- You don’t need an Apple developer’s account to develop your app.
- You don’t have to go through the app store approval process to publish your app.
- You don’t have to go through the app store approval process to update your app.
- Apple is not going to stop offering your app.
- You have a very wide range of CSS/HTML tools to choose from to do your development, and a large base of people who know CSS.
- You can push changes to your content, pages, etc. in real time.
- May also run on other WebKit mobile devices. Note that Palm, Android, certain Nokia phones, and certain Blackberries all have Webkit browsers.
More on this subject as the class goes on.
