Opinions - page 26

A tiny authentication chip in the headset with on-cord control shipped with the just-released iPod shuffle is raising concerns among some that Apple will extort licensing fees from third-party headset manufacturers who wish to make headsets compatible with Apple’s new music playing devices.

First reported Friday in a review of the new shuffle at iLounge, the authentication chip was then derided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as Apple’s attempt to invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act not to stop piracy, but to impede competition and innovation.

Saturday night, Boing Boing Gadgets posted pictures of the curious chip, along with a thoughtful piece pondering whether Apple’s engineering really amounts to DRM: “For all we know, it could be something the FCC made them put in so that it doesn’t interfere with whalesong.”

The EFF raises a great point, actually, wondering why more reviewers have not seized on Apple’s proliferating instances of hardware DRM: “If it were Microsoft demanding that computer peripherals all include Microsoft “authentication chips” in order to work with Windows (or Toyota or Ford doing the same for replacement parts), … reviewers would be screaming about it.”

In the final analysis, however, if Apple is in fact, as Boing Boing put it, “attempting to eat the headphone industry whole,” the company will lose. Consumers have the last vote and to the extent it may seem Apple products are stifling competition, raising prices and limiting choice, Apple’s tiny devices will go unsold.

There are already many many alternative music players on the market for consumers to choose from – some of the best even made by Apple itself – making the new shuffle a stillborn product if consumers perceive an inability to use it as they see fit.

I grew up with 1980s home-computer gaming: Atari, Commodore, Spectrum, Amstrad. In the UK, we had, comparatively speaking, no money (yuppies aside), and, rather than being lucky enough to follow our disk-happy American chums, had to make do with cassettes. Inevitably, with tapes being cheap, publishers soon realised that affordable games were very saleable games, regardless of quality. Eventually, the number of £1.99 and £2.99 games being churned out was astonishing, as was the ever-diminishing amount of time it would take full-price releases to show up on budget labels.

Towards the end of the 1980s, it got to the point where almost no-one bought full-price games in the UK, because everyone would just wait for a price-drop. Watching apps on the App Store brings back these memories, and so perhaps it was inevitable that the other bastion of 1980s software—the compilation—would at some point make its way to the App Store.

On March 9, the 5 Fingers Games Bundle appeared, mashing together BurnBall, Chopper, Up There, Sneezies and Blackbeard’s Assault. Time will tell if this process works in the present day. It certainly has the potential to give exposure to poor-selling but quality games. However, compilations were the other thing that broke 1980s gaming in the UK, since almost every half-decent game ended up on a compilation eventually. I’m hoping people will continue to buy and support indie devs, rather than wait for a now seemingly inevitable price-drop or compilation entry that will ultimately lead to cheaper entry points and fewer development resources.

Evil Panda says: See me inside Tweetie. I like Tweetie. Apple, stop being stupid, or Evil Panda will get you.

UPDATE: All’s now well in the land of Tweetie. Apple relented and, in double-quick time, posted Tweetie 1.3 to the App Store today. However, this episode highlights that if you’re going to censor things, you really have to censor the ‘right’ ones, and also have some consistently enforced guidelines to work towards. And so Evil Panda is sated for now, but he’s still watching, Apple.

I recently moaned about the App Store on my blog, Revert to Saved, when the South Park app rejection debacle highlighted Apple’s inconsistency regarding application approval. (Short version: South Park app gets rejected for “potentially offensive” content, despite entire South Park episiodes being for sale on iTunes and therefore watchable on an iPhone.)

Today, however, things took a turn for the crazy. Tweetie, an iPhone Twitter client—in fact, the very best and top-selling iPhone Twitter client—just got its latest update rejected. The reason is so staggeringly bonkers that I’m hoping it’s an early April Fool jape. Apple rejected it, according to the developer, because there was an offensive word in the Twitter trends list, which Tweetie provides access to. No, really.

This is so astonishingly stupid that I am still reeling that Apple could be so dumb. Are apps now supposed to police the entire internet? Does Safari filter out rude words? Is Apple suddenly going to wrench Tweetie and every other Twitter client from the App Store? For that matter, maybe Apple should remove the likes of WriteRoom, because, hey, I can write the word “fuck” in it, and I might offend myself.

Sort out your App Store approval process, Apple, because you’re looking stupider by the second. And while competition is currently non-existent, it certainly won’t be that way for long.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmE1PbeOYVE

This video from the Blogger team at Google isn’t new, but it did teach me a few things I didn’t know before. Sending stuff to a Blogger account from your iPhone is very simple, even if you don’t already have a Blogger account.

First, that Blogger allows anyone to create a blog instantly via email (or SMS message) by simply sending a first post to [email protected] (or to 256447 for US SMS messages). Just like the widely-admired Posterous service, there’s no need to sign up for anything in advance.

Second, and this is the clever bit, is that you can upload content to Blogger.com this way and then when you claim the post from your desktop computer, you can associate that content with any *existing* blog you have.

I know Blogger isn’t fashionable as a blogging platform these days, but I’m rather fond of its simplicity and ease of use. Evan Williams was right about those templates, though. Come on, guys: new templates? Much to ask?

Wasn’t it great to see Apple roll out a huge number and variety of new Macs and accessories on Tuesday without the benefit of Steve Jobs? The company’s culture and talent run deep, and Apple is in very capable hands with Tim Cook in charge. The new line-up is quite nice.

On the other hand, Tuesday’s announcements summed up and put the spotlight on the single-greatest opportunity that Apple isn’t capitalizing on right now: making the Mac mini the must-have living room computer of the century. WIth just a few small tweaks, the Mac mini would become the killer digital entertainment product the AppleTV aspires to be. No BluRay. No HDMI. Under-sized hard drive. No plans to offer monthly subscriptions for access to the video library. If the company took care of this stuff, hardware makers and content providers alike would be quaking in their boots at the thought of the Mac mini. But Apple left it out yesterday. Again.

To see why the company can’t see an opportunity that’s right in front of its face, click through.

If nothing else, Apple’s product refresh announcements Tuesday serve notice that even when the world around them seems to be coming apart at the seams, the product teams in Cupertino can be counted on to refine and improve the company’s product line at regular intervals.

And to, more often than not, prove the Apple commentariat wrong in the process.

A case in point is the refresh of the Mac mini. Written off almost a full two years ago by AppleInsider as a dead item, Apple has since then made THREE updates to the product line, two of them substantial. AI were originally saying the mini wouldn’t make it to Intel.

And then, just last fall, Gizmodo tried to bury the mini under rumors that European inventories were being allowed to thin.

The truth of the matter is that as much as great thinkers in the press and great dreamers among the consuming public may want Apple to craft product in the image of their hearts desire, the producers and designers inside One Infinite Loop have their own vision and their own timelines to which they prove, again and again, focused and true.

Yes, the era of locked-down secrecy may be at an end, as leaks and (invariably badly lit) spy-shots tend to precede product announcements more these days, but those who would seek to bury an Apple product before the company itself issues an EOL statement are more likely than not digging a hole they might look to crawl into months or even years down the road.

We’ve written previously about the odd dichotomy emerging from the general disdain with which the iPhone’s camera is regarded — fixed focal length, only 2 megapixels, blah, blah, blah — and the ever-increasing number of applications appearing to give iPhone photographers unprecedented control and creativity over their images.

Tonight we call your attention to a wonderfully whimsical app called ColorSplash, for two reasons.

First, it’s an amazingly powerful tool that, for $2, gives anyone the ability to transform their snapshots into arresting images in a way that Madison Avenue has long paid professional photographers and creative directors big bucks to do.

Using your finger on the iPhone’s touch interface you can highlight just enough color on a black and white image to make it pop, turning something ordinary and mundane into something extraordinary and memorable.

It’s cool, it’s easy, intuitive and it works. And it’s $2.

Which calls for the second point, which is that, when this kind of thing can be done so well and so easily and so cheaply on Apple’s mobile UI, just imagine the creative possibilities to come when touch interface technology becomes the norm for high-end mega CPU computing platforms.

What I was able to accomplish here tonight, literally in a few minutes dragging my fingers across a little 3″ screen, would have been far more complicated — if not more time consuming — to accomplish using masks and layers and industry standard digital retouching tools in common use today.

The current economic situation may appear to be dire in many respects, but the future of creative expression, as evidenced by the explosion of tools and ideas inspired by the iPhone, seems bright indeed.

AppleTV is dead, it just hasn’t stopped moving yet.  With fewer than 2 million units sold, it hasn’t achieved the commercial success of its rivals, and continues as a failed effort on the part of Apple to extend the digital hub into the living room.

The final nail in AppleTV’s coffin comes yesterday as Netflix announces a digital only subscription option, but the fatal shot was fired back in November.  Follow me after the jump, as we discuss how Netflix strategy not only killed AppleTV but also threatens more than just longtime rival Blockbuster, and what (if anything) Apple can do about it.

Image: sausurau

Japanese cell phone users are simply ahead of their time, according to a report at Wired, which counts the Apple smartphone’s relatively pedestrian toolset and a strong dose of cultural bias against non-Japanese brands to explain why Apple’s provider partner Softbank is now giving away 8GB iPhones to customers who sign a two year contract in the country where gadgets rule.

For example, while many Japanese are heavily into working and playing with video and photography on their cell phones, the iPhone has virtually no video support and a camera that could be described as eccentric, at best. In addition, many Japanese enjoy TV tuners built into their cell phones, while YouTube and the Ustream app can hardly be said to offer content with mass appeal.

Nokia and Motorola have also famously failed in Japan, so Apple is not without company, but in a country with extremely competitive cellular rate plans, Softbank’s monthly rates are seen as too high in comparison to others’ offerings.

It’s odd to think that in the US and in many parts of the rest of the world, where Apple sold over 10 million iPhones in 2008, the device is seen as a status symbol, even an indicator of too-much coolness, while in Japan, “carrying around an iPhone would make you look pretty lame.”

Apple’s annual shareholders’ meeting today could be more about the elephant in the room, not sliding profits and job cuts which have become increasingly common topics in American business.

With Mac sales above the anemic numbers of PC makers and the iPhone continuing to make marketshare inroads, the financial side of the annual meeting is without surprises.

“Don’t expect too many fireworks,” advised CNBC’s Jim Goldman.

I’m only on my second MacBook upper case (pictured above), and it’s currently held together with a piece of duct tape.

But that’s nothing. Over at MacInTouch, reader Derek C is on his eighth, and Apple are sending him a whole new MacBook.

The related Flickr group, My MacBook was cracked by itself is still going strong, too. I suspect many Cult readers have seen this problem.

The appeal of a unibody replacement grows ever stronger.

This post at The Next Web made me stop and think for a moment. I’ve been one of the many people who’ll cheerfully spend a dollar or two on an app that looks enticing and has generally good reviews.

After all, a dollar or two is nothing, right? Less than a cup of coffee, less than a pint of beer in my local pub.

But what’s the cumulative effect? Let’s see now… Open iTunes, click iTunes Store, click on my account ID, enter my password, click “Purchase History”, do some adding up, and the total is:

£68.60, or US$99.70 at the current exchange rate.

One hundred bucks, near as dammit, on iPhone apps. Wow. I had no idea was going to be that much. I was expecting about half that.

It also highlights just what an excellent idea the App Store is, and how well it has been designed. Shopping there is so simple, so instantaneous, and often so cheap per-app, that it almost becomes a thoughtless act. “This app looks cool. I’ll try it.” A dollar here, a few dollars there.

I’m not complaining, I’m just noticing my own App Store spending habits for the first time. This information is available to anyone who goes digging around inside iTunes to see it, but perhaps Apple could make it a little easier to keep track of spending.

How about a small box on the iTunes Store front page, which says “So far this month/year/to date, you have spent $X on iTunes.”?

Something small and unobtrusive; but visible.

Confession time: how much have you spent? And is it more or less than you expected?

Microsoft used an image of an ambling snow leopard licking its chops for the backdrop to its Live Search homepage on Thursday, prompting a few in the business and technology press to speculate why.

Among them, Ina Fried at c|net is likely furthest from the mark, with her suggestion Microsoft could have been showing a player’s tell that Live Search will be the default search engine in Safari’s tool bar when the next version of OS X launches.

Fried suggests that because Microsoft has money to spend and because it might be willing to do so in order to get the market share boost for Live Search that such a deal would bring, well, she admits the idea is a “crazy” one, but she put it out there any way.

Why it won’t happen: Apple doesn’t need the money and has almost never made it a practice to co-brand its products with services that suck.

I don’t generally put up posts on every single thing that might compete with Apple products in the market place. After all, when you’re number one, everyone is always gunning for you.

But Samsung is a major player in the global mobile phone market and when the company floats an idea such as the Blue Earth Solar Powered phone, I have to sit up and take notice.

Designed to symbolize a “flat and well rounded shiny pebble,” according to the marketing material, Blue Earth features a full touchscreen front and charges up via a solar panel on the back of the phone, purportedly generating enough electronic power to make a call anytime.

What’s more, the case is made from recycled plastic water bottles and the thing has a built-in pedometer that calculates how many CO2 emissions you’ve reduced (and therefore how many trees have been saved) by walking as opposed to taking the car.

The handset and its charger are both free from harmful substances such as Brominated Flame Retardants, Beryllium and Phthalate. Screen brightness, backlight duration and Bluetooth can all be adjusted in an energy-efficient mode called “Eco mode”.

It would be pure speculation on my part to say whether this phone will pose a serious challenge to iPhone’s preeminence in the touchscreen smartphone market, especially as there’s no word yet on its OS and, as everyone knows, the iPhone’s hardware design is elegant and all, but it’s the OS that sets it apart from all others. So, until we know more, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Blue Earth is supposed to be available in the UK in the second half of this year; no pricing or full tech specs available at press time.

As the guys at SlipperyBrick put it, “this is a serious eco-hippie phone.” And even though I’m not a serious eco-hippie, I’m going to go pour myself a bowl of granola and ponder Blue Earth.

Via SlipperyBrick, via PocketLint

Om Malik, a notable technology blogger, gave up on his iPhone Wednesday.

Citing ongoing and ultimately insurmountable frustration with AT&T’s network, Malik decided to ditch the iPhone and opt for a T-Mobile BlackBerry Curve 8900 for email and SMS. “I also signed up for a plain-vanilla voice service from Verizon Wireless. And I already have a 32 GB iPod Touch for surfing and music,” he said.

Admitting all that is probably not an ideal solution, Malik – wiith over 1800 friends on Facebook and nearly 20,000 followers on Twitter – found solace in the fact his new devices “can all be charged using the USB port of my Macbook, thereby obviating the need for extra chargers.”

Given that his decision rested solely on the deficiencies of AT&T’s network in the San Francisco Bay Area – ungodly stretches of time “searching” for the network, slow download speeds of web pages, problems with email, static, dropped calls and shoddy call quality – and he professed love for the iPhone, it’s a wonder he didn’t just jailbreak it.

Yes, it’s true. There is a man who swapped his iPhone for a Blackberry. In some respects, I greatly admire Ben Ackerman. Not because of his choice of smartphone, but because he was brave enough to own up to his change of heart in public. Not many self-confessed members of the “giant Mac fanboy” club would be prepared to do that.

But Ben has. He prefers the Blackberry, as he explains in a slightly contradictory post on his blog.

I say “contradictory” because Ben is clearly caught between a rock and a hard place. He’s the first to admit that the iPhone:

(a) is “prettier”

(b) has better apps

(c) and better web browsing

… but he *still* prefers the Blackberry. Why, Ben, why?

Because, it seems, the Blackberry is (in Ben’s opinion), simply a better mobile device. It does things you’d expect a mobile device to do, like, you know, MMS and copy-paste. The basics. That’s what it does, and it does superbly: the basics.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the iPhone doesn’t appeal to Ben and many thousands of other people. It’s because Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Jonathan Ive and the rest of the Apple gang just don’t consider “basics” to be part of their remit. They leave basics to everyone else. Their products go above and beyond.

So, two questions for you:

(1) Do you agree with any parts of Ben’s argument?

(2) If you ever ditched your iPhone for a Blackberry (or, God forbid, your Mac for a Windows PC), would you have the guts to say so in public?

Apple’s new 24″ LED Cinema Display suffers the fatal flaw of “ridiculous, terrible glare,” according to Jason Snell, editor of Macworld, who informed his Twitter followers Monday he’s putting his monitor back in the box and returning it to Macworld Labs.

Snell has spent his professional career as a writer covering Apple and, despite the presumed objectivity of his position as the editor of one of the larger, more recognizable mainstream media brands associated with the Cupertino computer maker, likely wouldn’t give up on such a major piece of Apple hardware unless he felt it was poorly executed.

Snell, of course enjoys a luxury many consumers do not, in that he can give his display back to the magazine’s lab and not have to worry about its cost or the space it may take up sitting unused in a corner or on a shelf. Average folk who’ve bought Apple’s new display and discovered after using it for a time that the glare is unbearable have far fewer options for doing anything about it.

What about you, dear reader – how do you feel about Apple’s embrace of the glossy screen on its flagship display? Is it worse in the wild than the glossy notebooks’ display? Would you send it back to “the Lab” if you could?

Over at Reddit, some of the Redditors have been enjoying a little friendly desktop sharing over the past day or so. If you’re looking for some inspiration for your own desktop arrangement, there’s plenty to be found here.

Seeing all these desktops got me thinking: what are the desktops of the Cult team like? And how about our lovely Cult readers?

At the top of this post you can see my desktop, and “minimal” doesn’t really do it justice. My desktop is always kept clean and clear, devoid of decoration and deprived of a Dock. But that’s just me, and I’m a bit weird. How about my fellow Cultists?

Twitter engineer and minimalism enthusiast Alex Payne writes with some passion on the subject of “everything buckets” – by which he means those apps into which you can throw pretty much everything.

You know the apps he means: the likes of Yojimbo, Evernote, Devonthink, and a dozen or so competitors. Database-powered shoe boxes into which you can chuck PDFs, web archives, bookmarks, plain or rich texts, anything really. And then search through the lot.

Alex thinks “everything buckets” aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The proprietary databases they use might break; they add little that the OS X filesystem doesn’t offer:

“Everything Buckets are selling you a filesystem, and removing the step of creating and saving a new file within that filesystem. That’s their primary value. Whatever organization scheme they may claim to offer, you can replicate on the filesystem. I promise. Even tags (symlinks, aliases –œ look ’em up).”

I suppose he has a point, but I suspect there are many OS X users and Cult readers who will disagree with him. Yes you *can*, with a little effort, replicate most of what Yojimbo does by fiddling around with Automator actions, Smart folders, Spotlight comments and Finder windows; but let’s be honest, who has the time for all that, when Yojimbo (or any of the other apps Alex mentions) will do it all for you in an instant?

But that’s Alex’s point: the convenience of the app is what you’re trading your freedom (and particularly your *data structure*) for.

Over to you then, Cultists. Does Alex have a point? Or will he have to prise your Yojimbo archive / Devonthink database / Evernote note collection from your cold, dead hands?

Me? I’ve still got a Yojimbo bookmarklet and I’m gonna use it.

Woohoo! A bumper issue of WTF iPhone Apps this week, thanks to the ever-increasing avalanche of bobbins and foonity spewing forth from the App Store.

Let’s not dally! Onwards! With the craziness!

First up this week is Angry Scot: “Learn the Scottish way to say No! This application will help you summon your inner Scotsman to give you the courage (and words) to solve your problems in these trying times. Each response is carefully crafted and then spoken by an authentic Scots person in his native tongue.”

Daft, but we can live with it. Can things get worse? You bet they can. We’ve not even started yet.

Last week I posted some half-baked rants about iPhoto 09, and as usual the comments briefly buzzed with some agreement and disagreement.

But there was also this comment, from reader KaL MichaeL (reproduced sans editing):

“I love your blog except when you say anything negative about an apple product. I feel that if you are promoting the Mac Cult then you are a apple Fan end to end.”

And that… that struck me as a little weird.

No personal criticism intended, KaL MichaeL, but words cannot express how much I disagree with you on this.

The Cult of Mac celebrates all that’s good and great about Apple and its products, but that doesn’t make us blind to its failures and errors. A blog that simply promoted Apple and Apple fandom from “end to end”, as you put it, would be beyond dull. In fact, it would probably be a little bit like Hotnews: nothing more than PR puffery.

And that’s not what we’re all about. We don’t want to do that. We want to celebrate what Apple does (in our opinion) right, and moan in a grumpy manner about what it does (in our opinion) wrong. What else, after all, is the blogosphere for?

Cult readers, now’s your chance to cut me down and demand more slavish devotion to the Church of Mac. Or not.