How do you launch a social networking site in this day and age, long after the likes of Facebook and Twitter seized the world? One answer is "micro-social networks": designed with a clear and specific purpose in mind, they can fulfill that purpose better than any of the generalists like Facebook.

Platter is a new micro-social network app dedicated home cooking. It allows you to take pictures of food you make and upload them to show the world, tagging them with the you used ingredients. You can then search through those ingredient tags, finding inspiration for something to make with the ingredients you have to hand. As you'd expect, you can also do the usual social networking things, like follow people whose food you find interesting, and post comments and "likes" on pictures.

"Why do I need this?" you might ask. "I have Instagram and Twitter, Facebook and Foodspotting. Why do I need another app?" Well, the Platter team cleverly identified that in fact none of these apps are exactly what you need if you're a home cook looking to show off. Instagram has plenty of food pics, but lacks the ingredient tagging feature. Twitter and Facebook are more general purpose. Foodspotting is designed around the idea of taking pictures of food when eating out, not for home cooking. Platter is complementary to these services.

To underscore this, it has (as you'd probably expect) the ability to cross-post pictures to Facebook and Twitter. These cross-posts are in the form of links to Platter's attractive web interface (self-promotion alert: that's my own Platter page), from where you can drill down into individual pictures. This web view feature is already fuller-featured than Instagram's pared-down approach, as you can navigate from users to pictures and back again, and the Platter team are planning on expanding this further in the future.

Gallery: Platter, the social network for keen cooks

Technically, Platter works pretty well. It's been developed by a small team of five people (for both iOS and Android versions) alongside their day jobs, and early on there were some rough edges that betrayed the app's homespun origins -- the occasional layout glitch or failed post. Subsequent patches have mostly fixed the problems. There's still the odd interface quirk -- I didn't find it particularly easy to navigate through the app at first, and sometimes tap targets seem to be frustratingly unresponsive -- but nothing too annoying. I couldn't test the Android version, but I must at least note that it has one -- so your Android-toting friends aren't left out in the cold.

There are some usability decisions that are quite refreshing, too. There's no fancy/hackneyed (delete according to your biases) photo filters, for one thing; if you're suffering from Instagram Fatigue you may find this a relief. The app also doesn't enforce a trendy square crop on photos; when users view your images, they'll see the aspect ratio you took them in, giving you the flexibility to compose shots as you see fit. However, note that the layouts in-app often use square thumbnails, which can result in some weird cropping. Of course, the app can import pictures from the Camera Roll as well as take them live, so if you'd prefer you can use any app already on your camera to shoot, crop, and post-process images. Image compositing app Diptic seems to be a particularly popular choice.

Platter's approach to tagging us also interesting. Unlike Twitter or Instagram's free-form approach, the ingredient tags are set by the system, and you can't add to them yourself; this promotes a clean hierarchy of tags that isn't littered with duplicates or misspellings. However, so far, the tag names are resolutely Brit speak rather than American orientated; so it's "coriander" and not "cilantro", "aubergine" rather than "eggplant", "courgette" over "zucchini". My Colonial cousins may find this jarring. Update: a full complement of US-style food words have now been added to Platter's ingredient tags.

As for the actual content, the food, I've definitely found Platter to be inspirational. Not only on a "what can I make with this level" but also simply from a presentation point of view. And it's particularly good to know, when looking through pictures, that these are all shot at home in an amateur's kitchen. Looking at professional dishes on Foodspotting inspires me to eat; looking at amateur dishes in Platter inspires me to cook.

Platter is also building a fun community. The developers of the app are all very active on the network, commenting on dishes and running competitions. There's a sub-type of user who delights in naming their dishes with the most groan-inducing puns you can imagine, such as my personal best, "steaks on a p(l)an(e)".

Chatting with Platter

I spoke with Will Hodson, director of Platter, about the future plans for the app.

How did the idea for Platter come about?

"Platter occurred to me as I developed another project with Channel 4's 4iP scheme. They were looking for ideas that could drill down into people's food habits; I thought of something like food Twitter... but didn't want to share it with a media giant!"

What sort of team put Platter together? Is this a full time thing, a sideline gig, or what? How many of you are there, what are your backgrounds, and how long did it take?

"Platter was co-founded by me and four developers. Most of us are fairly recent Cambridge graduates, working in software and programming. I met these guys as a client for another job, was struck by their competence, and we all got on."

How do you feel the launch has gone? Are you finding a good audience?

"Our press coverage is a testament to the appeal of the concept. We've been featured or recommended in all UK broadsheets as well as Evening Standard and Stylist. ABC News in the US recently named us as the number two app for food photos in the world (just behind Instagram).

"Launch has gone well. I wanted to give this a serious food-loving hardcore and we have it. Our featured cooks read like a who's who of British food blogging: we have two of MSN's Most Influential Foodies on board, a Masterchef Finalist and most of London's top bloggers."

Some of the food bloggers Will mentioned include Food Urchin, Gin and Crumpets, Meemalee and Leluu. I forgive him for not mentioning my own sparsely-updated food blog, Objection: Salad!, which has won precisely zero awards from MSN's Most Influential Foodies. It must have slipped his mind.

What are your immediate plans for the app? New features? US localisation? Bugfixes?

"We are in discussions with investors now. There are big plans afoot. First, expanding tags to cover dishes' influences as well as their ingredients. So if my dish inspires you to try something similar, you can tag my influence in your photo. This is almost a new currency of approval in social media. It also means communities can form around cookbooks and suppliers, taking Platter way beyond Instagram into food-specific functionality. Second, we'll open up our website for logged-in use. It will also enable curation of one's favourite dishes. And third, we'll look to put down some roots in the States.

"Finally, we are looking into Instagram integration, via a similar solution to that used by Foodspotting -- users post pictures to their Instragram feed with a special hashtag, and we pick that up and re-post the picture to Platter."

You lead on both iOS and Android at once. That's somewhat unusual. Was that tricky to manage? Did it definitely bring in more users than if you'd led with one platform at a time?

"Android was fine to develop for because our Android guy has been fantastic. Marketing it has been a nightmare however. If you type in Platter on Google Play, it assumes you mean 'Plate'. So it's tricky to find our app. You'd expect better from Google. We're still committed to the Android App but most users are on iPhone."

Anything else you'd like to say to our readers?

"We've got this far with no budget and limited time, yet we've still established Platter as a great place for food photos. As we push out to embrace more home cooks making fantastic dishes around the world, Platter will become the place you go to decide what to eat."

I can't say any more than that, really. One of the privileges of writing for TUAW is being able to help smaller apps find a wider audience. I've really enjoyed Platter in the six or so weeks I've been using it, and I wish it every success for the future.

You can download Platter for iPhone for free from the App Store.

Platter: novel photo-sharing social network for keen cooks originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 24 May 2012 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Update: I made a mistake about Instacast's support for notifications in the original draft of this article. Please read my corrections at the end. My apologies, readers. --Rich

The release of Instacast v2.0 ruffled some feathers recently. Vemedio, publishers of the popular podcasting app, have taken the unusual step of switching business models with the new release. The old version of the app cost US$2.99; now it's $0.99 for the basic version, with an in-app purchase (IAP) to upgrade to Instacast Pro for a further $1.99. However, several features that used to be in the v1.0 app, like push notifications (update: see note at end of post) and the ability to re-order podcasts in the list, have moved to the Pro version. This means existing customers who upgrade to the new releases have to pay again to access them. (I'm going to dub this tactic the Instacast Maneuver.)

Unsurprisingly, this hasn't gone down too well with some longtime customers, who feel they are being unreasonably double-dipped. Angry one-star reviews for the latest version are accumulating in iTunes -- although, to be fair, they are far outnumbered by positive reviews by people who like the new interface.

I think this is an interesting story, and it ties into something I've been meaning to write for a long time about the non-intuitive meanings of "ownership" in our increasingly on-demand all-digital world.

"It's only two bucks!"

One of the most common reactions to the criticism is that it really isn't much money and, basically, people should stop whining. As accurately stated by Harry Marks, we spend more money than this on bad coffee without blinking. Software upgrades of OS X cost $29, and Windows or Photoshop (amongst many others) can cost hundreds of dollars -- does two bucks matter?

Certainly, I think it's absolutely fair to say that it's not a lot of money to anyone who can afford an iPhone or even an iPod touch in the first place. We're talking about devices that cost hundreds of dollars -- thousands when often-mandatory cellular contracts are added on. But...

Between my iPhone and iPad, I have at least 250 third-party apps. Many of those were free, but if just a fifth of my apps dinged me $2 via the Instacast Manoeuvre, I'd be looking at $100. That's not chickenfeed to me and it probably isn't to you either. So it's my contention that even if you think $2 for Instacast 2.0 is fantastic value, there's still a debate to be had here about value to the end user. If, like Seth Clifford, you don't love Instacast but merely think it "sucked the least of all the [podcasting] apps"; well, then that conversation takes on a different tone.

"Support the devs"

A similar argument commonly advanced to silence critics is that Instacast is a written by a small dev who needs the money; if you like the app, is it going to kill you to pay a little more for a new version? This is the angle the Vemedio company blog takes and it's certainly one I have some time for. Instacast isn't a top-tier app; many iOS users don't care about podcasts and most of the those who do are satisfied by Apple's built-in support. By definition of what the app does, Instacast is chasing a quite small niche of users and it shares those users with a number of high quality competing apps.

So Vemedio needs to establish a regular income stream, hopefully enough to support the firm and permit future development of the app. Presumably, the users want that, so surely it's churlish of them to complain about being asked to chip in a few bucks?

The problem is that many of them feel ripped off. Firstly, Vemedio took the unusual step of moving existing features into the extra-cost Pro version of the app. That's a questionable decision. Secondly, because of the App Store rules, there's no way for Vemedio to charge upgraders a reduced fee; it's all or nothing. Which brings us to...

"It's all Apple's fault!"

The App Stores both Mac and iOS restricts developers to well-defined ways to make money from their software: charge upfront, charge via In-App Purchase for add-ons, and/or charge subscriptions for ongoing services. Notably missing, as veteran Mac developer Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster has written extensively, is any sort of paid upgrade option.

Imagine you're GadgetSoft and you've just released WidgetThing v1.0 to great acclaim. All ten of its main features are popular. You have some great ideas for how to expand and improve it, but it's going to take a good chunk of time and effort to do so. At the end of that effort, you'll be able to release WidgetThing v2.0 with five new features in only one of two ways: as an in-place upgrade, meaning all your existing customers get it for free. Or as an entirely new app, in which case your existing customers have to pay all over again.

Economics theory tells us that WidgetThing v2.0 should be priced for new customers according to its 15 features, but priced for existing customers according to the extra five features it has over v1.0. It has different values to those two groups of customers, so should have different prices too.

Apple, for whatever inscrutable reason, doesn't let app makers do this. Charging longstanding customers full whack for upgrades is likely to be perceived as gouging; giving them upgrades in perpetuity for free is no way to run a business. Inevitably, some app makers simply won't bother. Chances are there are some fantastic v2.0 or v3.0 apps that have never left the drawing board because the developers simply couldn't justify it economically.

But why is it so bad to just give updates away for free? Isn't that a bit greedy? The answer is...

The race to the bottom

We only have ourselves to blame.

Picture the dawn of the App Store back in 2008 as a group of users in the middle of a big circle of developers. No-one knew how much to charge for anything; these were untested waters, an entirely new business model for consumers and creators. Nervous developers stepped up and pitched price points and users started buying apps. The savviest developers watched each other like hawks, nudging prices up and down in response to each other -- but mostly down, and down, and down.

About nineteen metaphorical seconds later, the nervous circle had turned into the bellowing hustle of the NYSE's trading floor, with everyone hollering lower and lower prices until many apps hit rock bottom: $0.99. The average price of an app today is $2.00, and the modal price is surely the dollar-store low water mark. Look at the initial iTunes reviews of any app costing more than three bucks and someone will inevitably call it expensive.

We know that many apps lose money; I have my doubts about the survey those results were drawn from but I think the general conclusion that only a lucky few devs make serious money from the App Store is a pretty common sense one. The race for the bottom -- the race we all subconsciously encourage whenever we held out to buy a $1.99 app in case it goes down to $0.99 in a sale -- means devs of even moderately successful apps are often left struggling for revenue.

Is it any wonder developers need to resort to every method they can think of to make ends meet?

The workaround

Surely this is all a storm in a teacup. Why can't existing users of Instacast v1 simply not upgrade to the new version?

Well, Apple doesn't make that very easy. There's no way to mark a specific version as "unwanted" in the App Store upgrade screen. If you accidentally hit Upgrade on that app just once, there's no way back -- unless you have manually extracted a backup of the older version of the app from iTunes, which is less likely than ever in this era of iCloud-powered backups.

Worst of all, you have to resign yourself to never again using the Update All button. If you don't have many apps, it might not be that much of a bother to manually upgrade, one by one, every one except Instacast. Other people, however, have hundreds of apps (I'm one) and receive dozens of updates a week (yo). Particularly given the App Store app's baffling habit of kicking you out to the home screen after each press of the upgrade, it quickly moves through tedious and into downright irritating.

The bigger picture

So far I've mostly been talking about Instacast, but the issues I'm describing affect more than just that one app.

Consider Tweetie, Loren Brichter's beloved Twitter app. I paid for Tweetie twice -- once for version one and again for version two, at a cost of $2.99 each time. I was delighted with each purchase, as Tweetie was easily the best-of-breed Twitter client at the time. Until, that is, Twitter bought it, relaunched it as "Twitter for iPhone", and eventually "blessed" it with dubious UI decisions and ads (later withdrawn) and more ads. From the second I upgraded from Tweetie to Twitter, the app I'd cherished and paid for (twice!) was gone, with no easy way to get it back.

For another example, consider the recent rumors that Rock Band for iOS would be shut down. EA claim this was "an error", although how that's possible is yet to be explained (particularly given this entry in the company FAQ which has since been removed).

Looking beyond iOS, EA is also famous for disabling online support in its console games, sometimes for games as little as seventeen months old. Once the servers are turned off, the entire online portion of the game stops working. The game you paid for is gone for good.

These tricky issues of ownership aren't even just about software. Sony removed the OtherOS feature from PlayStation 3 consoles after it emerged that people were using it as a jailbreak vector. A firmware update appeared, and boom -- just like that, my PS3 could no longer run Linux (and unlike many people, I'd actually installed Linux on my PS3). I could refuse the update, as long as I never wanted to play another game online. Not a great choice.

There are almost endless examples of these, and things are only getting more complicated as companies think of new ways to use and abuse the power that over-the-air updates and digital downloads give them over consumer purchases. Sooner or later, someone is going to push the envelope too far, and we're going to have some juicy class-action lawsuits over it. Until then, caveat emptor.

But let's return to the matter at hand -- the Instacast Maneuver. I think it arose from the limitations Apple has imposed on the App Store combined with the sometimes precarious finacial situation that some app devs can find themselves in. Vemedio are far from the only developers in this situation, so I am sure other app devs are watching how this goes closely as they ponder if they will follow along this path.

Overall, though, I have to come down against Vemedio on this one (update: please see the update below.) Not for the use of In-App Purchase itself; I think that was a fairly reasonable way around the lack of paid upgrades on the App Store. What I can't get away from the moving of features, including big ones like push notifications, away from the normal version and into the Pro. I've already bought a version of Instacast that does push. I don't think it's right to charge me, or anyone else, twice for that feature.

Update: I have accidentally propogated a common misunderstanding about Instacast, for which I must beg your forgiveness, reader. V1 of the app didn't have true Push notifications; it used local notifications only for some basic alerting. As several of my commenters below and Raphael Fetzer on Twitter have pointed out, the more dynamic Push notificaitons in Instacast Pro are genuinely new. I am grateful for the correction. Vemedio has also announced since this post was drafted (but before it went live) that the forthcoming Instacast v2.0.1 will make Smart Playlists available for free, i.e. in the base-level, non-Pro version of the app. Finally, the In-App Purchase upgrade to Instacast Pro is currently on sale for $0.99.

In light of these changes, I humbly withdraw -- and apologise for -- my criticism of Vemedio above.

Instacast pricing raises hackles: are apps bought or rented? [Updated] originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 17 May 2012 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Update: See discussion of the ITU's "sliding scale" of 4G below. Commenters have pointed out that since 2010 the standards organization has acknowledged that 3G evolutions can reasonably be called 4G. References to 4G vs. IMT-Advanced have been clarified.

In a rare move of capitulation to a carrier, Apple caved to pressure from AT&T and made a controversial change in iOS 5.1 last week: an iPhone 4S on AT&T now reports a "4G" network rather than the old 3G signal. This change has been expected since October of 2011, but that doesn't mean it was uncontroversial.

Reactions to the switch were mixed. Some people suggest that the terminology is largely meaningless anyway, so the relabeling doesn't matter; a wireless standard by any other name will still download as sweetly. Others were affronted by Apple failing to stand firm and stop iOS being infected by AT&T's marketing pixie dust.

Some easily swayed folk even took to Twitter to congratulate Apple on delivering a 4G upgrade to their existing handsets, apparently not understanding that this change is nothing other than nomenclature. The iPhone didn't get any faster in this update; all that changed was the graphical indicator on the phone.

So who's right? I suspect it's probably obvious, but I'm in the "this is wrong and annoying" camp, and I think the people on Twitter overjoyed at an upgrade they didn't get are supporting my point. I'm going to set out my argument; please feel free to wade in in the comments and make your opinion heard if you disagree.

A small disclaimer

In order to give you some context around what has happened here, I'm going to briefly summarise the history of how wireless communications standards are created. This necessarily involves some alphabet soup, I'm afraid, as everyone in the wireless game dearly loves their TLAs (three letter acronyms), ETLAs (Extended Three Letter Acronym), and DETLAs (Doubly Extended Three Letter Acronym). Bear with me, or if it gets too much, skip the next section.

Readers with experience in this area will notice me glossing over all sorts of details. I'm just trying to provide enough background to make the rest of the story comprehensible, but if you think I left out anything important, please leave a comment and tell me.

For clarity, note that I am concentrating on GSM and its derivative technologies, and omitting the various CDMA flavours used by Verizon and Sprint in the USA and a modest number of other wireless firms world-wide. Suffice it to say that the roughly the same standards process happened on the CDMA side of the fence.

Standards & speeds: a brief history of wireless

There is a famous quote misattributed to Albert Einstein which goes like this: "you see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

Since the first analog wireless telephones appeared in the 1980s (retroactively called "1G"), there have been many attempts by various bodies to design standards for the non-existent cat. The idea was for everyone to be using the same cat; that way, manufacturers could exploit economies of scale. This would mean cellphone companies could make fewer models that worked in more places in the world, infrastructure vendors could manufacture interchangeable cell towers and radio stacks, and end users could move their cellphones between countries or between operators within the same country.

As Patrick Bateman and Gordon Gekko were yakking on brick-sized Motorola DynaTacs connected to 1G networks, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute were looking ahead and developing Groupe Spécial Mobile, which would later be renamed Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). GSM was by far the most successful second-generation wireless (2G) standard. Even as consumers were becoming familiar with the technology, however, the next global standard -- Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) -- was being developed. This time, the process was world-wide (as opposed to GSM, which was developed by European companies) and led by the International Telecommunication Union or ITU. The ITU is the United Nations agency charged with coordinating standards for digital communication among all member nations.

Lather, rinse, repeat: as gadget blogs filled up with brand new 3G handsets in the early 2000s, the ITU pushed on and defined target goals for next-generation networks to hit. These were defined in a standard called IMT-Advanced, which was finalised in 2008. (The standards process churns slowly; the actual specification for IMT-Advanced was finally adopted early in 2012.)

IMT-Advanced specified some aggressively high targets for bandwidth: 100 megabit/sec downloads when the mobile device is moving fast (e.g. in a car) and 1 gigabit/sec when stationary or moving at a walking pace. Even Apple's mighty new hardware interface standard, Thunderbolt, can only manage 20 gigabit/sec -- and that has a wire. IMT-Advanced, the true successor to 3G technologies, is what we originally thought 4G would be... but 4G turns out to be a marketing sticker rather than a technical standard.

Where the rubber meets the road

The original IMT-Advanced standard put out by ITU wasn't a fully fleshed-out, technically implemented solution. Rather, ITU standards are sort of like aspirational goals for technology vendors to achieve. While ITU's busy brains were drafting the IMT-Advanced standard, telecoms companies and consortiums like the 3rd Generation Partnership Project were beavering away on new solutions like LTE and WiMAX. The first generations of these technologies didn't meet the requirements for IMT-Advanced, but new versions known as LTE-Advanced and WiMAX Release 2 will eventually hit the numbers.

Meanwhile, of course, mobile vendors have mouths to feed so they need to keep selling us shiny geegaws. We saw lots of intermediate standards pop up between vanilla UMTS 3G and true IMT-Advanced. I've already touched on current generation LTE and WiMAX, which were new technologies; these come in between 3G and 4G, but closer to the latter. There were also a few "UMTS-on-steroids" solutions developed, such as HSDPA and HSPA+. Again, these enhance data speeds over and above what the initial versions of 3G could offer, but far short of the requirements for IMT-Advanced -- and rather closer to 3G performance than they are to "4G."

An iPhone 4S on HSPA+ has a maximum theoretical download speed of 14.4 megabit/sec; that's just 1.5% of the speed that IMT-Advanced demands of 4G. The new iPad with LTE tops out at 73 megabit/sec; fast, but still only 7.3% of the original target for IMT-Advanced ("4G").

All this has happened before

These intermediate standards are a replay of what happened with 2G. Initially, GSM's data component, General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), could only offer a paltry 9.8 kilobit/sec of data speeds -- no one saw mobile data coming when GSM was being laid down, so it wasn't a priority. When smartphones started to appear and it became clear this wasn't enough, but before 3G standards were anywhere near complete, we saw mobile vendors design and deploy High Speed Circuit Switched Data (HSCSD) and then the torturously-named Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution (EDGE). HSCSD boosted download speeds to 57.6 kilobit/sec and EDGE as high as 386 kbit/sec.

This led to EDGE often being referred to as "2.5G", as it was said to be a halfway house between 2G and 3G. Apple coded the original iPhone OS releases to communicate to the customer if they were on a GPRS network (with a dot) or a EDGE one (with an 'E') -- the difference is significant, and the user has a better experience if he or she knows what performance to expect before using the device.

Enter the marketers

Following this pattern, we could reasonably expect the faster-than-3G slower-than-4G standards like HSPA+ to be called "3.5G", or even "3.1G". Some people do that, but it wasn't enough for the marketing departments at some big cellular operators.

It's always easier to sell things to people when you don't have to make them read a post as long as this one before they understand what they are buying, and it's even easier still when you've taken the last number and turned it up one louder -- hence digital camera's megapixel myth. AT&T and Verizon were quite keen, to say the least, on warping the term "4G" to apply to these new 3.5G standards.

So they did just that, without as much as a by-your-leave, starting in 2008. Sprint Clearwire was the first to jump the 4G hurdle, then Verizon and Metro PCS, and eventually T-Mobile (branding similar HSPA+ technology to what AT&T now offers in the iPhone 4S as "4G"). None of these networks met the IMA-Advanced speed threshold, nowhere near it -- but that did not stop the carriers from taking advantage of the lack of a technical standard for "4G" to gain some branding bonus.

There are any number of Android handsets supporting HSPA+ that now are branded and marketed as 4G; last year's Samsung Focus S continued this into Windows Mobile 7. Now Apple has joined in, in a surprising move, seeing as how it is normally lauded for being immune to carrier interference.

Update: As commenters have correctly pointed out, in 2010 the ITU let out a heavy sigh and acknowledged what carrier marketing had already done to confuse the marketplace. The organization allowed that 4G, while not formally defined, might as well be used to refer to upgraded 3G technologies like HSPA+ rather than only to the IMT-Advanced superspeed standards. Since 4G has no official meaning within the standards process, one can't say authoritatively that the indicator is technically wrong; only that it is decidedly confusing.

Make no mistake -- what's happened in iOS 5.1 on the iPhone 4S is an AT&T change only. If you're anywhere else in the world, on any other network, and enjoying a full-speed HSPA+ download to your iPhone 4S, the indicator will say "3G" and not "4G." Only AT&T gets this treatment (so far).

Even worse, Brian Klug of Anandtech discovered that even plain-jane UMTS 3G reports as 4G now -- so the new "4G" indicator can't even be used as a meaningful guide to when you are getting HSPA+ speeds. It just means you're on AT&T's network and you're getting better than EDGE speeds.

The disappearing "Enable 3G" slider

That's not the only thing that changed in iOS 5.1/iPhone 4S settings to suit AT&T, as it happens.

The "Enable 3G" toggle in Settings.app has disappeared for AT&T customers on the iPhone 4S too, despite having been present in previous versions of iOS. This switch allowed device users to force the phone off the 3G network and on to the older EDGE standard; this was used for a couple of reasons, including improved battery life or getting "lifeline" data service in highly congested cell environments. Older iPhones demonstrated noticeably better power performance on EDGE versus 3G.

This is another piece of carrier politics in action, in my opinion. AT&T wants to clear customers from its old 2G/2.5G networks as fast as possible, so it can potentially close down old cell sites and prepare to re-use the cell bands for something else. As such, it's not in the company's interests to allow customers to disable 3G data altogether, as that binds them to the 2G/2.5G network.

I should note that this customisation isn't exclusive to AT&T iPhone 4S units, however. I use Three here in the UK, which (unusually) has no 2G network of its own; it rents 2G capacity from a rival operator to fill in coverage holes, and runs a (pretty substantial) 3G network of its own. This means that customers with "Enable 3G" set to off cost Three money, as they are effectively roaming onto a secondary network for all their data. I can't remember when I last saw this slider in my Settings.app, but it was some time ago.

Granted, I've never been terribly eager to use that on/off switch anyway. I've occasionally used it to try and eke out the last 10% of my battery, but it's not a setting I've found much reason to toggle. If this adjustment is going to put a major crimp in your iPhone usage, please let us know.

Wrapping up

Hopefully, I've convinced you of one of two things in this post. Either a) you are affronted that AT&T's marketing folks can redfine the capabilities of the iPhone 4S like this or (more likely) b) you just don't care very much about technical definitions and think I'm talking rubbish -- or perhaps c) you skipped over most of the article on your way to the comment box to tell me I'm a nerd.

Let me put it another way: until last week, an iPhone 4S on AT&T showed 3G; today, it shows 4G instead, even though the speed hasn't changed. That's highly confusing to users, which is the exact thing Apple is supposed to be great at never doing. On those grounds alone, this is an objectionable change. Even worse, Apple now sells an iPhone 4S that reports itself as 4G and an iPad that's directly marketed as 4G... but the iPad's download speeds are five times faster than the iPhone's. Obvious!

I can certainly understand that Apple wants to show users whether they are connected to a vanilla 3G network or a fancy HSPA+ one; the speed difference is considerable. Other handsets (like my ancient 2006-era HTC Tytn, which runs Windows Mobile 6) handle this by switching the network indicator to 'H', analogous to the 'E' that iOS shows for EDGE. I think it's disappointing that Apple made this change, particularly as we've all been so positive in the past at how it has successfully resisted carriers' habits of fiddling with things.

Hat tip to Jon Silva for the image

Faux G: New "4G" indicator on iPhone 4S is the tip of a standards iceberg (Updated) originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Love Apple gear? Like math? TUAW's Doing the Math series examines the numbers and the science behind the hardware and software.

The rumourmill has been busy lately with claims that we might get "Retina display" Macs soon -- and of course, a Retina display iPad 3 on March 7, probably, maybe, definitely. For an example of the sort of speculation, consider Bjango developer Marc Edwards, who tweeted: "Retina 27" Thunderbolt display: 5120×2880 = 14,745,600 pixels. 4K film: 4096×2160 = 8,847,360 pixels. Retina iPad 3: 2048×1536 = 3,145,728 pixels". This prompted me to dust off my Retina display iPad post from a year ago and revisit the mathematics I applied there to dig a little deeper into what a Retina display Mac might entail. Is Edwards right -- would a Retina display Thunderbolt display really need almost 15 megapixels?

Isn't this all just marketing?

Before I launch into a long-winded diatribe ("surely not!" -- everyone who's ever read any of my other TUAW posts), I need to address a surpisingly common point of view. Some people say that as "Retina display" was a term Apple made up, it can mean whatever it wants it to mean. If Apple wanted to, the theory goes, it could just declare the current iPad to be a Retina display and be done with it.

I think this argument is asinine. Firstly, although Apple invented the term out of whole cloth, it does offer a definition: "the Retina display's pixel density is so high, your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels." That has meaning, and if Apple were to weaselly dilute the definition for the sake of marketing some future product I think we should absolutely hold its feet to the fire.

Secondly, this isn't just about Apple. High DPI screens are starting to appear on other devices, like this Android tablet from Asus. The precise phrase "Retina display" might belong to Apple but the advantages of high resolution screens do not. As this is an emerging trend across the whole industry, it behooves us to strip away the marketing pixie dust and take an objective look at what this technology can offer.

Defining "Retina display"

So what does it mean to say that a screen's individual pixes are indistinguishable? The launch of the iPhone 4 and the first Retina display was, of course, accompanied by a jump in the screen resolution from 480×320 to 960×640 -- from 163 pixels-per-inch (ppi) to 326 ppi. This in turn lead many people to label some arbitrary resolution as "Retina display" -- typically 326 ppi itself, or 300 ppi. The latter number is a common rule-of-thumb baseline in the print industry for "photo resolution".

It's not that simple, however.

Hold a small-print book at arm's length. Notice how it's hard to read the text. Now bring the book up to a few inches from your nose. Notice how much easier it is to read now. Clearly, if Apple is defining a "Retina display" as "one where users can't see the pixels" then any discussion of whether a given display qualifies or not needs to take into account the distance between the screen and the user -- and that differs according to the device. An iMac on a desk, a MacBook in your lap, and a hand-held iPhone all have different viewing distances.

So, how do we determine how small a pixel has to be to be bordering on invisible? To answer this we need to think about subtended angles.

Consider the following scenario:

The viewing angle in this diagram, a, is called the angle subtended by the inter-pixel spacing, s. Whether or not a given detail is too small to be discerned by the eye is down to the size of this angle. This is how the size of an object is related to the viewing distance -- as you move an object of a given size closer or further away from the eye, so the size of this angle changes. Conversely, at given distance, a larger object will also subtend a bigger angle. The size of the image on the retina is intrinsically derived from the object size and the viewing distance, linked by this formula:

So what subtended angle is too small to see? The average person has 20/20 vision. This was historically defined as the ability to read letters on a standard eye chart that subtend 5 arcminutes of angle (an arcminute is 1/60th of a degree). What does that mean in pixel terms? Consider that just about the smallest legible fonts, Tinyfont by Ken Perlin and Tiny by Matthew Welch, uses five pixels of height (including descenders for Tiny) for each letter. This suggests the smallest resolvable detail for an average eye is around one arcminute. Indeed, one arcminute is an accepted value amongst academics for the resolution limit of a typical human retina.

Retina-ness of Apple's current displays

With the data above in mind, and applying the mathematics from my previous post, we can take some typical viewing distances for different Apple devices, combine it with the screen size and resolution, and calculate how close the screen comes to the definition of a Retina display we have arrived at above.

You can view a Google spreadsheet that shows the details of how this data is calculated.

Update, 2012-03-02: I've had quite a bit of feedback that many people sit closer to their devices than I do. I'm not sure if it's personal preference, or because I've used multi-monitor for many years (my 27" iMac is flanked by a 26" Samsung monitor, so I have to sit a little way back to fit it all in my vision). Either way, I've added a few rows to that spreadsheet that aren't shown on the table above to reflect these scenarios.

Update 2, 2012-03-04: The original version of the above table contained an error; I had forgotten that the screen sizes of the MacBook Air 11", 13" and MacBook Pro 15" are actually 11.6", 13.3", and 15.4", respectively. I used the wrong version in the calculation. This has now been fixed. This changes some of the pixel-per-inch figures slightly.

Just for fun, I threw in a couple of non-Apple devices for comparison -- a 50" TV at a distance of six feet, playing back a Blu-Ray and a DVD; and the announced Asus Transformer Prime Android tablet, which has a 1920×1200 display.

This table shows some things that surprised me.

Firstly, it shows that Apple's definition of Retina display aligns quite closely with my mathematic derivation. The iPhone 4 screen at a typical distance of 11" is just barely above the threshold for a Retina display. I believe this justifies my methodology.

Secondly, it repeats my previous conclusion that a pixel-doubled iPad running at 2048x1536 is easily enough definition to count as a Retina display -- even at a 16" viewing distance, which is on the close side from my experimentation with an iPad and a tape measure. Similarly, that Asus tablet is a Retina display too.

It also shows that many current Mac displays are a lot closer to Retina display levels than you might have thought. The 27" iMac at a distance of 28", a 17" MacBook Pro at 26", an 11" MacBook Air at 22" -- these screens all have pixels small enough to border on invisible.

Furthermore, the 480×320 iPhone screen is notably worse than everything else Apple makes today, at 53% of a Retina display. Even the second-worst 1024×768 iPad screen has finer detail at 61%. The worst Mac display is the 24" iMac at a distance of 28", at which distance its pixels are one-third too large to be individually indistinguishable.

Finally, this also shows why BluRay looks so good. On a largish TV at a shortish distance (50" at 6'), a 1080p image is at 92% of Retina level, whereas a DVD is a downright poor 36%.

There are two very important points here.

The first is that in order to achieve, or even handily exceed, the threshold for a Retina display, Apple does not need to double resolutions on most of its displays. Far from it. It would suffice to boost a 27" Thunderbolt Display from 2560×1440 to something around 2912×1638. (But note that there could be image quality issues from this -- see "The pixel doubling argument" below.)

The second point is that people shouldn't get their hopes up for how much better a Retina display Mac would be compared to the current offerings. The iPhone 4 was a huge step forward from the iPhone 3GS mostly because the 3GS's screen was comparatively poor. Existing Macs have much better screens to start with, so any improvement will be much more modest.

Looking beyond one arcminute

From the above, you might think that there is hardly any reason to Apple to change anything, because the benefits of higher resolution screens are so modest. But clearly HiDPI mode exists, and specialist medical imaging screens are between 508 and 750 ppi. What's the benefit to these high pixel densities?

The answer is that our definition of the limits of human vision -- details that subtend an angle of one arcminute -- is rather simplistic. There's a lot more to think about when considering how real human vision interacts with computer display technology, including atypical viewing distances, different sorts of patterns, and so forth. Reading words, for example, is possible at smaller sizes than reading random letters, because your brain has more context to guess at the characters. Your brain is a sophisticated pattern matching tool and it will use information from the surroundings to try and interpret details your eyes can't quite make out clearly.

Here's a number of test patterns for you to try this out on your own display. If you want to try this on an iOS device, you need to get the appropriate file for your device -- iPhone or iPad -- and save it to the Camera Roll. This is because iOS will helpfully try and zoom and pan images but we want to ensure that one pixel in the test image takes up one pixel on your display. Once you have them in the Camera Roll, view them full screen through the Photos app with your device in the portrait position. If you compare your Mac, iPad, and iPhone, you should see quite a difference in how well each screen performs.

The pixel doubling argument

Rene Ritchie for iMore makes a solid argument for why an iPad retina display must be pixel-doubled -- i.e. 2048×1536 -- and not some intermediate resolution (just as was the case for the iPhone 4 before it). Anything else means every single existing app either has to re-scale art assets -- resulting in a fuzzy display -- or let them appear at a different size on-screen -- resulting in usability problems as the tap targets are resized. This is because every single existing iPad app is hard-coded to run full screen in 1024×768.

The situation is fuzzier on desktop, however. Apple's current displays already vary between 92 and 135 pixels-per-inch. Users are more tolerant of UI element resizing, within reason.

Consider the 109 ppi 2560×1440 27" Thunderbolt display, and let's suppose Apple wanted to Retina it up. It could up the resolution to 4192×2358 -- which works out to 178 ppi -- and achieve a display with finer details than the iPhone 4. This is one-third less pixels than the native pixel-doubled resolution (which would be 5120×2880). UI elements would look proportionally larger -- but no more than they do on the 24" iMac display today, so it wouldn't look clumsy or odd.

Update, 2012-03-02: David Barnard of App Cubby wrote a great followup post with some mockups comparing a 27" 168 ppi screen in HiDPI mode (at a resolution of 3840×2400) and the current 109 ppi one. He also makes an interesting point that he find Apple's more dense modern displays harder to use:

What you should notice is that the text and UI elements are physically smaller on the current 109ppi iMac than they'd be on the hypothetical 84/168ppi 27″ iMac. This may be frustrating to some users, but I actually prefer my old 94ppi 24″ Cinema Display to any of Apple's higher PPI displays. I like that the system default 12pt text is larger. The sacrifice is in the usable workspace, and that's a matter of taste. I've been hearing from more and more people on Twitter that the 11″ Macbook Air is surprisingly usable with OS X Lion, even though the workspace is a scant 1366x768 pixels.

Wrapping up

Hopefully, I have convinced you of several things in this post.

• "Retina display" carries more meaning than pure marketing.
• The definition of what is, and what isn't, a Retina display must consider viewing distance.
• The improvement you'd see from a Retina display Mac is significant, but less than the improvement the iPhone 4 offered over the 3GS.
• A 2048×1536 iPad would be a Retina display and would look quite a bit better than the current model (but, again, be less of an improvement than the iPhone 4).

Still not convinced? Sound off in our comments!

I'd like to thank fellow TUAWers Brett Terpstra and Erica Sadun for helping me with the Retina Tester graphic.

Retina display Macs, iPads, and HiDPI: Doing the Math (updated) originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 01 Mar 2012 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple's announcement of Mountain Lion included many promised new features, including a stronger focus on the Mac App Store than ever before. Two significant new features, iCloud document syncing and Notification Center, are only accessible to App Store apps, and the new Gatekeeper security tool will include a setting to lock a Mac down so it can only run software purchased from the App Store.

All this has (probably inevitably) got people wondering if this is the first step towards a version of OS X that will only run programs from the App Store -- a world where indie developers who cannot or will not use the App Store as their distribution platform will be frozen out altogether.

I think that's an unlikely end state (making my headline fully Betteridge compliant), and so do some prominent indie developers, but I also think the issue is worth examining.

A brief recap of the App Store

When Apple added the App Store to iOS in 2008, it was a revolution in more ways than one. For the first time, we had a major general-purpose computing platform where software developers could not freely distribute their work to a wide audience; a platform where users could only purchase and download approved programs from a central, controlling authority. This wasn't a new idea -- gaming consoles have been using this "walled garden" model since the earliest Atari and Mattel consoles -- but it's the first time it had been applied to a device that some might consider a successor to the personal computer. So powerful and successful was this idea that we had to invent neologisms -- "jailbreak", "sideload" -- to describe processes that we had taken utterly for granted for the first thirty-five years of personal computing.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the App Store is bad. Although it undeniably introduces new restrictions on how we use our expensive devices, the upside is a frictionless user experience for discovering, installing, upgrading, and uninstalling apps that had never been seen before outside of console gaming. Coupled with Apple's economically viable micropayments infrastructure, this spawned a sprawling "appconomy." Hundreds of millions of users spending billions of dollars on apps from millions of developers; a fluid, dynamic software market the like of which the world has never seen the like of which.

Back to the Mac

In early 2011, Apple brought some of these principles to the Mac with the release of the Mac App Store. Like its iOS ancestor, this also promoted app discovery and management -- but with one key difference: it's not the only game in town. OS X on the Mac still has its traditional ability to download and install software from... well, anywhere. The Mac App Store also brought some restrictions to what an App Store-purchased app could do, but nothing too onerous. At the same time, it offered access to Apple's payment processing engine, meaning indie devs could spend less time looking after financial transactions and more time cranking out great code (at the cost of the familiar 30% "rake" of Apple fees). Everybody wins.

Many developers found that their users quickly moved to accept and then prefer the Mac App Store. Reports of great success with their early releases were plentiful. For example, graphics manipulation program Pixelmator grossed $1 million in 20 days after announcing it would be an App Store exclusive. The authors of the Sparrow email client were very happy with the App Store. Other success stories abounded.

Confined to the sandpit

For the best part of a year, everything was happy in App Store land... but as of March this year, Apple was going to require all App Store apps to run in a "sandbox" (although this deadline was recently extended to June). This means, amongst other limitations, that each app's access to the underlying system is sharply curtailed, to the point where an app can only read and write to approved directories within the user's home folder -- and it requires explicit permission to do even that. An app has to specify which "entitlements" it needs (specific system permissions and capabilities) to get its work done; Ars Technica's book-length Lion review by John Siracusa has a great sandboxing section examining how this is managed.

This set of restrictions affects many existing apps for the worse. Craig Hockenberry of the Iconfactory reported that the company successfully ported xScope (after having problems with a bug relating to symlinks in home directories). He noted, however, that some apps would never be effective in a sandbox; the example was Panic's Transmit, an FTP client, which requires wide filesystem access and probably couldn't be meaningfully ported to the App Store under the sandboxing rules.

Hockenberry also told me that two other pieces of popular Iconfactory software, CandyBar and IconBuilder, could never work with sandboxing. The former modifies system files and the latter is a Photoshop plug-in.

Some developers, seeing the sandbox writing on the wall, are being forced into difficult decisions regarding their App Store offerings. Manton Reece of Riverfold Software has announced that his ClipStart video library tool will be withdrawn from the App Store altogether because of incompatibility with sandboxing.

This is particularly troublesome for users who have already bought the App Store version of his app; Reece cannot easily identify them to give them an upgrade to a non-App Store version, nor can he offer them new versions of the app within the App Store's framework. To his enormous credit, Reece is willing to "honor Mac App Store receipt files" -- presumably via a tiresome manual process -- and provide extra serial numbers for customers migrating to new computers.

For similar reasons, and with similar problems for users, Atlassian Software's SourceTree is also leaving the App Store.

Even apps that don't seem to require system-wide file access can fall foul of sandboxing. Any sandboxed app can open any file anywhere on the system via the File > Open menu, because the sandbox presents the standard OS X dialog window to the user with special elevated permissions. But Gus Mueller of Flying Meat, father of the image editor Acorn, tweeted "just discovered you can't use AppleScript to tell (sandboxed) Acorn to open an image it hasn't opened already."

All this has provoked some understandable bad feelings. As Red Sweater Software's Daniel Jakult forcefully put it, "Shame on you, Apple. Your developers shed blood, sweat, and tears to succeed on the Mac App Store. Now you drop them with misguided policy." Jakult elaborated on his position in a blog post where he outlined the changes he'd like to see made to sandboxing to make it more workable for everyone.

Mountain Lion

Mountain Lion, the next version of OS X, will add further fuel to the fire. It adds a new security system, Gatekeeper. On its highest setting this will only allow programs downloaded from the App Store to run. This isn't the default, however; on the out-of-the-box medium setting, the Mac will run apps from the App Store and those digitally signed by a process carried out between the dev and Apple.

This process doesn't cost the devs anything (beyond their existing $99 annual developer membership fee) and doesn't restrict what the app can do. It is designed to offer a halfway house solution between the locked down App Store and the anything-goes wild blue Internet. After all, Apple might not have a malware problem today, but that could change in the future. Finally, Gatekeeper's lowest setting allows all apps to run unfettered -- just like all previous versions of OS X.

It's possible that Apple planned this split approach all along -- although if so, it was rather mean-spirited to not start off requiring sandboxing for all App Store apps. Yanking the rug out under existing apps isn't good for developers or users. It seems more likely to me that these changes are the result of a genuine strategy shift within Apple, or possibly the sandboxing/entitlements infrastructure was simply not fully baked enough in 10.7 Lion to permit most apps to work with it effectively (including those using Apple's own AppleScript interapplication framework).

Still, after a somewhat winding road, we're arriving at a good place with Mountain Lion. Users who don't adjust the default setting will be able to run apps from the App Store and elsewhere with a degree of malware protection, and devs can distribute apps that fit the App Store's slightly simplistic model there whilst also distributing signed apps via other channels. Great, right? Well, I still see a few problems with this.

Mixed feelings about the App Store

Firstly, as it stands, every third-party app on your Mac today won't run on Mountain Lion, as they are not digitally signed. This means if you upgrade you're going to be plagued with "this app is not trusted" messages (you can enable Gatekeeper on OS X 10.7 to get a taste of how annoying this is). If you have a lot of apps -- particularly older apps that might not ever receive digitally signed updated versions -- this might become the Mac equivalent of Vista's hated User Account Control prompt. If so, many existing users might end up turning Gatekeeper off altogether, rather defeating the point.

The second problem is the ongoing FUD being generated around the Mac App Store as a result of the ongoing painful process of enforcing sandboxing. Apple has twice extended the deadline to switch it on -- it was originally last November. In the mean time, I and other Mac users I've spoken to have found ourselves holding off on App Store purchases, or actively sought out non-App Store versions of apps, to avoid getting into a state where we have a licence for an app that is removed from the store.

The third issue is commercial pressure. What if, in the future, users come to view programs not on the App Store with disdain for missing features or even outright suspicion at a perception of lower software quality? So far I don't think this has happened, but it's a possibility in the future. If sales outside the App Store begin to drop, devs will come under a covert pressure to move to distributing their wares via Apple. They might then face an unpalatable choice between dwindling sales or neutering their programs to comply with sandboxing.

App Store only APIs

With Gatekeeper and app signing, Apple seems to be proposing a three-tier system -- App Store apps in the first tier, digitally signed apps in the second, other apps in the third. In theory, apps in tier two and three are equal, but the ones in the App Store are limited by the sandboxing requirements.

It's not that simple, however. A subtlety arises from the existence of features that are only accessible to the App Store apps. Two big new parts of Mountain Lion -- iCloud document syncing and Notification Center -- are described as being only useable to App Store programs. This widens the gap between the first and second tiers, particularly if the hunches of a few developers I spoke with are right and Apple continues to make marquee OS X features App Store-exclusive.

Now to be fair to Apple, there is a big mitigating factor, because both of these services use server-side resources Apple has to maintain with no direct income. iCloud, for one, clearly relies on cloud storage to work and cloud storage doesn't come cheap.

Notification Center is more puzzling. At first, I thought it worked primarily like Growl -- in other words, it was a way for an app already running on my Mac to bring something to my attention. Fellow TUAW writer Chris Rawson and Iconfactory's Craig Hockenberry told me I was wrong, so I dug deeper and talked to a few developers. Anand Lal Shimpi's investigation showed that, in the current developer beta, Mountain Lion has two types of notifications -- local ones, that can be sent by any app, and server-side push notifications, which can only be associated with App Store programs.

Jonathan George, CEO of Boxcar, told me that for his company the push notifications are far preferable, even on OS X. On iOS, any app that wants to notify the user arbitrarily (except Apple's apps like Calendar and Mail, which can use private APIs) needs server-based push notifications as a workaround for the lack of always-on backgrounding.

It initially seemed to me that this is less important for OS X. Consider my Twitter client, which is always running on my Mac. It's checking every few minutes for new messages and can send a ping to Notification Center without any external servers. This, however, can take a few minutes -- a server-side push is realtime, or at least, really really fast. This is clearly better for some types of apps than local-based notifications coming from a polling loop.

So what about App Store-only?

To come back to the question I opened this piece with: could/would Apple mandate, in a future release of OS X, that the App Store would be the only game in town for getting software onto the Mac?

Well, perhaps "could" is the wrong word. Apple certainly could, but I think we're a long way away from a world where most users would approve -- and for those who are comfortable with it, they'll be able to switch Gatekeeper into full-on paranoia mode and achieve the same end.

Furthermore, if Apple was planning it for the future, I don't think we'd have seen Gatekeeper's middle setting introduced at all. The mere existence of this feature underscores that Apple is serious about giving users some extra malware protection via code signing without mandating the App Store. Indeed, Panic's Cabel Sasser asked an Apple representative about this when he was briefed on Mountain Lion and he reported that "for what it's worth, they told me point blank that they value independent apps and do not want them gone."

This code signing option is not only a technical solution, but also grants indie devs working outside the App Store a veneer of respectability that might help make some less experienced users more comfortable doing business with them.

There's also the question of professional-level software. It seems rather unlikely that the Adobes, Avids and Microsofts of this world would be happy to hand 30% of the sales of high end programs like Creative Suite or Office to Apple, as would be required if these apps were put in the App Store. Do those companies need OS X more than Apple needs them? It's debatable, but it's a game of chicken Apple would perhaps be wiser to stay away from. It's not dissimilar to the row about in-app purchases under iOS and apps like Kindle, and Apple lost that one.

A tale of two app stores

I think Apple, in simultaneously watering down the existing App Store via sandboxing and giving a non-App Store mechanism for developers to bless apps, has created a segmented market. It seems to me we're going to end up with the App Store populated by smaller apps from smaller developers (who will find the support of Apple's payment processing infrastructure compelling) and larger but relatively simple apps for which sandboxing doesn't chafe too much.

Meanwhile, we will hopefully still see a vibrant indie dev scene outside of the App Store. Indeed, by enforcing sandboxing, Apple might have just given the alternative channels a lifesaving boost... but by locking key OS X features up to only be accessible to App Store software, it's simultaneously making it harder for non-MAS indie devs to compete. It's too early to tell which of these factors will come to dominate over the others.

This is assuming, of course, that Apple sticks by its guns. The slipping schedule for essential sandboxing suggests Apple is perhaps a bit uncertain or conflicted about the way forward here and maybe we will see sandboxing significantly relaxed or expanded before it becomes mandatory.

I'll end with one piece of wild speculation, because I'm a blogger and because I'm under my House of Crackpot Theories quota for this month.

If an existing sort-of-an-app-store service like MacUpdate took Apple's digital signing certificate and ran with it, it's not impossible we could see an Unofficial App Store emerge. One which requires digital signing of all the apps, and offers developers a payment processing and download hosting service, but does not require sandboxing or unpredictable app approval processes. I think Apple's sandboxing policy may create a gap in the market by wilfully narrowing the scope of the App Store. I don't know if that gap is big enough for someone to wedge an entire new product into, but I'd throw money at anyone who's willing to try.

The author would like to thank everyone who helped compile the information in this article: Jonathan George, Craig Hockenberry, Chris Rawson, Erica Sadun, Anand Lal Shimpi, Fraser Speirs, Steve Troughton-Smith, and the other devs I spoke with off the record.

Does Gatekeeper point the way to an App Store-only OS X? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple's new AirPort Utility 6.0 for OS X was released yesterday, bringing over the slick UI from its pre-existing iOS version -- but as my colleague Chris reported, it also removes access to a number of features in the process. At the same time, Apple are still hosting downloads for the older version of the tool which still has the full feature set. Predictably, there's been some indignant fallout from this admittedly curious decision, but what sorts of features are missing, and should you care? I loaded up the old and new version of the tools side-by-side to see what I could find out.

Here's the "Wireless setup" page for my AirPort Extreme under the older AirPort Utility:

And hiding under that "Wireless Options..." button, you get more settings:

Here's the corresponding page on the newer tool:

And under the "Wireless Options..." button:

We've lost access to quite a few settings there:

• Multicast rate
• Transmit power
• WPA group key timeout
• Wide channels option

The page where you define DHCP server options is rather better laid out in the new version. Here's the older one first:

And the newer, which folds in some settings like NAT enable and port mapping which were hidden behind other tabs in the older UI:

But again, there are options missing -- you can no longer specify a DHCP message or set an LDAP server. And the tiny scrolling lists for DHCP reservations and port maps that show only two lines at once are laughably inadequate. I have eight mapped ports, and reading through them to find one I want to adjust is unnecessarily difficult in this new UI.

The Logs and Statistics section of the old tool is completely missing too, and that has helped me out of a few jams. In particular the signal strength graph is useful:

This is really handy for tracking down that one stray device on your 802.11n network that is dragging you down to 802.11g speeds, or for working out where to best position an AirPort Express to get that extra signal boost you need. You can get some information via a tooltip in the wireless clients list in the main screen, but it's not exactly obvious, and it doesn't convey how things change through time:

Also missing from the logging facility is the ability to configure a remote SNMP server to collect and collate logs from lots of AirPort devices to a single central server.

It's not all bad, though. The new UI has this really handy topography display which shows you how your network is plugged together:

For example, this is telling me that my living room AirPort Express isn't connected to the AirPort Extreme via Ethernet, like it should be -- it has a dashed line instead of a solid one. It's also telling me it's offline, presumably for the same reason.

Disk Sharing seems to have lost the ability to set a Windows workgroup and allow/disallow guest access:

The new AirPort Utility is also missing the printer sharing tab altogether, although it might just have become entirely automatic as the old screen mostly only displayed a list of connected printers anyway:

This extra "Options..." screen is also missing from the new tool:

So we can no longer set the metadata for the AirPort device's location (useful for larger-scale installations in offices, where there may be lots of access points used at once) or set the status light to blink on activity.

The old tool also offers support for RADIUS authentication of clients which is absent from the newer software:

Some people are reporting that MAC address access time control is missing. It appears to be functionally intact, just re-arranged. Old tool:

New tool:

IPv6 settings are also entirely absent from the new AirPort Utility.

So in summary, then, unless you're a systems administrator for a complex office install with multiple AirPort devices and demanding technical requirements, you're probably not going to notice the missing bits in the the new AirPort Utility. And if you are...? Almost as if it's acknowledging the missing bits and pieces, Apple is hosting downloads for the old and new versions of Airport Utility side-by-side. There's nothing stopping you from installing both on your Mac, and it's absolutely fair to say that the features I've noted above are missing are entirely advanced ones that are of little interest to normal home users.

As well as configuration features that are missing, support for older stuff has also been decreased in AirPort Utility 6.0. The 802.11g versions of the AirPort Express, which was on sale from 2004-2008, and pre-2007 AirPort base stations simply don't work with the new tool at all -- the device doesn't appear in the management UI. The new tool requires Lion, so Snow Leopard or Windows users are out of luck (yes, the old version is available for Windows, to my surprise). And one final limitation: the new version of the tool locks you out when it's upgrading firmware for any device on your network, as Chris noted yesterday. That's not exactly something you do every day, though.

It seems unlikely that you are going to care very deeply about these changes, and if you do, you can easily get the older version of the utility. Still, though, I think it's both peculiar and curious that Apple is requiring users to choose between a nicer UI and access to the full feature set of their AirPort devices. It's as if AirPort Utility 5.5 is now "AirPort Utility Pro" and AirPort Utility 6.0 is "AirPort Utility Home". It just seems so... uncharacteristically inelegant.

Have you noticed any other missing features that I've overlooked? Please leave a comment!

In pictures: AirPort Utility 6.0's missing features originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of Guinness Breweries, was involved in a drunken argument about which of Europe's many game birds could fly the fastest. Unable to settle the argument even after consulting a well-stocked library, he commissioned a new reference book that would be filled with the sort of facts that people routinely argue about over beer -- the fastest, furthest, most expensive, largest, and so forth.

Thus was Guinness World Records born, and it has continued to this day. Last year it announced that Microsoft's Kinect was the "Fastest Selling Consumer Electronics Device" ever. The Xbox 360's motion-sensing controller sold an impressive eight million units in its first 60 days on sale.

However, let's look at some other numbers relating to another consumer electronics device you may have heard of -- the iPhone 4S. The 4S was announced on October 4 and went on sale on October 14. Leading up to this, we know that iPhone 3GS and 4 sales were down based on the widely circulated rumours of the 4S release. So we know that most of Apple's iPhone sales for the quarter would have happened after the 4S was released.

We also know that Apple sold 37 million iPhones in total in the fourth quarter of 2011 -- in other words, from October 1 to December 31. Furthermore, survey firm Consumer Intelligence Research has produced credible analysis that suggests that 89% of those 37 million sales were of the iPhone 4S model. This is corroborated by the high average selling price of the iPhone reported in Apple's quarterly earnings report. An average of $659, above the iPhone 3GS and 4 price points, suggests that the majority of sales must have gone to the more expensive iPhone 4S models.

Finally, we know that Apple sold four million iPhone 4S handsets in the first three days it was available. Oh, and that there's 78 days between the date the iPhone 4S went on sale and the end of Apple's quarterly reporting period.

So to recap: the Kinect holds a genuine world record for selling eight million devices in 60 days. The iPhone 4S definitely sold four million devices in three days, and went on to sell as many as 33 million devices in 78 days. It seems extremely likely that somewhere between those two numbers Apple comfortably eclipsed Microsoft's 60-day sales record.

The only fly in the ointment I can see might be Guinness World Record's definition of "consumer electronics device." I'm not sure if cellphones are included, or if they perhaps have their own category. Several media sources such as the Telegraph took care to point out that Kinect outsold the iPad and the iPhone 4, which suggests that these devices were considered as part of the same category. If so, come the publication of the next volume of the Guinness World Records book -- the 2013 edition, due towards the end of this year -- we can expect to see Apple take Microsoft's place as the record holder.

Will the iPhone 4S overtake the Kinect as the fastest selling consumer product device? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Love Apple gear? Like math? TUAW's Doing the Math series examines the numbers and the science behind the hardware and software.

Several sites -- including TUAW -- reported yesterday that 80% of all smartphones AT&T sold in Q411 were iPhones, based on AT&T's quarterly earnings report. On closer inspection, however, there's a subtle but important detail that we overlooked in AT&T's wording. It reported "9.4 million smartphone sales" but "7.6 million iPhone activations" (emphasis mine).

So, consider the following series of events. Alice buys an iPhone 3GS back in 2009 on a two-year contract. In late 2011, she treats herself to a new iPhone 4S -- that's both a sale and an activation for AT&T. She gives the 3GS to her husband, the long-suffering Bob, who can finally ditch his flip phone.

Bob needs service though. His "new" 3GS is locked to AT&T -- unlike in many other countries around the world, most American carriers won't voluntarily unlock even out-of-contract handsets. Even if it were unlocked, though, it's not compatible with either the CDMA networks used by Verizon and Sprint, nor the oddball 3G frequencies used by T-Mobile USA. Finally, AT&T refuses to support iPhones on its pay-as-you-go GoPhone plan (although if Bob read TUAW he'd know he could work around this). So, with no other choices, Bob rings up AT&T and starts an iPhone contract so he can use the old handset as more than just an oddly-shaped iPod touch.

At the end of this process, AT&T has closed one new sale -- but counted two activations, one for Alice's new iPhone 4S and one for Alice's old iPhone 3GS in Bob's name. This means the 7.6 million activations includes some double counting, and can't directly be compared to sales.

We reached out to AT&T's Seth Bloom to confirm whether our reasoning was true. He said "You're right that activations are a bit different than sales -- and activations includes things like gifted iPhones as you suggest." However, he also added that "In this quarter, the number of activations from things like gifted iPhones doesn't change the math much. We aren't sharing a number, but gifted phones is a relatively small portion of total activations."

How much might a "relatively small portion" be?

Let's revisit those numbers: 9.4 million smartphone sales and 7.6 million iPhone activations. Suppose that 10% of all those iPhone activations were to used handsets. In other words, out of all of those brand-new iPhone sales AT&T made in the last three months, about one in ten of them (a virtual cookie to any commenter who spots why I had to say "about" there) were made to a person who a) already had an older iPhone and b) then proceeded to sell or give that handset away to someone else, who reconnected it back to AT&T's network. That would mean that AT&T activated 6.84 million new iPhones and 760,000 old ones. In turn, that means that the iPhone took 73% of AT&T's overall smartphone sales. The other 27% will be split between Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone 7.

More generally, we can plot a graph of how the iPhone's market share changes as a function of the recycle factor or the proportion of activations which went to reused handsets:

If we revisit AT&T's statement we can also see that "82 percent of postpaid sales were smartphones." This means, remarkably, that unless 25% of iPhone activations went to reused handsets (which seems unlikely in light of Bloom's comments) then over half of all contract phones AT&T sold were iPhones. This story is repeated on Verizon too.

The bottom line is: Apple kicked all kinds of posterior in the smartphone market during the last three months of 2011. Can it continue to do so in 2012? It might not be able to maintain quite this stupendous a lead. The timing of the iPhone 4S launch (in autumn, versus the previous summer iPhone introductions) likely boosted sales by causing some greater-than-usual pent-up demand. Supporting this hypothesis, Tim Cook admitted that sales of the older models waned between July and September. It'll be fascinating to see what this massive quarter does to the overall smartphone market share of iOS versus Android in the coming months.

AT&T's iPhone "sales" versus "activations": Doing the Math originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The "iTV" rumourmill -- speculation that Apple will be releasing a full-size television, screen and all -- is back to full speed again. I've long been skeptical about this possibility, but even I have to concede that we reached the "no smoke without fire" level some time ago. The rumours are too numerous and too persistent to not have some sort of substance to them.

Nevertheless, there's a few aspects of the most frequently repeated speculation that don't make sense to me; I'll explain which ones, and why, below. Want to add your own voice to the discussion? Jump into our comments section!

The future of video distribution

The big-picture issue that drives many of the rumours is the coming battle over how we, the viewers, will receive and pay for television content.

On the one hand, we have the status quo: "conventional" broadcast and subscription TV (over the air, cable, digital terrestrial or satellite). Pay TV income today is about $300 billion world-wide, with about $100 billion of that in the USA alone; that's a roughly equal split between advertising and subscription fees.

It's a highly incestuous market, in which content producers and content delivery firms are often owned by the same parent companies or bound to each other in complex webs of cross-licensing deals. However, cable TV firms acknowledge the tough times ahead as their business models are placed under threat by the wave of Internet based streaming. Still, though, no one's going to be keen to place the current huge incomes under any threat without some clear payoffs to a new business model.

And then there's the other hand. There's a common view that existing services like iTunes, Netflix, Hulu and other "over-the-top content" streams are glimpses of the future. A future where people pay for the individual shows or episodes they want and watch it whenever they choose, rather than being restricted by channel packages and schedules. If that's to be the future, though, there's massive uncertainty over how the giant media companies can get from here to there without going broke in the process. Smoothing over the disruption of a $300 billion industry isn't easy. Making turkeys vote for Christmas is even harder.

Will Apple be part of the efforts to push this change through, or will the Apple TV remain a "hobby"?

Apple TV vs "iTV"

Much of the recent speculation has focused on Apple's alleged plans to expand its existing Apple TV set-top box into a full blown screen-and-all television. I'm going to call this mythical device "iTV" here, for clarity, although I doubt it would ever ship with that name because that might cause confusion with UK broadcaster ITV.

I must confess, the idea of the iTV doesn't make much sense to me.

First, the big downside as I see it: Apple TV is, famously, barely more than a "hobby" for Apple because of low sales -- but a $1000+ premium HDTV is necessarily going to be a far harder sell than a $99 add-on. Plus, people simply don't change their living room TVs as often as they change most other gadgets in their life.

What are the potential upsides, though? Firstly, remember that most of the (slightly breathless) benefits that are being attributed to the iTV -- cord-cutting, disrupting existing pay TV business models, iTunes streaming, and so forth -- are just as applicable to the Apple TV as the iTV. Hence these are not reasons for Apple to create an iTV. It could tick all those boxes with some new Apple TV software or a new hardware version. The list of unique-to-iTV features is non-zero but makes for a far less compelling product.

Second, cabling. It's true that wiring in a TV isn't simple at all -- in fact it's one of those complicated areas of tech that Apple seems to delight in turning upside-down. However, I have reservations about Apple's ability to revolutionise here because people (I contend) expect to be able to plug all sorts of stuff into their TVs. Can you imagine a successful iTV that shipped without multiple inputs for component, HDMI, composite, and so forth? A TV which didn't allow the addition of a games console or a DVR or (shudder) a VHS player for the (double shudder) family's home movie collection? But if a TV has all those ports, how can it be any simpler to set up or use than existing ones?

Second, UI. I've used a few brands of HDTV and it's probably fair to say the on-screen displays are often workmanlike at best. Apple could bring some slick polish to this area. But... how often do you use these screens? Personally, I tweak the brightness levels on my TV a few times a week to account for changes in the ambient light level. That's about it. I don't think most consumers use these interfaces often enough to muster any wallet-opening enthusiasm about what they look like.

Third, AirPlay. Something that happens quite a lot in our household is for one of us to be viewing content, on a Mac or an iOS device, and want to share that with other people in the room. The ability to seamlessly shunt videos, pictures, and audio onto a television via AirPlay is extremely useful for this (although the lack of baked-in AirPlay support in OS X is a puzzle). However, it relies on the television already being on the right HDMI input. It would be more useful still if the AirPlay client was built into the TV itself so you could use it regardless of what was currently showing, or even if the TV was in standby. This is why we suggested that the Apple TV is a compelling accessory for the iPhone and iPad.

Does all of this add up to a solid set of reasons to junk an existing HDTV and buy an Apple iTV? I'd say not -- not for most people, anyway. The benefits are just too slim. Apple might find it an easier sell to target people who don't yet have an HDTV, but that by definition will be the less affluent and least tech-focused consumers; that's not a great market segment to pitch a premium device at. Apple could negate some of the disadvantages if it launched a cut-price device, but with margins generally pretty thin in the mainstream HDTV market it'd be left not making any money -- in which case, why bother?

Another minor point to finish off with: having watched someone wrestle a 27" iMac out of an Apple Store and across a 10 minute walk to his car recently, I'm not convinced Apple retail stores are really set up for such large-box purchases. Yet retail is such a significant part of Apple's success story that it's hard to imagine it being sidelined for iTV sales.

However, I could be wrong; Apple's a lot smarter than I am, so maybe it's found a compelling angle I've overlooked. Or perhaps the rumours are half-right, and Apple is going to revolutionize the world of video distribution -- but via the Apple TV, rather than an iTV. What forms might that revolution take?

The UI challenge

If over-the-top is to be the future of TV, there is a significant challenge coming regarding how that content is organised and presented to the user. Existing "browse" type UIs, whether the genre-based structure of iTunes or Netflix or the channel-centric nature of a traditional pay TV set-top box, don't really scale well to having hundreds of thousands of titles for a user to choose from. I'm also dubious about any "search" type UIs that rely on the user hunting-and-pecking an on-screen QWERTY keyboard via a remote control with an up/down/left/right block. It simply feels ungainly and awkward to me. Steve Jobs famously said he "cracked it"; do we really think he could be talking about something so kludgy?

One possible answer is to rely more heavily on personalised recommendations, rather like Amazon or TiVo. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised to see this become an area Apple looks to innovate in -- perhaps by acquiring a startup, as they did for Siri. But no amount of recommendation smarts can hope to ever fully replace the search box, which will always require the user to somehow enter free-form text.

The Boxee Box solves this problem with a two-sided remote; the upper surface resembles the sparse Apple remote, with just seven buttons: up/down/left/right, select, play/pause, and menu. The flip side has a micro-sized QWERTY keyboard. It's alright, but the keyboard is tricky to type on and isn't backlit, presumably for battery life reasons. It's consequently very difficult to enter text in a dim home theatre room.

So how can Apple drive this forward, then?

The iPhone as a controller

Many people believe that iOS devices will be the answer. As they are blank slates for software to project a flexible and changing UI upon, the reasoning goes that they are perfect for this. They can display a five-way pad for basic UI navigation, transport controls during playback, and switch to an on-screen keyboard when that's a better choice. The existing Remote app for the iPad/iPhone that works with the Apple TV is a good example of this context-sensitive control.

This solution isn't without its charms, but I have some reservations. For one, there are households with more people than iOS devices -- particularly those with young children. If your son or daughter wants to watch cartoons, are you really going to hand over your iPhone so they can turn the TV on? Are you going to be happy to buy a $300 iPod touch to go with your $99 Apple TV?

Secondly, there's a growing demand these days for so-called "two screen viewing"; the TV showing a movie or program, viewers each with a smartphone in hand or computer in lap -- perhaps checking Facebook during ad breaks, or doing quick IMDb lookups to answer "who's that guy?" queries (I must confess, I do this a lot). Some broadcasters are starting to pick up on this and launch companion apps, such as the deal between Sky TV and zeebox; sporting leagues like the NBA or MLB in the States already produce such 'sideview' apps, and third parties like Yahoo's intoNow have similar capabilities.

iOS devices, of course, don't have deep multitasking. Are you going to be satisfied with having to switch away from your Twitter app halfway through writing a tweet so you can channel hop, mute an annoying advert, or -- even worse -- pause playback when the doorbell rings?

Also, you can't use an iOS device as a remote control without looking at it, because it's a flat sheet of undifferentiated glass. If you don't think that's a problem, next time you watch TV for an hour, make a point of always looking directly at the remote before every single button press. It sounds minor but it's surprisingly annoying.

Moreover, if you watch movies in a darkened room then your iPhone will default to eye-searing brightness levels. It's long annoyed me that the "adjust brightness automatically" setting doesn't go far enough in either direction.

For this reasons, whilst I accept that an iOS device can be a useful ancillary controller for a home audio-visual setup, I don't think it can be a compelling primary controller.

Siri

Much fuss has been made about the possibilities of using Apple's Siri voice-recognition technology for TV control, both for and against. I see upsides and downsides.

There's no doubt that voice recognition could be compelling for the "I want to watch the latest episode of Breaking Bad" use case -- in other words when you turn the television on knowing exactly what you want to do. It also appears that Siri's recognition engine is easily sophisticated enough to cope. Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox already supports this sort of thing, and is reasonably successful at it.

As with the iOS-device-as-controller scenario, however, there are some ways in which Siri would be a step back from a traditional remote control. Again, next time you watch TV, try speaking each command aloud as you press the button. "HDMI one... Volume up... Volume up... Volume up... Channel down..." It feels ridiculous and clumsy.

There is one use case I see where voice control is superior -- "pause playback so I can deal with this emergency." If the dog just knocked your New Yorker all over your cream carpet, not having to fumble for the remote whilst also running for a towel and shouting at the hound is useful. Apart from this, though, I simply don't think Siri for routine television UI navigation is compelling.

There are physical downsides also. Kinect's voice control only works because it has a good quality directional microphone built in to the sensor bar, which is always placed near to the screen. Siri, of course, is on a device you naturally speak in to and hold at close range. Building a pickup into the body of an Apple TV might not work very well, as people often tuck them into AV racks where the sound would be muffled. Having a small microphone on a wire would be ugly, and requiring the user to talk into an iOS device would incur the disadvantages covered in the previous section. An iTV could solve this problem, of course, by integrating the microphone into the housing of the device.

Overall, although I could see a place for Siri, and although it seems to attract a lot of attention from bloggers, I'm not sure it's the most interesting part of the puzzle. I think the really juicy stuff is: what would we watch on an iTV?

Content sources

Along with the user experience difficulties, Apple faces commercial ones if it is to push iTunes streaming as a mainstream alternative to (as opposed to supplement to) existing pay TV solutions like cable and satellite. Namely, content.

So far, the Apple TV has been a slightly odd halfway house. The primary focus of the device is undoubtably iTunes content, but iTunes doesn't have everything. There's some limited concessions in the form of baked-into-the-OS apps for Netflix and NHL/NBA/NFL streaming, as well as some Internet services like Youtube, Vimeo, and Flickr. Compared to the wide variety of streaming services out there, though, this is just a drop in the ocean.

The big question here is whether or not Apple will open Apple TV up with an App Store for streaming content. On the one hand, it seems to make perfect sense. It seems unlikely that, going forward, we are going to have one source to rule them all for over-the-top content. Most content producers and distributers are keener on controlling at least some of the customer relationship via their own apps. So we have current episodes on dedicated apps like HBO Go, the BBC's iPlayer, or Hulu whilst older archival content appears on Netflix or Amazon Video.

If the content players won't simply put everything they have into iTunes (perhaps because they are afraid of giving Apple too much control), why not allow them to ship their own apps for the Apple TV? This approach seems to be working OK for other iOS devices. Apple could mandate in-app payments and take a cut from them, exactly as it does on the mainstream App Store, so it'd make some money too.

If Apple wanted to do this, though, I think it already would have done. The Apple TV is five years old and it's been an iOS device for almost 18 months now. So why might it not want to open the platform up? One explanation I can think of is that it doesn't want the user experience to be fragmented.

Consider the Boxee Box. Boxee does a reasonable job of aggregating content across many of its sources; so, for example, if I do a search for Memento I might see a single result that offers me multiple ways to watch the film: a premium streaming service like Vudu, perhaps a free ad-supported service, and the DVD ISO stored on my file server (I love that film). But, crucially, Netflix content is not aggregated outside the interface of Boxee's dedicated Netflix app, so it doesn't appear in search results. Similarly, even though Vudu content is reachable from the generic Boxee UI, the actual Vudu app has a nicer experience that does a better job of highlighting new releases and sale titles.

I suspect, eventually, Apple will buckle and we'll get an App Store for the Apple TV. I certainly hope so, at least. It'd be a much more useful device.

I don't think that shipping apps for iOS and using AirPlay to stream them to an Apple TV is a really convincing answer to this problem, either. Many of the disadvantages listed under "the iPhone as a controller" apply to this model, plus battery life becomes an issue from the constant Wifi streaming. Do you really want to have to routinely put your phone on charge before you can settle down to watch a movie?

There's also little clarity about the fundamental business model. So far, we have iTunes, Vudu, and the link with the pay-per-episode model, bolstered with season passes, while Netflix, Hulu and others have a monthly-fee, watch-all-you-want model. The latter model might be more comfortable to consumers as its basically how pay TV works today.

There are rumours going back to 2009 that Apple is seeking to adopt a subscription plan. However, Reuters reported recently that Microsoft scrapped its online TV subscription business before launch because it couldn't agree a price with content providers that matched the price it felt it could charge consumers for the service. There's certainly a large discrepancy between the costs most people will pay for a monthly cable subscription and the cost of a Netflix or Hulu Plus account, for example. Dan Frommer speculates that unless the large content companies agree to simply make a lot less money than they do at the moment -- and why would they? -- this is going to be a huge roadblock to subscription-based service offering fresh content.

International iTunes

As a native of Britain, I am painfully aware that iTunes video content outside the US is drastically truncated -- an issue that sometimes doesn't receive the attention it deserves from the often US-centric tech blogs. Even worse, Netflix only works in the US, Canada and UK. TV shows are only available in six countries, and even movie rentals are only available in 50. By comparison, the iPhone is available in more than 120 countries. The bottom line is, the Apple TV isn't anywhere near as attractive a device around the world as it is in the US.

If Apple is going to fulfill the grandiose dreams many people have for it to revolutionise video distribution, it's going to have to get to the bottom of this somehow. I don't mean to gloss over the stupendously complex world of international distribution rights for TV shows and movies, but for it to still be so poor five years after the product launched suggests Apple isn't giving this matter top priority. That won't do at all. There's a lot of world outside America's borders.

Wrapping up

I think what the future holds is cloudy and far less obvious than many people are painting it. Yes, the sheer volume and persistence of the rumours surrounding Apple's ambitions in the TV market make it likely that something is coming... but from where I'm sitting, it doesn't look clear-cut that Apple are going to change the world again, either.

To finish up, I'd like to return to the famous quote given to Walter Isaacson by Steve Jobs; that Apple had "cracked it" regarding the future of TV. Less attention has been paid to this followup statement by Isaccson in an interview with CNet (thanks to Yoni Heisler for pointing this out to me):

Q: How far along were they on the TV? Did you get any indication of that when talking to Jobs?

A: They weren't close at all. He told me it was very theoretical. These were theoretical things they were thinking about in the future.

Apple's plans for your living room: On Apple TV, "iTV", Siri, and all the rest originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 15 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple's announcement of Thunderbolt on Feb 24th was greeted by excitement, as Mac users became aware of the tantalising possibilities of this new high-speed port. There's lots of things Thunderbolt can do that were simply not possible before -- driving multiple external displays from a single port, "docking" a laptop to a selection of external ports via a single cable, expanding a laptop with high-performance desktop graphics cards.

Then there are applications that older standards like Firewire and USB simply aren't fast enough to cope with, such as capturing uncompressed 1080p video or very fast external drives like RAID arrays or sold state drives. Our own Chris Ward went so far as to ask if Thunderbolt could foretell the end of the line for the Mac Pro as we know it, by allowing a Mac mini sized chassis to be endlessly exapanded via external Thunderbolt-connected peripherals.

And yet... ten months later, if you go to Apple's store and search for 'Thunderbolt', you'll see just 11 products, three of which are Apple's own ultra-expensive Thunderbolt Display (plus its VESA mount) and the official Thunderbolt cable. There's three LaCie BigDisks, at $500 for 1 TB and $600 for 2 TB, or $900 for an ultra-fast SSD unit. There's four types of Promise Drobo-like RAID boxes, starting from $1150. Finally, there's a Promise Thunderbolt-to-Fibre-Channel adaptor, for $800 (Fibre Channel is an multi-gigabit enterprise-grade communication protocol used to connect with storage-area networks like Apple's Xsan, among other applications), allowing Thunderbolt-equipped machines to participate in distributed video workflows.

None of these are remotely mainstream devices. The 2 TB LaCie disk is almost twice the price of an equivalent eSATA/Firewire model, at $329, which will be just as fast using eSATA as it is Thunderbolt.

So where are all the devices that normal humans might want to buy? Has Thunderbolt arrived as more of a damp fart?

My research for this post started when I was considering an iMac purchase. I'm not keen on Apple's official SSD pricing, because a top-of-the-line aftermarket model (twice as fast) is available for about $150 less. If possible, though, I'd also like to avoid the work of swapping my own drive in -- I'm sure I'll spend half my life trying to remove dust from the inside of the screen afterwards. Logically, I thought to myself, I should be able to buy some sort of reasonably priced Thunderbolt-connected drive bay that would be just as fast as an internal drive, right?

Wrong. Such a thing doesn't exist. The only thing close is the $900 LaCie model I mentioned above, and it's a whopping $500 more expensive than the OCZ drive I am considering. No-one is offering a cradle you can put your own drive into. Nor can you buy... well, most of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph, actually.

There's been plenty of promises from third parties, to be sure. Sonnet, in particular, has announced a broad range of exciting products, such as an Expresscard/34 adaptor (pre-order now, ships by December 14th). With that card cage, lots of expansion options open up (like eSATA ports). However, Sonnet's PCIe Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis, which will connect any normal PCIe x16 card -- like a high-performance graphics card -- and the RackMac mini Xserver -- which will convert a Thunderbolt-equipped Mac mini into a 1U server -- won't be available until "early January."

Another raft of devices were announced at the Intel Developer Forum in September of this year, but manufacturers were long on promises and short on firm prices or ship dates. Blackmagic's HDMI capture device is available now, but that's a rather specialist piece of kit with a hefty $300 price tag. Belkin's Thunderbolt Express Dock (a dongle with Thunderbolt on one end and USB/ethernet/etc. on the other) won't be out until "spring 2012" and has no suggested price. mLogic's mDock looks interesting, but the company doesn't even have a full website up so we couldn't contact them for any updated information on when it might ship.

Even Apple itself hasn't showed much follow through for Thunderbolt devices. We've got the Thunderbolt Display, with its extremely handy forest of ports which are ideal for laptop users working on a desk. The 27" 2560x1440 screen is certainly sumptuous, but at $999 it's a pretty specialised device -- and there's nothing else on offer.

So, almost ten months after Thunderbolt was announced, its initial high promise is still mostly unfulfilled. TUAW reached out to several of the manufacturers mentioned above but frustratingly none of them would comment about why the peripherals have been exceedingly slow to ship. I have theories -- Thunderbolt remains highly expensive to implement and purchase, for example. Consider that a single Thunderbolt cable costs more than an entire eSATA-equipped drive dock.

Also, despite Apple's high Mac sales of late, and all current Mac models (except the Mac Pro) coming suited and booted with at least one Thunderbolt port, there can still only be a few tens of millions of Macs out there with it. In the grand scheme of things that isn't a substantial install base for OEMs to target, compared to (say) the sheer volume of PCs with USB ports. Hopefully we will soon see Thunderbolt ports on PCs, which will help address both of these issues by giving OEMs a wider base to target and bringing some volume to manufacturing to bring prices down.

For now, though, Thunderbolt's strong early promise remains mostly unfulfilled.

Thunderbolt devices are still irritatingly thin on the ground originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 11 Dec 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

By now you've probably heard of the widely reported case of Siri's alleged pro-life stance. Walking the dogs this morning, I thought through what I hoped would be an interesting blog post about what I feel this means about Apple and our relationship to technology. I see an interesting link here between Siri and the heavy-on-the-texture UIs of Apple apps like iCal and Find My Friends.

Even before the response from Apple was published, it seemed more likely to me that this wasn't so much a case of Apple pushing a political agenda as it was a limitation of Siri making it look that way. Indeed, if anything Apple seems to have a a liberal, rather than conservative, political agenda -- for example, it donated $100,000 to the campaign to keep gay marriage legal in California in 2010. But, really, all this is incidental to what I was thinking of writing.

Then Adam Engst wrote a great post at TidBITS that stole my thunder by pre-empting most of what I had to say! The gist of his argument is as follows: that the problem with Siri is that, although it looks very much like sorcery at first glance (and although Apple carefully presents it that way in its advertising), it really isn't. It's just another computer program like all the rest -- and like all the rest it comes with limitations and drawbacks and bugs and issues. It doesn't help that the chattery nature of Siri -- the jokey responses, the easter eggs, the sly film references -- create a substantial facade that it really is a facsimile of a real person. But that's all it is: a facade.

Sometimes that facade cracks. For example, we've seen problems because of cloud failures -- or, indeed, if you have no data signal on your phone to communicate with the Siri data centre then it simply stops working. In the case of the searches for abortion-related matters, the problem appears to simply be a lack of information in the backing databases that Siri draws upon, like Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. I'm sure that this is only one of many such gaps in Siri's knowledge, albeit a highly politically charged one. For example, Siri's address lookups are resolutely US only, despite it being supported in many other countries (such as my native UK) and Yelp having a perfectly reasonable database for it to use.

Where I'd like to go further than Engst does is by drawing comparisons between Siri and Apple's recent trend towards so-called "skeuomorphic" UIs. This is the extensive use of real-world textures and imagery to underpin an app's functionality. Think of iCal on Lion, Calendar on the iPad, Game Center on iOS, or Find My Friends on the iPhone -- with leather bits, and little torn edges, and faux piles of poker chips, and stacks of pages in the corner of the screen.

I have a vehement aesthetic objection to the look-and-feel of most of these apps; I find them pointless, distracting and, frankly, a bit twee. This is merely my own tastes, though. Thinking more objectively I also have a practical objection. I believe that skeuomorphic UIs create false models of interaction. For example, in iBooks there is a stack of pages on the corner of the screen; a swipe across that stack turns the page. Seems logical enough, right? But the same stack of pages in Calendar for iPad on iOS 4 was not swipeable. It looked the same -- and clearly a real-world stack of pages can be turned -- but Apple seemingly just missed this feature out.

You might think that it's no big deal for Apple to implement that, and indeed the feature turned up in iOS 5 -- but I would humbly suggest that this is a hole with no bottom. The same stack-of-pages decoration still isn't swipeable in Contacts, for example. Look at iCal for Lion -- look at those little torn edges across the top of the page, where the virtual remains of last months page are seemingly left behind. Why can't I tear them off with my mouse and clean them up? That's exactly what I'd do with a real calendar that looked like that.

And even if Apple somehow made a UI that has almost every interaction a reasonable human being might expect of it -- a tall order, but let's suppose -- it's still only going to feel like a sheet of glass. As Bret Victor's fantastic essay on interaction design brillianty demonstrates, "pictures under glass" are never going to be anything more. If you can't smell the leather, or feel the grain, why make it look like leather in the first place?

Getting back to my original point, I see a link here. Skeuomorphic UIs resemble physical objects, but they cannot hope to emulate the myriad ways we have to emulate physical objects -- so they are always doomed to disappoint on some level if we let ourselves be fooled. Siri presents itself as a real person, a sort of "auditory skeuomorphism" if you will. But short of passing a Turing test one day that, too, is doomed to always disappoint. Sure, it looks like magic -- but so did the Wizard of Oz until Toto pulled back the curtain. Never forget that there's wires and gears back there making it work, or you'll be surprised when the abstractions leak.

Footnote: let's look again at Apple spokesperson Natalie Kerris's statement to the New York Times. She said "[t]hese are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks."

I think it is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, I'm rather cynical about Siri's "beta" nature; I agree with Macworld senior contributor Glenn Fleishman, who wrote, "If you're advertising Siri as a feature, it's not beta." On iPhone 4S launch day, I spent ten minutes in an Apple Store enduring a low impact sales pitch from a Genius and he didn't mention the "beta" word once. Nor does it appear in Apple's TV spot. But then again, Gmail was in beta for six years; I'm not even sure I know what beta is supposed to mean any more, and I write software for a living.

Still, though, it seems to be that Apple are suggesting that as long as Siri has "places where we can do better" it'll be in beta. Well, hmmm. As I mentioned above, I'm not sure how -- short of some sort of Skynet-level breakthrough in AI tech -- Siri will ever be finished. With a field as complex as natural language processing, there's simply too much that can go wrong -- too many ways for humans to innocently throw a spanner in the works with their rich and wonderful languages. I do wonder if perhaps that statement to the Times was just a teensy bit rushed so Apple could nip the story in the bud. Not that I'd blame it for that, but it struck me as an interesting point nevertheless.

Why Siri is like skeuomorphic UIs: the magic is just skin deep originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I'm a bit of a shutterbug, so Photo Stream is something I was really interested in when it was announced as part of iOS 5's feature set way back in June. Frictionless, automated sending of photos from my phone to my computer? Sign me up!

Of course, as is too often the case with Apple, the nitty gritty of how this would work wasn't explained in any detail -- particularly for Aperture, which often takes a back seat to iPhoto when Apple is showing off its apps.

Hopefully, this article will answer all your questions about how these two products interact. If not, please leave a comment pointing out what I've overlooked.

Before we start, some basic housekeeping. Photo Stream isn't going to appear in your Aperture at all if you don't first upgrade to v3.2. You'll also need OS X 10.7.2 or later, and iOS 5 on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. You'll also need to go to the iCloud pane in your System Preferences and make sure that "Photo Stream" is ticked (thanks to commenter 'kootenayredneck' for the reminder). If you've done all that, you're all set.

Accessing Photo Stream within Aperture

This is Photo Stream's marquee feature: snap a photo with your iOS device and have it show up on your Mac.

It's easy to do, though it comes with one small wrinkle. In Aperture, go into Preferences | Photo Stream and tick the appropriate boxes. The caveat is that you can only have Photo Stream active for iPhoto or Aperture, not both at once. Turning it on in one app turns it off in the other.

With that setting in place, a Photo Stream entry should appear in your Aperture Library list.

Clicking on this will show you all the photos in your Photo Stream, which you can look through. You can't make any edits, however, until you import them into your library:

Clicking "import photo" brings the photo into your library and allows you to do all the usual range of Aperture adjustments to it.

Note that the Photo Stream implementation on your iOS devices will only be active when they are connected to a Wi-Fi network. If you only have cellular 3G access, no photos will be transferred in either direction. However, don't forget that tethering creates a Wifi network. In a pinch, you could use an iPhone to create a tethered network and connect a second iOS device to it. That would give the second device full Photo Stream access.

Note also that "Automatic Import" means Aperture is constantly copying Photo Stream pictures to your Aperture library. It creates a series of Projects, one per month. As long as you start Aperture at least once per month and once per 1000 photos, this guarantees you can never lose a photo placed in Photo Stream.

Non-destructive editing

Here's a neat trick that isn't immediately obvious. If you take a photo on the iPhone and use the new built-in photo editing features of iOS 5, when you bring the photo over to Aperture the edits are preserved as edits, in the usual Aperture master-and-version-file manner. So you can choose to change them as you please, perhaps replacing iOS's rather crude "enhance" wizard with Aperture's fine-grained adjustments.

I would very much like to see this functionality available to third-party devs. It'd be great if the likes of Instagram and Camera+ were able to save clean copies of their filtered output without cluttering up your camera roll with duplicate versions. Of course, as those filters aren't directly comparable to Aperture's, that would only be possible via a single image file that is basically just two JPGs stuck together -- whereas I imagine the native Photos app is doing something more sophisticated.

Putting photos into Photo Stream from within Aperture

By default, when the third checkbox in my first screen grab above is ticked, all new photos imported into Aperture are automatically added to the Photo Stream by default. More on this "feature" in a second. If you untick that box, you can still manually choose to add specific versions by dragging and dropping them within Aperture to the Photo Stream entry in the navigation tree.

However, before you go adding files en masse, remember that by default everything in the Photo Stream is going to be downloaded to all your iOS devices; that there's no way to delete images from Photo Stream except for a full purge; and that Photo Stream only deletes images when it's holding more than 1000 pictures or after 30 days.

This can add to create quite a headache. It means that if you pull 400 1.5 MB JPG shots into Aperture, it's going to immediately upload 6 GB 600 MB of data to iCloud. If you're not on fast, unmetered Internet, that could be at best inconvenient (as it'll choke your Internet connection up for a prolonged period) and at worst expensive (if you go over your ISP's bandwidth cap). It's then going to download all of those photos, albeit at an "optimised resolution" to each of your iOS devices, exacerbating the problem. Testing on my iPhone 4 and iPad showed that Photo Stream optimised images are around 500 KB each. Continuing our example, then, if you have an iPhone and an iPad that's a further 4 GB 200 MB download for 10 GB 800MB of bandwidth used overall. (Thanks to commenter 'IhatePundits' for catching the mistakes in my mathematics.)

This can also lead to problems with your iOS devices running out of disk space, which then has knock on effects that can start deleting app data you wanted. Overall, it's probably a good idea to leave "automatically upload imports to Photo Stream" to the iPhoto-using casual shooters. I'd go so far as to question Apple's decision to enable this feature by default in Aperture.

RAW files and Photo Stream

The problems with Photo Stream and bandwidth start to look much worse when you examine how it handles RAW files.

According to the Aperture documentation, how RAW interacts with Photo Stream isn't immediately obvious -- but it is very important that you understand it. If you send a RAW file from Aperture to Photo Stream -- either automatically via the "import all" checkbox, or manually -- and if that RAW file has no edits applied, then it's the full-sized original RAW that ends up in Photo Stream. On the other hand, if it has had edits applied then Photo Stream ends up holding a JPG copy instead.

This surprising handling also applies to RAW files imported to the iPad via the Camera Connection Kit. This is a common workflow for me when I am travelling, as I typically do not bring a laptop. Several times a day, I import all the images from my cameras into my iPad, partly for proofing but also partly for backup purposes. It's not unusual for me to shoot 15-20 GB of photos on a week long vacation (I'm very much a statistical photographer).

With Photo Stream enabled, this means I'll be choking up the hotel's Internet connection for hours on end as well as making my iPad run slowly as it manages the upload process in a background task I cannot control or suspend. In my experience, hotel Wi-Fi isn't either the fastest or most reliable, so this could become quite hard to manage. Even at home, if you're on metered Internet, you could easily (and accidentally) chew through multiple gigabytes of your bandwidth allocation.

Note, however, that as Apple states here, RAW files (like full resolution JPGs) are never delivered to iOS devices. If you put a RAW file onto the iPad or if you tell Aperture to add one to Photo Stream, it's an around-500-KB optimised JPG that ends up synced onto the other iOS devices.

Most irritating of all is it is that unlike in Aperture, the Photo Stream option for iOS doesn't have a "download all photos but do not automatically upload new ones" option. It's on/off only. So I have to micro-manage the setting depending on whether I'm using my iPad to import photos from my camera en masse (in which case I want it disabled) or work with iPhone snapshots (when it has to be enabled).

There's also a subtle interaction with the "automatic import" setting in Aperture. Files brought in like this are managed copies, i.e. with the master file living inside the Aperture library. If (like me) you maintain your Aperture library file on a small laptop drive and use external reference masters held on a network share or a larger external drive, then allowing Aperture to import a lot of RAWs through Photo Stream may cause you to suddenly run out of room on your laptop's drive.

Now, it's only fair of me to note that if you are in the luxurious position of not caring about upstream Internet bandwidth, then there is an significant upside to this -- cloud-based backup of your photos. Even if you managed to lose your camera, your memory cards, and your iPad, up to 1000 RAW files are still safely in Photo Stream ready to be pulled into Aperture when you get home. There's definitely perks to this system, I just wish Apple had given the end users a little more control because we don't all live in Infinite Bandwidth Land.

Remember also that Photo Stream storage does not come out of your main iCloud disk space allocation (the 5 GB you get free or any extra you pay for). That's admirably generous of Apple -- a full stream of RAW files could easily be 10-20 GB depending on your camera.

Photo Stream and Apple IDs

One final note. I've seen a few professional photographers around the web getting excited about using Photo Stream as a sort of low-rent proofing service -- for example, to consolidate work from multiple cameras tethered to laptops onto a single workstation back at the office where another member of staff is compiling picks in real time, or for a supervisor to keep an eye on pictures taken on a shoot in real time.

Remember that for this to work well, you're going to need a lot of bandwidth at the shooting site -- particularly upstream bandwidth, which is often not that fast on low-end and medium range Internet connections.

It also requires all the different devices and Aperture installs to be connected to the same Apple ID. Depending on the setup you are contemplating, that might not matter at all, or it could be a significant limitation.

Deep dive: Aperture and Photo Stream, how do they work? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 06 Nov 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech -- a prominent market research firm and a powerful figure on the Scrabble board -- today released its latest "smartphone OS barometer" report, and it has some noteworthy conclusions in it about the British market. Specifically, the report claims that in the 12 weeks ending 2nd October 2011, iOS market share in the UK was 18.5% whereas Android was more than two-and-a-half times that -- 49.9% of all new smartphone sales. Apple's share at this time last year was 32.9%, compared to 28.8% for Android. In the US, Kantar's numbers show an even stronger tilt in Android's favour: 66.4% Android, 21.5% iOS.

Beyond the head-line grabbing Apple-vs-Android story, there is other interesting data in the report. In the UK, 69.1% of all phone sales in the last 12 weeks were smartphone sales -- and 43.8% of the population now own a smartphone. It also has the interesting tidbit that HTC does rather better out of Android sales than Samsung (44.8% of all Android phones are by the former, and 37.9% are the latter). Internationally, Samsung is a long way ahead of HTC.

I need to address one common criticism of many market share comparisons. It goes like this: while Apple quotes its volumes in terms of units sold to end-users, many Android OEMs quote units shipped to distributors and resellers instead. This skews figures against Apple because it means unsold handsets languishing in stock rooms around the world count as "sold" stock.

Kantar Worldpanel's methodology doesn't work that way. Rather, it gathers material from interviews with volunteers who have agreed to be tracked. It "conducts over 1 million interviews per year in Europe alone," which is certainly some substantial data gathering.

A second issue people often bring up when discussing market shares is carrier availability. In the US, the iPhone was (of course) only available on a single carrier until relatively recently. This factor doesn't affect the UK market. All six of our mainstream carriers have been selling subsidized iPhones since the release of the iPhone 3GS, and all six also offer Android handsets as part of their ranges. It's a level playing field.

I spoke with Dominic Sunnebo, the author of the report, and asked him for more information on Kantar Worldpanel's testing methods. He told me:

In order to generate the insights you have seen published we have a longitudinal panel of demographically (age, gender, region & ethnicity) representative individuals in each country: for example we track 15,000 people in the UK, 20,000 in the US, and 26,000 in Brazil. We interview the same individuals every 4 weeks, to see if they have had any change in their mobile ownership e.g. new phone, new tariff, new network, etc. The day/date of these changes are recorded, and these figures are then collated into time periods e.g. "12 weeks ending 03rd October 2011" (as in our latest report). As it is the same individuals we interview each time, this also allows us to accurately track switching between brands, OSs, networks, etc.

Now, there is an important mitigating factor to Apple's seemingly poor numbers, specifically the iPhone 4S launch timing. We know that Apple phone sales dipped throughout the last few months as people waited for an updated iPhone, followed by explosive sales of the iPhone 4S. It seems sensible to expect Apple to regain some of those market share points in future reports from Kantar Worldpanel. Given the size of the gap between Android and iOS, though, it's difficult to imagine it closing completely.

The report also mentions that consumers in the UK are particularly price-sensitive to smartphones, preferring to choose a lower-end handset on a free-with-monthly-plan pricing to higher end phones where a purchase price is charged. This, of course, was a market Apple was not addressing at all until the iPhone 4S launch just a few weeks ago, at which time the iPhone 3GS became "free." If Kantar's analysis of consumer preferences is correct this should also give Apple a boost in the future.

It's also debatable just how much market share matters. As Charles Arthur says in the Guardian, Apple's relatively low market share in the computer market hasn't stopped it from making a mind-boggling amount of money. If you could be the CEO of a company that makes all the widgets or a company that makes all the money, which would you choose?

The opposite point of view, proposed by Henry Blodget of Business Insider, is sometimes referred to as "the Highlander Principle" after that film's famous line "there can be only one!" Technology platforms always converge onto one dominant platform, goes the reasoning, as developers concentrate support on the OS with the greatest numbers of users and users flock to the platform they are most familiar with and has the widest range of apps available. Certainly, this happened in desktop OSs, with Windows maintaining its two decade stranglehold to this day. Therefore, Blodget surmises, iOS is doomed and Apple "FANS" (his article was sub-edited by cAPTAIN cAPS lOCK) are clinging to a dying platform.

Blodget ignores significant areas in consumer technology, however, where the Highlander Principle hasn't happened at all -- such as mobile phone OSs at any point in history up until now, or games consoles, or even social networks (which should be more vulnerable to network effects than most -- and yet Google+ and Twitter and Facebook all co-exist). Blodget even concedes that as so many modern apps are cloud-based, the strength of the "platform" in a modern smartphone OS is somewhat diluted. Yelp is still Yelp, whether you use its iPhone app or its Android one.

Meanwhile, to muddy the waters further, Android users are far more thrifty than iOS ones. Even if Android outsells iOS forever, this factor means devs could easily make more money on Apple's platform.

It remains far from clear what the future holds. To my mind, the question isn't whether Apple is losing ground to Android; that seems pretty certain, at least in the narrow terms of the numbers of handsets sold. Rather, it's: what sort of handsets are they?

Some amount -- perhaps most -- of the sales that Android is picking up comes from thrifty consumers buying low-end phones and not spending a lot of money on apps. It seems a deliberate part of Apple's strategy to leave that part of the market unaddressed -- consider that the cheapest pre-pay iPhone in Britain is an astronomical £320 ($510) for an 8 GB 3GS. That may or may not be the right strategy in the long run.

Smartphone wars: Android "has half of the UK smartphone market" originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Similarly to my previous notes on the iPad 2 launch, here are a few things I noticed about Tuesday's event that were too small to deserve a post of their own.

On it being the iPhone 4S and not the iPhone 5

The iPhone 4 is the best selling smartphone in the US. The iPhone 4S presents a solid upgrade over last year's model in several key areas: raw speed, camera performance, and the new Siri voice-recognition technology.

And yet, many pundits are disappointed. For a typical example, consider Henry Blodget's post at Business Insider. There's even talk of a company-wide Apple "fall from grace" by Zach Epstein at Boy Genius Report. If you want more where that came from, there's a good round-up of opinions from professional analysts by Charles Arthur at the Guardian. Wall Street was somewhat unhappy too, with Apple shares dropping during the announcement but ultimately rallying to finish down a modest 0.6%. Meanwhile RIM shares dropped to a yearly low, so it seems Wall Street is more skeptical about Apple's competitors than it is about Apple itself.

Clearly opinions are mixed. Plenty of people are simply happy, like Dan Frommer and Marco Arment. Others, like MG Siegler (warning, NSFW language), are saying that analysts and pundits "do not understand" Apple and that the backlash is idiotic. And yet... I've spoken with as many family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, and Twitter followers that could tolerate me blathering on about Apple again, and I've paid particular attention to the non-technical ones, the normal folk, the not-geeks.

Many of them, not all of them but more than half, are slightly negative. They've told me they're "lukewarm" on upgrading, that they are "looking at Android" more seriously, that they were "underwhelmed" by the announcement. One friend waited at the end of his contract for a few months but might stick with his 3GS now. Another wasn't sure if the iPhone 4S was worth the money over the iPhone 4.

So do these naysayers have a point?

Let me talk for a moment about how I feel. It's my considered opinion that the 4S represents a relatively modest upgrade over the iPhone 4. Having slept on it I've decided that the approximate £275 ($450) it would cost me to upgrade my unlocked 32 GB iPhone 4 is too steep a price to pay for the benefits the 4S would bring me -- but I'm not convinced this is a bad thing. iPhones are expensive devices usually tied to expensive two-year contracts and I don't really want to buy a new one every year.

I'm also not convinced Apple can make enough of them for everyone to upgrade every year -- consider how long it was into 2010 before you could stroll into any Apple store and have much hope of finding an iPhone 4 on the shelf to buy. I don't think Tim Cook is losing any sleep because I've decided not to upgrade. Also, looking back, the iPhone 3G wasn't that big of a step forward from the original iPhone (3G chipset, same internals) -- and the 3GS wasn't a huge improvement over the 3G (faster chipset, slightly better camera). Apple's model here is evolutionary changes and I think it's perfectly comfortable with many users being on an "every other" upgrade cycle. It helps a lot that old devices continue to receive new versions of iOS, of course.

But! It's important not to lose sight of the fact that value is in the eye of the beholder. Particularly keen photographers, the visually impaired, frequent international travellers: these people will get more value from the iPhone 4S's new features and so find the upgrade cost more reasonable. And also there's (sadly!) plenty of people out there with deeper pockets than I have, who'll care less about the money.

Still, though, there's certainly a lot of people out there for whom the absence of a new chassis design for the iPhone seems to be a major problem. Haters gonna hate, as always, and certainly bold "Apple has lost its way! Doooomed!!" headlines will garner cheap pageviews, but is this anything more than that? [Does anyone remember the 3GS update being called disappointing as well? - Ed.]

I do wonder if, perhaps, Apple's cone of silence has gone a little too far in recent times and started to work against it. Perhaps it needs to do a little more to calm down the runaway speculation that proceeds one of these big announcements, maybe via some controlled and anonymous leaks. Otherwise these tedious backlashes (and the backlash-backlashses of people criticising the "whiners") will continue. Then again, as Apple continues to print money with everything it makes, it'd be pretty justified in not caring one whit either way.

There's also the risk from competitors to consider. Apple is in approximately-annual refresh cycles, so we can assume we're not getting any more iPhones for at least nine months. Does the iPhone 4S take it far enough ahead of the pack of Android, Windows Phone 7, and other smartphone platforms to stay relevant over that timeframe? Certainly, there are crowd-pleasing features that Apple lacks, such as larger screens and LTE or WiMax 4G network access. But again, I keep coming back to the fact that the iPhone 4 and 3GS were selling extremely strongly right up to the eve of this announcement, and they lacked these features too. They matter to some people but I don't think they matter to most.

There are two bottom lines here. The first is that for most folk the 4S probably represents a bigger step forward over the 4 than the 3GS was over the iPhone 3, and certainly more than the 3G over the first iPhone -- and yet all those models were huge success stories. I think the 4S will end up doing just fine, a point that even Blodget concedes. As I write this a few hours after pre-orders began, we have the usual stories of websites crashing under huge demand and cellphone operators warning they are running out of stock -- although of course it's how sales go in the first months, rather than the first hours, that really count.

But the second point is: no-one actually knows, unless they have a crystal ball hidden away (and I know of no superstar bloggers who win the lottery every week, so that's doubtful). It's possible (but I think unlikely) that Apple committed a strategic gaffe, it's possible (and I think more likely) that the iPhone 4S will sell strongly for the year to come. All we can do is watch and see.

Carriers

Two things of note in the US carriers part of the announcement. Firstly, Sprint will not be getting just the iPhone 4S but also the 4, which will doubtless help it sell into the middle market as well as the top tier. And the iPhone (in any flavour) is still not available on T-Mobile US. This is probably because the 4S, like previous models, still doesn't support the 1700 MHz frequency band, which T-Mobile uses for its 3G service.

Siri

Without a doubt, Siri was the most impressive part of the presentation; a real example of what Apple does best. High technology, sure, but tempered with a real depth of thought put into the usability and usefulness of the new features.

One open question about Siri is when its language support will improve. Ominously, Apple states that "Siri is available in Beta only on iPhone 4S and requires Internet access. Siri may not be available in all languages or in all areas, and features may vary by area. Cellular data charges may apply." Surveying the various international pages for Siri suggests that, at least at launch, it will support English (US, Australian and UK), French and German. However, on all the other iPhone 4S pages I looked at, Siri isn't mentioned as a feature. Bafflingly, this includes other English-language countries such as Canada and Ireland, plus Japan, Spain, Mexico, Norway, Italy, Switzerland, and Denmark. Of course, it is clearly marked as "beta" and Phil Schiller promised more languages would be added without promising which ones or when. This will inevitably dent sales of the 4S in many countries, as Siri is a banner feature for the new hardware and a big part of the reason to choose a 4S over an iPhone 4.

Another improvement I'd like to see made to Siri in the future is an API to allow arbitrary apps to plug into it. For example, if I tell Siri "show me the way to go home" I want it to load CoPilot rather than Google Maps. This seems like one of those things Apple naturally fills in later; it couldn't do anything before the announcement, of course, without giving the game away as to how deeply integrated Siri was. However it could introduce UI problems as presumably the user would need extra configuration screens to manage exactly which apps would be triggered by various Siri actions.

That same footnote on the Siri page also says "requires Internet access." We never did find out exactly what that big data center Apple built was for -- given that iTunes content is mostly stored in CDNs and iCloud is implemented on top of Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's EC2 platforms.

I'm speculating that at least some of that data center's huge processing capacity is for Siri, and that at least some portion of Siri's sophisticated voice recognition works in the cloud. Presumably not all of it, otherwise it won't work when you are in a weak signal area; but consider what happens when you dictate text to the Siri software. It reads the text back and asks you to confirm that you are happy with the transcription. This is a classic setup for machine learning algorithms, and I think perhaps that each time you teach Siri a correction for a word it is uploaded to the cloud and, eventually, downloaded to everyone else's Siri implementations. There's very few effective ways to build a phoneme database of all the world's dialects and accents, but this would work (for a fascinating look at how Google solved the same problem, look at the history of GOOG-411).

If my rampant and baseless speculation is correct, this means that Siri is a huge, powerful, learning network with nodes all around the world. Hopefully it'll never become self-aware, eh?

On the iPhone 3GS, the iPod touch, and fragmentation

The 3GS is still available on two year contracts for the foreseeable future. That means it'll still have nominally up-to-date users well into 2014, six years after it was introduced. That's a very long time in cell phones -- take a look at PCWorld's "best phones of 2005" for a reminder of how long.

This may be challenging for devs to cope with because it widens the performance gap between the best and worst models they might reasonably be expected to support. This isn't the same fragmentation problem as Android faces, as the 3GS will run iOS 5 so the software is the same. Nevertheless, it might introduce problems, particularly for games developers. We've already seen some "iPad 2 only" and "iPhone 4 only" games here at TUAW and this trend might accelerate in the future, leaving 3GS owners out in the cold.

However, in an unusual move Apple didn't upgrade the iPod touch to the same A5 CPU and powerful GPU fitted to the iPhone 4S. Smaller games devs might therefore prefer not to allocate resources to making games take full advantage new faster chips. As Apple said itself at the event, the iPod touch is very significant in the games market. App developers writing performance-sensitive apps will have to ask themselves some tough questions about how to best optimise those apps over the coming year. (I'd speculate, incidentally, that this was a move to ringfence A5 production capacity for the iPhone 4S and prevent component shortage. Apple is working hard to ensure the iPhone 4S is as widely available as possible).

Also, at least here in the Europe, the 3GS is still very expensive without a contract -- £329 ($510) in the UK. Despite Tim Cook's talk of how Apple only has 5% of the entire phone market, it seems to have not yet decided the time is right for an aggressive push into the pre-pay market, and for that they are going to have to sell a much, much cheaper iPhone. The time might never be right for them to do that. Trading profit margin for market penetration isn't a common Apple tactic.

Conclusion

Apple is a big, secretive company. Which means the best time to figure out what is on its hivemind is when it makes bold, public moves like launching flagship products.

I'd say that the iPhone 4S announcement shows a company confident in its existing products, willing to stick with an existing chassis design and risk disappointing a few people with sky-high expectations. It shows a firm still pushing the envelope in unexpected and imaginative directions, a firm that can "innovate at the margins" as Jason Kottke puts it -- instead of a bigger screen or thinner phone, we got revolutionary voice technology. It shows a vibrant company that, even in the wake of the tragic loss of its most prominent genius, is still fascinating to watch and a pleasure to purchase things from. I will continue to enjoy doing both.

Notes on the iPhone 4S announcement originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Amongst the frenzied speculation that tomorrow's media event will see new iPhones and the end of the iPods both Shuffle and Classic, there's also been some lower-key talk of a possible "iPod touch 3G", designed to sit halfway between the iPad 3G and the iPhone. I must confess, this makes very little sense to me. Here's why.

First problem: the hardware

Chris Rawson and I previously went back and forth on the differences between the iPod touch and the iPhone. It comes down to two things: the addition of the cellular technology stack in the iPhone (the baseband chip, antenna, and larger battery to power it) and the use of a few lower-cost components in the iPod (particularly the screen, chassis, camera, and RAM).

So if you graft the cell stack onto an iPod touch, what you actually end up with is physically indistinguishable from a low-end cut-price iPhone. Packing in that extra hardware dictates sacrificing the iPod's slim chassis and most of its price advantage. There's nothing left to distinguish it from the iPhone product range any more. This runs counter to Apple's normal strategy, which is to leave very clear gaps between product lines and avoid losing sales to analysis paralysis.

Now, perhaps I'm just being pedantic here. So what if the hardware is really just a diluted iPhone; what's in a name anyway? Surely the thing people are really getting excited about is the idea of a cheap data-only plan, just like the iPad has. Well, I'm not sure it's that easy, unfortunately.

Second problem: the carriers

The iPad has enjoyed enthusiastic support from the cellphone carriers despite Apple mandating its unusual and remarkably cheap data-only no-commitment plans. I claim that the iPod touch would have at best a lukewarm reception and more likely a downright hostile one.

I've spent a fair bit of time with cellular network industry insiders over the years and if you get talking to them a common view of the carriers' opinion of the future quickly emerges. The carriers are all deeply, deeply scared of what is usually referred to in telco slang as "carrier commoditization": the idea that the less attached the users are to a service the easier it is for them to move to competitors. This introduces severe downward pressure on prices -- great for users, not so great for the shareholders. GigaOM has a good essay that discusses carrier commoditization in detail.

What the carriers desperately want is to preserve the status quo. They want to offer dozens of overlapping plans with confusing naming schemes, thus ensuring as many users as possible are on the wrong plan for their needs. Either users don't have as many bundled discount minutes, messages and data as they use, and pay overage charges; or they select a bigger bundle than they need and overpay that way; or, when contract renewal time comes around, they stay with their current provider out of laziness or sheer confusion. The carriers want long contract terms to lock customers in and reduce churn. The carriers want to promote their own brands as much as possible, which is why so many non-Apple handsets have carrier-specific apps and carrier-specific logos all over them. The carriers want to own the user and anyone who stands between them and the end-user is to be feared and, if at all possible, avoided.

Data-only no-lock-in plans like those designed for the iPad threaten this business model. With fewer competing numbers to baffle consumers with, it becomes far easier to shop around between carriers and compare prices. Without artifacts like your phone number tied to the carrier, it becomes trivial to move between operators -- in the same way as a webmail email address makes it easy to change your home ISP without having to tell everyone that your bender.bending.rodriguez@planetexpress.com email address no longer works.

The wide carrier support for the iPad can be explained because -- quite obviously -- no-one out there is ditching their normal phone contract in favor of an iPad (well, except perhaps for Dom Joly.)

Of course there are also Mifi-type mobile hotspots, and even the awkwardly weird ZTE Peel -- but these devices also can't be reasonably combined with an iPod touch to replace a phone, because they can't receive incoming calls when they're switched off (and they have awful battery life to boot). As such they are "secondary" devices that allow the carriers to extract a second modest monthly fee from a customer who's almost certainly already carrying a phone with a premium contract attached. That's fine, but the second these cheap data plans start taking a bite of the lucrative contract market will be when the carriers drop them like a hot potato. That's exactly what a data-only iPod touch 3G on an iPad-style data plan would be.

Apple managed an end-run around the carriers with the iPhone. It brings in high-value customers by the metric ton but those people aren't customers of the network -- a Verizon iPhone is the same as an AT&T iPhone, so the customer belongs to Apple, not the carrier. Have no doubt that this sort of thing induces deep conflicts in the carrier's management and sleepness nights for the senior staff. It's my belief that support for an iPod touch 3G would be a bridge too far for them.

But perhaps I'm wrong about this too, and maybe either one carrier (perhaps a hungry third-tier company like Sprint) will bite the bullet or maybe enterprising hackers will figure out a way to make iPad SIMs work in an iPod (expect Apple to make at least a token effort to prevent this, to placate the carriers). What next? Who's going to buy this?

Third problem: the users

Who needs just data on a mobile device, and doesn't care about voice or text messaging? I think there's less of a market for this mythical device than many people believe.

There are people who already have a phone, of course -- say, folk who are locked into a contract, or have a phone provided by work, but would really like to also have an Apple device with mobile data access. I can't deny those people must exist, but are there enough of them to justify a device mostly designed for them? It seems unlikely to me.

It's not hard to find tech bloggers who will tell you they "hardly use voice calls any more" -- I'm one of them, in fact. It's a rare month that I use more than 50 of the thousands of free minutes that come bundled with my unlimited data iPhone plan. So surely ditching the voice (and maybe even SMS) parts of our plans to save a few bucks makes perfect sense, right? We can always use Skype or Google Voice to make those few remaining calls.

I'm not so sure. It's true I rarely use voice but I still need it around for actual emergencies -- in case of car breakdowns, or accidents, or sudden illness, or an airline misplacing my baggage. These are exactly the times when I need the highest level of reliability from my voice service. However, at no point in my years of using it has Skype ever struck me as a service that has the highest level of reliability. As the Skype website itself notes, "No emergency calls with Skype. Skype is not a replacement for your telephone and can't be used for emergency calling."

I can't comment on Google Voice -- because it's only available to US citizens, which is a very good reason that you can't rely on that either. Even if you are willing to trust a VOIP service, it's still no use when you have only a borderline GPRS nine-point-eight-kbit data connection, or if you're traveling and don't care to pay your cell operator's horrifying data roaming fees.

The bottom line here is that I feel that even if (for some people) voice communication isn't frequently used any more, that doesn't mean it's not important -- any more than house insurance isn't important because your house hasn't caught fire recently.

Wrapping up

So, that's why I think an iPod touch 3G is highly unlikely, tomorrow or in the foreseeable future. Think I'm an idiot? Hit the comment form below and tell me so. And whether you agree or not, be sure to join us for our liveblog of the media event where we'll be covering the fun and frolics!

And now for the inevitable weaselly footnote where I cover myself in case it turns out Apple is smarter than me.

The thing I think we could see tomorrow that will scratch many people's itch for an iPod-with-data is a pay-as-you-go iPhone. In fact, here in Europe we've been able to get the last few iPhones on a no-contract basis (at a hefty upfront premium, of course) so this wouldn't be a radical shift in policy for Apple. We can also get tariffs with tiny numbers of voice minutes but generous data allowances, which is a basically a back door to the same end-point -- a no-contract iPhone that the user can move between cheap plans on different operators as easy as swapping a SIM card. But, please: no-one tell the carriers, or they'll catch on and stop offering these plans! In any event, this would be a significant change on the part of the US carriers, so we'll see if AT&T and Verizon can ante up and offer some appropriate plans -- and Apple can ship a "world phone" handset that works on all the US networks.

Why the iPod touch 3G makes no sense originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The long-awaited Boxee for iPad app went live yesterday and quickly rose to the #13th most popular free app for iPad. Simultaneously, Boxee released a new firmware version for the Boxee Box set-top media player, v1.2, with some new Apple-friendly features like AirPlay and AFP support. We've gone hands-on with all the new functions.

Airplay for the Boxee Box

Probably the biggest news for me isn't the iPad app at all -- it's Airplay support for the Boxee Box. This is something I've been hoping for ever since our own Erica Sadun started to help reverse engineer the AirPlay protocol, eventually leading to her AirPlay receiver software for OS X BananaTV.

You need to enable AirPlay first, as it's an "experimental" feature. Turn on your Box, go to the Settings page, and navigate to Network > Servers and tick "Enable streaming from iOS devices". Immediately, "Boxee" should show up in your Airplay settings in compatible iOS apps.

In fairly brief testing, I received somewhat mixed results. Photos, Videos and YouTube worked fine sent from my iPad 1 and iPhone 4. Video playback was slightly laggy, but no more so than when using an AppleTV or any other AirPlay receiver. The Boxee remote is capable of basic transport control -- play/pause works with video content, as does the d-pad for fast forward and rewind. It doesn't, however, do next/last picture when the Box is showing photos, nor can you start or stop slideshows with the remote.

Sound was less successful. The native iPod app on both my iOS devices detected the Boxee Box, but I had several instances where the stream got "lost" -- the device thought it was sending it to the Boxee but no sound came out. I also had one crash which required me to hard-reset the Boxee. On the other hand, when it did work it worked well -- and in a neat touch, the Boxee activates its sound visualizer during music playback to give you something to look at. Spotify also didn't work at all, I couldn't convince it to make any noise. I had the same problem when trying to stream audio from iTunes 10.4 on my Mac to my Boxee Box.

As this option makes the Box appear to be a normal AirPlay client, all iOS apps that support AirPlay video and audio streaming should work with it, notwithstanding crashes on Boxee's end. Note that it also isn't listed as supporting the new iPad 2 mirroring mode in iOS 5, although we weren't able to test that. Again, however, this feature is clearly advertised as being experimental.

Streaming content from your network to the iPad

On to the iPad app itself now, then, and the first big feature is the ability to stream arbitrary audio and video content within your network to the app. My first big disappointment: this is really just a lukewarm rework of Air Video. Like all these streaming apps, the Boxee version needs an intermediary computer that consumes the video content and converts it into an iPad-friendly video stream. I had initially hoped that the Boxee Box itself would be able to fill this role, so I wouldn't need to leave a computer switched on for it to work. No such luck in this release.

For the iPad app to work, then, the Boxee Media Manager (BMM) has to first be running on a Mac or PC on your network (minimum supported OSs are OS X 10.5 or Windows XP). Very similarly to how Air Video works, the BMM has a minimal UI that allows you to select which folders of content will be visible to the app. Switch to the iPad, and your content is there, presented in a reasonably attractive UI.

Now, there are downsides. Like all of these pieces of software, there's a quality drop from the conversion process. That process also creates lag -- it takes a few seconds after pressing Play before you see any video, for example, and trying to fast forward to a particularly point in the video rapidly becomes quite frustrating.

Compared to more established solution like Air Video the Boxee app has several other important drawbacks. It offers limited customisation, whereas Air Video lets you fine-tune the conversion process to trade off lag, quality, and network bandwidth. Even worse is the lack of support for not-on-local-network streaming. With Air Video, wherever you are in the world, you can enter a PIN into the app and all of your content will stream out of your home connection, across the internet, and down to your device. Boxee cannot do this. On the other hand, if you don't have pretty significant bandwidth both at home and wherever you are, this often ends up looking pretty ropey anyway so (at least for me) this isn't a killer feature.

Finally it's worth pointing out that the Boxee Media Manager app has no hardware acceleration so has to do all the video conversion heavy lifting on the CPU alone. This translates to a lot of heat, a lot of fan noise, and video playback that might be jerkier than it has to be if your Mac's CPU isn't particularly powerful.

Of course, Boxee is free, but then Air Video is only $3.

One last note: if you really, really like Inception, a trick presents itself: when playing back media, the Boxee player itself has AirPlay support. Which you can then direct to a Boxee Box for those dream-within-a-dream moments. Well, in theory; in practice, this just resulted in gray screens and lockups whenever I tried it. It's a silly thing to do so that doesn't strike me as a significant problem.

Social integration & Watch It Later

That's not the only trick up the Boxee app's sleeve, however. Boxee has long supported social integration to its server-side accounts, with two key features. These are visible as soon as you load the Boxee app.

Watch It Later is rather like Instapaper for video. You install a special bookmarklet in your web browser. Whenever you find yourself browsing to a video you don't have time to watch right now, click the bookmarklet. Next time you load the Boxee iPad app (or turn on your Boxee Box) all those videos will be arranged in order for you to catch up on.

The social integration is similar, but it's for videos other people post. You link your Boxee account to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Any video link that any of your friends post will be collated automatically and, again, presented for you to skim through and catch up on. If like me you often browse Twitter in quick bursts where you rarely have time to watch videos, but you never remember to go back and look them up later, this can be a really useful feature.

Looking to the future

I chatted with Andrew Kippen, Boxee's vice president of marketing, as I was composing this review. I asked him how he thought the launch had gone and what Boxee's short- and longer-term plans were to develop the software.

TUAW: Any thoughts on how the launch of the app has gone? Was it well received?
AK: Really well received. We're #13 on the App Store for Top Free Apps -- not bad for 24 hours.

TUAW: Any immediate plans for bugfixes or changes?
AK: I think we'd like to smooth out a few things in the first time experience and we're listening to forums/Facebook/Twitter/Email to hear how things are going for people -- mostly all positive, but we're hoping to squash any bugs that come up quickly.

TUAW: Why can't Boxee Media Manager run on the Box itself -- am I right in thinking there's not enough CPU grunt?
AK: It's something we're going to work on. We wanted to get it out there for Windows and OS X, before we baked it into the box. Always good to get first reactions so second effort has everything people want.

TUAW: I've seen some crashes using the AirPlay streaming (which is perfectly understandable, I know you've worked to a reverse engineered standard and it's clearly marked as experimental) -- will this improve in future releases?
AK: Yep -- obviously there's only so much we can test with early access users (~200) vs. the tens of thousands that are using the app now.

TUAW: Will Boxee Media Manager be getting GPU acceleration anytime soon? It runs my poor MacBook Pro pretty ragged right now!
AK: It's something we want to support. Just working to find time & resources to make it happen.

TUAW: Longer term, where is the app going? Are you going to add the plethora of options contained in Air Video, for example? Any plans to support outside-the-local-network streaming?
AK: Lots of plans for where we can go, but you'll have to stay tuned for that.

The bottom line

In this launch, Boxee has presented us with some experimental-but-cool stuff (AirPlay), some genuinely neat new stuff (social features in the Boxee iPad app), and some promising-but-needs-work stuff (media streaming to the iPad). In any event the app and the Media Manager software are both free, so you've nothing to lose by giving it a go.

Gallery: Boxee Box v1.2 and Boxee for iPad: hands on

Hands on with Boxee for iPad and Boxee Box v1.2 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The appearance of the MacDefender trojan back in May provoked a lot of back-and-forth between various tech writers (including your humble correspondent). Was this a sign that the good times were ending? That the Mac platform would come under ever-fiercer attack from malware authors? That soon we'd all be running resource-sucking virus scanners and a-fearing every link we clicked?

Well, in a word: no. It wasn't. And I've got some science to prove it.

A primer on "malware definitions"

If you're unfamiliar with the concepts at work here, it'll help to understand my results if you know exactly what a "malware signature" is. The primary way a malware scanner works is to examine files on your computer -- sometimes all files (the so-called "deep scan" approach, which usually takes hours) and sometimes only specific files that are known to be targeted by viruses, trojans, and other malware. Scanners also usually stay running in the background and scan each and every file you open and program you run right as they load, as an extra level of always-on protection. This last mode is what often causes computers to feel sluggish after you install anti-malware software.

So what does this "scan" thing entail, exactly? Glossing over a lot of technical details, the scanner will run the file it is examining through a hash function of some kind. This is a sort of ultra-strong fingerprinting algorithm that creates a unique identifier for the file (a 'hash') that can definitively match data or code segments. The malware definitions list is a catalog of hashes that have been generated from known malicious files; if a file on your system matches one in the list, then boom, You've Got Malware.

An example of XProtect's signatures for MacDefender.

For this setup to have any value at all, it's crucial that the definitions list is kept up-to-date. Things can move fast in the malware world; new threats emerge suddenly and (even more insidiously) malware authors tweak their existing programs to have a different signature, making them undetectable by the scanner. These "variants," as they are called, result in a rapid cat-and-mouse game between developers of malware software and developers of malware scanners.

This is what happened to Apple back in early June. The MacDefender trojan prompted Apple to start aggressively pushing out updates to its own in-house malware scanner, XProtect. This, in turn, prompted hackers to start releasing new variants of MacDefender that bypassed the new check, then another new check from Apple, another new version of MacDefender, and so on. Many commentators wrote long posts with varying degrees of pessimism and optimism about how this would end. Would the hackers win and Apple be overwhelmed, or would they be defeated by Apple's vigilance?

My methodology

Two months ago, I tried to come up with a way that we could answer that question definitively.

I wrote a small script to download Apple's malware definitions file every hour and permanently store each unique version. I started this script running on June 2nd, capturing version 2 of the file; since then there have been 22 further versions, each adding new malware definition signatures to the scanner. I now have all that data at my fingertips.

Before I show you what I've discovered, let's consider what this script hasn't taken into account. It's not really measuring how much malware exists for the Mac, of course. It's measuring how much malware Apple has identified -- whether MacDefender related or not (there is other malware listed in the file, like OSX.HellRTS.) However, I think that's not too useless a metric: we know that Apple put considerable effort into staying on top of the situation with MacDefender, sometimes releasing updates to the definitions file just hours apart. We can also assume that Apple, with its world-wide support staff, can do a better job than anyone else at keeping its ear to the ground for new threats. It seems reasonable to assume that the state of that XProtect definition file is a good proxy for the state of Mac malware in general.

Results

The following and graph shows the number of unique malware variants listed in the file as each new version was released.

There are two occurrences where the graph goes down, i.e. a new version of the file lists fewer definitions than the older version. This happened when Apple found two new variants, wrote signatures for them both, then later found a single signature that covered both variants. My script records this as a variant "disappearing" because there are fewer signatures overall. It doesn't mean that protection actually decreased.

Analysis

For a period of several weeks, we see the rapid cat-and-mouse game predicted by people like Ed Bott. Variants of MacDefender appear at the rate of about one a day, and we see a corresponding update of the XProtect definitions file once or even twice a day also. This keeps going until we reach the 21st version of the definitions file, which detects 15 distinct variants of MacDefender (labelled OSX.MacDefender.A through to OSX.MacDefender.O) using 12 different detection signatures.

And then... nothing. No new updates to the file since the 23rd of June.

There are two ways to look at this. It's possible that the malware kept coming, and Apple either failed to notice it, or just gave up trying to keep up. If that were true, though, we'd expect to still be hearing about it, both in the general press and from TUAW's contacts throughout the Mac ecosystem of developers and support staff. But we've heard nothing.

The other option, then, is that the malware has stopped evolving. The MacDefender authors gave up trying to issue new variants, and nobody else has (so far) taken their place. The Mac malware scene is... well, if not dead, then asleep. Stunned. Pining for the fjords.

I stand by my earlier cautionary note. There's no magical protection against malware in OS X -- there's solid engineering, but that's not infallible. All computer users, regardless of OS, should remain vigilant: don't run software from untrusted sources, don't fall for web browser popups screaming that you have viruses, think twice before entering your iTunes or online banking or email password into an unfamiliar website.

Still, for now, I think Mac users who were worried about MacDefender can partly relax. The wolf is still not at our door.

Footnote: regarding Lion's version of XProtect

The recent release of Mac OS X 10.7, Lion, appears to have brought some changes to XProtect as well as overall enhancements to OS security. The URL that is probed for new malware definitions has moved (from here in Snow Leopard to here in Lion) and the file itself contains quite different signatures -- there are signatures in each version of the file that do not appear in the other. Furthermore, although the Snow Leopard version lists MacDefender.A through to .O (15 variants in all), the Lion version only lists .A and .B. The .B definition list, however, contains many more signatures. It doesn't necessarily mean that XProtect doesn't detect as much malware as it did before.

My guess would be that the new OS has brought with it internal modifications to how XProtect works that has caused these changes. Again, however, I do not feel that this invalidates my results. Snow Leopard remains a supported OS that will still have a large install base for some time to come, and (we can assume) Apple will continue to release security updates for it in as timely a manner as it ever did -- including XProtect updates.

Mac malware 'explosion' missing in action originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Suppose you're at at your desk with a MacBook and an iPhone. You want to check cinema screening times at your local multiplex and the weather forecast so you'll know if you'll need a jacket or not. Which device do you reach for?

If you choose the MacBook, you'll need to go to a cinema listings service and enter your zip code to find your multiplex, then repeat the process on a weather tracking site (unless your Dashboard already includes appropriate widgets for that data, in which case it's one keystroke away). On the iPhone, you just load a couple of apps, which know where you are so can show you the local data automatically.

This exact scenario happened to me earlier, and I surprised myself by reflexively reaching for the iPhone, without thinking. Somewhere along the way it started to feel like the logical device to use for this sort of thing.

Now, this is a highly trivial example. Safari and Firefox on the MacBook can do location sensing via Wifi positioning, for example (although few websites support this), and sites can also try and guess your location based on your IP address (although I've found that to be occasionally quite inaccurate). Local information services like cinema listings will also typically offer to store your location for future use, so the search becomes a one-time thing. Stick with me, though; I'm going somewhere with this.

Think about the bigger picture. Go back a few years, and computers typically had just two input devices: a keyboard and a mouse. Some of them would also have a webcam and a scanner, but you'd only be using those occasionally and for well-defined specific tasks (mostly "Skype" and "scanning", respectively.)

Now think about the input methods on an iPhone 4. The keyboard and mouse have been replaced by a touchscreen, of course. You've got front and back cameras too, similarly to the scanner and webcam. But wait! There's more!

• It has a GPS chip, of course, so it can tell where it is (bolstered with some clever battery-saving aGPS too.)
• It has a magnetometer-based compass, so it can tell which way it's pointing (and sense any magnetic fields.)
• It has a gyroscope and acceleration meters, so it can tell when you move it -- and in which direction, how far, and how fast.
• It has an ambient light sensor to adjust screen brightness according to your surroundings.
• It has two microphones -- one for your voice, and one purely for background sounds for noise-cancellation purposes.
• It has an orientation sensor so it knows which way up it is.

And that's just the iPhone itself, before we consider additional hardware like Nike+. When compared to almost all the proceeding technology in the thirty-something years since the Apple II kicked off the personal computer revolution, the iPhone has an extraordinary number of ways to perceive the world around itself. In turn, this leads to huge possibilities for apps in the future that can do a much better idea of anticipating our needs based on our surroundings and, in turn, feel far more personal than the "personal computer" ever did.

Perhaps the simplest examples are apps that use device rotation to change the entire UI to something different. The iPod app, for example, switches between CoverFlow selection and the more traditional UI. Calvetica shows day and month views in portrait and week planners in landscape mode. WeightBot allows daily weight entry in portrait view, then goes one stage further -- with a summary view when you turn the device counter-clockwise and a graph of your weight loss (or, in my case, lack of weight loss) when you turn it to landscape clockwise. Another simple example is Instapaper and its option to change to a muted white-on-black color scheme when your phone's local clock indicates it's night-time.

More sophisticated is the use of the various motion sensing circuitry for games like Rage, which allow players to aim their guns in the game by moving their devices around. Spin the same tech another way and you get 3D panorama photography apps like 360 Panoroma. Here, you move and tilt your phone in a complete circle and the app uses the camera to build a complete image of your surroundings -- and then also uses the same tilt sensing to let you view the photos, panning the picture as you pivot on the spot.

Take this idea to the next level and you get augmented reality, which is probably the poster child for sensor rich computing at the moment. Combine the motion tracking with the camera feed and, as the user waves their phone around, show them the camera view but with extra bits added. Star Wars Trench Run (sadly no longer available in iTunes) superimposes TIE Fighters on whatever you are looking at and allows you to shoot them down. Less frivolously, the AR mode in the Yelp app is a very intuitive way to get your bearings when navigating to a restaurant.

Yelp is far from alone. There are lots of augmented reality apps for the iPhone that do all sorts of things -- translate foreign languages, give metadata on live events like gigs, even create floorplans of your house.

This trend isn't limited to smartphones either. Hasselbad's H4D-200MS digital medium format camera has a clever new feature called True Focus. The photographer sets a focus point, perhaps a model's eye, and then software in the camera watches the scene. As the photographer moves the camera around to change the composition, motion sensors in the camera body feed back to the software which adjusts the focus setting to compensate, keeping that point in perfect focus. By using the motion sensors the camera can do a better job of staying on-target than traditional autofocus subject tracking.

But what about the future? I think we've barely scratched the surface of the possibilities. However, one key drawback with iOS is the relatively limited multitasking means some of the more wacky ideas of third party devs aren't possible.

For example, consider the rather dizzying possibilities of Tasker, an Android app that can engage a childlock for all apps except a few games when you are at home and the time is before 9pm. Or sense when you are at your parents' house in the boondocks and disable 3G altogether, so your phone doesn't hammer its battery flat trying to hang on to weak signal. Or set the phone to mute all notification sounds between 11pm and 7am, except for calls from numbers in your phonebook. Or any one of a million other possibilities, all of them ways to leverage your phone's knowledge of its surroundings to make it adapt to you, rather than the other way around.

Another interesting idea was suggested by Dan Frakes, MacWorld's senior editor: put an unlock code on your iPhone that is automatically disabled when you are at home. It turns out this is possible today for jailbroken iPhones with CleverPin, but of course this sort of deep system modification isn't possible without jailbreak tools.

We can only hope that Apple will do more to embrace the possibilities of sensor rich computing in future iOS versions and give developers more flexibility to access these features. We've all seen how iOS 5's Reminders app offers location-aware popups (e.g. "remind me to put my lunch in the fridge when I arrive at the office"), and we know Apple is patenting location-aware traffic warnings. It would be very nice for all of us if Apple would open this up to third party developers, so they could set an app up to perform some pre-arranged task like a notification alert when the phone is next in a certain location.

I hope to see something like this in future iOS versions, because I think there's still a lot of ideas that no one has had yet. What awesome uses of sensor-rich computing do you like in your apps, and what would you like to see in the future?

Sensor-rich computing: the quiet revolution that started in your pocket originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 12:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I have a longstanding audio quality problem with iTunes -- but iTunes Match will finally resolve it for me. Hurray! Hopefully this post will help others in the same situation.

It all starts with the sad fact that I'm a perfectionist idiot about audio quality, so I still buy CDs and rip them myself using Apple's lossless codec -- I can't quite bring myself to (usually) pay more on iTunes for a lower quality file. The lossless codec achieves about 50% compression, yielding files about three times larger than the iTunes Plus 256-kbps AAC setting that most people rip in and the iTunes Store uses. It is, however, a complete bit-for-bit copy of the original CD.

Note that its not so much that I can hear the difference; more that I don't drive myself mad wondering if I can. I have occasionally, but admittedly not often, picked up the odd rough-sounding cymbal splash in iTunes Plus files when listening on decent headphones; but I am by no means one of those audiophiles who believes in spending thousands on speaker cables and $2000 on a power cord that defies the laws of physics. Still, though, by using only Apple lossless audio codec (ALAC), I know that I can avoid even thinking about sound quality issues. That's the appeal for me.

Even if you're unconvinced by my reasoning here (and I admit it has more to do with my own eccentricities than strict logic), there's another reason to prefer ALAC format ripping -- down the road, if I have to change to alternative music formats, I won't need to rip the CDs again. I can turn the ALAC files back into pure WAV format and then transform them into any other format without any further loss of quality. I do this occasionally when I want to put more music on the USB stick that I keep plugged into my car radio, which will play mp3 and WMA files but not AAC. In contrast, running a lossy encoded format file like AAC through the encoding process to another one like mp3 results in a really muddy, horrible sounding file.

However, whilst ALAC is fine for use on my Mac where disk space is cheap and for streaming around my house's Ethernet network where bandwidth is plentiful, it's not really much use for syncing to my iPhone, because it's too darn big. I'd prefer to compromise quality a little on the iPhone in order to fit a decent amount music in and because I mostly listen to the iPhone when walking the dogs or in my noisy day-job office, neither of which demand the highest fidelity.

Sadly, iTunes really doesn't want to work with me. It has the "convert higher bitrates" option, which is teasingly close to what I want, but it's irritatingly locked to only output 128 kbit/sec AAC. That really is too low -- I can definitely hear annoying compression artifacts. So, for a long time, I've been maintaining two iTunes libraries. One is full of ALAC and I use it for playback in the house; the other is full of AAC and I use it to sync my iPhone with. Hence, when I rip a CD, I have to rip it twice (or do a second pass of conversion from the ALAC files to AAC), and if any track names, album art, or other metadata need adjusting, I need to adjust it twice. This is tedious and annoying.

Enter iTunes Match, which might just solve this problem for me at a stroke. I'm hoping it will allow me to rip once as an ALAC file, and upload that converted file to iCloud. Apple says that:

[A]ll the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality -- even if your original copy was of lower quality.

which implies to me that even ALAC files going in come out at the lower quality 256 kbit/sec setting. I wouldn't even need to cable my iPhone to iTunes to get new music any more, let alone rip CDs twice or juggle multiple iTunes libraries. For $25 a year, I'm in, although it seems that we'll be waiting until 2012 to get iTunes Match in the UK.

Although this problem is fairly obscure, I have seen others people post about this problem from time to time (one, two, and many of the comments below). I hope this post will reach those folk and prompt them to look at this little side-effect of iTunes Match more closely.

How iTunes Match solves my obscure downsampling problem originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 11 Jun 2011 12:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

What? Another iOS photo sharing app? No, wait, keep reading! The just-released Piictu app (official site, iTunes) has some new tricks to show you.

Piictu's big idea is to treat the photos you post not as the traditional timeline view we associate with blogs and apps like Instagram, but rather as a series of conversations, each on a certain theme.

Suppose I post a picture of my dogs, Daisy and Jake. Any of my friends who see that -- or anyone on the service as a whole -- can then post a picture reply to that photo, perhaps of their own dogs, or some other pet. Someone else can post another reply, and so on. Piictu groups responses together to encourage an ongoing conversation.

The power of this simple idea is perhaps best demonstrated by this photo thread pictured in the second half of this post, where an impromptu multiplayer game of tic-tac-toe took place between several of Piictu's beta testers.

Continue reading Piictu puts the fun into iOS picture sharing

Piictu puts the fun into iOS picture sharing originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In accordance with Betteridge's Law of Headlines, I believe the answer is a resounding "no."

The unusually virulent meme quickly spread around the Mac blogging world that iMessage will kill SMS as we know it and, going one stage further, to characterize iMessage as "an attack" on the carriers. John Gruber of Daring Fireball went so far as to say he would "cancel my SMS plan as soon as this ships."

But hold on there a second. Is it really that simple?

Continue reading Will iMessage kill wireless carriers' SMS revenues?

Will iMessage kill wireless carriers' SMS revenues? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Short of time? Intimidated by a huge sprawl of WWDC news? Here are the most important things for iPhone users to know about what changes we'll be seeing in the fall when iOS 5 is available for our phones.

1. iCloud

Probably the biggest change to how we'll use our iOS devices going forward, iCloud is the glue that binds it all together. It has a number of big features of its own: buy music on your iPhone and copies of the same songs will appear on your Mac and iPad, for example. Work on a Pages document on your Mac, and the same file will be available on the iPhone. iCloud also shows a simple list of all the apps and music you've purchased, so you can easily re-download things you've already bought but deleted.

iCloud also plays an important supporting role in many of the other features iOS 5 brings to the table -- I'll highlight them as we go through the following sections.

2. PC free

No more cables! With iOS 5, your iPhone will be able to sync your iTunes content over your Wi-Fi network and download new iOS updates on its own without having to connect it to iTunes first. Plus, iCloud will automatically back up important content on your iPhone -- such as game saves and photos -- once per day. When you get a new phone, a quick sign-in with your iTunes account will have it automatically downloading the last backup. Now, more than ever, the iPhone can claim to be a post-PC device.

Continue reading Seven things iPhone users should know about today's announcment

Seven things iPhone users should know about today's announcment originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Jun 2011 17:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Last week saw a major new product announcement from Google: the new "Google Wallet" will allow people with compatible mobile phones to use them to pay for goods and services in shops with a simple wave of their hand. This follows a number of in/out/in/out/shake it all about rumors that this "NFC" stuff might be included in the next iPhone. So what is NFC and why should you care? Sit back, grab a cup of coffee, and I'll explain.

Continue reading What Google and Mastercard's new mobile payment system could mean for iOS users

What Google and Mastercard's new mobile payment system could mean for iOS users originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 30 May 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Love Apple gear? Like math? TUAW's Doing the Math series examines the numbers and the science that lie behind the hardware.

The contentious subject of Mac security has been back in the news in recent weeks following the emergence of a fake antivirus package called MacDefender (also known as Mac Security and Mac Protector) that managed to steal a number of users' credit card details, and a new piece of "crimeware" called Weyland-Yutani BOT which allows non-technical hackers to easily create password grabbing webpages that specifically target Mac browsers.

This prompted a fresh round of "the Mac is under attack! Malware will drown us all! Exclamation!" blog posts, followed by the usual backlash against them. On the alarmist side, Ed Bott wrote "Coming soon to a Mac near you: serious malware", predicting doom, gloom, and dogs and cats living together.

The case for the defence was eloquently made in an article entitled "Wolf!" by Mac uber-blogger John Gruber where he simply collected assorted "Mac malware is inevitable" quotes from prominent analysts... going back to 2004, and all clearly unfulfilled in the sense of widespread attacks or exploits in the wild. Bott responded with a thoughtful post where he made a more reasoned case that malware for Macs really is inevitable in the long run, regardless of how inaccurate previous predictions have been.

So who's right, and who's wrong? Is it time to run to the hills or are people just sounding the gong of panic unnecessarily? In this post I'm going to try and dive a little deeper into the issues surrounding Mac malware, hypothetical and real, and separate the headlines from the facts.

Continue reading Malware, Macs, and crying wolf: Doing the math

Malware, Macs, and crying wolf: Doing the math originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 14 May 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Back in February, Apple began enforcing App Store rules regarding requiring in-app purchases of e-books in addition having options outside the app. Sadly, today that has caused the people behind iFlowReader to shutter their business because "Apple is giving us the boot by making it financially impossible for us to survive." Users of the e-book reader app are being warned to back up their data carefully, or they might lose access to the content they have purchased through it.

Previously, apps like iFlow Reader were able to sell content for the app only via non-App Store purchases. For example, with Amazon's Kindle app, you can use the Mobile Safari web browser to purchase books via your Amazon account. Apple doesn't take its usual 30% cut of these transactions. The new rules mean that developers wouldn't be allowed to do this. All such business would have to go via the in-app purchase API, using the user's iTunes account and with Apple taking 30% of the money. Existing apps apparently were given until the end of June to change how they work or face removal from the store.

UPDATE: Companies are not required to only offer in-app purchasing, but they are required to offer it as an option and, according to section 11.13 of the T&C, must price the in-app purchase the same as or lower than purchases made outside the app. In effect, this does mean that most purchases are likely to move to the in-app model and incur the 30% surcharge. Customers will presumably prefer to carry out the smallest number of steps to make the purchase, which is the in-app model.

I speculated in February that Apple's change could cause some popular apps to flee the store. We know that Sony's Reader app was rejected, that Readability had to shelve its native app (it later released a web app) and that TinyGrab also abandoned plans for an iOS app.

Continue reading iFlow Reader calls it quits, abandons App Store

iFlow Reader calls it quits, abandons App Store originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 11 May 2011 06:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Remember when Google said it wouldn't release the source code to Android 3.0 ("Honeycomb") because it "wasn't ready"? Remember the snarky remarks from Apple bloggers about how it was rushed to market and the definition of "open"? And the hopefully thoughtful piece I wrote about what this might mean about what happens next?

Now imagine if it was Apple stalling on releasing source code that it had promised the open-source community. Surprise! It was.

Brian Proffitt wrote a post for IT World, published earlier today, detailing how Apple is refusing to meet its obligations by failing to promptly release the source code to the latest version of WebKit, which makes up most of the guts of the Safari web browser in both mobile and non-mobile flavors. While competent interpretations may differ, most FOSS folk agree that the LGPL license involved requires a simultaneous release of binary and source code.

Eerily, just as Proffitt brought light to bear on the issue, Apple's opensource site released the source for projects included in iOS 4.3.3 (thanks to reader Jan for the heads-up). This code release, while certainly welcome, comes 60 days after iOS 4.3 first became available for download from Apple's consumer-facing servers; this timeline cannot possibly be reconciled with any reasonable definition of 'simultaneous,' unless Apple is in possession of a TARDIS.

Apple's sluggish code drop, in a couple of ways, is notably worse than Google's seemingly similar reticence.

Continue reading Apple releases iOS 4.3.3 WebKit source, but stretches the spirit of the LGPL

Apple releases iOS 4.3.3 WebKit source, but stretches the spirit of the LGPL originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 09 May 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Back in the mists of history -- probably the late '90s or early '00s -- I remember reading a blog post. I'm afraid I have been unable to find it again, so you'll have to take my reminiscing on faith (but please leave a comment if you know what I'm talking about). This post dissected and analyzed a collection of freshly granted IBM patents which, taken together, painted a picture of the future of personal computing that has stayed with me ever since.

In essence, they called for each person to be carrying around a personal "computing core" -- a device we'd recognize today as a modern smartphone, although it was close to science fiction back then -- that could be docked into a variety of shells to become other devices, such as a laptop or a desktop. While Apple's PowerBook Duo subnotebooks were designed to transform into desktop computers when docked with their base units, they didn't quite meet the pocketable part of the 'computing core' definition.

I was reminded of this recently when reading Anandtech's review of the clumsily-named Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101. If you're unfamiliar with it, the Eee Pad looks, at first glance, like Yet Another Identikit Android Tablet, as it has very similar specs to the rest of them -- Android Honeycomb software, dual core NVidia Tegra 2 system-on-a-chip processor, 1 GB RAM and so forth.

The Asus, however, has two key things in its favor. Firstly, for the baseline Wi-Fi/16 GB configuration, it's $100 cheaper than the iPad. Secondly, it works with a $150 laptop dock accessory that turns it into a netbook.

Continue reading Docks, transformers, computing cores and taking it all with you

Docks, transformers, computing cores and taking it all with you originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 05 May 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

MacStories points out there is a small, but perhaps important, difference in the "SSD+HDD" option on the new iMacs. You used to simply get two drives you had to manage separately, as in the screenshot here taken from my MacBook Pro (in which I long ago swapped the optical drive for an SSD). For the new models though, Apple now specifically states: "if you configure your iMac with both the solid-state drive and a Serial ATA hard drive, it will come preformatted with Mac OS X and all your applications on the solid-state drive. Then you can use the hard drive for videos, photos, and other files."

This may suggest a change from the older models, where the SSD came with OS X installed on it, but the HDD was blank. As OS X helpfully stores various files under your /Users folder, this (by default) ended up on the SSD. Users had to take special action to put files on the HDD instead of the SSD. There's been some speculation that Apple would do something different in these new devices, perhaps by placing the OS on the SSD and mounting /Users on the HDD to try and give users the best of both worlds.

As someone who has a hybrid setup exactly like this today, it strikes me as a rather un-Apple solution because it's fiddly, complex, and it requires the user to stop and think on a regular basis. I use a 64 GB SSD as my boot volume and /Users/rich on the boot volume is a symlink (note: see update at the end of this post) onto the 500 GB HDD unit. My OS X install, my /Applications folder, and my Aperture library are all on the solid state drive; pretty much everything else, like my Aperture masters, iTunes library and so on are on the magnetic drive.

This isn't a bad compromise, but it's still hard to look after.

Continue reading New iMacs and HDD+SSD configurations; how do they work?

New iMacs and HDD+SSD configurations; how do they work? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 04 May 2011 13:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Cast your minds back to the launch of the 27" iMac in mid-2009. One of the new features was Target Display Mode, which introduced the ability to use the iMac as a pure external monitor, bypassing the built-in computer entirely. This could be useful if you wanted to dock a laptop to a big screen temporarily -- or if you were worried that the substantial investment in a 27" screen would, in years to come, be hobbled by the aging CPU and GPU inside the iMac. The theory was that you could eventually just stop using everything but the display.

However, Apple has quietly dropped substantially modified the feature on the latest iMacs, which were announced today. For one, the Apple knowledgebase article describing the feature specifically mentions it is for "iMac (27-inch, Mid 2010), iMac (27-inch, Late 2009)," excluding the newest model. For two, while this archive of the old model's tech specs page states "27-inch models also support input from external DisplayPort sources," there is no such mention on the updated page for today's model.

UPDATE: MacRumors spoke with an Apple rep who said the feature is still supported on the new models (through the Thunderbolt ports), despite not being mentioned on the tech specs page.

UPDATE 2: Macworld has confirmation from Apple that the new iMacs will support Target Display Mode, but only when the device they are connected to is also a Thunderbolt-equipped Mac; the trick won't work with older mini DisplayPort models.

So, a new MacBook Pro connected to a new iMac will work, but older MacBook Pros will not, and a current MacBook Air won't work either. This also means the popular Kanex adaptors (which convert HDMI signals to mini DisplayPort ones, letting users plug things like game consoles into their iMacs) probably won't work with the new iMacs -- we've contacted Kanex to ask for confirmation.

This change is probably tied to the mini DisplayPort being replaced by two Thunderbolt ports. Whatever clever hack Apple did to make the mini DisplayPort connection bi-directional in the earlier iMacs is presumably difficult or impossible to replicate through Thunderbolt, as it has less control over the protocol (remember that Thunderbolt is an Intel design, and uses a special Intel communications chip).

UPDATE 3: Consider that, for legacy mini-DisplayPort devices to work, the Thunderbolt interface would need to consume a raw display signal -- not one wrapped up in the clever Thunderbolt protocol (note, PDF link), which combines PCIe and DisplayPort data into a single stream. This is probably why the new Thunderbolt ports cannot maintain backwards compatibility with older devices. However, when the device sending the signal also has Thunderbolt, they can negotiate a way to send the signal that the receiver can understand.

What do you think, readers -- was Target Display Mode always a pointless curiosity, or do you think this is a loss for the iMac's feature set? Has anyone out there used Target Display Mode in anger?

Target Display Mode on new iMacs limited to Thunderbolt sources (updated) originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 03 May 2011 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Update 2: Apple has issued an official response.

Update: This story has generated followups from Thomas Ricker at Engadget, David Pogue, Andy Ihnatko and Dan Moren at Macworld. Researcher Alex Levinson points out that despite the Guardian's positioning of the location data as a shocking revelation, this data stash was well-known to forensics experts for some time (it's even mentioned in Levinson's book on iOS forensic analysis); as we noted below, analyst Christopher Vance had written about it in 2010 as well.

All concerned also note that while the location data is cached on your phone and on your computer, there is absolutely no evidence that Apple or your cell carrier are accessing that file to track you over time (although it's likely that AT&T or Verizon know your location anyway, since your phone registers itself with cell towers as you roam). That doesn't mean Apple is off the hook, by any means: US Senator Al Franken has written to Steve Jobs looking for answers about how this data is gathered, what it's used for and why it isn't encrypted.

--

The Guardian reports that independent researchers Pete Warden, a former Apple employee, and Alasdair Allan, a data visualisation scientist, announced today at Where 2.0 that they've explored a file hidden inside iOS backups which appears to track the location of the device going back as far as the installation of iOS4. [The first indications of location data in this file were actually brought up some time ago, but with substantially less fanfare. -Ed.]

The above map shows data taken from a test iPhone, and shows a detailed history of the phone's movements around the south of England. Warden and Allan have put up a page with a FAQ discussing their findings and an Open Source software tool you can run on your own backups to see what you iPhone knows about you. They've also published a video demonstrating the problem.

Particularly worrying is that this file is unencrypted on the device (and on your Mac or PC, unless you encrypt your iTunes backups) and so easily accessible by anyone with access to your computer's iTunes backups folder or with jailbreak access to your device. Because of the way iTunes handles backup-and-restore, the data will even automatically persist across devices if you replace your iPhone.

Continue reading Your iPhone is silently and constantly logging your location [updated]

Your iPhone is silently and constantly logging your location [updated] originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 20 Apr 2011 10:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Update: Dropbox has sent us a response to the issues raised in this article; it is reproduced in full at the end of this post.

Popular cloud file syncing service Dropbox, much beloved by TUAW, has been in the news lately. On the one hand, it announced it had hit a new high of 25 million users, which is a number that is both pleasingly big and pleasingly round. On the other hand, it has been the target of some strongly worded criticism for its security features -- or, more accurately, problems with them.

The most recent of these criticisms arose from an update to the Dropbox Terms of Service to state that if the government asks, it will hand over your files:

As set forth in our privacy policy, and in compliance with United States law, Dropbox cooperates with United States law enforcement when it receives valid legal process, which may require Dropbox to provide the contents of your private Dropbox. In these cases, Dropbox will remove Dropbox's encryption from the files before providing them to law enforcement.

This isn't terribly surprising, although on first glance it might sound awful. Consider the alternatives. If Dropbox receives a legally binding subpoena court order (thanks for the correction, JBB) in a criminal case demanding the release of data, what else could anyone expect it to do except hand the data over, right?

Continue reading Dropbox under fire for security concerns (updated)

Dropbox under fire for security concerns (updated) originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 19 Apr 2011 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

For such a seemingly simple concept, "open" sure is a contentious term these days.

I've previously written at length on TUAW about the topic of Android's openness and, semi-relatedly, the GNU Public License. Last week, news came that Google is making serious changes in how it manages the Android ecosystem, and those changes have led many commentators to conclude that Android's much-touted "open" nature is, and always has been, little better than a sham.

I believe, however, that there are genuine ways in which Android is more open than most operating systems, and that these differences could have surprising ramifications for what happens next as Google wrestles its partner OEMs for control. We may see an Amazon-branded version of Android that does not have Google's blessing, and with it, an Android fragmentation issue that makes dealing with the current ecosystem look like child's play.

Continue reading Is Android forked? Give Amazon a chance

Is Android forked? Give Amazon a chance originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Henry Blodget at Business Insider has posted about Comscore's latest smartphone market share survey: "Apple's share increased slightly, but is dead in the water and has now fallen way behind Android. Android now has a third of the US market (33%). RIM's share has plummeted to 29%. Apple is holding at 25%." The Android market share figure for the quarter before, Sep-Nov 2010, was just 25%, so it certainly shows a sharp increase.

Blodget's article is incredibly linkbaity from start to end, but the underlying Comscore data is interesting nevertheless. Is it true that "Apple fans should be scared to death," as Blodget surmises, though? His contention is that, with a higher (and growing) market share, app developers will soon come to prefer Android as their main platform and iOS will gradually whither away as it becomes more and more of an afterthought. Although not impossible, I'd suggest this is quite unlikely and (even if Blodget is correct and the mobile market will converge onto a single OS) it is far, far too soon to say which OS that will be.

Firstly, consider that despite Android's rising market share Apple owned 83% of all mobile transactions in 2010. This has led many to suggest that Android users simply don't like paying for apps, which might be true; there are many mid-range Android handsets marketed at cost-conscious consumers, whereas the iPhone is a resolutely expensive device. Google, as an advertising-driven firm, would also perhaps prefer to have an app store full of free apps that show its adverts, rather than one full of premium apps.

Continue reading "iPhone dead in water," claims Business Insider

"iPhone dead in water," claims Business Insider originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

For the last six years, global research firm TNS has been compiling extensive reports on the usage habits of mobile phone users. Today the company announced the release of its latest work, TNS Mobile Life 2011. Based on a staggering amount of effort -- 25,000 hours of interviews with over 34,000 respondents covering 43 countries -- there's a ton of interesting data here on all sorts of things wrapped up in some attractive Flash graphics to allow you to slice and dice the data. For example, the above graph shows how various phone use cases -- email, social networking, internet and so on -- varies by time of day across different countries.

The survey shows strong brand loyalty amongst both iOS and Android users, with 51 percent and 49 percent of respondents, respectively, "very likely" to stick with their current platform in the future. I suspect this is because of the lock-in effect of the two platforms' strong app store offerings. Once you've bought a few hundred apps through iTunes or the Android Market, you have a few hundred reasons not to want to switch platforms. Indeed, a quarter of all survey participants said that content and apps for their devices are a key part of choosing a platform.

For Windows and Symbian those customer loyalty numbers were only 30 percent and 31 percent, respectively. It might be that Nokia's deal with Microsoft to switch to Windows Phone 7 might not help it as much as it hopes, although it's likely that the relatively poor customer satisfaction in the Windows camp reflects more on previous versions of Windows Mobile (which, as an owner of one, I can confirm stink out loud) than they do on the shiny new WP7.

Looking to the future, the survey sees that as usage of SMS and still photography will reach market saturation, and customer purchasing decisions will be increasingly driven by advanced features, such as access to social networks, live TV viewing and photo and video uploading, particularly in emerging markets. Indeed, the survey paints a picture of a tremendous, untapped hunger for advanced smartphones in these emerging markets, which it defines as 24 countries including most of South America, most of Africa, China and India, amongst others.

There's far more data here than I can hope to cover in this post -- if (like me) you're a data nerd, I recommend you take a long look for yourself.

Mobile Life 2011 survey covers phone use habits and future trends originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Here in the UK, O2 was Apple's partner operator for several years, and it remains the default choice for a lot of us iPhone users. With the new emphasis on tethering in iOS 4.3 via Personal Hotspot, many of us O2 users (particularly those of us with Wi-Fi iPads) have been clamoring for better tethering plans (as Ben Sillis notes, O2 has recently fallen behind rival networks in terms of its value for money.)

Today, O2 is announcing new tariffs (note that in UK jargon we say "tariff" instead of "plan") across the board, for both its subsidized handset contracts and its SIM-only deals. The full details are here, but the important details for iPhone owners are:

• Tethering is now completely free. If you have a 1 GB data allocation, then it doesn't matter if you use that data on the phone or on a connected device -- it's all charged the same.
• Data allocations are now tiered separately to your base plan. 100 MB of data is £3/month, 500 MB is £6 and 1 GB is £10.
• The basic 300 min voice / unlimited SMS / 500 MB tariff is £37 per month with an 18 month subsidized handset deal. If you commit to a 24 month contract, you can deduct £5 per month. This used to cost £30.64 per month (Google Cache of the old page).
• The same tariff structure on a 1-month-notice SIM-only deal is £21.50 per month (previously, this was £20.43). If you commit to a 12 month contract, you get twice as many voice minutes.
• Upgrading customers can now choose 12 month contract lengths, meaning you can get each new iPhone release when it comes out. Previously, most people were on 18 month contracts, which didn't sync up very well with annual iPhone refreshes.

What do you think of the new plans, readers? Personally, I'm going to be calling them today to move my SIMplicity over to the new structure so that I can tether my iPad at will -- I might bump up to 1 GB per month of data, too.

Thanks to Jonny Riches for sending this in.

UK cell operator O2 changes tariffs, offers free tethering originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

If you follow our tech startup sister site TechCrunch, or if you've read any of the reports from the South by SouthWest (SXSW) conference this year, you've probably seen a lot of column inches given to current-media-darling "group messaging" apps. SXSW has a reasonable track record of predicting the Next Big Thing. It was where Twitter first came to many people's attention in 2007, for example, and it was an early success story for Foursquare in 2009, too.

My usual reaction to hype like this is to roll my eyes and avoid the apps in question altogether, although that might just be because I've never blagged tickets to SXSW. Eventually, though, TechCrunch's relentless enthusiasm wore me down, and I took a look at one of the commonly mentioned apps, Beluga. To my surprise, what I found was a slick, well-designed app that solved a communication problem I didn't know I had. That'll teach me to be cynical!

Before I explain what I liked about Beluga, an aside: there are a number of other significant group messaging apps, including GroupMe, Fast Society, Yobongo, the soon-to-relaunch Betwext Talk and the brand new, bought-by-Google Disco. However, international availability of these apps is spotty.

For example, at the time of writing, only Beluga and Yobongo were in the UK App Store -- this is probably because these apps incorporate free-to-the-user SMS features that are tricky to make work cheaply internationally. As I'm in the UK, this means I can't do a detailed review roundup of all the apps. Look for this in a future TUAW post by one of our American bloggers. I'll use Beluga as an example to demonstrate concepts that are common to all the group messaging apps.

Continue reading A primer on group messaging apps

A primer on group messaging apps originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Love Apple gear? Like math? TUAW's Doing the Math series examines the numbers and the science that lie behind the hardware.

One of the new features we first saw in the developer beta of Mac OS X Lion back in February is long-overdue in this correspondent's humble opinion: it finally supports TRIM on solid-state drives.

TRIM (which, despite the capital letters, isn't an acronym) is a way to speed up SSD access by performing important housekeeping tasks in the background or on file deletes, rather than leaving it until the user is writing data to the drive. Since then, TRIM has also appeared in 10.6.6 for new Macs with Apple-supplied SSDs only, and with third-party tools, it's now possible to get TRIM running on any SSD under 10.6.7.

This raises the question: what exactly is TRIM, and why does it matter? If you've been wondering what this seemingly arbitrary abbreviation is, and why it matters, then I'm here with my best Science Hat on to remove all that wonder (as we scientists so often do) and replace it with cold hard fact.

Continue reading Keeping SSDs in TRIM: doing the math

Keeping SSDs in TRIM: doing the math originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I cannot imagine using my iPad without a case. It's not that I'm paranoid about protecting it so much as I just find it very difficult to type on without some sort of prop. Perhaps how I use my iPad is unusual: I draft blog posts on it, use it to keep notes in meetings, and use it a lot in the kitchen for recipe display. Since I first bought the official Apple case mere days after getting the iPad, I haven't used my iPad naked for more than a few hours without missing the ability to stand it up.

The official case was (a rarity for Apple) both highly practical and incredibly ugly. The seam around the edge might have helped with impact absorption, but it also made the iPad feel like a cheap novelty. Over the last year of iPad ownership, I've looked at multiple options, but have never found one I really wanted -- mostly due to analysis paralysis, I suspect. I ended up sticking with the official case, as much as I disliked it.

As such, the new Smart Cover for the iPad 2 looked highly relevant to my interests, but after deliberation, I decided not to upgrade, so that wasn't an option for me. Then our sister site Engadget pointed out that the Smart Cover is remarkably similar to Incase's Convertible Magazine Jacket for iPads (Extra Capital Letters Unwieldy Name Edition). So, naturally, I ordered one immediately, and having used it non-stop for the last week, these are my thoughts.

Continue reading Incase Convertible Magazine Jacket for iPad review: Smart Cover without the iPad 2

Incase Convertible Magazine Jacket for iPad review: Smart Cover without the iPad 2 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 20 Mar 2011 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

AT&T is ruining a lot of people's days with a customer mailshot explaining that its "records show that you use [tethering] but are not subscribed to our tethering plan." iOS, of course, will disable the built-in tethering facility if you do not have an appropriate carrier plan.

There are a few jailbreak apps, the most popular of which is MyWi (previous TUAW coverage), that bypass the plan check and enable tethering independently. When you run MyWi or similar apps, your iPhone creates a wireless hotspot that allows you to connect other devices without the explicit permission of your carrier. Until now, people have assumed that AT&T either doesn't care or cannot determine that the traffic comes from a connected device rather than the iPhone itself. Clearly, those assumptions are incorrect.

OSXDaily.com has the full text of the letter. It goes on to state that users can either terminate their unauthorized tethering usage before March 27, or they will be automatically moved to AT&T's DataPro plan. DataPro includes tethering and doubles the data cap from 2 GB to 4 GB, but also costs an extra $20 per month compared to the normal smartphone data plan. Any customers on the grandfathered unlimited data plans from older iPhone plans would also lose that facility if they moved to DataPro. (Update: reworded this paragraph for clarity based on feedback from @GlennF and @Chartier; thanks guys!)

Continue reading AT&T aggressively moving against unauthorized tethering

AT&T aggressively moving against unauthorized tethering originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 18 Mar 2011 08:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Yesterday, VeriFone (a $4.2b company) launched a harsh public attack on upstart rival Square (a less-than-fifty-people, $37.5m in funding startup). You may remember Square from previous coverage on TUAW or its impressive advertising last year. So what's going on, exactly?

The basic gist of the Square service is simple. It sends you a free little reader doohicky that you plug into your iPhone or iPod touch's headphone/mic port, and you get an accompanying app for free from the App Store. When you want to charge money from someone's card, you swipe it, enter the amount, and they sign for the payment on your screen.

Square takes a transaction fee of a flat 2.75 percent for a swiped transaction (a little more if you manually key the card details in), but there are no other fees of any kind -- not on the hardware, nor is there a monthly service fee. There are also no credit checks or complicated paperwork to sign up for Square in the first place.

Continue reading VeriFone's FUD meets Square's QED

VeriFone's FUD meets Square's QED originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.