Jasonified.

The tech sites are rife again with stories about Apple planning to release a branded television set within the next 18 months.

I say If they do, it’ll mean the death of the Cinema Display.

Why?

Any Apple TV set would have to work with external devices to be at all useful. Most likely this would mean multiple HDMI inputs, possibly a DVI, maybe a Component/Scart interface (although the latter are unlikely I admit).

Hell, it may even have a Thunderbolt port.

Also, being Apple they’ll probably add USB ports for connecting external media, charging devices, a variation of iOS like we’ve seen on the Apple TV 2 hardware and all this with ethernet and/or wireless connectivity built in.

They might even throw in a FaceTime camera - makes sense to have teleconferences through your “tele” right?

Finally, if they want to compete with regular TVs then they’ll probably have to consider a built in digital tuner with (most likely) recording capabilities. You could use an external tuner but built-in would tie in nicely with iTunes/iOS etc.

So what’s the problem?

Price.

If the price of a full-blown TV is too HIGH then they are too close to the cost of a full-blown iMac. We’ve already seen stories of people buying iMacs instead of Cinema displays and using the target display mode to use it as a monitor! 

If the price is too LOW then why buy a 27” Cinema Display when the TV will most likely come in sizes upward of 27” AND will have connectivity to your computer?

Apple are unlikely to release a TV set without external connectivity that is designed NOT to allow you to connect your Mac to it. So here’s what they’d need to do :-

a) reduce the price of the Cinema display dramatically,

b) price the TV set between the Cinema display and a base iMac,

That’s a pretty big challenge.

My feeling is that if Apple release an Apple Television then it WILL replace the Cinema display and on that basis an Apple Television would mean the death of the Cinema Display.

Mobile developers who offer in-app upgrades are current facing a potential patent dispute (and licensing issue) with Lodsys, a group that is claiming patent infringement.

The specifics of the patent deal with in-app upgrades and applications that are downloaded with limited features and offer the ability to “upgrade” to the full version *within* the application.

This usually consists of hitting a button in the app that invokes a transaction via the iOS in-app purchase API and at this point features in the App are “unlocked”. In some instances this can mean downloading new content (such as new levels etc)

Developers who offer in-app upgrades and purchasing are clearly worried about this whole affair but there are a couple of options available to them which would avoid breaching this patent.

1. Separate applications. In essence a developer would create multiple versions of it’s application in the AppStore. Each app would have a separate ID and cost.

Users could be prompted to download the new app from the Appstore thus bypassing the in-app purchase.

The downside of this solution is it would clog the AppStore with multiple versions of the same app.

2. Mini-apps that “unlock” features in a main app. I haven’t checked this against the Apple developer agreement but basically this would work by having a main application which includes ALL the features people can purchase on it’s initial download.

The additional features are hidden and locked when the application is installed.

To “upgrade” users are directed to NEW, separate applications in the AppStore each of which would offer a particular upgrade.

Each “mini app” would be purchased as a NEW application install (thus bypassing the in-app upgrade patent) and when launched they would make an HTTP call to the main app (e.g mainappUID://<VALUE>) passing some sort of token across that would “unlock” the features of the main application. 

Obviously there could be some security issues here in encrypting the URL key to ensure it can’t be called manually from say Safari but technically this should be possible.

Hope this helps!

Rumors of Apple working on a game console have been around for a while - today I played on it and it’s amazing.

And what’s more you can own it today.

Apples game console consists of an iPad 2, HDMI adapter and a copy of Real Racing 2 HD, the first game to support the “console” configuration.

(More games are sure to follow)

The result when plugged into an HD TV is an experience that I can only describe as amazing and akin to playing on a “proper” console.

The iPad 2 outputs 1080p graphics to the TV whilst leaving menu options, race track info and stats on the iPad screen.

Oh and did I mention the iPad becomes the steering wheel?

With more games undoubtedly supporting this type of setup in future the Apple game console has well and truly landed.

Game on.

1. Apple introduce new content subscription policy for apps.

2. Tech news report that devs will have to give 30% to Apple for all in-app purchases

3. Devs have a “shit fit” and start dumping their in-dev apps saying they’ll go web app instead and Apple are money grabbing bastards.

4. Tech news reports dev discontent, publish open letters to Apple reaffirming they are bastards

5. More “experts” join the fray announcing their disappointment and how they predicted this 10 years ago.

6. The demise of The AppStore is reported as everyone will switch to Android or Web apps. Apple are confirmed as bastards.

7. Steve jobs clarifies for everyone who over reacted and didn’t read the new T&Cs properly:-

“We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps.”

1. Panic over

If like me you’ve been running Windows 7 under boot camp on a MacBook Pro you may have noticed a sound issue with the Cirrus chipset.

Basically, volume is significantly reduced from the speakers *unless* you switch on sound enhancements and “volume normalisation”. If you do this you get significantly louder sound coming from the speakers.

The issue with this fix is that audiodg.exe starts taking up CPU cycles

Cirrus have released updated drives that fix the issue and enable louder sound without having the enhancements enabled.

You can download them here

“One is how much we love our customers and how much we want to take care of them. We were stunned, upset, and embarrassed by the Consumer Reports stuff, but we didn’t know enough to be able to address it.

If we’d done this event a week and a half ago, we wouldn’t have had half the data we have today. We’re engineers, and we want to solve real, hard problems. I don’t think we could have done this faster…we’ve had cots in the labs, cars here all night.

We’ve been living here. But’s human nature to tear down successful people. I see it happening to Google, a great company. Haven’t we earned the credibility and trust that we’ll take care of our customers?

The reaction has been overblown, and we could use your help with this.”

Spot on. Now let’s move on.

eBoostr is a utility for Windows which was designed to bring the Readyboost feature of Vista to Windows XP and 2000. Readyboost is a technology that utilises the access speeds of USB flash memory to improve your system performance by caching data which can then be retrieved faster than a hard disk.

eBoostr has some significant advantages over Readyboost in that you can control more devices, you can specifically “tune” your cache by prioritising the applications and data to store and the cache is retained on reboot meaning that boot up times can be significantly improved.

This is all good but eBoostr comes with another benefit if you’re someone like me that uses Virtual Machine software like VMware and Parallels to run Windows under Mac OSX.

Typically USB drives running through Virtual Machine software like Parallels doesn’t pass through the full performance of the USB drive to the virtual machine which means whilst eBoostr can work with your USB devices you can gain a performance increase of around 10%, sometimes none and *sometimes* it’ll degrade performance. This is understandable since you’re access the device *through* a virtualised operating system.

One neat neat feature of eBoostr though is the ability to select system memory as a primary cache as well as a USB drive. This means that if you have enough memory allocated to your VM, you can partition off for example, 1gb to act as the eBoostr cache.

Once the cache is rebuilt you can run the control panel application above to see the performance and how much of the cache is being used at one time. A really useful feature is the ability to test the cache speed. In this mode, eBoostr switches off the caching, tests access speeds and then repeats the test with the cache enabled. In my case I was able to get disk read times of 3.8x the speed of the raw disk speed.

The nice thing about eBoostr is you can tell instantly that it works. Install and configure it, load in a couple of apps into the priority list, build the cache and then launch the application and instantly you can see a difference. This is no Placebo.

Obviously apps like eBoostr are RAM hungry and you need to be able to afford to give away a gigabyte of RAM in this case but if you have the capacity installed then I highly recommend eBoostr as a way to boost your virtual machine performance.

(On a final note, if you’re not running a VM and using Windows natively on your computer, eBoostr has one last feature that makes it worth the money especially if you’re running with a 32-bit operating system and have more than 3gb of RAM installed. Version 4.0 of eBoostr allows you to use the unused memory above the 3gb 32bit OS limit as a cache! This means you get the benefit of using that additional 1gb of RAM on a 4gb configuration without losing any of your existing 3gb RAM accessible by Windows. Neat.)

Reading this article today prompted me to ask the question, Do the iPad shortcomings actually matter?

Let’s face it, the iPhone came out 3 years ago with no 3G, no MMS, no multi-tasking or flash support and yet it’s been revolutionary in the mobile market and has forced other manufacturers to re-evaluate and rework their phones and user interfaces. All the companies that scoffed at the time about it’s capabilities are now catching up with its stranglehold on the mobile market.

Looking at the netbook market, it’s been more of the same for years. Tablets have come and gone, Netbooks are popping up all the time but what’s innovative or different about them? They all run Windows or Linux and are all far too complicated for *most* people and battery life sucks despite them being solid state disk (SSD) based.

Does it matter that the iPad doesn’t have Flash as HTML5 takes hold? Will it force developers to support non-flash devices or question if they

need flash at all for particular web site features? Does multi-tasking really matter if you have a device that launches apps instantly and apps remember where they were when you left them? Is it a bad thing that you have 100,000+ apps at your disposal that are safe, trusted and won’t break your device?

I had a great conversation with someone the other day that nailed the case for the iPad. He was talking about buying his parents a notebook/netbook so they didn’t have to go upstairs to the office/den all the time to be able to emails/surf the web etc.

The problem is a netbook would be over the top for what they need. They just need to be able to email, surf, see photos etc so they don’t need anything over complicated.

The iPad is an ideal solution for them. They can sit on the sofa, email / surf using an interface that isn’t complicated and a device that’s easy to manage/backup etc.

This is where the iPad may well succeed - making netbooks/sub-notebook type devices easier to use for *most* people and maybe, just maybe we might start seeing some innovation and revolutionary products from competitors as a result.

In January 2009 I made this post this post in which I commented on why I thought we would never see Flash on the iPhone.

I didn’t believe it was a performance or stability issue - I believed it was Apple ensuring that their Appstore was the ONLY appstore on the iPhone.

(jail broken phones excluded of course)

The fact is, allowing Adobe to put Flash on the iPhone is basically allowing them to run their own Appstore of Flash based applications and this represents a threat to Apple.

With the release of the iPad we’re seeing discussion on this again but do Apple know something we don’t - will HTML5 make Flash obsolete?

Comments welcome