worship the glitch
This is Eric Mortensen's blog. He works @ Blip and lives in Brooklyn.
The future of TV is about access and entertainment, not a remote control upgrade. The people focusing on Siri’s integration with any possible Apple television have a serious lack of imagination.
Should any such product be developed, it would likely have a blazing fast 802.11n Wifi extender built in. While most access points are optimized for distance and throughput, the TV would be designed to serve extremely low latency networking to the room with the television in it.
Combine the speedy, hyperlocal area network with AirPlay, and you’ve got something far more compelling than Siri, which is utterly uninteresting, and even counterintuitive, as a TV add-on.
You have a television that will instantly play anything your iPod, iPhone or iPad sends to it, without having to switch inputs or even turn it on. Directly controlling your television in any fashion is utterly ridiculous. It’s just a leftover from the original, pre-remote control design. A modern television should be a dumb display and nothing more. It is for watching, not controlling, and certainly not for talking to. On mobile, the touch interface has been about removing layers of abstraction. Siri is an extension of this. On TV, Siri would just get in the way.
Apple won’t get in the TV game just to replace the remote control. They’ll do it to complete what they’ve already begun with the current Apple TV. They’ll make it easy for developers who’ve already extended their apps from iPhone to iPad to extend them to Apple TV as well, as we’ve already seen with games like Real Racing II.
The television has a future only as an extension of a mobile device. An Apple television will be able to do anything an iPad can do. All other televisions will continue to do what televisions have always done, which is very little. Nobody with an iDevice will even consider buying a TV without AirPlay built in. Manufacturers will beg Apple to let them build AirPlay into their sets. And Apple might just let them.
The future of television is here.
John Gruber (via ericmortensen)
Replace “anti-competitive” with “authoritarian” or “censoring”.
(via ericmortensen)
iOS5’s AirPlay enhancements suggest that Apple TV is no longer a hobby. Contrary to what the pundits say, I expect Apple to continue their cautious approach toward television. But they are not without direction. They know what they’re doing. Unlike everyone else in the space (with the possible exception of Roku), who continues to deliver half-baked ideas as products, Apple isn’t going to fully embrace Apple TV until it’s truly The Future Of Television. AirPlay is likely a big part of that future.
BTW, Cringely deserves credit repeatedly insisting that this was Apple’s future as far back as 2005.
When I invited Jobs to take some time away from NeXT to speak to a group of students, he sat in the lotus position in front of my fireplace and wowed us for three hours, as if leading a séance. But then I asked him if he would sign my Apple Extended Keyboard. He burst out: “This keyboard represents everything about Apple that I hate. It’s a battleship. Why does it have all these keys? Do you use this F1 key? No.” And with his car keys he pried it right off. “How about this F2 key?” Off they all went. “I’m changing the world, one keyboard at a time,” he concluded in a calmer voice.
“Here’s to the crazy ones.” The words are familiar. They were spoken by Richard Dreyfuss in an iconic Apple ad. This version, narrated by Steve Jobs, never aired.
Paul Goldberger, dissing Apple’s new building in the New Yorker.
Goldberger’s criticisms make sense, but betting against Apple on design and functionality is seldom a good idea.
FCP X: Didn’t We Ask For This? by Jeremy Garchow
CTG: I want to commend Jeremy Garchow for this excellent piece on FCP X. A lot of people are torching him for it in the comments section, yet most of them don’t use any specifics on why they believe the program isn’t what we (“editors”) asked for. Good work Jeremy, you make a lot of great points and the article really delves into the new functions of FCP X. It’s absolutely worth a read fellow Tumblr’s. I know FCP X has been polarizing, but it’s time to stop kicking and screaming and start trying to wrap our heads around the software.
(above article link via: creativecow.net)
Excellent. Can’t wait for Logic Pro X!
(via stevewyshywaniuk)
Apple has apparently filed a patent for software that would sense when iPhone users are trying to use their phone’s camera at live events — and disable it.
The story has been mostly discussed in terms of how this “feature” would benefit promoters and broadcasters by limiting unauthorized videos of live events.
But my first thought was, “If concert promoters can block smartphone cameras, what’s to stop governments from doing the same thing during protests and rallies?”
(via @cairowire)
Apple looking to build “best office building in the world” by 2015.
- Design will include a courtyard in the middle and curved glass all the way around.
- Jobs is planning on transforming an area that’s 20% landscaping to 80% landscaping by putting most of the building’s parking underground.
- There are 3,700 trees in the area at the moment, Jobs has hired an arborist from Stanford to take the area up to 6,000 trees.
- The plan is to build a four-story high building and four-story parking structure.
- The campus will incude an energy center, and natural gas will be the primary source of power, using the grid as backup.
- There will be an auditorium, fitness center and some R & D buildings.
- Jobs plans a 40% increase in Apple employees going from 9,500 today to 13, 000 in 2015.
- He wants to increase the campus’ space 20% from 2.6 million to 3.1 million square feet.
- Landscaping will increase 60% from 3,700 to 6,000.
- Surface parking will decrease 90% from 9,800 to 1,200 .
- The building footprint will decrease 30% from 1.4 million to 1 million.
- Cafeterias will fit 3,000 people at a sitting.
- The whole building will be designed with the utmost concern for employee safety.
One is gaudy, tacky. The other? Understated, elegant.
Not really fair. One is at a a large video game convention. Videogames are gaudy and tacky. The other is at a small, closed event for software developers. And they’re just smelly.
Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves
Today at Where 2.0 Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden will announce the discovery that your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file. Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps. We’re not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it’s clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations.
What makes this issue worse is that the file is unencrypted and unprotected, and it’s on any machine you’ve synched with your iOS device. It can also be easily accessed on the device itself if it falls into the wrong hands. Anybody with access to this file knows where you’ve been over the last year, since iOS 4 was released.
via jennydeluxe’s twitter: O’Reilly Radar
Is Apple recording my moves or am I recording my own moves without knowing it? Neither is good, but there’s an important difference between the two. Apple has a pretty good record on privacy issues, so I’m curious to see the reasoning behind this. But I’m not expecting to hear a response anytime soon.
What an idiot. Replace Jackson with some random Republican and replace iPads with immigrants. It’s the same nonsense.
7 hours and 118 aftershocks later, the store was still open. Why? Because with the phone and train lines down, taxis stopped, and millions of people stuck in the Tokyo shopping district scared, with no access to television, hundreds of people were swarming into Apple stores to watch the news on USTREAM and contact their families via Twitter, Facebook, and email. The young did it on their mobile devices, while the old clustered around the macs. There were even some Android users there. (There are almost no free wifi spots in Japan besides Apple stores, so even Android users often come to the stores.)
You know how in disaster movies, people on the street gather around electronic shops that have TVs in the display windows so they can stay informed with what is going on? In this digital age, that’s what the Tokyo Apple stores became. Staff brought out surge protectors and extension cords with 10s of iOS device adapters so people could charge their phones & pads and contact their loved ones. Even after we finally had to close 10pm, crowds of people huddled in front of our stores to use the wifi into the night, as it was still the only way to get access to the outside world.
