More than three months after releasing software for Windows-users to send documents to a Kindle, Amazon has now released the Mac version. Announced on Tuesday afternoon, the "Send to Kindle for Mac" application allows Mac users to wirelessly send personal documents to their Kindles via drag-and-drop in the Dock or within the app itself. Users can also send documents to the Kindle by printing from any Mac application.

As we wrote in January when the Windows version was released, each Kindle already comes with its own e-mail address so users can send files to themselves. (There's also an Instapaper mechanism for sending documents to Kindle.) The desktop software aims to make that process easier, however, by eliminating the need to involve an e-mail client (especially convoluted in the case of printing from an app, which would involve printing to PDF and then sending that PDF to your Kindle). Users don't have to be sending documents to a hardware Kindle either—files can be sent to a Kindle app on a mobile device, too (such as the iPad or an Android phone).

According to Amazon, users can also use the Mac software to archive documents in your Kindle library for download later if you don't want those files to show up and take up space on your device right away. "Your last page read along with bookmarks, notes, and highlights are automatically synchronized for your documents (with the exception of PDFs) across your Kindle devices and Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and Android," the company said in a statement.




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When I first unboxed the new 1080p Apple TV and plugged it in, I wasn't blown away. Having used a Boxee Box for the last 16 months, I've come to expect flexibility and a broad selection of content sources from my streaming set-top boxes. In fact, after several minutes of playing around with it, I was tempted to box it back up and send it back.

Then I tried AirPlay. Mirroring my iPad's display on the TV screen, I was suddenly able to not only stream any video I could find, but look at photos, browse the Web and view other apps on the big screen. If the Apple TV has a killer feature, this is it. Some of the device's biggest shortcomings - limited content, lack of a keyboard for text input, no Web browser - are instantly alleviated once you toggle that AirPlay switch.

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While you can technically beam your entire iPad screen onto your TV using AirPlay, there are certain things that the feature is best suited for. For the most part, it's great for streaming video. When you're navigating the iPad's home screen, launching apps or trying to use apps that have fluid animations, there's a noticeable lag. It's really too bad. Google Earth, for example, would be cool on a TV.

What the feature is primarily intended for is watching video content, and it does that quite well. Even so, some apps offer a better experience than others.

1. YouTube

It might seem too obvious to mention, but YouTube's iPad app is an essential one for the Apple TV. The same is true of its tablet-optimized mobile Web app. There is a YouTube app that ships with the Apple TV, but searching the world's largest user-submitted video site from a tablet is a much better experience than typing letters in one-by-one using the Apple remote.

Despite its tendency toward shorter videos, YouTube is quickly becoming a mainstay in many living rooms, as viewers turn toward the service for everything from music videos and funny viral clips to longer-form videos that are slowly making their way onto YouTube as Google gets serious about premium content.

2. Netflix

Again, this is an obvious choice, but it shouldn't be excluded from this list. Like YouTube, Netflix is already included on the Apple TV, but the user interface is quite different on the iPad. Most importantly, one can navigate the app by touching and typing rather than tediously pointing a remote at the screen. Netflix subscribers who own an Apple TV and an iPad will probably spend quite a bit of time with this app.

3. Boxee

In addition to its own Apple TV-style set-top box, Boxee offers an iPad app that includes some of the platform's best features.

Like the Boxee media player UI, its iPad app pulls in videos that are shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter, much like Flipboard does for written content. Another one of Boxee's most useful features is its "Watch Later" queue, which you can populate using its browser bookmarklet, Instapaper-style. If you come across a great TED talk, music video or mini-documentary during the course of your day and don't have time to watch it, just click the button.

The Boxee app also allows you to stream videos that are stored locally on your computer using its Media Manager. If you have a lot of video files, this feature helps make up for the Apple TV's lack of external storage.

4. ShowYou

ShowYou is another app that curates video content via your social connections, and it does a really great job of it. The UI is a little nicer than Boxee's and it takes better advantage of the screen's real estate by providing a massive array of recently shared videos on a grid, which you can navigate by swiping left or down.

ShowYou pulls off the social curation quite well, but this isn't all the app does. It also sports YouTube integration, lets you follow other ShowYou users, and offers curated categories of content like Art & Design, Comedy and Music. All told, there is a ton of video content packed into this one little app and it works exceptionally well on the TV screen.

5. PBS

While networks and cable channels struggle with how to offer content to tablet users without upsetting the existing order, PBS is a bit more liberal. Its iPad app features full episodes of many programs, including Frontline, Nova and News Hour. Conspicuously absent is the wildly popular Downton Abbey, which is normally available to stream online while the season is airing.

PBS doesn't make videos available indefinitely and the selection is somewhat limited, but they do a better job than most networks of offering content to tablet users without requiring a cable subscription to view it.

6. Al Jazeera (English)

As far as iPad apps go, Al Jazeera's is pretty bare bones. It doesn't have a slick, fluid UI that will blow you away, but rather its value is in the content it offers. In the United States, Al Jazeera English is not carried by most cable operators, even though the network has received praise from sources as unlikely as Donald Rumsfeld for its coverage of recent turmoil in the Middle East.

This app solves that problem, at least for iPad and Apple TV owners. The first tab is a live stream of whatever is being broadcast on Al Jazeera English at the moment. The other three tabs are just parts of the channel's websites framed into the app, and unfortunately not all of the video content found there is in a tablet-ready HTML5 format. Still, the live stream alone makes this app worth watching.

7. TED

TED's is another well-designed, video-heavy iPad app that works well on the TV screen. Since some TED talks are on the longer side, they're even more appropriate for the "lean back" viewing experience.

The app itself is great. The content never expires and it can be navigated by recency, theme, tags or even adjectives like "courageous," "funny" or "jaw-dropping." You can also save your favorite talks locally so they don't need to be streamed.

8. Guardian Eyewitness

Video is the only thing for which the TV screen is well-suited. The Guardian's popular Eyewitness app is simply a slideshow of full-screen, beautiful news photographs from around the world.

In terms of functionality, you could hardly get more simplistic, but these images comprise some of the best recent examples of photojournalism and they deserve to admired on a big screen.

9 + 10. Rdio and MOG

Then there's music. More and more, people are using their Internet-connected TV as a sort of modern, household jukebox. Apps like Pandora are standard on many smart TVs these days, and streaming services like Spotify and MOG have been quick to develop their own apps for various Internet TV platforms.

Which app you go for will obviously depend on which service you're subscribed to. As far as user experience goes, Rdio and MOG both win for having developed form factor-appropriate apps for the iPad, rather than scaling up their iPhone apps. We wish we could say the same for Spotify, which is apparently still working on that particular feature.

Of course, if you already subscribe to Spotify, go ahead and use their app to stream music from your TV. It works just fine and a bad UI isn't exactly a deal-killer for an app whose sole purpose is to deliver sounds rather than pictures.

Discuss

Tim Cook announced an updated version of the Apple TV today, able to support 1080p HD video and coming with increased compatibility for a variety of Apple offerings. The new Apple TV will be released next week on March 16 and is available for pre-order starting today at the same $99 price point as its predecessor.

Cook demonstrated the device's new interface and showed its picture improvement through a clip from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (The Artist must not have been available). While the interface still isn't iOS, it appears to be an upgrade over what was previously offered. The interface is now easier to navigate through an icon-based design, and it supports many of the familiar video options (YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo etc.).

The new Apple TV has gained compatibility with iTunes Match and AirPlay. Earlier in the event, Cook announced that iTunes would support 1080p and movies would be supported in iCloud. Now all those purchases are accessible across Apple devices (iPad, iPhone, TV, etc.) no matter what venue you purchase them from. Upload time between devices appeared rather quick in a demonstration that took place during the keynote. Additionally, with Apple TV working with AirPlay, iPhone 4S and iPad users can rely on its mirroring ability to stream Web content or any work done on these devices.

Among other features worth noting, Apple TV's work with Photostream was demoed. Photos from your iPhone will automatically become accessible via Apple TV (a characteristic available on the previous incarnation of Apple TV). The new interface also has a Genius button, so Apple can recommend content to you based on TV or movies you've watched. Cook eagerly showed off the new features before closing with the option to pre-order today, saying, "and I would encourage you to do that."


Despite rumors about an updated processor for the device, that was a noticeable absence from the Apple TV announcement. Updates: With the product page now live, the updated Apple TV runs on Apple's A5 processor as opposed to the A4 (thanks to Ars user, Bolero, for the tip). When Ars received some hands-on time later in the day, we learned this isn't the same A5 as the new iPad.

A reminder: Apple TV requires an 802.11g/n Wi-Fi or Ethernet network, a broadband Internet connection, an HD TV capable of 1080p or 720p, and an HDMI cable (which, naturally, is sold separately).






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It's easy to take jabs at Apple for sometimes being too "closed." From restrictions on mobile apps to the limited customizability of the iPad, it's a reputation that the company has earned even as it sells millions upon millions of devices. Even the original Macintosh infamously discouraged tinkerers by requiring specialized tools to physically open it up.

While it may frustrate many hobbyists and hackers, this approach is simply a cost of being one of Apple's millions of otherwise satisfied customers. It's rare that the company crosses over the line between closed and alarming. But that's exactly what just happened.

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The trouble started shortly after Seth Godin submitted his latest e-book to Apple's iBookstore. The marketing pundit and super-prolific author penned a book titled "Stop Stealing Dreams" and sent the finished copy along to Apple for approval. Much to his shock, the book was rejected.

The reason? An email from Apple identified "too many links to Amazon store" as the prime offense. Yes, simply linking to one of Apple's competitors is a bold and forbidden enough gesture to cause a book to get banned from its digital storefront.

As Godin himself outlines on PaidContent, this is pretty disturbing stuff. "What's inside the book shouldn't be of concern to a bookstore with a substantial choke on the marketplace," Godin writes. "If it's legal, they ought to let people read it if they choose to."

On the iPhone, Apple has certain obligations to the carriers and its own market dominance, which sometimes lead the company to forbid certain features from finding their way onto the iOS platform. In many cases, this is understandable.

But this is different from free mobile WiFi tethering or other app features that directly compete with Apple or the carriers. These are books. You know, the things that have historically been banned and burned when the powers that be don't appreciate their contents. Books contain ideas and information. You know, the stuff that's supposed to be much more fluid and accessible thanks to technology.

Of course, the book-burning analogy has its limitations. Anybody who really wants to read Godin's book can go get it from Amazon or in another format outside the iBookstore. But there's something unsettling about a dominant player in a information-centric marketplace such as this refusing to offer a piece of content strictly for competitive reasons. How would we feel if Barnes and Noble refused to carry a book about the history or corporate philosophy of Borders or Amazon? Or if they wouldn't order a book written by the CEO of a competitor, simply because doing so would inadvertently aid the enemy? Many people would rightly be freaked out by that.

Discuss

It's official. The next version of Apple's desktop operating system is due out this summer, and it's going to move Mac OS X closer toward the look, feel and functionality of iOS. Mountain Lion, much like its predecessor, adds features to desktop that users of the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch are already quite familiar with. And it will make the integration between all of these devices much tighter.

Of all of the new features coming in Mountain Lion, most of them either port something from iOS over to Mac OS X or otherwise bridge the user experience between the two operating systems.

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A number of features that launched with iOS 5 in October and swiftly making their way to Mac OS X. Notification Center is one of them. With Mountain Lion, Macs will have iOS-style push notifications, which can be viewed via a typically-hidden panel off to the right of the screen. In the same way iPhone and iPad users can pull down from the top of the screen to reveal Notificiation Center, Mac users will be swipe down on the track pad to reveal their recent notifications.

As predicted, iMessage is also making its way to Mac OS X. A new app called Messages will replace iChat and integrate with standard chat protocols per usual, but also work with Apple's new SMS substitute. This begins to bridge the gap between devices and allow users to send text and media message to other Apple users regardless of device.

If you were, like me, excited about the launch of Reminders, but too disappointed at its desktop integration to actually use it, it's time to get excited again. For real this time. Apple is launching a Reminders app for the desktop, which will of course integrate with iOS via iCloud. For those of us who do the majority of their day-to-day work on a laptop or desktop, this feature is absolutely critical for Reminders to be truly useful. Until now, there was little reason for people to give up tools like Remember the Milk or Things, both of which exist seamlessly across devices.

Speaking of iCloud, that's getting more deeply integrated into Mountain Lion as well. Moving forward, this will be paramount to maintaining the user experience across devices.

For those who use Notes on iOS or Stickies on Mac OS X (or both), there's good news. Those apps are now one. Stickies is being replaced with Notes on the desktop, which will sync with one's notes on their iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, thanks to iCloud. Users of apps like Evernote may find this feature yawn-worthy, but for those who have opted to use Apple's proprietary tools for note-taking, it will be a big plus.

Like iOS 5, Mountain Lion is getting deep Twitter integration. Other new features in Mac OS X include Game Center, Airplay mirroring and a new security feature called Gatekeeper. As MG Siegler points out in Techcrunch, it is sure to generate some controversy, since the OS will only accept Mac Store apps and software from verified developers by default. It is a bit walled garden-y, but the setting can be changed.

For a more detailed walk-through of Mountain Lion's new features, you can check out the hands-on reviews done by MacWorld or Techcrunch.

The new OS won't be available until the summer, but developers can download a preview from Apple starting today.

Discuss

2012 started with a flourish of new apps across iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The holiday season is the busiest time of year for app publishers but the follow up in January was equally impressive. That is a testament to the growing app ecosystem and the number of developers starting to program for mobile platforms. We take a look at some of our favorite new apps from last month below.

The app update section returns for the its fifth month and we found that fewer of our existing apps issued updates for new features or bug fixes than in months past. We also have a new treat in the Apps of the Month: a limited Staff Picks section where some of ReadWriteWeb's writers picked the apps they found most interesting during the month.

The list, as always, is a bit subjective so please let us know in the comments if we missed an app or you have found one that you cannot live without.

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Cross-Platform

Vimeo (Free - iOS, Android)

As a video platform, Vimeo has always played second fiddle to YouTube. Yet, Vimeo does attract a more professional grade of videographer and often the contents of Vimeo are much more polished than the much uploaded to YouTube from millions of would-be Internet stars. Vimeo finally has a new app for iOS and Android and it is everything you would expect from the platform in terms of quality video and performance. Users can view videos, manage their accounts and upload all from one app. The Android version of Vimeo requires 2.3 Gingerbread or above.

Producteev (Free - iOS, Android)

Talk about cross-platform. Producteev is a task manager available for Macs and Windows PCs, iOS and Android, IM and email. It is basically everywhere. As a task manager, one of its best features is the ability to work offline so you can access your tasks and projects from everywhere. Imagine being an intern working on Capitol Hill in D.C. and stuck on the Metro Orange Line between Roslyn and Foggy Bottom (if you have never worked in D.C., that is where the train goes under the river and there is absolutely no cell reception) then the ability to access your tasks offline on your phone is tantamount. You can also invite other users into the projects within the app with its workspace feature. Business is going mobile.

Lanyrd (Free - m.Lanyrd.com)

We eventually envision that the cross-platform Apps of the Month section will be dominated by HTML5 mobile Web-based apps as opposed to those that happen to be released for both iOS and Android within the same month. So, we introduce our first HTML5-based Web app ever in this column with Lanyrd, the social conference directory. It made a big splash when we wrote about it for ReadWriteMobile on the last day of January and the community at Hacker News had a fairly robust discussion about how it was made and what its benefits are. The greatest benefit of Lanyrd's mobile Web app is that it utilizes HTML5 offline caching so you can get around any conference even when the Wi-Fi or cellular connection has gone kaput. While Lanyrd is a fairly simple and the UI leaves a bit to be desired, this is a great first step towards open standards and cross-platform deployment through the mobile browser.

Plex ($4.99 -- iOS, Android)

Plex for iOS actually came out for iOS in December but the Android version was released in January so we will give it a cross-platform designation. It is a media platform that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux. Install the Plex Server on your computer then download the app and all of your media (music, video, pictures) will be converted to mobile form through your myPlex app. Plex serves over 200 channels including Vimeo, YouTube, Revision3 and others. When attaching it to a Mac it can run content from iTunes, Aperture and iPhoto. Truly a simple and powerful media streaming app.

Zynga Poker (Free - iOS, Android)

It is what it is, as they say. Poker from social gaming company Zynga. This poker game is a little cooler on the geek factor though since it was written in HTML5 and then wrapped for the native platforms (a hybrid app). If you have ever played Zynga's poker app on Facebook, this will be no different except it has now gone mobile. Connect with friends, get some free chips and get your Texas Hold 'em' on.

Staff Picks

So, when I mentioned a "limited" Staff Picks section, I was being literal. Trying to get the busy ReadWriteWeb staff to put together one measly selection for Apps of the Month is like trying to pull the back hairs off an angry baboon. I promised I would shame the staff for not getting in their Apps of the Month selections by the deadline and I will continue doing so in this column until more than five staffers actually send me selections. They have a variety of excuses from "I didn't like the app I chose" to "I learn about new apps when you write about them." Bah! For a staff that writes about new applications and gets thousands of pitches a month on a variety of topics, you would think that picking one measly app would be easy enough to figure out.

Well, here are the staff selections we did get.

Jon Mitchell - Writer

The Ying to my Yang here at RWW, Jon had his App of the Month lined up weeks ago. Kudos, Mr. Mitchell.

Day One (Journal/Diary) ($1.99 - iOS)

Day One is my new journal. It supports tweeting and whatnot, but it's the best app for keeping things to myself that I've ever used. You can set daily reminders to write in it, or you can just dash off entries whenever it suits you. If you want to keep it secret, you can lock it with a passcode. Day One supports MultiMarkdown formatting, so you can make text bold, italic, and add links, too. Day One has been around for a while, but version 1.5, which launched this month, adds iCloud syncing. Now your journal is seamlessly synced between your iDevices, as well as the Mac app if you swing that way. It also supports Dropbox, if you'd prefer to sync there.

Robyn Tippins - Community Manager

Our intrepid community manager is a big gamer. You would not think of it coming from a mother with a thick Southern accent but if we ever open a RWGaming channel, Robyn would be our go-to resource.

Shogun: Rise of the Renegade (First mission is free on iOS, $1.99 to unlock the full game and the other missions.)

I'm a big fan of the games where you dodge unbelievably complex patterns of bullets and bombs, like Geometry Wars, so when I saw the screen grabs from this game I knew I'd probably enjoy it. In Shogun: Rise of the Renegade, you are fighting a warlord, the winner of World War IV. The premise is silly, but you don't play these games for a story. The graphics are retro-90s, the soundtrack is annoying but appropriate for the game type, the price is great, and other than the minor annoyance in weapon changing, it's a cool game. If you enjoy Japanese arcade games filled with lasers and 'bullet hell' situations, you'll enjoy this fun little game. Best part? It fits right into the iCade!

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier - Channels Writer

Joe came in with an app at the very last minute after I threatened a public shaming on the staff editorial call. I was ready to give him a pass since he has been traveling in Europe last week, but Zonker came through.

Wunderkit (Free - iPhone)

Wunderkit is a sort of social to-do manager. It's suitable for setting up a "Getting Things Done" type workflow for personal use, or you can invite friends and co-workers to join and share workspaces. It's a low-impact collaboration tool that might catch on, if a team is iPhone-equipped and heavily into social tools. For maximum features, like gettimg involved with other people's projects, you need to sign up for a $5 a month account. But that's far cheaper than a lot of other collaboration tools. Having just checked it out recently (it was released on January 31), I can't vouch for its effectiveness just yet, but it looks promising.

And back to our regularly scheduled program.

iPhone & iPad

Chasing Salander: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ($0.99, iPhone)

I break my own rules (that Apps of the Month need to be published in the month being written about) every so often for apps that came the month before that rock. Chasing Salander certainly fits into that category. It is an enhanced e-book of the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo where you chase renegade Lisbeth Salander through 14 locations with a short reading and pictures. With over 100 new facts not found in the books or movies this is a great app for any fans of the Salander triology.

Yamaha NoteStar Sheet Music (Free - iPad)

Play the piano? Want to rock with your favorite band but do not have the sheet music to do it? NoteStar is a hands-free sheet music where you can play along with the band or have the keyboard section isolated to study it on your own. You can preview and purchase new music from within the app and Yamaha's screen flow feature provides automatic page turning in time with the music. The performance can be slowed or sped up depending on your learning limits. If I knew absolutely anything about playing the piano, this would seem like a great place to learn new songs.

iTunes U 2.0 (Free, iPad/iPhone)

Apple called for a mysterious press conference in the middle of January in New York City. It was actually a cruel thing to do to the poor Apple Fan Boys of the world because they all got excited that a new iPad was coming down the pipeline. No such luck. What Apple did announce was its new textbook initiative that makes courses available online through the iPhone or iPad from universities across the world. As a general concept this is cool stuff, but there has been controversy over Apple iBooks End User License Agreement and if it is even legal to proceed in the fashion that Apple has. Our Marshall Kirkpatrick called iTunes U 2.0, "not perfect, just awesome."

SoulCalibur ($11.99 - iPhone/iPad)

I used to play the classic SoulCalibur game on the ill-fated DreamCast at[…]

Apple updated iBooks Author to version 1.0.1 on Friday afternoon, the only change being an update to the software's controversial end user license agreement. The updated EULA now specifically only applies distribution restrictions to the interactive .ibooks format files generated by the app.






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If managing your to-do lists is taking up more time and effort than you spend actually getting things done, a new iPhone app coming from developers Phill Ryu and Milen Dzhumerov, designer David Lanham, and publisher Realmac Software might be the perfect solution. Tossing most iPhone UI conventions out the window along with any religious adherence to GTD principles, the upcoming Clear app is designed to eliminate the friction and complexity of adhering to systems like GTD and be as easy to use as a paper list. We were able to meet up with the team at the 2012 Macworld|iWorld to check out the offerings.

Clear has no standard navigation bar at the top or tab bar at the bottom—common iPhone UI elements. Instead, the app is stripped down to the bare minimum, with a rectangular strip for each list item. Pull the list down from the top to add another item. Swipe right to mark the item completed. Swipe left to delete the item from your list. Pinch to access a list of lists—you could keep a shopping list, a list of errands, and a list of projects, for example.






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This post originally appeared on Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog ("iBooks Author: Appreciating Apple's Intent"). It's republished with permission.

Apple's recent announcement and release of its iBooks Author tool was met with plenty of controversy. This HuffPost article pretty well sums things up.

My question is simply this: Why all the fuss? Apple's intent has never been to improve the book publishing industry. Just like Amazon and any other ebook vendor, Apple's goal is to capture share of this rapidly growing segment. In Apple's case, it simply decided to offer an authoring tool that's capable of creating some pretty darned cool products. If Amazon were to do the same thing and create a terrific authoring tool for mobi or KF8 format, would the industry be as upset? I don't think so.

How is this any different from the App Store model itself? Developers are creating apps for the App Store, and they know they'll only run on an iOS device. They also realize they'll have to go through Apple's approval process before getting into the App Store.

Prior to the release of iBooks Author, the content creation and distribution model looked like this:

Author writes material in favorite word processor.
Author/publisher edit and convert that content into mobi format for distribution on Amazon, EPUB format for distribution through iBookstore and others, etc.

The exact same model still exists today, even with the introduction of iBooks Author. That's right. Apple's EULA doesn't really lock you into its distribution channel for your content. That restriction only applies to a "book or other work you generate using [the iBooks Author] software." All Apple's really trying to do is prevent you from tweaking the output of its tool to create content for other distribution channels. OK, that's kind of annoying, but far from the lock-in nightmare so many people are describing it as. Based on my interpretation, you're able to use the same content as input to the iBooks Author tool as you'd use for a mobi-formatted product you want to sell on Amazon.

(I should also point out that I'm far from an Apple fanboy. Anyone who knows me realizes I dumped my iPhone last year for an Android-based Samsung Galaxy S II (and yes, I love it). I also tried to dump my iPad for a Kindle Fire but found the Fire user experience to be very disappointing. I'll probably make the jump to another Android tablet later this year, once key apps like Zite are available. In the meantime though, I want to make it clear I'm not here to shill for Apple. If anything, I'm currently in a stage where I'd prefer to buy devices that aren't made by the content providers. Samsung is high on my list, for example.)

Apple doesn't have an objective to move the publishing industry forward. It sees an opportunity to reinvent this industry, and it feels it can do so within its own, closed ecosystem. It's as simple as that, and it's consistent with everything it has done in the App Store up to now.

Let's also not forget that the iBooks Author tool is free. It's not like we paid Apple $50, $100 or more for some authoring tool that we thought could work for all content formats and distribution channels. If the tool's feature set is compelling enough, I'd like to think the other ebook vendors (e.g., Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Kobo, etc.) will have to come up with something at least as powerful for their own platforms. If not, they get left in the dust and Apple gains share. Seems pretty fair to me.

In the meantime, I plan to do some hands-on testing with iBooks Author. At first, I was discouraged because you can't download iBooks Author unless you're running Lion. I'm still on Snow Leopard, but an O'Reilly colleague sent me this link that shows you how to tweak a couple of settings so you can download and run iBooks Author on a Snow Leopard system. I just tried it, and it works fine. (You just have to carefully read and interpret the steps since it's a translation from French to English.)

TOC NY 2012 — O'Reilly's TOC Conference, being held Feb. 13-15, 2012, in New York City, is where the publishing and tech industries converge. Practitioners and executives from both camps will share what they've learned and join together to navigate publishing's ongoing transformation.

Register to attend TOC 2012

Related:

A few thoughts on iBooks Author and Apple's textbook move
The textbook industry might not be as "reinvented" as Apple hoped

Educators so far seem excited about the potential promise of a learning "revolution" enabled by Apple's new iBooks Author app. However, not everyone is feeling that same level of enthusiasm: e-book publishing experts have concerns about the formatting that iBooks Author can output, which isn't fully ePub 2 or ePub 3 compliant. Furthermore, Apple has added a clause to iBooks Author's end user license agreement that prohibits selling e-books created with iBooks Author anywhere but the iBookstore.

iBooks created by iBooks Author use ePub 2 along with certain HTML5 and JavaScript-based extensions that Apple uses to enable multimedia and interactive features. Those interactive features will only work with Apple's iBooks app, not with other e-reader software or hardware, because only Apple supports those extensions.

Still, there shouldn't be any technical limitation to exporting a strictly ePub 2-compliant ePub document if none of the interactive features are used. Unfortunately, iBooks Author only exports PDFs and text.






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Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the "GarageBand for e-books," so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.

Along with the details we were able to gather from our sources, we also spoke to two experts in the field of digital publishing to get a clearer picture of the significance of what Apple is planning to announce.






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Welcome to 2012! If you're a consumer, you're likely getting ready for another year full of new products, drama, and intrigue from the tech world. If you're a journalist, you're cowering in fear of the upcoming CES trade show. And if you're a Mac or iOS developer—well, as always, you're wishing for bigger and better things out of Apple and its community.

While the iOS and Mac App Stores exploded in popularity in 2011, there's still plenty of room for improvement on the developer side. When we spoke with a number of iOS and Mac developers about their wish list for 2012, they didn't hesitate to let us know about changes they would like to see.






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Apple may be poised to announce changes coming to iBooks, and perhaps eBook publishing, sometime this month. In particular, we believe the announcement may have important reverberations for textbook publishers and buyers.

According to a report by All Things Digital published Monday, the company is planning a media event in New York to make a "media-related," not hardware-related announcement. Further, sources for TechCrunch claimed the announcement will focus on "improvements to the iBooks platform," and the event will supposedly be more geared towards the publishing industry (not necessarily consumers).

Apple has recently highlighted the ability of its iBooks platform to include sound, video, and other features by offering a free eBook of The Yellow Submarine. And based on information from our own sources, we believe the announcement could likely involve support for the EPUB 3 standard, which enables a wider variety of multimedia and interaction features. Amazon recently announced its own similarly improved eBook standard using HTML5 and CSS3.

Several authors have also told Ars that they long for tools to help transform book text into standards-compliant eBooks. The opportunity certainly seems ripe for Apple to offer such a tool. If Apple created software that could generate standards-compliant EPUB files, it could be a boon to both the publishing industry and independent authors alike.

Incidentally, one source who has worked with Apple to integrate technology in education recently suggested that Apple may have important changes coming to its iBooks platform directed specifically toward the academic set. Digital textbooks represent another nascent market that Apple could potentially upend as it did with music and mobile apps.




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A pair of enterprising iOS developers have created
a hack that allows iPhone and iPad apps, including Facebook and
YouTube, to run on the
Apple TV.

The second-generation media hub is essentially an iOS device,
with an iPad-style A4 chip under the hood and a modified version of

iOS 5 for its operating system. You can use AirPlay to stream
video from a nearby iPhone or iPad but it doesn't have its own
apps (yet).






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When I first heard about podcasting, I didn't get it. Why would I want to download MP3 files of people talking? But then former Apple CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated the usefulness of podcasts when he introduced podcast support for iTunes and the iPod at WWDC 2005, and I was sold. (Watch the video if you're unfamiliar with podcasting.) 
I now listen to podcasts when walking to and from work, cooking, doing the dishes, etc. This lets me keep up with developments in philosophy, economics, science, and technology, not to mention entertainment with things like the stories from flight attendant Betty and relationship advice from Dan Savage. Podcasting combines two somewhat revolutionary elements: podcasts can be produced by anyone, and you can listen to them on the go without taking away time from other activities.







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Out of the box Siri can do a few common things, but it struggles when you try to get too complicated with it. GigaOM offers up a few clever address book customizations to make Siri work more naturally. More »

When the much-loved screen shot and image annotation Mac app Skitch was purchased by Evernote a few months ago, an iOS version of the service was said to be forthcoming. Evernote has made good on that promise by launching Skitch for iPad, with an iPhone-friendly version coming soon.

On the iPad, Skitch lets you pull up photos, screenshots and Web pages and annotate them with arrows, shapes, text and lines. It's a stripped-down offering compared what Skitch can do on the desktop, but for the tablet form factor, it works quite well.

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Many of us here at ReadWriteWeb love to use Skitch to mark up screen shots for some of our stories, but you don't need to be a tech blogger to get the most of out the service. Everybody from UI designers to executives could use Skitch for iPad to add new ideas and context to images on the go.

The app even has a built in Web browser so you can snap screenshots and scribble on them as needed. Of course, you can always take a screenshot of any site or app on the iPad by simultaneously hitting the home and power buttons on the device. Those images land in your "Photos" collection, which Skitch can then pull from.

In addition to marking up images and maps, you can pull up a blank screen and use Skitch like one of the many digital whiteboard applications we've seen. In fact, this application could easily replace most of those offerings while providing a whole slew of handy new features on top of it.

All marked-up images are saved automatically within the app. They can be emailed, saved locally or tweeted out to the world. You can plug in your Evernote account to save things there, but it's by no means a requirement.

The first iOS app for Skitch comes a few months after the service was acquired by Evernote and subsequently launched an Android app.

Discuss

When the much-loved screen shot and image annotation Mac app Skitch was purchased by Evernote a few months ago, an iOS version of the service was said to be forthcoming. Evernote has made good on that promise by launching Skitch for iPad, with an iPhone-friendly version coming soon.

On the iPad, Skitch lets you pull up photos, screenshots and Web pages and annotate them with arrows, shapes, text and lines. It's a stripped-down offering compared what Skitch can do on the desktop, but for the tablet form factor, it works quite well.

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Many of us here at ReadWriteWeb love to use Skitch to mark up screen shots for some of our stories, but you don't need to be a tech blogger to get the most of out the service. Everybody from UI designers to executives could use Skitch for iPad to add new ideas and context to images on the go.

The app even has a built in Web browser so you can snap screenshots and scribble on them as needed. Of course, you can always take a screenshot of any site or app on the iPad by simultaneously hitting the home and power buttons on the device. Those images land in your "Photos" collection, which Skitch can then pull from.

In addition to marking up images and maps, you can pull up a blank screen and use Skitch like one of the many digital whiteboard applications we've seen. In fact, this application could easily replace most of those offerings while providing a whole slew of handy new features on top of it.

All marked-up images are saved automatically within the app. They can be emailed, saved locally or tweeted out to the world. You can plug in your Evernote account to save things there, but it's by no means a requirement.

The first iOS app for Skitch comes a few months after the service was acquired by Evernote and subsequently launched an Android app.

Discuss

Apple isn't exactly known for letting consumers and developers tinker with its products. While the Apple II had expansion slots and a relatively open design, later hardware shipped by the company would become harder to modify. What they sold was what consumers got, with very little room for customization.

Today, developers are having a field day jailbreaking each subsequent version of iOS and even hacking Siri to put its voice control technology to use in unique and interesting ways. Officially, Apple discourages jailbreaking, even though the practice has been a source of good ideas, some of which the company has borrowed.

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How does Apple feel about Siri-hacking? They haven't made any public statements about it one way or the other, but one generally assumes they're not thrilled. Early attempts to port the feature to devices other than the iPhone 4S for which it was intended have proven complex and technically illegal. However, an update made to iOS 5 today paves the way for legally permissible porting of Siri to other devices.

Whether deliberately or not, Apple has unencrypted system files within iOS 5 that were previously locked down. As self-described iPhone hacker @MuscleNerd pointed out on Twitter, them doing so enables developers to port Siri to other devices without infringing on the company's intellectual property.

It may well have been an oversight, which may be patched up when iOS 5.1 drops, but for the time being developers are free to tinker with Siri and make it work on iPads, iPods and older iPhone models.

It remains to be seen if Apple embraces Siri-hacking in the longrun. Such a move would be rather unlike them, but if it can perceive a branding or other business advantage to letting the hacking continue, Apple could follow the precedent set by Microsoft earlier this year. Instead of frowning on developers who hacked their Kinect motion control technology, the company actively encouraged them and even offered cash prizes for the best hacks.

Discuss

Were I to tell my most perpetually indignant friend that his tablet’s 3G radio is prone to regular performance drops of up to 75 percent, he would likely enter apoplectic rage.

Such is the emotional fabric of the modern tech enthusiast. We’re already concerned about overloaded data networks that can’t handle too many simultaneous user requests, and Apple’s iPhone 4 "antennagate" imbroglio, rightly or wrongly, has left conspiracy-minded consumers wary of self-sabotaging hardware.






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If being a successful jailbreak developer can get you hired at Apple, apparently so can redesigning the oft-criticized Notification Center. Apple has hired Jan-Michael Cart, perhaps best known for creating demos of proposed Notification Center tweaks, to intern with the company for the next seven months. Cart's internship follows two other recent hires known for notification work, suggesting the company is aware that iOS notifications still need some work.

Cart, currently a junior majoring in Mass Media Arts at the Univeristy of Georgia (go Bulldogs!), specializes in video and graphic design. He has recently begun experimenting with Xcode and learning about iOS development, according to his website. With the release of iOS 5, Cart began creating videos to demonstrate his ideas for improving its Notification Center feature.






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Owners of iPads, iPhones and iPods running the latest version of iOS have not yet had the option to jailbreak their devices in a way that's at all worth the trouble. For those who are dying to break free of Apple's restrictions, an untethered jailbreak appears to be on the way.

On Friday, France-based iOS hacker @pod2g uploaded a video showing that he was successful in jailbreaking iOS 5.0.1 running on his iPhone 3G. This came about a month after he announced on Twitter that he had discovered a bug in iOS 5 that would make a jailbreak possible.

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Jailbreaking is not something a majority of iPhone owners do, but it's ideal for a certain subset of users who like to customize their device and download apps that might be perfectly useful, but wouldn't survive Apple's rigid app submission requirements.

Currently, a tethered jailbreak does exist, but such a method requires the user to plug their iPhone, iPad or iPod into their computer every time the device gets rebooted. For those who can't tolerate living within Apple's boundaries it may suffice, but for the average user, it's a bit too inconvenient to be worth it.

Why Jailbreak Your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch?

For something that is technically forbidden by Apple, the jailbreaking community sure does seem to heavily influence the company's official software releases. Jailbreaking iOS 3 brought the ability to shoot video, add custom backgrounds and upload to YouTube. All of those things ended up in iOS 4, among much else. Similarly, jailbreaking iOS 4 meant even more customization and an all-in-one notification center that looks curiously similar to the one that ended up being included in iOS 5.

There are certain things that Apple is unlikely to ever embrace. The ability to tether one's iPhone to their laptop and piggyback on its Internet connection for free is one of them.

Other reasons to jailbreak iOS devices include the option to make FaceTime calls over 3G, unlock the phone from its original carrier, block phone calls and texts and download any number of unauthorized apps. Want to play old school video games on an NES emulator? Open your phone using facial recognition instead of a password? Fit more apps into folders? Customize colors and other design details? All of this is possible on a jailbroken device, and developers are banging out new apps all the time.

It doesn't come without its downsides, however. By casting aside Apple's restrictions, you also forgo the tight security of the App Store and the likelihood of inadvertently installing malware on your device is increased. When Apple releases new versions of the OS, you'll have to forgo updating to it or give up the jailbroken lifestyle until a new solution is released.

UPDATE:: On Sunday night, @pod2g wrote on his blog that he had successfully jailbroken iOS 5.0.1 running on an iPhone 4. No further details or instructions were posted but he assured readers that he's working jailbreaking the iPad and iPod Touch next.

Discuss

Before the tablet wars were in full affect, the tablet rumors wars raged on the Internet. Primary topics of conversation in this pre-iPad era were what Apple was doing with tablets (and what it would be called), the TechCrunch Tablet and the dual-screen Microsoft Courier. The CrunchPad, as it was going to be called, was usurped by Fusion Garage and turned into the JooJoo, a more or less terrible device that will live in infamy in the graveyard of devices gone by. Apple, as we know, has taken over the world with the iPad. The Courier? Abandoned by Microsoft before ever seeing the light of day.

Two developers miss what the Courier could have been. Together they started a group-funded Kickstarter project called Tapose to bring the defunct-Courier to the iPad. The app is expected to go live later this week. Check below for exclusive screenshots.

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Tapose raised $26,561 from 1,274 developers using Kickstarter. Even our ReadWriteWeb Channels editor David Strom threw in $100 and offered advice to co-founder Benjamin Monnig. Monnig is an aerospace engineer for Boeing, working on glass cockpits for 737 airplanes.

Tapose, based off the word juxtapose, has a crazy amount of functionality. It is more or less like the team wanted to cram the whole Courier into an iPad. It has a word processor, wireless printing, a media browser, cloud functionality, internal app-like functions, a control hub, a "pencup" for making journal entries and doodles, a journal to go with that cup, a slide bar, drawing functions, sticky notes, lists, lasso-style media tool for cutting and pasting, collaboration tools, different types of paper backgrounds, business card sticky notes. If half of what Tapose has listed in its features page, it is automatically one of the most useful, productive apps ever created for the iPad. Based off these screenshots, it looks like there is a lot more.

The whole concept is based off of the notion that the Courier was a dual-screen tablet that could perform much like a laptop. Since the Courier project, we have seen several dual-screen smartphones, all of them beautifully confusing flops that did not work anything like intended. Tapose is intended to work by having two sides to an iPad app, giving users multi-tasking capabilities with the functionality of fully functional tablet.

The app was submitted to the Apple App Store on Monday, Dec. 5. A quick search of the app store does not show it available as of yet but it is expected to go live by the end of the week.

The whole thing is amusing. It will be doubly amusing if Tapose becomes one of the best selling apps on the App Store. Even the founders thought the concept was amusing, posting a humorous sketch on YouTube.

If you watched that skit all the way through, you have to be excited of what Tapose is going to bring to the world. Two guys with a crazy idea get group funded by more than a thousand people and launch one of the best apps (in theory) the world has ever seen? What is not to love about that story?

Are Drake and Monnig crazy? Or are they crazy enough to be absolutely brilliant? Let us know in the comments.

Discuss

Since launching with the iPhone 4S in October, Apple's new voice-controlled personal assistant feature called Siri has been enamoured of Apple fans, mocked by others and been found to have a few humorous Easter eggs built in.

As cool as Siri seemed to many at launch, like so many things, it's true potential wasn't really unlocked until a crafty developer got his hands on it and started tinkering. Pete Lamonica managed to create a hack called SiriProxy that allowed him to control his thermostat using only his voice (more on that below). He set up a proxy server and posted his code on GitHub so that more developers could take advantage of it and push the limits of what Siri can do. And indeed they have.

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1. Turn Up (or Down) The Thermostat

The first Siri hack to gain considerable attention was Lamonica's voice-controlled thermostat. He set up a proxy server to trick Siri into thinking it's communicating with Apple's servers and wrote some custom handlers for actions related to controlling his WiFi-enabled thermostat. In a video posted online, Lamonica successfully gets Siri to tell him the current temperature and even bump it up a few degrees.

2. Start, Stop and Lock Your Car

After Lamonica's thermostat hack made the rounds, another developer used a similar approach to tap into his car's computerized control system, which allowed him to start and stop the car, as well as lock the doors and set the car alarm. Like the thermostat example, this hack will only work with a car that has such a system to tapped into. In this case, he's using the Viper SmartStart app for iPhone, which requires an in-car installation to work.

3. Watch Seinfeld (Or Anything Else on Your TV

In a possible foreshadowing of Apple products to come, another developer was able to commandeer Siri to find and play video content on Plex media center software. The result is a scenario right out of Back to the Future 2. Simply ask Siri to play the most recent episode of The Simpsons, and almost instantaneously the opening credits will begin.

4. Have Siri Read You the Latest Headlines

For news junkies who aren't in a position to stare at their phone (for example, while driving), one hack will read back headlines from a given RSS feed. All you have to do is ask. A developer known as @JailbreakMatrix, who also wrote a hack that lets Siri control iTunes playback, posted a video online showing Siri read back Endgadget headlines.

5. Dim the Lights and Close the Curtains

Pretty much any household item that can be connected to the Internet can theoretically be controlled by Siri. Thankfully, that list is growing. In one recent hack, a developer was able to get Siri to close his curtains, dim two different lights and turn on his ceiling fan. This tweak utilized an iPhone app written by the developer that could control various household items. He just simply built a bridge between the app and Siri, enabling futuristic voice-control of the room around him.



Discuss

The developers behind minimalist writing app iA Writer have rolled out its latest update, which adds iCloud integration to sync documents between the iPad and Mac OS X. This is the first time iCloud has been baked into an application released by somebody other Apple, according to iA Writer founder Oliver Reichenstein.

iA Writer is a popular desktop and iOS app for writers that is designed to maximize focus on long-form writing. It does this mostly through a minimalist design and enabling a full-screen mode to eliminate distractions on the desktop. It's one of several distraction-free writing apps of this nature.

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Some of these apps offer native syncing or allow users to plug in their Dropbox account to sync content that way. With this update, iA Writer users can just use their iCloud storage, much as they would with contacts, calendars and other data.

iA Writer has an especially stripped-down interface, offering very few options other than to write. To enhance focus, it highlights the line of text you're working on and grays out everything else. To further simplify things, the app has solid support for Markdown, the rich-formatting shorthand syntax created by Daring Fireball author John Gruber and beloved by bloggers everywhere.

To promote the latest version of iA Writer, Reichenstein has cut the price of both the iPad and Mac apps.

Discuss

Inkling, the San Francisco startup that develops interactive iPad versions of college textbooks, made its first big step in courting the mainstream consumer a few weeks ago when it debuted its version of The Professional Chef, the official textbook of The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) chef school.

Turns out, it’s working out pretty well.

This week, Inkling’s Pro Chef title became the third highest-grossing iPad app on Apple’s App Store, Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis said at the GigaOM RoadMap Conference in San Francisco Thursday. That’s compared to all iPad apps worldwide. It also became the top-grossing iPad app in the App Store’s “lifestyle” category.

As we wrote in the piece about the Pro Chef launch last month, the cookbook represented a bit of an inflection point for Inkling, which had up until then produced more strictly academic titles. Inkling thought that Pro Chef would have a wider appeal, MacInnis told me in a brief interview, but its current performance has certainly surpassed its expectations. This means that there will likely be more crowd-pleasing titles with crossover appeal in the future — and that’s good news for students, as well as the rest of us.

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Can gorgeous design, learning algorithms and millions in venture capital funding make a simple home thermostat as coveted as the iPhone? If anyone can achieve such a lofty goal it’s Tony Fadell, the former chief architect at Apple, who led the development of the iPod and the first three versions of the iPhone, and who left Apple two years ago to start connected thermostat company Nest Labs.

While Palo Alto, Calif.-based Nest has been operating for about a year and a half, has 100 employees, and funding from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures and Al Gore’s investment fund, it just came out of stealth on Tuesday to reveal its smart thermostat design and energy efficiency ambitions. Nest says the thermostat is the first “learning thermostat” in the world. It will be available for $250 in mid-November, and can save 20 to 30 percent in a home’s energy consumption.

The idea behind Nest

Fadell explained to me in an interview that he and his wife (who led human resources for Apple) decided to leave Apple about two years ago to spend more time with their young children, and basically retire. But you know how that goes for the ambitious, young, Silicon Valley types. While designing a green home in Tahoe, Calif., Fadell became hung up on the lack of options for a thermostat for the home — they were expensive, not smart, ugly, and basically “crap” says Fadell. And like all good entrepreneurs he thought to himself: there’s got to be a better way.

That option ended up being getting back on the Valley treadmill, and creating one of the most ambitious greentech ventures I’ve seen to date. Nest has raised tens of millions of dollars (they wouldn’t disclose the amount) from high profile venture capitalists including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, Al Gore’s investment group Generation Capital, and Shasta Ventures.

While other companies are targeting the smart thermostat market (see my article on The next home energy battleground: the smart thermostat) like Opower and Honeywell, Radio Thermostat Company of America and EnergyHub, and EcoFactor, Nest is the first company that has created an end-to-end smart thermostat service, which offers the software, a gadget and a data-filled website. Fadell tells me that everything that the consumer touches has been designed by Nest.

That’s why it has 100 people and have raised a lot of money. The team building the learning algorithms includes Yoky Matsuoka, the former head of innovation at Google, and machine learning expert while Stanford Professor Sebastrian Thrun is an advisor to the company.

How Nest works

What will stand out most to energy nerds like me that look at a lot of thermostats, is the unique design of Nest. The thermostat’s form is a simple circle, with a ring on the outside and a single button, that controls the entire interface. Like the iPod and iPhone, Fadell wanted to make the device intuitive and simple to use and he says for the Nest system to work “it needed to be a coveted, cherished object that sits on your wall.”

In contrast, a major problem with most thermostats is that only two out of five are programmable and of those that are programmable, only 6 percent are actually programmed by the owners, says Fadell. Most thermostats are confusing, boring, or just not smart enough to keep the home owner’s attention.

The Nest thermostat, on the other hand, is supposed to learn your energy consumption behavior and program itself, and then automatically help you save energy in a convenient way. Once installed, the thermostat takes about a week of hardcore learning to recognize the standard way you heat or cool your home, and then recommends settings that are slightly more efficient than what you already do. It also automatically turns down the thermostat at times that are convenient to you. The device also continues to do lighter learning of your behavior via pattern recognition and your manual interaction with it, throughout the life of the device.

The recommendations and energy efficient mode appear to the Nest user as a leaf on the interface, giving direct feedback on energy choices. But the automatic control of heating and cooling will likely have a bigger impact on energy use. The Nest thermostat has five sensors — temperature, humidity, light and two activity sensors — and the activity sensors can notify the device to turn down the heating and cooling when no one is in the house.

The Nest thermostat also has a feature called “time to temperature,” which shows the home owner how long it will take to heat or cool the home. Say, you set the thermostat for 75 degrees, the Nest interface could read, 75 degrees in 25 minutes, letting you know how long it will take. The idea behind that feature is that most people set a thermostat like an accelerator, says Fadell, increasing the temperature or cooling way above or below the actual desired setting. But giving the user more feedback can help curb this problem — think of it like seeing how long a download of a file will take.

In addition to the thermostat device itself, Nest has created mobile apps and a website to be able to remotely turn up or down the thermostat, and also to give far more detailed data about home energy use. For example, you can log into the Nest website and see how much money you’ve saved, how many times you’ve turned up or down your thermostat.

The smart grid and Nest

The Nest thermostat also has Zigbee and Wi-Fi chips, so that it can connect with both your home broadband connection, and also other Zigbee devices like a smart meter, or smart appliances. Fadell says that thermostats are installed only every decade or so, so when the smart grid is fully deployed he wants the Nest thermostat to be ready.

Other companies like Opower and Honeywell are using a smarter thermostat as a way to connect with and control the smart energy home. While a lot of companies have focused on fancy dashboards that can monitor and control a home’s energy consumption, these devices haven’t really caught on, and smarter thermostats seem to be a better way in.

However, Nest is one of the only companies that is directly targeting consumers for its thermostat. Nest plans to sell its thermostat at Best Buy, via building specialty channels, and through its website. Fadell tells me the company wants to “connect with the iPhone generation where it shops.”

But at the same time that Nest is going direct to consumer, the device will clearly have a utility play, which the company is being quiet on right now. Like EcoFactor’s smart thermostat service, I could imagine utilities could work with homes that have Nest installed, to collectively curb energy consumption during peak grid events. This type of service is called demand response, and the saved energy per household helps utilities manage their grids during really hot summer days. Since the device also has ZigBee installed it could potentially connect with utilities’ smart meters, too.

Nest says that home owners can save 20 to 30 percent on their energy bills, which is one of the highest estimated ways to curb home energy use on the market. In contrast, mailed detailed energy bills from Opower are helping home owners cut around 2 percent. EcoFactor says with its similar thermostat service (but no designed gadget) it can get home owners to cut their energy consumption by 17 percent. If Nest actually takes off, utilities will be interested in working with that double digit energy reduction, though I’d like to see that 20 to 30 percent reduction validated in larger real world customer deployments.

My impressions

I think Nest is one of the more ambitious, and cool, ideas I’ve seen in the greentech space. The Nest thermostat is also beautiful and the idea is game changing on its own. However, I’m not so convinced it will work (I want it to! Prove me wrong!). I just don’t know if people will spend $250 on a thermostat, particularly in this economy. You can buy a connected, digital, programmable thermostat for $50, and $100 on the high end.

Also while Nest includes detailed instructions on how to install the thermostat (including a Nest screwdriver), installing a thermostat is actually kind of confusing. I’ve tried to tinker with some of the newer connected thermostats, and usually I end up wishing I hadn’t tried to do this myself — it involves circuit breakers and electrical wiring. Nest says it will offer Nest-approved installers, if people don’t want to install it themselves. Maybe the Best Buy Geek Squad will be able to help with this.

At the end of the day, it will take an army of Nest-inspired early adopters to convince the rest of the country and world to adopt Nest. Silicon Valley will probably rave about it, as they should, but will the other 99 percent of the country get on board with a $250, do-gooder, smart thermostat that’s as pretty as the iPhone?

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How much wisdom can one glean from a 20-minute chat with Professor Clay Christensen? I would say — if one keeps his mouth shut and asks the right questions — a lot. Here are notable highlights from my chat with the famous Harvard Business School professor, founder of the Innosight Institute and author of such best selling books as The Innovator’s Dilemma and Disrupting Class.

Jobs at hand

Steve Jobs and the company he co-founded just might be one of the few companies to look the innovator’s dilemma right in the eye and stare it into submission. Jobs’ Apple decided that it was better to cannibalize itself rather than have others do it. And so, the briskly selling iPod was replaced by the iPhone, and the iPad became the new low-end computer. When I asked Professor Christensen what made Jobs special, he said, “Jobs never said he understood the customer, but instead he tried to learn what they are trying to do, and that was his genius.”

Why? Because that helps focus on what matters the most: helping your customers get the job done. The professor pointed out that most people tend to focus on the wrong things, especially in the fast changing world of technology. Christensen argued that when companies make products that help make everyday stuff easier and get the job of life (or work) done, in the end customers don’t need any persuasion. That is precisely why a company like Apple can find buyers for its products so much more easily. Christensen pointed out the fundamental insight Steve Jobs had was that he focused on the “job.”

“Jobs are very stable in a sense and don’t change very much,” he said. For example, Julius Caesar used a chariot to get messages across from one city to another. Fed-Ex uses planes and trucks, he said. The job of delivering the packages hasn’t changed; just how it is done has changed.

Companies that realize this are fine, and will always find a way into the future. Apple understood that people would buy music, just not from a record store.  Amazon is another company that has figured out that people love buying books, though it might not be from a bookstore, or even in a paper form. That is one of the reasons it introduced Kindle.

Innovation troubles

I asked the famous academic what he thought of the increasing rhetoric around a decreasing emphasis on fundamental innovation and long term thinking in our society. He said that the problem isn’t with a lack of teaching or learning; instead it is a problem with finance.

Financial institutions and educators have propagated a way of thinking that is poison for innovation, Christensen said. And that thinking is around internal rate of return or IRR. As a result, investors are looking to put money to work fast and take it out as quickly as possible. This behavior is not only prevalent inside companies but also inside the venture business, he said. Christensen said that typically it takes about seven years or so to get a company to the finish line and get a good return on investment. Now compare that with an incremental product (or improvement) that you can flip quickly – that gives a big boost to the IRR.

As a result, venture capitalists are focused on short-term innovations and that is just nuts, he added. “I keep saying, don’t be distracted by the siren song of synthetic message of IRR,” he said. “It is dollars and not IRR percentage that matters.”

Professor Christenen was critical of the migratory capital that sloshes from one sector to another or one country to another – moving in and out after locking in short-term gains. He thought the government should consider a new kind of tax structure that encourages longterm investments and stability. For instance, no capital gains taxes for investments that last as long as eight years. “Then you will find people like Steve Jobs and the vibrancy of innovation will return.”

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Apple this morning announced a new subscription service for all publishers of content-based apps. It's the same one we saw with recently-released iPad app "The Daily," but it's the previously untold details that are getting people riled up. And riled up they are. Like most things Apple does, today's announcement has caused waves of reactions from publishers, bloggers and mainstream media alike.

From "Greedy" to "Brilliant, Brazen or Batsh*t Crazy" to "Anti-Competitive", Apple has been called a lot of things today and we're here to round up the backlash.

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So, What Exactly Did Apple Announce?

The short version is that Apple announced a subscription service for media apps that uses In-App purchases and sets aside a 30% chunk for Apple on each transaction. Apple CEO Steve Jobs broke it down.

"Our philosophy is simple--when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing," said Jobs. "All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app."

The Aftershocks of Today's Announcement

Like most things with Apple, they speak and the world reacts. Today was certainly no exception.

As Engadget's Paul Miller describes it, "The big trouble stems from the fact that Apple requires anybody offering a subscription service to offer that service for the same price or less through Apple. That means you can still sign up folks through your own methods and get all the cash, but if anybody signs up through your app, Apple gets a 30 percent cut." According to Miller, subscription-based music service Rhapsody has said it won't go along with the new service because of this.

RWW Alum Frederic Lardinois asks if Apple is getting too greedy with the 30% cut it's requiring of publishers, questioning the effect it might have on publishers and content providers.

"If Hulu has to give Apple $2.40 of every $7.99 subscription it sells, can it still make a profit?" asks Lardinois. "Or will Apple's move force them to raise their prices across the board?"

The effects of the move appear to be wide-reaching, as ComputerWorld's Gregg Keizer points out that these new rules actually affect Amazon's Kindle.

Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller confirmed that those rules apply not only to newspaper and magazine publishers, but also to content sellers like Amazon.com, which offers a Kindle app for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

To meet Apple's guidelines, Amazon must remove its "Shop in Kindle Store" link from its Kindle application. That link, which opens the iOS browser and displays Amazon's Web-based e-bookstore, is currently the easiest way for Kindle app users to purchase new books.

Even the Nieman Journalism Lab has joined in on the Apple-bashing today, pointing out that Apple is "setting itself up as a toll-taker on news org's' road to a new business model."

Meanwhile, mainstream media's response comes in the form of an article in The Wall Street Journal asking if Apple's subscription rules are in fact legal.

"Apple Inc.'s new subscription service could draw antitrust scrutiny, according to law professors," writes the Journal's Nathan Koppel. According to the article, the antitrust argument hinges on two primary points - whether or not Apple is exerting "anticompetitive pressures on price" and whether Apple is a "dominant player in the market."

All of this aside, if Apple implements these rules, some fear the worst. New York based entrepreneur and blogger Hank Williams warns that this could be the end for many subscription services on iOS.

"Many types of content businesses dont have 30% of margin to play with. In books, Amazon doesn't have 30% margins to give to Apple and remain in business. In music, services like Pandora probably don't even have 5% of margin to play with," writes Williams. "But Apple is not stupid, so they have certainly run the numbers. And so it seems that they have decided that they now have a platform that is so popular, that the services that can't afford to pay them 30% are not needed anymore."

Cause for Concern? Or Simply Hyperbole?

If the reaction in the media today is anything to go by, then there is certainly cause for concern. But is the move enough to put services like Pandora and Amazon Kindle off the platform? When the announcement came over the wire earlier today, ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick tweeted that he "would pay 30% of subscription fees for 1 click CCard access to upscale owners of the finest mobile media consumption device in history."

Scanning over the full, massive thread of coverage on Techmeme, however, either says that there is obviously a big problem here, or we're all blowing it out of proportion. As TechCrunch's MG Siegler points out, "to those who have followed tech news for any extended length of time, this is a familiar refrain. Company X changes something, therefore Company X is 'evil'." Are we simply reacting true to form? Or has Apple overstepped its boundaries, both legally and in terms of what companies and publishers deem acceptable?

Discuss

FLIPBOARD, AS YOU DOUBTLESS know, is a social media magazine for iPad. Part RSS reader, part iPad publication uniquely curated by each reader, the app brings serendipity, discovery, and typographic excellence to the experience of keeping up with one’s friends on Twitter, Facebook, and so on. This morning (last night in Japan), a new, improved version of Flipboard was launched, offering designers like us even more visual pleasure and rewarding the hours we put into our content’s semantic underpinnings.

Designer Craig Mod, in a letter, told me his “goal was to try and produce one of the best RSS experiences out there.” It’s accomplished via features like those listed below and more, as seen in these screenshots Craig sent me from his pre-launch tests:

auto-small caps
portrait and landscape optimized typography
full bleed images
flowing of text based on image size and location in the document
auto-generation of [figure] and [figcaption] objects based on alt
text on images

Adds Craig, “What’s great is that the more semantic and clean your feed, the better it will look in the app.”

Download Flipboard or update your copy in the iTunes Store and see.

Prior to the iPad's release, we posed a question to the readers: "why jailbreak an iPad?" Jailbreaking, the act of hacking an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad to install unapproved, third-party applications, is a popular pastime for many Apple mobile device owners. It provides more control over the hardware and software, offers new settings to tweak and delivers more features to what was formerly a locked-down, closed device.

But with the launch of the iPad, the reasons to jailbreak seemed, at first glance, limited. Tethering, for example, one of the most popular hacks for iPhones (it turns phones into computer modems) is no longer necessary on an iPad. You can buy an iPad with 3G built in. Apps that let you hack the camera aren't needed because the iPad has no camera. Apps for hacking the phone or providing VoIP access are also unnecessary because the iPad isn't a phone. And so on.

So we asked: is there still a good reason to hack an iPad via jailbreaking? As it turns out, there are several.

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For details on how to jailbreak an iPad, go here.

1. Multitasking

An app called "Backgrounder" turns your iPad into something that more closely resembles a "real" computer. With this app, you can run programs in the background while you switch between apps. For now, this app is a must-have for iPad jailbreakers, but it's worth noting that a coming software updated - iPhone OS 4.0 - will deliver multitasking to the iPad later this year.

2. Dashboard

The Dashboard app allows you to download and install widgets from Apple.com, just as you can on Mac OS X computers. Although not entirely bug-free and some widgets don't work, most of the ones we tried did just fine.

3. Rock

Rock, the third-party app store filled with paid apps that deliver more features and functionality works well on the iPad. Here, you can download things like My3G which tricks apps into thinking you're using a Wi-Fi connection and not 3G (helpful for restricted video apps) and MyWi, which turns your iPad into a Wi-Fi hotspot others can use. (Note: not all Rock apps will work on iPad).

4. SBSettings

One of the most popular tweaking apps, SBSettings lets you put toggles for various settings on your iPad's springboard - even toggles for settings that don't have toggles - like re-spring or reboot. For iPad users suffering from Wi-Fi woes (yes, that's still not fixed), you could put a Wi-Fi toggle on your springboard to reset the Wi-Fi - the only workaround that actually works for 100% of users.

5. Peripherals!

Devoted hackers have come up with ways to use peripheral devices with the iPad, including, most recently, an Apple Magic Mouse. Others have set up external hard drives to work with the iPad and have even used a Wiimote to play Super Mario World using the jailbreak app, SNES4iPhone.

6. "Depixelize" iPhone Apps

One of the more disappointing things about the iPad is how iPhone apps look when launched on the slate device. We knew they wouldn't look great, but when Steve Jobs said all iPhone would work on the iPad, we expected something better. They look just awful. However, the combination of a jailbreak app and some slightly more advanced hacking skills will allow you to scale iPhone apps for the iPad to run them in fullscreen without pixel doubling.

7. And More...the Complete List

If your favorite app isn't listed here, you can check its status in the "iPad JB Compatibility" spreadsheet, maintained here on Google Docs. This crowdsourced report lets you see what apps are compatible, what features work and what, if anything, is being done to update the app for iPad compatibility.

Discuss

Dropbox, the file storage, sharing and sync service, is now available for the iPad. With an early morning update to the company's iPhone application, the free Dropbox app is now a "universal" app, a term that describes single apps that resize and reformat themselves to function properly on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

With the updated version of Dropbox installed, iPad users can access all their stored files and folders without having to sync files via iTunes first, as is necessary with Apple's own iWork suite of office applications. Those files can then be viewed in Dropbox itself or opened using third-party software programs .

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Dropbox has been a favorite app of ours for years. Way back in 2008, we named it one of our top five favorite online storage services, and, unlike a few others on that early list, this app has withstood the test of time.

Dropbox: Your Files, Available Everywhere

For those not experienced with Dropbox, it's an online file storage service which functions like a hard drive in the "cloud," meaning your files and folders are available from any computer with an Internet connection. Ideal for mobile devices with limited storage, Dropbox has become increasingly popular over the years as it eliminates the need to actually carry all your files with you on the physical media in your smartphone, netbook or other mobile Internet device.

In addition, Dropbox's file synchronization capabilities mean that you can manage your files from any Dropbox desktop client application, where files are stored locally and synced to the cloud, or from its Web and mobile interfaces. No matter where you make a change, that change is duplicated everywhere else. The service also lets you access prior revisions of documents and provides sharing features.



On the iPad

With the latest update to the Apple mobile application, Dropbox users now have access to an app that is, in our opinion, an improvement over Apple's own idea of how files should transfer between devices. The beauty of the iPad is that everything you need is available from the slate computer itself: the iTunes Store, the iTunes App Store and, of course, the Web. App updates are available over-the-air too, so there's very little that actually requires you to plug in your iPad to your Mac or PC and sync it like the giant iPod Touch that it is.

One major exception to the iPad's untethered beauty is its document synchronization process. With Apple's iWork - an app The Wall St. Journal's Walt Mossberg dubbed "a serious content creation app that should help the iPad compete with laptops" - the only way to move files from computer to iPad is via an iTunes sync. Alternately, users are forced to deal with workarounds like emailing files to themselves, for example, or uploading them to a website for later download.



Dropbox eliminates those cumbersome solutions and in their place delivers a high-resolution, elegant app worthy of the iPad itself.

You can view files right in Dropbox whether those are word processing documents, spreadsheets, slideshows, photos, videos, music, PDFs or other files. And your favorite files can even be synced for offline viewing.

If you want to open a file in an external application, Dropbox supports a growing list of compatible partner applications like QuickOffice, Documents to Go, Fuze Meeting, Air Sharing HD and others.

The basic Drobox service offers 2 GB of free storage. Power users can upgrade to Pro 50 or Pro 100, which provides 50 or 100 GBs, respectively, for a monthly fee.

You can download Dropbox for iPad here.

Discuss

Fans of Red Sweater Software's blog publishing tool MarsEdit got a surprise Tuesday morning with the release of MarsEdit 3. The most significant update to the software is the addition of a rich text editor, though those who fiddle with the HTML for their blog posts got an updated syntax highlighter. A new media manager rounds out this solid update, one that the company hopes will attract new users and get old ones writing again. 

According to Red Sweater founder and developer Daniel Jalkut, some of the features in MarsEdit 3 have been in the works for roughly 2.5 years—basically since MarsEdit 2 was released. Many of the enhancements in the new version respond to long-standing requests from users, Jalkut told Ars, particularly rich text editing. "Most of the [blog] Web interfaces and desktop competitors have a rich mode but, until now, MarsEdit has focused exclusively on HTML/markdown source," Jalkut said.





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The long-awaited iPad/iPhone jailbreak has finally arrived, allowing anyone with an iPhone, iPod Touch or even the brand-new Apple iPad running the newest versions of the iPhone Operating System the ability to unlock their device and install unapproved, third-party applications.

Unlike Google's Android Market, the app store for Google-powered phones, Apple's iTunes App Store is tightly controlled with only "approved" applications allowed access. But for jailbreakers, the term used to describe those who hack their devices, hundreds more applications are immediately available, allowing you greater control and freedom over the hardware you own.

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Why Jailbreak?

Users who jailbreak can download apps that allow you to customize everything on the device from your homescreen images to your icons. You can also multitask by running apps in the background, tether your iPhone to your PC to use it as a modem, even turn your iPhone into a "MiFi" hotspot. Those are just the highlights, though. The jailbreak application stores (there are several, like Cydia, Icy and RockYourPhone, for example) have apps that let you do pretty much anything. Here, there really are "apps for that," when "that" is something Apple would rather you not do.

For some users, there are only one or two apps that make jailbreaking worthwhile, but for others, the reason for jailbreaking isn't just the apps themselves, but the freedom a jailbroken device provides.

For those who aren't afraid to void their warranty (don't worry, you can always restore to factory settings with no one the wiser), the new jailbreaking tool called "Spirit" brings that level of freedom to all Apple mobile devices running firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3 or 3.2. This is also an "untethered" jailbreak, meaning you don't have to plug in your device to your computer every time your reboot it, an issue that plagued similar exploits used in the recent past.

How To Jailbreak the iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch

Note that this particular jailbreak is what's known by the hacker community as a "userland" jailbreak. That means that it exploits a security weakness in the mobile operating system. Apple tends to quickly patch these holes, once exposed, through software updates. Jailbreak users who don't want to be affected by the soon-to-arrive Apple software update, can go through a procedure to back up something called "SHSH blobs" which allow you to downgrade and re-jailbreak your device if you were to accidentally upgrade. If you want go through this step, there's a tutorial here. Otherwise, just be careful to not upgrade your device when a new software patch is released.

Once you're ready to jailbreak, do the following:

Verify you're running the latest version of iTunes (9.1.1) and then sync your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad one last time in order to back it up. The iPad should be running OS 3.2.

Download the Spirit jailbreak for Mac or PC. Both are found on the Spirit homepage. (Also here: Mac, PC).

Connect the iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch to your computer using the USB cable.

Run the Spirit jailbreak application. (Note: Windows users may need to run the program as an administrator - Right-click on the .exe file and choose "Run as Administrator" from the menu. If you still have issues, try running it in compatibility mode as well. Right-click, go to Properties, Compatibility tab, and check the box "Run this program in compatibility mode for: Windows 98/Me").

Click the "jailbreak" button.

The iPad will automatically reboot.

Once rebooted, you'll see the "Cydia" application installed on your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad's desktop. From here, you have access to all the unapproved, third-party applications.

That's it!

Your device is now hacked.

Note that Spirit is not a "carrier unlock" which allows the iPhone to be used with carriers other than AT&T. It is a jailbreak only.

Discuss

Early last month, Apple changed the terms of service agreement on its software development kit for the iPhone and iPad to include section 3.3.1, which effectively prohibited developers from using Adobe Flash on its mobile devices.

Today, the New York Post is reporting that this move may have brought about some unexpected results - an antitrust investigation.

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According to the Post article, "the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple's new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple's programming tools."

If you are friends with any iPhone developers, then you've likely heard all about last month's changes to the SDK terms of service, which states that all applications "must be originally written in C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs". This meant that any other workarounds to bring Flash-based applications to the iPhone, such as compilers, were suddenly outlawed.

As Nick Bilton of the New York Times' Bits Blog noted last month, this change was "sure to set off a brush fire at the headquarters of Adobe Systems" and now it seems to have done more than that. So, although Apple CEO Steve Jobs penned a long explanation last week as to why Adobe's Flash would not be allowed on any of Apple's mobile devices, it looks like security flaws and technical glitches may not be reason enough.

According to the Post, the decision on which agency will launch the antitrust inquiry is just days away and "doesn't necessarily mean action will be taken against Apple, which argues the rule is in place to ensure the quality of the apps it sells to customers."

Discuss

For some of you, your brand new iPhone 3GS came with the newest OS 3.1.3. For others, you unknowingly upgraded your OS without realizing what it would mean. Either way, we know that you've been stuck obediantly following the terms of your license agreement and running only authorized apps. Well, those days are finally over.

A new jailbreak called Spirit just been released and works on the latest iPhone and iPad operating systems.

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The latest jailbreak was announced late last night on the iPhone Dev-Team blog.

The Spirit jailbreak is now out! Congratulations to @comex for the first userland jailbreak since the 1.x days.

Spirit provides an untethered jaibreak on those newer devices which used to require a computer nearby to finish the boot process. Spirit is able to do this because it doesn't actually kick in until after the kernel is running.

Spirit is an "untethered" jailbreak for any iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch running firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3 or 3.2. Untethered means that the user does not need to plug the device into their computer every time they reboot it, as opposed to "tethered", which requires this.

This latest jailbreak works on both Mac and PC and is available free for download. The Reddit discussion of the new jailbreak indicates that Spirit works on the 3GS with the latest software updates, but as with anything of this sort, a full backup would be strongly advisable.

Spirit is not a "carrier unlock", which allows the iPhone to be used with carriers other than AT&T, but a "jailbreak", which allows users to run unauthorized software. If you're wondering why you would want to jailbreak your iPhone, give Sarah Perez's article, "Why You Have To Jailbreak the iPhone" a quick read.

Discuss

Penultimate, by Cocoa Box Design, aims to bring the analog act of note taking to the purely digital iPad. In recent days, the application has enjoyed the number one sales slot on the App Store, as well as a short time in the top 10 grossing apps. However, as we all know by now, not all that glitters is gold. Does Penultimate stack up to its lofty App Store success?

As long as you don’t look too closely, Penultimate is beautiful. The application takes its styling inspiration from a leather-bound notebook filled with your choice of white lined paper, graph paper, or blank white paper. The power of the app lies in allowing users to create as many separate notebooks as they desire, making the task of organizing notes somewhat trivial.





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By now, everyone has an opinion on the walled gardens Apple has erected around the iPhone, the iPad and the apps that run on them. The company is simply curating its platform, or it’s micromanaging developers to death. It’s nourishing the most successful computing platform of all time, or it’s suffocating innovation. It’s advancing the computer, or pushing it backwards. So divisive is the debate that it sometimes feels like the culture wars have come to Silicon Valley.

Whether you think Apple’s efforts to control the iPhone OS environment are helping or hurting, its ability to do so will eventually break down. Control never lasts forever — especially on the web, where entropy seems to be a guiding principle. The question is when Apple’s control will start to break down. I think it already has.

But while my reasoning is partly tied to the broader debate about open vs. closed systems, it has much more to do with a development that’s taken place over the past few months, one that even most technophobic Apple customer can grasp immediately: Apple isn’t just refereeing technical violations like private APIs; it’s refereeing morality.

It started when Apple pulled 5,000 apps from the App Store because of sexual content — though an arbiter of porn, even one with the best of intentions, will always end up with all sides angry with them. Apple’s shifting stance on political satire ignited another brush fire. It banned, then allowed Mark Fiore’s iPhone app; now, any aggrieved yahoo with a rejected app can fashion himself as a First Amendment martyr.

I’m willing to accept that Apple is trying doing the right thing for its customers. In one sense, Apple is like Walmart, or any retailer that excludes magazines and books with content it deems too sexual or politically controversial. But Apple is more than just a retailer — it’s the provider of a platform, and a wildly successful one. Apple can control its platform on a small scale, but as success expands that platform domain, the company’s control inevitably breaks down as it starts to create more problems than it solves.

The problems affect developers, content partners and consumers. To avoid having to explain its capricious approval system, Apple has retreated into an opaque cloud of inscrutability, making telepathy a vital skill for successful developers. As publishers large and small bring their content to the iPad, Apple’s murky morality may give them pause — or worse, lead to self-censorship. And curating controversial content in a way that leaves all parties unhappy is hardly a savvy way to market a hot new product to consumers.

Apple has often demonstrated an ability to be flexible. In January, it eased some controls on the app approval process in an effort to speed it up. It recently allowed Opera Mini into the App Store, an exception to its rule that third-party apps not compete with its native offerings. And iPhone OS 4 will finally concede to longstanding calls for the iPhone to multitask third-party apps.

So the company is likely to reassess its control-freak tendencies as well. It has three choices: One, hold to the status quo; two, curate its platform, but add a set of clear guidelines as to what’s allowed and what isn’t, or maybe a curtained-off section for controversial apps; or three, adopt an open environment where apps are rejected only on technical considerations. The first will only add to confusion. The second might work if the guidelines are explicit enough. The third is the simplest, but involves giving up a lot of control.

My guess is Apple will go for option No. 3. Not right away, but in increments. In the early days of the web, ISPs faced a similar choice and decided not to control what customers could read. Apple will always favor a closed architecture that lets it offer a web experience on its terms. But in time, even its curated experience will look more more like the messy reality we see on the web today.

Related GigaOM Pro Content:

Needed: A Neiman Marcus for Mobile Apps
Will Killer Apps Affect Which Handsets Consumers Buy?

Image courtesy of Flickr user herwings.

Apple’s iPad will be a revolutionary gadget, certain pundits have predicted, transforming everything from print media to environmentally friendly transportation to computing at large. But I’m beginning to think that Apple’s much-hyped new tablet may have more impact on mobile marketing than any other segment.

For years, mobile marketing has been on the cusp of a breakthrough, according to industry analysts, but has been held back by a host of problems, including the small screen sizes of mobile phones and a general lack of traffic on the wireless web. As I discuss in my weekly column over at GigaOM Pro, Apple is positioned to give mobile ads a huge boost with iAd, a platform and network that will deliver come-ons to users on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad via the upcoming iPhone OS 4. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Apple will charge advertisers a stiff $1 million or so to deliver ads to the mobile devices, and may demand as much as $10 million for marketers eager to be a part of iAd’s launch.

The high price tag is sure to keep some advertisers at bay, as will Apple’s insistence on controlling how ads are created in iAd. But marketers willing to shell out the cash to be a part of iAd are sure to invest heavily to create the kind of compelling, immersive ads that will grab users’ attention on the iPad (and Apple will surely make sure they do so). While the tiny screens and limited controls of mobile phones continue to shackle advertisers looking to target on-the-go users, iPad’s full-sized touchscreen invites the kind of creative, innovative campaigns that ad agencies dream of.

That kind of functionality will allow creative types to develop all sort of innovative, compelling mobile ad campaigns. And those efforts will trickle down to smartphones and other mobile devices as advertisers tweak them to compensate for the shortcomings of smaller gadgets. So while advertisers may not be able to fully duplicate their iPad campaigns on traditional handsets, Apple’s new tablet will have a major ripple effect throughout the still-emerging world of mobile marketing. Read the full article here.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Steve Rhodes.

Apple could be planning to expand its voice command capabilities on the iPhone thanks to the pending acquisition of Siri, which makes an iPhone app that lets users perform Web searches by voice command. News that the company was acquired first appeared in an FTC premerger notification (PDF) and was confirmed by Silicon Alley Insider and others.

For those who have already played around with Google's search app for the iPhone, Siri's voice search capabilities will appear quite similar, but it goes further than just showing search results. With the app running, users can speak what they're looking for ("What movies are playing nearby?" or "Make a reservation at Francesca Forno for two people at 6pm"). The app will then determine what service you need—a basic list of search results, a Yelp review page, a reservation through OpenTable, etc.—and list out your options along with maps and other data.

If Apple chooses to integrate Siri's technology into the iPhone OS, Google's Voice Search app would be redundant for many users—after all, if the OS can do it, why bother downloading an extra app that does less? That's probably the point. Considering that Apple may still have a Google Maps replacement in the wings, it certainly seems as if the company is making more of an effort to separate itself from Google, though both Apple and Google publicly insist that their relationship is still strong.



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On Tuesday, the LLVM team announced the availability of its 2.7 release. LLVM is an open source project with a license similar to BSD's; it offers front ends for a number of programming languages, compiling them to intermediate code that can be interpreted by a Just-in-Time compiler or immediately compiled into native code. The 2.7 release marks a major milestone for LLVM, as it's the first time that its C language compiler, Clang, has sufficient C++ support to self-host, meaning that it can compile a functional version of itself.

Although the C++ support is considered alpha-quality, LLVM considers Clang's C and Objective-C compiling to be ready for production use. The relatively high quality of Objective-C shouldn't be surprising, as Apple was one of the early commercial backers of the project. The influence of Apple may also be felt in the progress made in supporting ARM processors, which has been given a beta designation. New in this version are support for both the Linux and Darwin ARM ABIs, as well as improved code generation for the ARM vector instruction set, NEON.

But Apple isn't the only game in town. LLVM has been used by Google, for its Unladen Swallow Python project, and Adobe, which adopted it for its ill-fated attempt to get Flash applications running on the iPhone/Pad platform. With 2.7, Linux and Darwin support arrive in the same release, and the Objective-C compilation can now target non-Apple platforms thanks to use of the GNUstep runtime. There's also vastly improved support for VMKit, which allows static and JIT compilation that supports both Java and Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure. 2.7 brings a new garbage collection architecture with significantly improved performance.

There are some other interesting tidbits scattered throughout the release notes. Significant progress has been made in developing a plugin that will replace GCC's standard optimizers and code generators with those derived from LLVM. There's also initial support for a soft-processor that operates on field-programmable gate arrays. 
The growing number of projects that rely on LLVM seems to indicate that the project is attracting much wider interest than it was just a few years back.




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Bento is the consumer version of popular database software FileMaker Pro. The new iPad version of the software joins the Mac version, currently at version 3, as well as the iPhone version in the growing stable of Bento implementations. At $4.99, the iPad application is 10 percent of the price of its desktop sibling, but the desktop software isn't necessary in order to make use of it.

Creating a database from scratch in Bento for iPad is simple thanks to the 25 different templates included with the software. These templates are made for people who are looking to track things like recipes, expenses, customers, and inventory. Each template can be edited to meet the needs of a specific user and can be helpful starting points. For those who want to start from scratch, there is also an option to start from a blank slate.





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Dan Grigsby, founder of Mobile Orchard, is abandoning iPhone development. The reason? Apple's "ask permission" environment doesn't work for him anymore. He explained his decision in a recent blog post:

Ask permission environments crush creativity and innovation. In healthy environments, when would-be innovators/creators identify opportunities, the only thing that stands between the idea and its realization is work. In the iPhone OS environment when you see an opportunity, you put in work first, ask Apple's permission and then, only after gaining their approval, your idea can be realized. I've always worked at the edge; it's where the interesting opportunities live. None of the startup[s] I've created would have been possible in an ask permission environment.

What's interesting here -- from an industry perspective -- is that if you get past the Apple vs. Adobe vs. OS 4.0 vs. what-have-you stuff, there's two legitimate viewpoints floating around. You've got developers like Grigsby who find Apple's model too limiting. So they get out. And then you've got devs who think the App Store opportunity outweighs the obstacles (for now). Dan Pilone, co-author of "Head First iPhone Development" and founder of Element 84, is in that second group.

After corresponding with Grigsby and Pilone, I was struck by how much they have in common. There aren't any vast philosophical differences at play here. Both dislike aspects of Apple's model and both also see lots of opportunity in the App Store. Yet one is in and one is out.

The concerns

To help me understand his fundamental problems with Apple's model, Grigsby began by outlining the series of events that led to his departure from iPhone development.

Grigsby: Very often, you would have a group of developers in some kind of social setting and one would say, "I want to give you a free copy of my app." And in one case, a guy handed me a business card that had a URL for the iTunes store. And then he gave me a dollar and said, "Just go buy my app." That's crazy. I don't want your dollar. I want you to be able to whip out your iPhone and give me a promo code.

So, I wrote a single-site browser that would interact with iTunes Connect and let iPhone developers generate a promo code. Now I knew, because I've read the terms and conditions, that would never be allowed into the App Store. There's language in there that says you can't scrape the store. I was going to distribute the source instead. But I talked to some attorneys and they said Apple could decide that bothers them and kick me out of the program.

From what I perceived as maybe a $10,000 or $20,000 opportunity, I had to make a decision as to whether I should stay in this business. That's such an uncomfortable place to be. And so that most recent experience, the "you live or you die at Apple's discretion," made me start to look at all of the other examples of places where they're treating the App Store as an extension of their brand as opposed to just a marketplace. I lost all of my enthusiasm. I made a decision that I was going to change to something else.

Pilone has his concerns as well. He's a pragmatist, not an evangelist. He noted, for example, that recent app snubs should raise red flags for all developers.

Pilone: I think there's a potentially significant risk lurking out there. That's the approval process. Not from an "Are you using undocumented APIs?" perspective. That's an easy one to avoid. But from a "No thanks, you're competing with something we've already done," or "We don't want that kind of application on our phone," perspective.

Google Voice is the poster child for this issue, and there was a lot of rumor and speculation over whether the Opera browser was going to make it into the store (it ultimately did). This now begs the question, if Google Voice was delayed (Apple never officially rejected it as far as I know) because the voice, voicemail and SMS features duplicated functionality already on the phone, on what grounds could the Opera browser possibly be accepted? The point being, there's a real business risk of investing in a product only to have it completely rejected without any real avenues to rectify the situation. I don't want to make a bigger deal out of it than it is. Obviously 180,000+ other applications have managed to get into the store. But it's a risk.

A secondary marketplace

One proposed solution to developers' concerns is for Apple to allow a secondary market to take root. This would be an open space where developers who don't want to go through Apple's process can sell their apps legitimately. I posed this alternative to both Grigsby and Pilone.

Grigsby said a secondary marketplace would be a fine addition, but he's interested in a different change: he believes markets will naturally form if users can install software on Apple devices in much the same way developers can.

Grigsby: When you give someone the fundamental ability to install software on their phone, entrepreneurs will build marketplaces and create discoverability. Obviously, that's a threat to Apple. And so I can see Apple's point in all of this. This is why when you talk to me, I'm sad. I'm not mad. But it runs against my principles.

Pilone responded with a host of big questions:

Pilone: How many "secondary" marketplaces are we talking about? One? Two? Who decides? As a consumer, do I need to worry about all of them? What's my purchasing, downloading and installation experience like? Do I get enough value in the apps in that "store" to justify the time and complexity of having to figure it out? Sure, there will be power users who would use it, and as a developer I don't want to ignore that crowd, but really, in the grand scheme of things, what apps do you want or need that aren't in the App Store now? I go back to the philosophy that if a secondary market is valuable to you (as a developer or a consumer), go with a device that has it.

In or out?

I asked Grisby what Apple would have to do to get him back. He laughed, claiming he has no say in the matter. But in the off chance Apple asked, there's only one thing he wants:

Grigsby: I'm not standing outside saying, "Apple, you will do this or else." I recognize that my voice doesn't command that kind of authority with them. But I'd be happy if they gave people the ability to distribute apps outside of the store. I love marketing. I'm a marketing hacks kind of guy. So I can get people to find the applications. Just give me the ability to freely create works and find a market for them and I'll be happy.

It's a simple enough request. Just one tweak to the model, right? But in the course of my exchange with Pilone, he hit on the fundamental problem developers face: Apple is, above all else, focused on the consumer. Anything that runs counter to that isn't debatable.

Pilone: I take a very pragmatic approach to this. I think it's important for people (read: developers) to realize that Apple is a consumer products company. At the end of the day, they're about consumers, not developers. Apple philosophically believes that by delivering a closed system they can deliver a better consumer product. The success of the iPod and iPhone strongly supports that argument.

Apple's iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad are "closed" devices that are 100-percent targeted at the end users. Developers are welcome, but you're going to support Apple's vision of the end-user experience whether you want to or not. Ultimately, it's a gamble for Apple. They're taking a risk that if they alienate too many developers, some other platform may draw them in. But Apple's wagering that if they make the best consumer product out there, it will have the largest user base. Developers will code for it because that's where they can be paid for their work and reach the broadest audience.

Keith found an interesting story telling a bit about how Steve Jobs operates. It involves small teams of young engineers willing to work 90-hour weeks in total secrecy, and a complete willingness to throw away bad ideas without flowery language. The iPad is surprisingly similar to the Mac."


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Soon after the first iPads started showing up on Princeton University's network earlier this month, the university's network admins noticed strange behavior from Apple's tablet computer: some iPads kept using an IP address after its DHCP lease ran out. That's part of the reason the university "banned" the iPad from its network. 
What's really going on here, and how can it be fixed?





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Is there a method to the madness that Apple uses when choosing cities for retail locations? After reading an Experian Simmons report that ranks designated market areas by the number of Apple customers in each, I suspect as much.

Using data collected with its Experian’s Micromarketer Generation3 analytics tool, Experian Simmons created an index that calculates a consumer propensity to own or use Apple products. A geographic market with an index score of 100 indicates the middle ground; higher scores reflect an area where consumers are more likely to use Apple wares while those with lower indices are less likely to do so. As the numbers make clear, markets with the highest scores generally have a greater number of Apple retail locations.

Source: Experian Simmons

Some notable markets from the report:

San Francisco – Oakland – San Jose, Calif. — With the highest index of 149, consumers in this area are nearly 50 percent more likely to buy and use Apple products than the average U.S. consumer and as such, is home to 12 retail locations. Given that this is where Apple’s headquarters is located, this makes perfect sense.
Boston — 31.3 percent of the Boston adult population uses Apple, earning it a spot just behind Apple’s home turf with an index of 145. Number of Apple retail locations: 11
New York City — Nearly one in three adults uses an Apple product — nearly 4.9 million people — truly justifying the Big Apple name. An index of 141 might be worth many Apple Stores, but the four in New York are spread out to attract the most traffic in densely populated areas.
Bluefield – Beckley – Oak Hill, W. Va. — With the lowest index score of 41, residents here won’t find an Apple Store within the state. Instead, they’d have to travel over 200 miles to either North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia or Pennsylvania for the Apple retail experience.

One could easily take a chicken-and-egg approach to the data and argue that perhaps there are more Apple customers in certain areas because there are more retail locations to begin with. I don’t think that’s the case, though. Customers from any market can simply purchase Apple products online — but folks in West Virginia don’t seem to be doing so.

I have little doubt that adding a retail location helps Apple’s sales, but I’m inclined to believe that the company puts more of its stores in markets where it already has a captive audience. And Apple stores are also service centers for Apple products — adding stores where you don’t have products to service may not be the best strategy for growth. Instead of repeating the mistake made by many retailers by building a store and hoping for audience, Apple builds the audience which helps support the store.

Precision found a nice little piece of speculation on the real reason behind Apple's recent efforts to restrict app development to XCode. While the standard given reason is to kill competition from Flash and other stacks, this story speculates that the real reason has to do with the unusually large die size of the A4 processor inside the iPads. Worth a quick read.


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Between packing up to move apartments and keeping an eye on Twitter’s Chirp conference, I’ve been playing around with a new 15-inch Macbook Pro, one of the many new laptops introduced by Apple earlier this week. The 15-inch devices, which use Intel’s i5 and i7 processors while the 13-inch Macbook Pro uses the Intel Core 2 Duo chip, look virtually no different than they did before, with unibody styling and the same screen size, weight and number of ports. The only visible change is in the design of the mag-safe power connector, which is now clearly inspired by the MacBook Air charger. [Digg]

The real change in these new laptops is under the hood — in the stuff you can’t see. It all starts with the integrated( Intel graphics) and discrete (Nvidia’s GeForce 330M GT) graphics chips, which can be found in both the 15- and 17-inch machines. The 13-inch Macbook Pros use the 320m chip. What Apple has done in this most recent update to its line-up is make switching between two graphics modes automatic, depending on the task at hand. For instance, a simple application such as Mail or Safari by default uses the embedded/integrated graphics engine, while more graphics-intensive apps such as Premiere or Aperture automatically switch to the more muscular graphics chips.

So what’s the big deal about this? First, you get a smoother performance. But the big impact is on the battery life of these laptops, especially with the 13 inch Macbook Pros. While the previous generation of MacBook Pros used Nvidia’s 9400M integrated graphics engine, the new line-up uses the new Nvidia 320M. The old chip had 16 cores while the new 320M has 48. And yet the 320M, despite being more muscular (it provides an 80 percent performance gain over the 9400M) is 40 percent more energy efficient. That boosts the battery life of the laptops by as much as three hours, which means Apple is offering total battery life of between 8 and 10 hours on the new MacBook Pros.

I’m pretty sure Apple made more tweaks than just that in order to get those 8-10 hours, but graphic chip optimization has to be right up there when it comes to squeezing more out of the battery. Maybe because it makes both the hardware and the operating system it’s able to get more from the batteries on its machines.

These tweaks reminded me of something uber-investor and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, who will be speaking at our Green:Net conference on April 29, said recently — that by innovating around the internal combustion engine, we can substantially improve car mileage. Others believe that by writing more efficient, smarter software, more life can be squeezed from the current generation of battery technology. Apple is certainly proving that.

Oh and in case you were wondering about the machine itself, it is really really really fast. Much faster than my old MacBook Pro, which has an SSD drive and 8 GB of memory. Apps start in a blink of an eye and even iTunes works as if it was suddenly Barry Bonds. If you want to know anything specific, go ahead and ask me, and I will do my best to answer your questions.

I like both Adobe (Lightroom rocks!) and Apple (iPad rocks!), but I’ve been asked over and over again what I think about Apple’s new 3.3.1 policy. You know, the one that basically bans cross-platform development frameworks. And, in particular, basically nails the Flash coffin shut on iPhone/iPod/iPad. So, what do I think?

I love it.

And I’m surprised more developers, end users, business leaders, and general web standards lovers everywhere aren’t posting about how great this is.

It’s good for end users.

The App Store already has a signal-to-noise problem. With hundreds of thousands of apps, finding the good stuff is tough. Bear in mind that every single one of those Apps was built by someone intentionally designing for these devices – and we’ve still got plenty of junk in amongst the gems. Now imagine a bunch of developers just cross-publishing to lots of devices – ignoring all of the strengths of each of those devices. The signal to noise ratio gets worse, fast. Ugh.

It’s good for the web.

For me, this one is the biggie. These devices are a dual-platform: iPhone SDK and HTML. Don’t like the iPhone SDK? Build for HTML. And finally, finally, someone has stepped up and done something about the de-facto Flash monopoly. Flash has helped the web and HTML standards to stagnate. It’s sorta like a drug. It’s whizzy and slick, granted. But it’s a nightmare, too. Flash crashes constantly. Its performance is terrible (when a 1Ghz mobile processor in the iPad plays video more smoothly than Flash on a 16-core Mac Pro with a hefty GPU, that’s a problem). And it smashes through web paradigms left and right. Why? Because there’s no competition.

Look at the browser world, on the other hand. With Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and Apple duking it out, we’re seeing a breathtaking pace of innovation. Browser stability and performance is improving at an astonishing rate. There’s no reason Flash shouldn’t be super-stable and fast by now – but it isn’t. It’s like the Internet Explorer doldrums all over again – Flash is holding us back, just like IE used to. I’d rather be building for something with a scary fast pace of innovation than something stale.

The iPad is already spurring HTML5 adoption even faster than before. Witness all the video and games sites that are already scrambling to announce and ship their HTML5 interfaces. Bring it on!

I want to build for the web, not for Flash.

It’s good for developers.

And by that, I mean “good developers.”

Good developers are language agnostic. They’ll write in whatever language is worth the effort.

Good developers love great toolsets and great platforms. The iPhone SDK is amazing.

Good developers want their creations to be perfectly tuned to their purpose. The iPhone/iPod/iPad interfaces demand and deserve lots of individual attention, not to be marginalized by some middleware cross-platform publisher.

Good developers want their products found and used. The App Store signal-to-noise issue is a daunting one – more shovelware won’t help.

Good developers want a stable community, with lots of advice, sample code, libraries, etc. A fragmented development landscape prohibits that – a unified one encourages it.

I could go on – you get the point. Best of all? It weeds out poor developers. And if the iPhone SDK and HTML5 aren’t your thing – go build somewhere else. I’m sure there’ll be another computing revolution in a decade or two that you can ignore yet again.

(and if you’re a good developer – we’re hiring and we’re having more fun than you can possibly imagine)

It’s good for Apple.

They get better apps. Happier end users. More productive good developers. Fewer bad developers. And, of course, they make more money. They did invent the software, devices, and App Store, afterall. Why should they marginalize themselves out of their own business?

It’s even good for Adobe

Granted, not quite as good for Adobe as having Flash on these devices. But lets not forget that Adobe has a stable of great applications, like Illustrator and Photoshop, which aid iPhone development. Their sales will still boom.

Finally, Adobe is incentivized, finally, to actually improve Flash. I’ll bet if Adobe actually made Flash stable, fast, and power efficient, it could get added to the iPhone for use in-browser. It’s not like Apple enjoys seeing half rendered web pages in their browser – they just enjoy customer complaints about crashing and poor performance less. Believe me – I know all about customer complaints due to poor Flash behavior.

But that window of opportunity is closing – the owners of those web pages don’t enjoy their stuff being half-rendered either. They’ll rush to fix that problem – without Flash – if Adobe doesn’t fix it for them.

So there you have it. Thanks, Apple, for doing what’s best for the web, your customers, and developers like me. The future is bright. Long live web standards!

(this post written on an iPad in WordPress’ excellent app)

UPDATE #1:

I understand many disagree, and have their own reasons. Go write for Android, another great platform that’s more open.  Maybe if you do, Android will ‘win’.  I think you’re confusing platform choice and development choice here.  Personally, I’d love to have more platform choice.  Who wouldn’t?  But Apple did invent this thing.  They certainly deserve to make whatever decisions they want about it.  If you’re right, and I’m wrong, those decisions will kill the platform.    I happen to think I’m right, and I happen to think Flash needs to seriously improve – and the Apple’s the only way that’s gonna happen.

Note that I don’t have an opinion on things like MonoTouch, which I know nothing about.  It could very well be that Apple painted with too wide of a brush here and excluded some things that should really be included.  I just don’t know.  I do know, though, that history has shown that cross-platform languages and frameworks have an abysmal success rate.  The last thing we need is watered down apps built for the lowest common denominator.

Finally, yes, SmugMug uses Flash.  I’m sure we’ll continue to use it.  Like I said, it’s slick and whizzy and like a drug.  We used it because it was the only tool for the job.  Adobe did a great thing with their h.264 support, and we love our Flash apps – when they work.  But it’s been awfully frustrating to watch Flash continue to crash and perform poorly for our customers, especially because Adobe doesn’t seem to care.  They certainly don’t respond to us when we ask for help, and they certainly haven’t fixed their issues with multiple releases.  I’m hopeful that this sudden pressure and increased competition will cause them to bring Flash up to the level of their other superb products like Lightroom.  If not, you’ll certainly see us move away from Flash as HTML5 support and performance continues to improve, just like everyone else on the web.  We can play Quake II in HTML5, for heaven’s sake!

UPDATE #2:

Steve Jobs on Adobe.  Amen, brother.

It’s only Wednesday but we already have our link of the week. Although they call it merely a “quick write-up” (and it is a fast read), iA’s mini-compendium of design insights before and after the appearance of the iPad at their office should be required reading for all web, app, and/or interaction designers.

In the equivalent of a breathlessly quick seminar presentation, iA discusses typographic resolution and feel; the effect of the device’s brilliant contrast on readability; the kitsch produced by rigorously adhering to Apple’s “make it 3D” guidelines; whether metaphors work; and more—all of it well worth far more than the little time it will take you to absorb.

In particular, I call your attention to the section entitled, “Interaction Design: So What Works?” Although intended as a guideline to producing well-tuned iPad apps, it also works splendidly as a mini-guide to creating better websites, much like Luke Wroblewski’s brilliant “Mobile First” presentation at last week’s An Event Apart, which carried a similar message:

The limited screen estate and the limited credit on the number of physical actions needed to complete one task (don’t make me swipe and touch too often), pushes the designer to create a dead simple information architecture and an elaborate an interaction design pattern with a minimal number of actions. This goes hand in hand with the economic rule of user interaction design: Minimize input, maximize output.
Since the smallest touch point for each operation is a circle of the size of a male index finger tip, we cannot cram thousands of features (or ads!) in the tight frame; we have to focus on the essential elements. Don’t waste screen estate and user attention on processing secondary functions.
We found that the iPad applications we designed, made it relatively easy to be translated back into websites. The iPad could prove to be a wonderful blue print to design web sites and applications. If it works on the iPad, with a few tweaks, it will work on a laptop.

Via iA » Designing for iPad: Reality Check.

Apple touts the automatic graphics switching in its new 15" and 17" MacBook Pros as a "breakthrough technology from Apple." Some readers scoffed at the description earlier today, assuming (as we originally did) that Apple was using NVIDIA's Optimus technology. We discussed the graphics switching technology at length with Apple this afternoon, and though Apple's implementation is similar in concept, it differs in a few key areas from Optimus.

The main goal of Apple's automatic graphics switching is to balance graphics performance with long battery life. Intel's latest stable of mobile processors—Core i3, i5, and i7—all include integrated graphics in the same package as the CPU. Dubbed Intel HD, this integrated graphics processor is designed primarily for efficiency. While its performance is far better than the previous GMA950, for instance, it still wouldn't be classified as good for "performance" graphics in any sense of the term in common usage.





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As the iPad descends upon us, it is fair to ask, "Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?" Depending upon whom you ask, the conclusions vary widely. The yin and yang of openness vs. integrated raises a fundamental question that underscores the battle being fought in the simmering industry battle between Apple and Google.

As the iPad descends upon us, it is fair to ask, "Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?" Depending upon whom you ask, the conclusions widely vary.

For example, RealNetworks' Rob Glaser forcefully argues that Apple's vertically integrated model "Must be stopped." He cautions: "If that's the way the industry plays out -- and there are a couple of vertical stovepipes that are closed -- A: we will have a much slower pace of innovation than we've ever had and B: there will be a tremendous loss in terms of value creation versus it being more horizontal."

Meanwhile, science fiction writer, blogger and tech activist, Cory Doctorow, recently made waves when he asserted in Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either) that, "If you can't open it, you don't own it. Screws not glue." He concluded:

The real issue isn't the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it. If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn't for you. If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn't for you. If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you're going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn't for you.

And don't even get me started on the legions who dismiss Apple's end-to-end approach with an "Apple's Evil" slap, or more stridently, paint the story as "destined" to play out as things did in the PC Wars, with arrogant Apple racing to an early lead, only to get its head handed to it in the end.

I won't spend a lot of time bringing to the fore the masses that see the Apple model in more favorable terms, as the numbers speak for themselves across just about any metric that matters:

85 million iPhones/iPod Touches/iPads sold
185,000 applications built
100,000 developer ecosystem
4 billion application downloads
15 billion iTunes media sold
JD Power Award for Customer Satisfaction
Ungodly operating margins/cash flow

So how to reconcile the animus with the market's clear directional momentum? Read on ...

Progress and grumpy old men

The late Herb Caen, the legendary columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle, once wrote a piece about the worsening state of San Francisco and, in particular, one of its main arteries, Market Street.

In it, he lamented about how this thoroughfare was always under construction, how the city's charms and enduring traditions were getting swept aside by outsiders, and how the place was becoming less and less hospitable to locals and long-timers, forcing Caen to wonder if, perhaps, San Francisco's best days were behind it.

Ah, but Caen was setting us up for an unexpected upper-cut, as at the tail end of the piece, he reveals (I am paraphrasing), "Would it surprise you to know that I wrote this piece way back in 1954?"

Caen's point was that then, as now, every generation sees their generation as the Real Generation and the Right Approach, when in truth, progress just moves forward.


Hence, the locals of San Francisco, circa 1954, saw a city losing sight of its traditions and therefore, its magic. In truth, the city was just moving forward with the times.


Thus, it was unsurprising that 30 years later, today's locals would reach the exact same conclusions about the "good old days" being their particular generational approach.

I would argue that Glaser, Doctorow and a number of others (Daring Fireball's John Gruber covers some of the other disenchanted in an excellent piece, The Kids Are All Right) are simply guilty of confusing their truth with The Truth, a not so subtle way of saying, "My Way or the Highway."

A note aside, while I have heard plenty of grumpy old men lamenting about the continuing rise of the Apple approach and its dark implications, I have yet to hear a single female prognosticator confuse such attributes with real-world unfavorable outcomes. Perhaps, it's because women don't long for the "good old days" of Stone Age tools, techno-babble, impersonal computing and the like.

Me personally, my first computer was a TRS-80, so I understand the nostalgia of being able to tinker down to schematics and assembly code, and just the same, prefer the ability to apply my muscles judiciously to higher level problems versus lower level ones.

Hence, what I give up in terms of absolute flexibility, I gain in not having to worry about hardware abstractions, infinite form-factors, middleware, glue code, software distribution, marketplace and monetization.

To me, that is a more than acceptable trade-off, inasmuch as you would be hard-pressed to argue that the model is less democratic or even less web friendly (while Apple is clearly trying to create the best native experience possible, they have unquestionably also created the best mobile web experience and are key proponents of HTML5 and pioneered WebKit adoption).

Nonetheless, the yin and yang of openness vs. integrated raises a fundamental question that underscores the battle being fought in the simmering industry battle between Apple and Google.

Do we really need more inmates?

There are two bookends that gave me a grammar and narrative for thinking about software (and hardware) development and design. The first is "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks, and the second is "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" by Alan Cooper.

In "Inmates," Cooper makes the argument that too often the development process is driven by techies building the types of products that they would like to use, as opposed to really understanding the aspirations and outcome goals of their target user, let alone who that target user even is.

Worse, they often compensate for this blind spot by building products that address all use cases, including edge cases, and build a design interaction model that is a composite of that blob of functionality.

The end-result are products that are confusing, needlessly complex and that address all theoretical problems from a check box perspective, but few real problems from a specific outcome perspective.

Keep this in mind next time you are comparing the Apple product that seems to be "missing" certain features relative to the cheaper alternative on the other shelf. Nothing is free when it comes to product design decisions.

Margins, and who keeps which piece of what dollar

It's worth revisiting Rob Glaser's earlier comment about "stopping Apple," as it underscores the real reason many want to stop Apple.

Back in the days of the PC, the rise of Microsoft and Intel led to a horizontally organized industry. Microsoft and Intel kept the highest margin dollars for themselves, and could expand into adjacent segments as they saw fit. They also left a number of chunks of the hardware, software and infrastructure stack to third parties.

This type of loose-coupling worked because the PC was essentially a homogeneous platform, and the expectations of user experience were such that daily system crashes, recurrent performance lags and numbingly-complex "enterprise" software was considered the rule, and not the exception.

Now, of course, the two industry standard-bearers of the Post-PC Era, Apple and Google, respectively, have addressed the challenges of old very differently. Google, by embracing simpler, loosely coupled (read: horizontally-focused) cloud-facing solutions, and Apple, by embracing vertically-integrated, complete product solutions that marry hardware, software, service, developer and marketplace.

But make no bones about it; the real tempest here is who keeps the high margin dollars.

In the case of Google, they are happy to allow any and all to plug into their search and advertising gravy train, so long as they can disrupt any and all incumbent segments ripe to be broken up by their model.

In the case of Apple, they see user experience and control of same as central to their value proposition and "govern" accordingly.

Whether you see one as more open, closed, virtuous or evil depends upon your personal preference about user experience and choice, not to mention your particular economic self-interest.


But that is a post for another time.

Related:

Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard
The Chess Masters: Apple v. Google
Open "ish": The meaning of open, according to Google
Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best
iPad First Impressions: The Good, the Not So Good and the Not Yet

On Friday, we wrote about the changes Apple is making to the terms and conditions that it requires from iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad developers before they can write software for these platforms. The new terms include a clause that prohibits a wide range of third-party toolkits and frameworks that offer developers benefits such as quicker, more robust application development and instant access to complex functionality like 3D game engines.

We believe the targets of this change to be, in particular, Adobe and Google's Android. Adobe is imminently releasing a new version of Flash that will, among other things, be able to produce iPhone applications. The new terms prohibit the use of such tools. Android is hurt because many of these frameworks facilitate cross-platform software development. As the smaller platform, Android benefits from the use of toolkits that allow developers to target the iPhone and then rapidly, and at low cost, migrate to Android.

Over the weekend, it appears that Steve Jobs weighed in on the issue. Jobs referenced John Gruber's rationale for the changes. He then, if the e-mails are authentic, clarified Apple's position, claiming that intermediate layers between developers and the platform have two results: they result in "sub-standard apps" and they hinder the "progress of the platform."
Let's take a look at each claim.





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Web’s Big Shift: From Numbers to Relevance: Mahendra Palsule discusses how the advertising is shifting from CPC/CPM to relevance-oriented advertising.

John Patrick, ex-IBM/ThinkPad:  ”The iPad as the beginning of the end of a lot of things as we know them today. It will not immediately replace laptops, netbooks, magazines, Kindles, and televisions — not immediately. Over time, however, it is easy to see how the world will change.”

Kenneth Yeung: How to develop a great mobile app to promote your business.

Cody Willard on Apple & Microsoft in race for #2: In 1997, Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple. In April 2010, stock market values Apple at $219 billion (#3 in the US) behind Microsoft ($266 billion) and Exxon ($325 billion).

Zillow CEO Rich Barton on iPad: The jet zipping by was the iPhone.  The iPad is the Sonic Boom.



More on iPad



Video: Verizon CEO So Wants an iPhone
Tech Insider


Netflix Reviewed: The iPad’s First “Killer App?”
Tech Insider


The iPad’s Not So Revolutionary Inside
Tech Insider


Media Apps and the iPad: Surprise! Free Is Better
Tech Insider






Recommended Event: Startup Lessons Learned, a conference hosted by IMVU co-founder Eric Ries. Speakers include Steve Blank, Randy Komisar, Andrew Chen and Dan Martell. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. More details here: http://sllconf.com

My Weekend Video Recommendation: The Magazine Art Direction on iPad.

iPad Magazine Art Direction from Brad Colbow on Vimeo.

The iPad offers developers a large touchscreen and enough power to do something interesting with it. With the tight time constraints to launch a game before launch, it's no surprise that so many of the best games are upgraded versions of titles that have already found success on the iPhone.

Bringing a game from the iPhone to the iPad isn't just about updating the graphics a bit; the ergonomics of the new device and how you use it also must be considered. We caught up with Firemint CEO Rob Murray, whose company developed Real Racing HD and Flight Control HD on the iPad, to talk about bringing hit games over to the new platform.





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The already strict requirements that must be met for an application to be published on Apple's App Store are set to take a turn for the worse, as Apple's NDA-protected license agreement has now updated an already annoying existing clause, Section 3.3.1, to make it even more offensive.






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One day has passed since Apple gave developers a sneak preview of iPhone OS 4.0, and already there's new (NDA-breaking) information floating around about the other 90-some features that Steve Jobs didn't discuss at Apple's media event. 
In addition to renewed evidence that Apple may add a front-facing camera and other camera-related features, developers with access to the beta have told Ars about even more tidbits buried within, essentially making OS 4.0 a piñata of API goodies for devs to beat on.

Thursday's announcement immediately turned up evidence that Apple might be adding a flash to the iPhone's camera, thanks to functions named VCaptureDevice.hasFlash, AVCaptureDevice.flashMode, and AVCaptureDevice.hasTorch. Apple is allegedly investigating LED flash options, which would make such a feature very BlackBerry-like. Additionally, the latest iPhone SDK continues to contain hints about a front-facing camera as well as iChat support.





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[Opinion] 

Windows Phone 7 (no "Series" any more, which is a shame because—other than Merc fanbois—who wouldn't want a 7 Series?) was always going to struggle.

Apple is, of course, the company getting all the love; the iPhone has been phenomenally successful. Android has finally started getting the handsets it deserves and now shows itself to be a capable, attractive, desirable platform. Windows Mobile, however, is widely hated, and is frankly dying where it sits. Windows Phone 7 is a necessary abandonment of Microsoft's cell phone legacy, but it also means that the new platform has to start from scratch. No pre-existing users, little pre-existing software, and two major competitors who are delivering a strongly competitive alternative.





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The rules beg to be broken.

Bear with me; anecdotes are required.

1990:

Twenty years ago, I was 13, and my father was not. He owned a 286, or perhaps a 386; I very much did not. For him, his computer was a functional employee. It did what he told it to do, slightly faster than a mathematical child prodigy, and he cared very little for what that manilla box chose to do when he was not around.

I, on the other hand, was far more interested in how that slab behaved, and the psychosis of that behavior. I wanted inside. And while I was forbidden to play with the computer, I was not forbidden to open an unlocked toolbox, find a Phillips-head screwdriver, and put it to work.

At some point, my unscrewing of the eyeless computer definitely became play for me. I opened the closed system, and have been working in, with, and around computers every since. I was yelled at soundly that evening -- leaving the various parts scattered around the room and then going to a church youth function without reassembling those parts might have contributed to the problem -- but it changed me.

Rules? Sure. I learn best when there are rules, because they beg me to break them and see what happens.

2000:

I was a Java and XML expert, and Jason Hunter was not. He hated SAX and DOM; I had been teaching them so long that I'd forgotten I hated them, too.

He didn't like the rules. He thought the APIs were stupid. He was right. He convinced me to open the closed system, and JDOM was born. Nobody liked us in those early days; certainly not the W3C or Sun, who was busily endorsing SAX and DOM in their Java API stack.

Now, JDOM is a core part of a whole lot of Java and XML processing. There are quotes from Sun on the JDOM quotes page.

2010:

A lot of people are upset about how closed the iPhone, and now the iPad, are. Cory Doctorow -- who I usually enjoy -- wrote a lengthy piece about the evils of the iPad and its awful closed system.

He says, among other things, this:

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth ... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."

The way you improve your iPad isn't to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

First, I agree completely with Cory's premise. I agree that Apple has taken far too much away. I agree that it is infantalizing to require us to send in the iPad to get its battery replaced. I agree that we should not have the App Store as a great gatekeeper in the sky cloud.

But, my gosh, when did developers ever need permission to break things? When did Steve Jobs become not just rule maker, but some sort of deity that actually prevented me from ignoring said rule maker, and doing whatever I could with my device?

Again, from Cory:

Then there's the device itself: clearly there's a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there's also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe -- really believe -- in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can't open it, you don't own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+. [Note: Link added.]

I'm sorry, but this is revisionist. While the Apple ][+ might have enabled a generation to follow, the hackers were well alive before they were handed schematics. Case in point, my earlier anecdote: I needed neither permission nor instructions from my father (or IBM) to break into that enticing bland metal case and tear out its guts. I just needed a screwdriver.

In fact, there is a vast difference between an intention for a consumer to not open a device and an inability of that device to be opened. Thankfully, iFixit didn't get the memo that Steve would be upset if you broke into the iPad, and opened it within hours of release.

Then again, perhaps they did get the memo. They just chose to ignore it.

Mike Loukides, a fellow editor and one of the brightest minds at O'Reilly, said it well (in email):

... the iPad presents a challenge, and that's a good thing. The argument is perverse (closed is good because it invites you to hack it), but I think it's valid.

Yes, it's perverse. And I, like Cory, am strongly for Apple getting out of my way. I'd like things to be more open. I'd like to have an easier means of sharing my comics, and my books, and my data. (I actually think that is the strongest portion of Cory's argument, and one I firmly agree with.)

But, failing Apple's permission, I'm sure there are many, many 13-year olds, unafraid of dad -- or perhaps very afraid, but willing to pay the price -- and they are picking up their screwdrivers.

Resist. Why not? It's how creativity is born.

Anders Carlsson, an Apple employee, announced today on the WebKit mailing list an evolution of the WebKit project called WebKit2.

WebKit2's major aims are to bake both a "split process model" and a non-blocking API into the WebKit product—and by extension into Safari and any other client which takes advantage of the WebKit2 framework.





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So before the purists go off the deep end, fuming about the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement today, let's just concede one point - it isn't truly multitasking. Apple announced "Multitasking" with seven key points, one of them being "Fast App Switching", and this is what they meant for much of multitasking.

But here's the thing. For some of the most exciting multitasking-oriented things we've wanted to do with our iPhones, the new OS will indeed offer true multitasking - and for that we're fairly excited, to say the least.

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Multitasking, for the most part, is handled by a double click on the home button, which pulls up a screen showing icons of all the apps currently hanging out in the background. Some, like Skype or Pandora, will actually be running, while others will simply be in a frozen state.

The multitasking feature will be available for iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 2nd Generation starting this summer and Apple is guaranteeing that it will not only keep your device moving quickly but will work to conserve battery life. In this effort, the company has released 7 APIs to handle the "multitasking".

Instead of allowing the application to continue running a full instance in the background, potentially clogging up the system and draining power, the OS will handle background operations for several specific processes.

[Image courtesy of GDGT.]

For other applications not using these specific background services, switching out of the app will simply freeze it in its current state for the user to return to later. Otherwise, Apple certainly nailed it as far as the types of services we were hoping to run in the background.

You want music to keep streaming through Pandora while you catch up with reading on Read It Later? You got it. How about keeping track of your bike ride across town with Map My Ride and being able to look up directions on the way? Sure! Keep Skype running in the background and get phone calls and chat notifications? Indeed. The iPhone will even complete tasks, such as uploading photos and videos, in the background - a feature sounds rather like "true" multitasking to us.

We admit, "true" multitasking or not, this fulfills many of our wishes and we're quite excited.

The only thing we'll have to hope for now is that the apps we want to multitask implement these new APIs. By doing multitasking this way, Apple has tried to assure that it can control the quality of the experience, but we'll have to hope for companies to follow along and release updated versions.

Discuss

Should college students consider buying an iPad to use in place of netbook or notebook computer? Since the release of the new Apple slate device a week ago, this question has weighed on the minds of students, parents, teachers and school administrators alike. On the surface, the iPad seems like it could be the ideal device for mobile computing on campus with features like its optional iWork office suite, an Internet-connected bookstore called iBooks which supports the commonly used DRM-free ePub format, the 160,000+ applications available via iTunes, many of which are educational in nature and, of course, access to the greatest research tool ever invented: the Web.

However, despite the iPad's pluses, there are still some issues that students should consider before purchasing this device.

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Problem #1: Wi-Fi Access (or Lack Thereof)

The iPad comes in several models, each with varying storage sizes and Internet connectivity options. At the bottom of the lineup is the $499 Wi-Fi only 16 GB iPad, the model that money-strapped students can just barely afford, if they can afford an iPad at all. But without a 3G data connection, Internet access may be limited. In fact, students may not even be able to connect to their own college's Wi-Fi network.

For example, George Washington University's I.T. Communications and Marketing Manager Rachel Blevins recently told a reporter at the school's independent newspaper that the university's wireless network would not work with the Apple iPad. The problem, explained Blevins, is "both a security and a support issue, because many of the small [personal digital assistants], smartphone, and pad systems use sign-in security, which is currently not compatible with our systems."

What Blevins is referring to is the VPN client software currently used at the university to connect students to resources typically limited to campus use only. Although the iPad software has built-in PPTP, IPSec, Cisco VPN software many universities (and of course, businesses too, as we pointed out earlier) use SSL VPN, a more secure solution which is not supported by the iPad.

That means that students with the Wi-Fi only iPad may not be able to connect to their college's network - often the only method of Internet access available in classrooms and other on-campus hangouts.

Update: SSL VPN support was just announced as coming in the next iPhone OS update, due out this fall.

Problem #2: Writing Papers

The iPad doesn't come with a keyboard. Although one is available as an optional $69 accessory, the included keyboard on the iPad is a virtual, on-screen keypad. In tests, many iPad reviewers found this keyboard was surprisingly easier to type on than they expected, especially in landscape mode, but for students writing long term papers, it may still fall short. A generation from now, after kids have grown up with touchscreen technology, that may no longer be the case. But at the moment, most college students will likely prefer hardware keyboards.

Another issue: when the paper is complete, many professors still require a printout, not an electronic document. However, the iPad doesn't include a printing function. There are a few third-party applications that offer this ability (WSJ's Walt Mossberg recommends Print Online's $5 app, for example), but none are as simple as a built-in technology would be. (Side note: printing support may be a feature added to the upcoming iPhone/iPad software Apple is announcing later today. Check back for an update).

Problem #3: iWork Doesn't Work for Students?

The optional iWork applications (Pages, Sheets and Keynote) are Apple's version of Microsoft Office's Word, Excel and Powerpoint. However, some are already finding them difficult to use for their purposes. One example: in the tests documented here, creating files on the iPad went well, but the sync solution provided by iTunes caused issues for the reviewer.

We also noticed some problems ourselves, documented in an early review by Frederic Lardinois:

"While you can easily import and export documents (Pages and Word) by email or through iTunes, complex documents don't always survive this move intact," Lardinois explained. "Footnotes and endnotes, for example, are simply deleted, making Pages for the iPad almost useless for a lot of students and academics. Tables of content simply become part of the text, which means that they don't auto-update any more." He also noted that Pages on the iPad doesn't offer a word count, something many college students need in order to know if their paper meets a professor's requirements.

Finally, Apple's document-sharing service iWork.com, while great for sharing files with other people, doesn't function as a way to sync files between devices.

Problem #4: No USB Port

iPad's lack of a USB port may not be an issue for some - so much of what we do now is web-based, after all. However, for college students who have become accustomed to porting their files around on keychain drives, the missing USB port requires a change in their workflow which may not fit in with their current lifestyle.

Instead of being able to plug in a portable flash drive to the iPad as they could with their Mac or PC, files can only be sent to the iPad via iTunes sync, email or web download. There are some third-party applications that can help, but again, nothing is as good as a built-in solution.

Conclusion: iPad's a Great "In-Between" Device, But Not a Notebook Replacement

Despite these disadvantages, the iPad still has a lot to offer college students as an additional device, if not a PC replacement. For example, Blackboard's free iPad application looks quite useful. From the app, students can check grades and assignments, add discussion board comments and blog posts and email instructors and classmates.

Plus, the iTunes Application Store has thousands of educational applications like advanced calculators, reference guides, dictionaries, note-taking apps, planners, utilities and much more.


The iPad also plays podcasts, like those offered via iTunesU, the collection of audio and video presentations created by many universities to distribute recorded lectures, films, schedules, syllabi, notes, maps and other information to students.

However, given the issues listed above, it's clear that the iPad and its software - at least in its current form - is not able to fully replace a notebook computer. Some of the problems may be addressed in time with revisions to the device's software, but for now the device remains a great "in-between" mobile gadget, not a next-gen notebook computer.

Discuss

Many have written about how the iPad heralds a new paradigm in computers. Computers today are too complex. The iPad is the device that our parents will use so they don't have to worry about the dark, scary underbelly of the file system.

During a recent panel at Mobile Portland, both the audience and the panelists discussed the shortcomings of the iPad as being obstacles for themselves, but that these problems wouldn't slow the iPad because the tech-savvy audience wasn't the target demographic for the iPad.

Despite the fact that everyone believes the iPad is targeted at those who need a simpler computer, Apple itself has never made that argument.

You cannot use an iPad without a computer. The iPad cannot:

Install operating system updates without connecting to a computer.
Back up data and software without connecting to a computer.
Print documents without somehow emailing or sharing the document to a computer.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a recent survey found that the people most interested in the iPad are the typical leading- and bleeding-edge adopters.

In the long run, the iPad may yet revolutionize computing in the ways that people hope. It certainly holds the promise to do so. A lot will hinge on when Apple addresses system updates, backups and printing.

If these issues are tackled in the 4.0 version of the iPhone/iPad's operating system, which will likely arrive this summer, look for a surge of interest from people looking for a simple computer during the back-to-school and holiday season.

Until then, I keep thinking about how Mobile Portland's tech-savvy audience—the crowd that argued that the iPad wasn't meant for them—responded when asked if they planned on buying an iPad.

Nearly every one of them raised their hand.

mDialog, a four-year-old Canadian-based video platform company, is announcing the launch of their new Apple-focused service, an "HTML5 adaptive video streaming service with dynamic ad-insertion." In a nutshell: it lets you stick ads into videos that work on the iPad and iPhone. The ads can be pre-roll, post-roll, mid-roll and precisely geo-targeted to fit an advertiser's needs. They can also be swapped out and replaced in real-time. The service's ad-insertion features put mDialog's platform more on par with that of Adobe Flash, a plugin-based technology that doesn't run on Apple's mobile devices.

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The mDialog service uses Apple's adaptive streaming specification in combination with the mDialog ad platform to deliver targeted videos to mobile device owners, whether they carry an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. And by the second quarter of this year, the same technology will be made available to the Android mobile OS as well.

For advertisers, the necessary features for managing an advertising inventory are present. On the back-end, you can customize settings like device frequency capping (how many times an ad is delivered to a unique device), time restrictions (when an ad should be played), a target impression goal (how many times a video is served), ad placement (pre-, post- or mid-roll) and geo-targeting. That last feature is incredibly easy-to-use thanks to an integrated Google map. Drop a pushpin, set the radius in miles. There's also DoubleClick integration for those who use it.

With mDialog, advertisers can get almost creepily specific, similar to the way Facebook ads seem to know far too much about you. Imagine targeting all the people attending a game at a football stadium, Greg Philpott, mDialog's President and Founder, suggests. Or watching an automobile ad that directs you to the dealership nearest you...and by "nearest" you, we mean not just those in your hometown, but those nearest to your precise location at this exact moment. As an aside, Philpott tells us that, in fact, the auto industry is very interested in just this sort of thing.

HTML5 Video vs. Flash: Ads and Analytics Needed

mDialog's Apple angle is due to the fact that it's focused on HTML5 video, both live and VOD (video-on-demand). For those who have somehow missed the news: the iPad doesn't play Flash video. This has put advertisers in a quandary since HTML5, the upcoming but still-not-solidified standard for web markup language does not currently support in-stream advertising and real-time analytics features in its video feature. But when there's a hole to be filled, the industry will fill it. Brightcove, for example, has advertising and analytics on their 2010 roadmap, MeFeedia's platform allows for HTML5 video and ads, entertainment community Break Media announced the same and white label platform Ooyala offers real-time analytics, advertising and live-streaming tools. Others are sure to follow.

A few of mDialog's features, including CPC and interactive overlays have yet to arrive. This detailed chart shows them as "coming soon." Philpott tells us "soon" means within the next 60 days, so advertisers won't have to wait too long. In the meantime, developers can use mDialog's application SDK to get started on their video integrations. Interested parties can get in touch with the company via their website.

Discuss

Some folks aren't having quite the honeymoon with their barely-smudged iPad as others, because they're finding Wi-Fi connections buggy and unreliable. Apple suggests at a KnowledgeBase support page that the issue might involve dual-band routers that can set up separate networks for each frequency range, but keep the same names or have separate security protocols. Apple suggests giving those bands their own name, as in adding "G" and "N" to those respective connections, ensuring they use the same security, and, if all else fails, resetting your iPad's network settings. [Apple via Gizmodo] More »

Before a dramatic split last August that saw Google CEO Eric Schmidt booted from the Apple board, Apple and Google had been the best of friends. Now that the two titans are broken up, it’s looking increasingly likely that Apple will buddy up with Facebook.

Apple and Google once shared a common enemy — Microsoft — and had different enough products and goals to coexist symbiotically. But with Google creating and selling Android devices as a direct competitor to the iPhone, swooping in to buy companies like AdMob under Apple’s nose and bringing the FCC in over anti-competitive maneuverings in iPhone app rejections, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has rallied his troops by calling bullsh*t on Google.

See our infographic on the chronology of the Google-Apple breakup

The situation poses a promising opportunity for other existing and emerging technology powerhouses. Who will be Apple’s new most-favored nation? It probably won’t be Amazon, given that little issue of the iPad and the iTunes Store. It could potentially be Microsoft, which is ironically looking for friends as it faces up Google in search and productivity products. But it’s clear that Apple holds grudges. How about Yahoo or AOL for their reach? They may have more baggage than assets. At this point signs and logic are pointing to Apple’s new best friend being Facebook.

TechCrunch reported earlier this week based on uncited sources that Apple will soon add Facebook Connect integration to iTunes. I’ve heard the same thing, and further that Facebook could become the social layer on top of the Apple experience. It would be similar to but broader than the way Google Maps is integrated into location information across iPhone applications — with deep implications for personalization and easy authentication across the user experience and for app developers. Instead of that crappy experience of leaving every app to go to the web to log in to Facebook Connect, you could integrate your Apple and Facebook accounts once, directly.

Apple, which has completely missed out on the social web, would get a huge leg up with the web’s premium social service. And the partnership could be just as helpful for Facebook (which, of course, has positioned itself squarely against Google as well), in terms of enabling commerce.

Facebook Connect on the iPhone today

That’s because the real prize here, for both Facebook and Apple, is authenticated payments for digital and real-world goods. Probably the single most important alliance to be brokered today is the connection between users’ online identity and their bank accounts. Spending money online and encouraging your friends to follow your lead is a huge market (here’s the obligatory call-back to the problematic but perhaps just before-its-time Facebook Beacon product). The Facebook social graph plus iTunes’ 125 million credit card accounts would be formidable. With their powers combined it would be much harder for PayPal, Google and Amazon to compete.




More on Social Networks



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Craig Newmark: Social Networks Are Shifting the Balance of Power
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iPad & the Facebook App Kerfuffle
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 Facebook and Apple have long been chummy, with some of the earliest corporate participation on the site being the “Apple Students” group, which dated back to at least 2006 and foreshadowed the current Fan Page product. And funnily enough, just like Apple has lagged on social, Facebook has lagged on music.

Facebook already has the beginnings of an alliance with PayPal to allow international advertisers to pay without credit cards (PayPal says it has more than 81 million active accounts). But as TechCrunch points out, Apple’s Lala acquisition could help be the connector between the two companies, given the music startup’s previous experience working with Facebook on allowing users to gift songs.

Still, there’s one indicator that Facebook and Apple are definitely not on the same page yet. At launch, there was no Facebook iPad application — an obvious fit for the device — and someone on Apple’s crack app review team let through a paid Facebook rip-off app that fooled and confused customers last weekend until Facebook had it shut down for trademark infringement.

Photo of Steve Jobs by Curious Lee. Mark Zuckerberg by Deney Tereio via Flickr, Under CC License.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

With the iPad, Apple Takes Google to the Mat

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

The iPad isn't a big iPod touch—an iPod touch is a miniature iPad that restricts the full multitouch experience in exchange for offering greater portability. With the iPad, in contrast, you get multitouch the way it was meant to be done.

That's one of our many take-aways after having submerged ourselves in iPad land since launch. The larger screen doesn't just offer more space to work with—it opens up a different and more immersive user experience. Because of this different experience, though, the closed nature of the platform can get under some users' skin in ways the iPhone and iPod touch do not.

Still, the iPad is likely to just be a starting point for Apple and for multitouch computing in general. There are obvious downsides to the device—we'll tell you what those are—but it's clear that it does sit in its own category that floats somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop, and it serves different purposes than either its smaller or bigger siblings. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

A large chunk of the Ars staff contributed to this review, either in the form of writing full sections or by offering feedback and insights based on their own experiences. Because the 3G + WiFi version is not yet on the market, we all tested a WiFi-only iPad. We think it's worth noting up front that the WiFi-only version is probably best if you only plan to use it at home or at Starbucks—you'll definitely miss not having an Internet connection while out and about, and the (non-contract) 3G data plans are not bad at all, so long as you can stomach the extra $130 you'll have to fork over for the privilege.

It's also the case that there are some parts of the iPad "experience" that we didn't get to cover here, but we think the next several pages will convey more about what using the iPad is like than you ever thought you wanted to know. So let's get on with it!





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The inner workings of the iPad reveal that Apple has learned much from its iPhone development, using many of the same components and cramming those chips onto a pretty small board behind the device’s 9.7-inch screen. Today, I managed to snag a few minutes with David Carey, VP of technical intelligence at UBM TechInsights, to talk about his experience tearing down the iPad.

He said that so far, the only big surprise was the new processor inside, but he couldn’t yet tell me if it was a new CPU using engineering that Apple acquired via its PA Semi acquisition or a a souped-up ARM Cortex A-8 processor. But he did point out some interesting design choices that Apple has made with its machining, and showed off all the insides. Enjoy.

Apple urgently needs to improve its strategy on the cloud. The iPad and the iPhone are perfect smart terminals for cloud computing. At some level Apple knows this, as it was pushing a MobileMe discount with iPads this weekend. But when you get your hands on an iPad, you realize that Apple missed a real opportunity for deep integration with its cloud offerings.

I've been a MobileMe user for a little while, since the transition from .Mac, and I like how it is integrated with OS X setup. On the iPhone, I love the over-the-air syncing of my bookmarks, contacts and calendar. I had expectations that the iPad would take this a step further.

However, the iPad is no more advanced than the iPhone in its cloud integration. I would have loved to have switched on the iPad, keyed in my MobileMe login, and automatically had my email, browser bookmarks, calendar and contacts set up for me, as well as the ability to load in ebooks through my iDisk, and have my photo galleries available.

Instead I was forced through the painfully overloaded iTunes application, and had to tether my device via USB to get all of my content on it. Setting things up was a crazy dance involving configuration in both iTunes and in the iPad's settings panel. To make matters worse, the iPad doesn't want to charge over USB. This means I need to plug it in twice: once to the charger, and then somewhere else to sync. Decent cloud access would have mitigated this a little.

I was genuinely surprised that the iWork and Photo applications for the iPad don't have built-in support for MobileMe. Email appears the be the only generally universal way of getting things out of the iPad.

Both OS X and Ubuntu offer me a much more pleasant out-of-box setup experience for connecting and synchronizing with cloud services. I suspect that because the iPad is divided up into little silos for each application, and iPhone OS doesn't offer any general notion of cloud services, it can only be this way for now.

I am hoping for a future where all I need to supply a device with is my identity, and everything else falls into place. This doesn't even have to be me trusting in a third-party cloud: there's no reason similar mechanisms couldn't be used privately in a home network setting.

I think the iPad is an amazing piece of hardware, and the most pleasant web browsing experience available. It is still very much a 1.0 device though, and its best days certainly lie ahead of it. I hope part of that improvement is a simple story for synchronization and cloud access.

Somewhat to my surprise, I'm equally as excited about the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) release for netbooks as I am by the iPad. The iPad is not yet a netbook-killer.

With the iPad's arrival this weekend, a holiday weekend for many Americans, this new iPad owner had the chance to see the device in action. In fact, "see" is the operative word here. Not, "play with myself," as is the case with most new tech gadgets I purchase. Instead, I simply watched from a distance as, over the course of the day, the iPad found its way into the hands of nearly every family member from ages 4 months to 87 years old. The incredible thing? No one walked away confused, frustrated or disappointed. It did precisely what they wanted it to do and with such ease that my tech support was not required - not even once - allowing me to sit back and relax...with an old-fashioned, paper-based magazine.

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After hearing the hoopla from the iPad launch, the crowd of "not-so-early" adopters has likely been left wondering if this is a case of media over-hype or if something revolutionary has truly occurred. If you count yourself among this group, then perhaps the spec-filled, analytical reviews won't sell you on the device's potential.

You already know what the iPad can do: apps, games, eBooks (or rather, iBooks), media and so on. But what can it do for you? How does it fit in with your life? This anecdotal review may help you to answer that question:

A Day in the Life of an iPad

The morning after the iPad's arrival - incidentally Easter Sunday here in the U.S. - I spent the first half hour of my day with the iPad in one hand and a baby bottle in the other. While the little one ate, I read the New York Times. For free. Well, at least some of it. Although a full-featured paid application is on its way, the "Editor's Choice" app available now is a great way to hit the highlights from the paper's top sections. The iPad's weight here was a bit of an issue - 1.5 pounds may not seem like a lot, but holding it aloft away from baby's grabby fingers was a bit tricky, especially because, unlike an actual, dull grey-colored newspaper, the iPad's glowing screen and colorful images is an invite to touch that can't be denied.

Morning Newspaper

Later, in the car to the family gathering, I finished reading the articles I missed in the NYT's offline mode. I have the Wi-Fi version of the iPad, so Internet access is limited. But the articles were still available, cached to the device for just this situation. I then passed the time with a game of iMahjong. Like most iPad games, Internet isn't needed to play.

Upon arrival at our destination - the sister-in-law's house where extended family would meet, dine and relax, I mistakenly imagined that the only two people who would be interested in my latest purchase were the teenage nephews, already iPod Touch owners and avid gamers. Although they were immediately engrossed, to be sure, they weren't the only ones who would spend time with this new device, as I would later find out.

Game-Playing Device

The first question from the oldest nephew: "I heard iPad apps are a lot more expensive than those for the iPod Touch - is that true?" Unfortunately, it is. For whatever reason, iPad developers have mistakenly assumed that a bigger screen means a bigger price tag. This is not how the minds of penny-pinching, allowance-earning tweens and teens think, though. And although they may not be the target market per se, their moms and dads are. A game priced too high will simply be ignored - or worse, torrented, the nephews tell me. There are plenty of iPhone apps on torrent sites, I'm being told - referring to the online stores of cracked, hacked and otherwise ill-acquired software programs, movies, TV shows, music and media made available for download for those running free torrenting client applications on their computers. iPad apps will soon appear here, too. Should developers be worried about this black market for their super-sized creations? Yes, possibly. Unlike the more moderately priced iPhone apps, iPad apps can be much more expensive. And if their prices extend beyond the comfort levels of today's consumers, you can be sure the apps will leak out on backchannels such as these.

With pricing in mind, I tell the nephews they could download anything they wanted so long as it was free. And so they set forth upon their iPad adventure. After playing a number of games, including the Guitar Hero-like "Tap Tap Radiation," a tilted maze in "Labyrinth Lite," the role-playing game "Aurora Feint 3," some sort of shoot-em-up called "EliminatePro," and several others, my iPad was soon filled with a screen of apps I knew I'd never touch but would be regularly accessed time and again at subsequent family functions.

Child's Plaything

Once the older nephews had their fill, it was the 5-year-old's turn. With adult supervision, he enjoyed Disney's interactive book app, Toy Story and created works of art fingerpaint-style via Doodle Buddy. (He got a real kick out of the sound effects that accompanied the paste-in clip art in the program, too. Animal sounds, apparently, are incredibly funny).

We mistakenly thought that the Marvel comics book application would also be a fun diversion for this second-youngest of the family. (Don't laugh - comic book aficionados we are not.) But after a second-page reference to "Girls Gone Wild" in the free Spiderman comic and a third-page image of our favorite superhero shouting "Shut the @#*% up!," we realized that, at some point, comics must have grown up. These one-time children's past-times are now adult graphic novels. Oops. App closed. Back to doodling.

Grandma's Photo Album

Later, with bellies stuffed by Easter ham and dessert, the iPad found its way to the baby's grandmother. One guess what she looked at? Yes, baby pictures. "Can you email me some of those later?" Of course I could, but not later, now. Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, photos (a max of 5 at a time) can be sent directly from the iPad's built-in Photos application.

...And Everything Else

Now hours had gone by, and the iPad was still in circulation. With nothing else to do, I opened a wrinkled, balled-up magazine I had thrown into my bag precisely for this reason. I didn't expect to get much iPad-time myself, I just didn't realize that it would literally never return to me. As one person played on the iPad - reading, watching a video, playing a game, etc. - others relaxed with TV, a book of Sodoku puzzles, toys, and (gasp!) even printed newspapers.

On the iPad, someone was playing cards. Then someone was watching Netflix. Grandma is showing great-grandma more photos. Look! The baby is doodling! Now someone is trying an iPhone app on the iPad. (Verdict? Not a good experience. Forget the fact that the iPad runs all the iPhone apps - they look awful. Don't bother.) Interestingly enough, one "app" that was never launched was Safari, the iPad's built-in web browser.

By nightfall, the iPad had been in rotation for hours upon hours and still had nearly 40% battery remaining. The battery longevity claims (10 hours+) are true, it seems.

A Family Computer

Debates about the iPad's worth as an eReader, aside, fears that it will somehow transform us from a population of content creators to passive consumers (most of us already are just that), hopeful claims from big media that it's the "future of publishing" - I'd argue that none of these are reasons to buy or not to buy an iPad.

Simply put: the iPad is the first real family computer. No longer is computing an isolated experience with one person staring at one screen, fingers clacking away on the keyboard while the rest of the family does something else. The iPad was shared between brothers, giggled over by children, and downright snuggled up with by parent and child. It was no more isolating an experience than someone reading the paper in the next chair over. It was easily just another everyday object. And that may be its biggest selling point yet: the iPad hides away the technology, and makes content king. And at the end of the day, that's not really such a bad thing.

Disclosure: The New York Times is a syndication partner with ReadWriteWeb.

Discuss

With the launch of the Apple iPad just days away, magazine and newspaper companies are putting the finishing touches on their apps for the tablet, hoping to lure both new and existing readers to this new format of multimedia device, and possibly even get them to (gasp!) pay for digital content. As the Wall Street Journal has described, magazine publishers are falling all over themselves to create iPad apps, in part because advertisers are eager to get on the device, and also because a comScore survey showed that a surprisingly large number of potential iPad buyers were actually interested in paying for content on it. So what would you most like to read on the iPad? Take our poll, which is embedded below, or leave your thoughts in the comments:


View This Pollsurveys


Magazine giant Conde Nast has apps for Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, Glamour and The New Yorker in the works, and others to come soon. But probably the most eagerly awaited magazine in that group is Wired, which showed off its iPad prototype at the TED conference.

VIV magazine also came up with a prototype of an interactive feature spread, as described in the New York Times Bits blog:

And one designer came up with a mockup of what a magazine cover could look like on a multimedia device like the iPad, as described at TUAW:

Whether the iPad will in fact be a game-changer for the media industry remains to be seen, but even Dan “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons has changed his mind as to whether he wants one or not — although former Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block says the iPad probably won’t change your life. Meanwhile, GigaOM Pro research analyst Michael Wolf estimated in a recent report (subscription required) that the launch of the Apple device could kickstart an $8 billion tablet app market (that report is just one of several iPad-related GigaOM Pro reports you can find here).

The iPad may be Apple’s next gold rush, but it’s also positioned to pay dividends to mobile developers in a big way. Applications for the much-hyped device will generally cost more than similar offerings on the iPhone, developers said in a story from the BBC this morning, due to unknown demand for the iPad and the extra work required to design to create feature-rich offerings that take advantage of the gadget’s high-tech screen. That presents a lucrative opportunity for developers who can entice users by fully leveraging the device’s capabilities.

Just how many people will want an iPad (or any other tablet) is uncertain, but GigaOM Pro VP of Research Michael Wolf predicts the tablet app market will reach $8.2 billion by 2015 (sub req’d). The increasing demand for mobile applications is crystal clear, however, according to data released today from Mplayit. The app discovery and merchandising startup said that 35 percent of iPhone, Android and BlackBerry users are interested in paid applications, with BlackBerry users willing to pay the biggest premium of all, with a medium price point of $5.99.

Those figures should be especially encouraging for developers targeting users of the iPad, which promises to offer a more interactive experience than is possible on even the best smartphones. Consumers who have grown accustomed to shelling out a couple of dollars for an iPhone game will surely pay a premium for titles that leverage the iPad’s 9.7-inch, high-resolution screen and its multitouch functionality. So if the iPad is a hit, developers who can deliver the goods on the impressive device will benefit as much as Apple will.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Forecast: Tablet App Sales to Hit $8B by 2015

5 Tips for Developers Targeting the iPad

The iPad: Cable TV for Publishers?

Mobile OSes Are No Longer Just About Mobile

Image courtesy Flickr user Johnny Vulkan.

Apple initially named five of the top six major publishers as launch partners for its iBookstore for the iPad. More recently, we heard that two independent publishers had signed deals to provide e-books and that Apple plans to offer free public domain titles from Project Gutenberg. Now, self-published authors will also get a crack at the iBookstore via deals Apple has struck with e-book publishing services Smashwords and Lulu.

Smashwords and Lulu are for e-books what TuneCore is for music. TuneCore will take your CD (or indie film) and upload it to the iTunes Store for a flat fee, eliminating the need to jump through all the hoops necessary to set up an account directly with Apple. All the royalties earned on sales of the album and individual tracks are then forwarded to the artist.





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AppleInsider is reporting this morning that some trusted sources are predicting a "full-on solution" to multitasking in the iPhone 4.0 OS, which is set to be released this summer. Already, the iPhone shows that it is capable of multitasking with bundled apps like iPod and Nike+, but the update is said to handle a number of security and interface issues.

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Already, jailbreaking the iPhone shows how the device is fully capable of multitasking, but opens up the device to malware and poorly designed third-party apps that can make a full restore necessary.

As AppleInsider points out, the real benefit of closing off the iPhone to multitasking is that there are no malicious apps running in the background, hijacking your phone. You are, after all, carrying a constantly GPS enabled multimedia recording device with you. At the same time, it would be absolutely wonderful to be able to listen to Pandora while using the MapMyRide app to track your bike ride across town, or any other number of combinations currently unavailable.

But beyond security, AppleInsider discusses the issues of user interface that we might not think of right off the bat. In other operating systems, switching between apps is simple, by way of a taskbar or system dock. On the iPhone, multitasking is often handled by a small strip added at the top of the screen, but this would become messy for multiple applications. Perhaps we'll see a new hardware solution to accompany this issue with the next iPhone "4GS" this summer. And, as Gizmodo points out, if we get multitasking for iPhone, can we really be expected to accept an iPad that can't do the same?

While AppleInsider says that its sources have predicted this "full-on solution", it notes that the much called-for feature has been falsely rumored, by their own articles nonetheless, on three separate occassions over the past year. In addition to this, it says that two of the biggest problems - resource conservation and battery life - were not addressed by their sources. Would we really want these features if it meant a bogged down device we had to charge every hour on the hour? And is this just another case of the boy who cried wolf? Let's hope not.

Discuss

Not too long ago, David Findlay built a device capable of communicating with just about any model of iPod via the dock connector using an Arduino Nano, PodGizmo breakout board, an old USB iPod connector, and a momentary switch. While it may not sound like a big deal, there is more to it than one might think: namely programming a device (in this case the Arduino Nano) to be able to receive, interpret, and respond to messages sent from an iPod. 
This means teaching it to speak Apple Accessory Protocol and, although proprietary in nature, it has been fairly well documented around the Internet. Finland slung some code so that his iPod touch was hooked up to one of the famous Staples Easy buttons in his car. Now he could easily play and pause his iPod touch without having to fiddle with the on-screen controls.

Fast-forward several months and  Findlay had all but forgotten about the project when he was asked by the folks that run Make magazine to talk about it. In particular, they wanted him to talk about the library he created for communicating with Apple’s portable audio players. He said yes, and decided to dive back into the project and attempt to add additional functionality to the project. 
Finland's first go around only involved tackling the the Simple Remote portion of the Apple Remote Protocol, which handles things like mute, next playlist, skip, and turning the device on and off. With newfound interest, however, he has now tackled the Advanced Remote portion, which opens up a bevy of new functionality, including getting names of songs, albums, artists, and track time; toggling shuffle and repeat mode; and all the other neat functionality that iPods have.

This newly released library of code will surely appeal to the do-it-yourself hackers who love tinkering, soldering, and programming. Someone could theoretically even build his or her own iPod speaker solution with a plethora of different options and feedback. The more daring could hard-wire a solution to a car’s in-wheel audio controls. Personally, I envision some sort of bicycle solution that docks the iPod on the handlebars but allows riders to control the device without taking their hands off the handlebars. An even more enterprising individual could rig something like this up to a sudden motion sensor so that when someone enters a room, the iPod begins to play.



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