Be Excellent To Each Other

A BBC iOS developer (https://twitter.com/#!/Jonnebob) tweets:

People are interpreting this as meaning we're going to get apps for Apple TV. Which would be nice, for sure.

Is the input device for Apple TV just a remote control? Or can you attached a mouse/keyboard and whatnot?

Or an iDevice?

Tweet: denied!

Just a remote control, at present. It has an IR window and ships with a tiny little seven-button Apple Remote. It can learn third-party IR remotes (and gets some extra buttons from doing so), and there's a remote app for iOS that connects via Wifi and offers keyboard input and the same seven-button interface.

Edit -- apparently, it has (unused) Bluetooth hardware, too.

I was just wondering as I couldn't see the point of apps on it if you couldn't interact with the thing normally. Apple would need to open the UI up somehow (pairing an iDevice and using that as an input seemed like the best, if still problematic, idea) or people would be stuck with text only input using some kind of T9 style interface with the remote control. And speaking as someone who's tried to do the latter a couple of times with their Sony TV it barely seems worth doing...

iPlayer, Sky Player, Vudu, ITVPlayer, Hulu, Plex, Boxee, HBO Go, ESPNPlayer, ...

How many of those would they allow though? iPlayer sure. Boxee or XBMC or the like? I'm not so sure.

Well, I think every entry on my list already has an App Store presence, which is why I selected them. Support for non-Apple codecs (which would be the raison d'etre of Boxee or XMBC, of course) are hard to do on iOS, but not impossible, and there's apps for the iPad that will play MKVs and AVIs and the like.

If Apple is fine with them on iPad (often with AirPlay streaming support), why would it refuse to release them for Apple TV?

A media streamer that can hook into iOS properly and has full 1080p support for mkvs would be perfect, but i'm not so sure that would be allowed. Direct competition for the iTunes walled garden, which with the upcoming Apple telly and the current AppleTV is a different market to the casual consumer in current iOS land. I wouldn't be surprised if those sort of apps are locked out, purely as an attempt to keep the market.

On the other hand, allowing those apps will mean more people buying the boxes in the first place, so greater market penetration.

I dunno really, just thinking out loud

I doubt it's technically achievable. The CPU doesn't have the grunt and no-one out there has managed to write a GPU accelerated decode for it yet.

Apple makes almost all of its money from hardware, not software. Always assume it'll do the hardware play. The iOS App Store, for example, is much more of a differentiator and a user lock-in vector than a direct profit centre for Apple.

I think this is pretty unlikely, for the record.

Well, getting a film from Apple is something like £3. My netflix account a month costs less than 2 films!

Malc

New MacBook pro looks very nice! 2880 x 1800 screen resolution!

Stop it.

Local search on Siri now, that might actually make it 1% useful.

Grim..., Safari will be able to upload photos now!

Fucking *finally*!

2003 has arrived!

Where's my fucking iMac you bunch of cunts?

Maybe they'll be launched with the next OS update then?

Fucking arseholes.

Interesting. By allowing you to grab an image URL, or by intercepting a file upload request?

Yeah, so I cracked and ordered one of the new Retina MBPs.

By present a picker onto the Photos collection when you hit "Browse for file" in a web view.

LAME.

Wait, what? What were you expecting them to do?

Doc: Can they choose videos, or is it specifically their photo gallery?

I was actually thinking more about embedding photos than uploading them. I want them to do what they've done, plus I want them to let me do a press-hold to grab image properties (such as the url) for embedding images.

Fucking Hipster.

Bastard.

Not sure. It was a very brief part of the keynote, and no-one I know with the iOS 6 beta has tried it yet.

You can do that now. Press and hold an image, select Copy. You now have two things on your clipboard; the image, and the text of the URL to the image. If you hit Paste into a text field that only understands text, you'll get the link.

Huh. Since when?

Forever, I think? A long time, certainly.

It doesn't work on things that are declared via CSS backgrounds, rather than <img> tags, but then again desktop browsers struggle with those too.

Hmm.


Thppppp.

If you hold down on the .com button, you can select different domain extensions!

So not the same thing

Not overly impressed with the new Maps app, but obviously it's beta so I assume they'll sort out all of the little things.

The data seems to be horrifically out of date - it has Shrewsbury Town FC's home ground in the wrong place, despite the team moving around 5 years ago.

I also asked it to give me a route from Shrewsbury to London, and it referred to one of the motorways (the M1 I think) as Western Avenue, i.e. "drive 82.9 miles on Western Avenue."

The Passbook app included in the beta seems to do nothing except show a splash screen, but that might be because it's US-only or they have no UK partners yet or something.

The Do Not Disturb feature looks to be very useful indeed, as is the slide-up options to quick-reply to incoming calls.

Hmmmm.....

http://store.apple.com/uk/product/IPAD_ ... OLY-114501

This was released on the quiet! An admission by Apple that the smart cover wasn't actually that smart in the end?

Video too: http://tnw.to/d0Je

Can't see the video?

And that's one of the worst articles I've read in a long time

No, I mean, the file upload supports video as well as photos, answering your original question.

Aha! Ta.

completely hate the wordpress app on the iPad, so this might help...

Hey, Cras: https://developer.apple.com/programs/volume/

Yeah, I know. Three annoyances (and really, these are properly stupid. I don't understand the way Apple steadfastly refuse to do business with corporate customers in any sane way).
1) Credit card purchase only. Even two-man dev shops are capable of putting together an invoice for centralised payment, for goodness' sake.
2) What you get is a spreadsheet of redemption codes. Managing who's used what code would be a nightmare.
3) Single Apple ID for accessing the system, which their terms & conditions forbid sharing on. Guy who owns that ID goes on holiday for a month? You're not buying any apps for a month.

Hmmm. Interesting stuff, Cras. I may have to write that up.

I've written things about the new MacBook: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/06/13/the-cont ... a-display/

And iOS 6: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/06/12/ios-6-on ... -the-drea/

I'd be interested to know if there are any figures on how many of the upper end of the MBP market is bought by individuals with their own cash, and how many are bought via companies.

Your arguments make sense from a long term perspective, but for me i'll get the top of the range model every 2 years from work, so upgradability and ease of repair isn't high on my list. I wonder how much of the market is like that?

I take your point about repairability, but with no moving parts, shouldn't there be less likelihood of things going wrong?

I think if they'd offered the Retina display on the old-style chassis I'd have gone for that, but I reckon I'd have been disappointed if I'd gone for a non-Retina display.

Complete cunt's trick, that.

I'm not sure I'll need any more than 8GB RAM over the next three years or so, so it's not really an issue for me. They're basically aligning their laptops with the iOS devices though, it seems.

Typing this on a MBPwRD.

This screen really is very nice.

Beex in Safari (with 2880x1800 text rendering) and Chrome (which doesn't do HiDPI correctly, so is effectively rendering text at 1440x900):



In other words, on the left is a retina display, and on the right is (basically) every other computer ever.

The one on the right looks infinitely worse than it does on my screen, so there's something wrong with your comparison there. The fonts are fucked.

It's an off-the-shelf install of Chrome. Are you zooming it in too far? The screen is at 205 dpi, so you should view it at 25% on a normal screen to compensate.