A Note on Media Alignment

It is worth noting that we’re beginning to see more media outlets align with or against Apple.  From my frequent review of popular mobile news coverage, it has become clear that Gizmodo and PC World do their best to highlight gaffes and problems in the iTunes ecosystem or just about iAnything.  Meanwhile a blog like MacRumors seeks to downplay news that might be viewed as concerning or add to the distress from iphone4antennaegate. (I just made that up).

While the title of these publications alone should serve as a strong indicator, keeping track is important.   The Clintons are well known for keeping their loyalty lists in order and it is entirely reasonable to assume Apple is doing the same.   For the record, I run an iOS app development group and generally advocate for the iOS platform.

The Recent Gaming of the App Store

Back to the issue at hand, MacRumors published a piece titled, “Reports of ‘App Store Hacked’ Greatly Exaggerated” that sought to downplay concerns related to the book category being hijacked by a rogue developer for over four days.  Indeed, the book category is small, however any evidence that challenges the fairness of the App store only adds to the mindset that not all developers get a fair shot.

When news like this is published it suggests that as an app developer, you not only must court and respond to any marketing opportunities provided by Apple (few and far between) but also worry about your app competing on its own merits in the top 50 ranking.

Apple ID Password Policy

Currently the only requirement for a password that may be used to access iTunes, MobileMe, the iOS developer portal and more is that it be 6 characters in length.  As far as I can tell, there are no other requirements and no common passwords are blocked.  (I briefly changed my password to ‘password’ to test this.)

To quote Wikipedia’s entry, “Password policies are usually a tradeoff between theoretical security and the practicalities of human behavior.”  In the case of the iTunes music store the practicalities of human behavior are that the general public is really bad at remembering passwords, especially if they require numbers or upper case letters.

From Apple’s perspective, when someone forgets their password they can not buy virtual goods, whether that be music, videos or apps.  It is my belief that Apple forces you to re-enter your password when ‘buying’ free applications or upgrading previous applications specifically to make sure you always know your password just in case you decide you want to buy something.

Given the number of accounts out there linked directly to credit cards, it is fair to assume that if Apple were to implement a stronger password policy it would have a negative effect on sales.  And, at least for the moment, the number of negative publicity associated with compromised accounts and their use to game the app store does not outweigh this figure.

Apple ID password requirements appear to have been unchanged for years, as hack reports have been reported for some time.  What is new is the app store gaming.  No one cares about others’ poor password choices until they start affecting their own bottom line.

When I went in search for the course files, I found them all individually linked on the course downloads page.  Since I don’t want to have to return to this page, I used a Firefox plugin to download all of the files and then organized them into folders. The result is one single archive for you to download.

Download – Stanford CS193P.zip – 81.3 MB

Most people are going to get an error when building projects from this set: “error: There is no SDK with the name or path…” Gonzalo Gasca posted a four step solution to this:

1. From the Projects menu in XCode, choose “Edit Project Settings”
2. Click on the “General” tab. Near the bottom of the inspector window, you should see the path to the non-existant SDK that’s troubling you.
3. Change the selection for “Cross-Develop Using Target SDK:” to another listed SDK instead of “Other” as it probably currently reads.
4. Click Build, and away you go!

It is nothing short of amazing that this level of educational material is available for free.  I came across the Stanford course after Windows Phone 7 evangelist Paul Thurrott pointed out that Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do in the realm of developer documentation and free training products.  He’s right.

There are a number of tricks to upgrading an iPhone in the United States.  Most revolve around the fact that AT&T subsidizes the cost of new iPhones.  So your old iPhone may be worth as much or more than the cost of a new iPhone if you’re up for a two year renewal.

I’ve been lucky to have every model of iPhone break on me at least one time (except the 4 which hasn’t failed yet) and have every phone replaced by Apple.  My iPhone 3G broke twice.  The first was my now well-indexed bit on the white screen of death.  In the second phone, the sleep switch stopped working (a common problem with early iPhone 3G).  Technically, I’m on my fourth iPhone in just over two years.

The day before the iPhone 3GS launched (June 18th, 2009), I took my malfunctioning 3G to the Apple store downtown Boston.  Since it had been just under a year since I had bought the 3G, Apple replaced the phone and I had a brand new iPhone on my hands.  I ended up selling the 3G for about $380 to someone who wanted to unlock it and send it abroad. Since the new 32 GB iPhone 3GS  was only $300, I got the new phone and pocketed some cash for a screen protector and a Gela Skin.

Today, I did near the same thing with the 3GS.  I only had the 3GS break once on me. One day the device stopped booting properly and would not make it past the Apple logo no matter how many restores and resets I performed.  Since the phone was non-functional, I took it in only a month prior to the release of the iPhone 4, and got a brand new 3GS.

Here are some starter things that will go in your favor:

• If possible, always buy your iPhone from the biggest Apple store in town.  My experience is that Apple stores are best at taking back purchases from their own location.  I’ve heard of AT&T taking returns rejected by the Apple store but that’s not been my experience.
• Be on the upgrade cycle.  Get your contract to line up with the annual June release date for the new iPhone.  This is when the older gen iPhone is at its highest value used.
• Wait to return a partially working phone until just prior to the launch of a new iPhone.
• Make sure you have the new iPhone on reserve at the Apple store prior to the sale.
• List the iPhone on Craigslist, including the OS number and the baseband number.  These are found in the Settings -> General -> About page.  The baseband number is the modem***.  Make sure you use the words ‘unlocked’ and ‘jailbroken’ in the listing even if your iPhone is neither.  For example, “The phone is not unlocked or jailbroken.”  This will improve your  chances of showing up in results.
• Plan to meet the buyer near your target Apple store.
• Plan to have backup buyers in case the first fails to show up.
• Bring a small paperclip to the sale, so you can remove your SIM card.
• Remember to do a Settings -> Reset -> Reset All Data at the end of your sale. Do not give your phone away until you have wiped all data!

At one point I considered adding AppleCare, since that would extend the time the phone could be owner.  However my experience is that most people buying past generation iPhones are doing so to jailbreak and run on different carriers.  Apple will not return jailbroken phones, so Applecare and the secondary market for iPhones actually collide somewhat.

My software company, Neutrinos, has been hard at work on an application for the Apple iPad called Rock Show.  Rock Show is an interactive art gallery for concert posters that lets you view, share and buy original limited edition artwork.

We’re very excited about the potential of the iPad and hope that this application does the device justice enough to be included in the launch of the grand opening of the  iPad App Store.

For more information about Rock Show, visit the official website, RockShow.fm. You can enter your email address to be notified of availability. Be sure to follow the app on Twitter @r0ckshow.  (The first o is a zero)

I’m going to list reasons these are not adopted, reasons they should be and a score for how hard it would be to adopt it where 1 is super easy, and 10 is hard. Here are three that I’ve identified and feel strongly about today:

3.  Mac OS X

The growth in quality of OS X as a Windows replacement has been a long time coming.

Reasons it is not adopted: Too expensive to buy a mac, unfamiliar methods for doing common things “I know how to do” in Windows, not seen as business ready.

Reasons it should be: The added expense is worth it in design and customer service, the new ways of doing old things require only minor variation in user behavior, you can run your legacy business tools on Windows in a Parallels window.

Difficulty of Adoption: 6.   Four points for learning how to launch programs and handle files in a new operating system. 2 points for the expense.  Great Macbooks can be found for less than $700 on Craigslist!

2. Lala

Reasons it is not adopted: I’ve never heard about it

Reasons it should be: Apple purchased this company because Lala negotiated an excellent set of deals with the recording industry.  These deals allow you to stream (almost) your complete mp3 collection from any computer anywhere in the world.  Forget bringing over your iPod to your friend’s house, just log into Lala there and boom you’ve got all your tunes via the internets.

Difficulty of Adoption: 2.  You have to download the Lala “Music Mover” which actually just scans your music collection and tells Lala what it is ok for you to stream.  This is a no-brainer, do it now.

1. Twitter

Reasons it is not adopted: Irrational fear of change, confusion over how it works, concern that the service is used for mindless updates only.

Reasons it should be: If you graduated from respecting only your local newspaper to allowing for reading the New York Times on the web, you are also ready to get updates via Twitter.  Anything is confusing if you have dedicated almost zero time learning about it. Yes, there are tons of mindless updates but also some of the world’s greatest known and unknown luminaries are sharing their thoughts and links.  You can screen out the silly people, you just don’t follow them.

Difficulty of Adoption: 6.  Four points for getting over your prideful indulgence that you already have as much information access as you need.  Two points for the time you’ll have to spend finding people to follow, what it means to @reply and what a RT is.

Apple enthusiasts are often quick to point out that the iPhone would run out of batteries too quickly or the processor would not be strong enough to support snappy use of multiple applications.  This proves true in testing a jailbroken iPhone.  But the iPad Apple tablet does not get the same defense.  The carefully touted A4 chip should have no problem running a sophisticated 3rd party application and the native mail client at the same time.

This is big trouble as more complex games for the device are introduced.  For example Grand Theft Auto, The China Town Wars, is a complex 3D game recently released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. GTA: CTW has the potential to lose mission progress by dropping you back to your apartment every time the game is left unexpectedly.  While this clearly negatively affects the gamer experience, imagine how frequent push notifications begging gamers to leave for just a moment will affect more persistent, longer-session games like World of Warcraft.

The A4 is pretty tough chip and conceivably should have the ability to safely run multiple iPhone and iPod Touch applications, if not the more weighty future iPad-specfic titles.  So why isn’t multitasking being allowed?

Apple does not want people to use streaming music services like Pandora and Last.fm until it is ready with its own cloud-based, Genius-powered streaming music recommendation engine a seamless listening experience through the iPod application and iTunes.

Currently, the only ways to play back audio while running another application (crippled multitasking) are:

• Using the iPod application
• Downloading an mp3 or other audio attachment from an email and hitting play. (Plays back from within the mail application)
• Downloading an mp3 or other audio from the web. (Safari plays it back)

Similarly, the only way to playback streaming audio is using the Last.fm application, the Pandora application or a few other apps that use a recommendation engine to create lists of songs you do not own and stream them to you.  If Apple were to allow you to playback Pandora today on the iPad and work with the iLife suite to author documents they will be training you not to use iTunes!

“But they can’t get away with that!” That’s right, they can’t.  That’s why Apple will introduce its cloud-based iTunes offering either before or in tandem with the release of the next generation iPhone this coming around June. Using the brains acquired in the purchase of Lala, Apple will be introducing a mixed-mode local and cloudbased listening experience where any iTunes music collection can be played back in part on the locally stored disk or streamed from the cloud using an iPad.

Apple will use Genius to identify and stream audio to iPad users in its own competitive play against Pandora and Last.fm.  Once a strong streaming, Genius-powered solution is available to iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users future devices will be able to multi-task all applications, including the most threatening, streaming audio services.

Jobs made it a point to illustrate Apple has 125 million credit cards on file through iTunes.  Every streaming audio selection that is in turn bought by the user can be facilitated using that payment information.  Not the case with Pandora or Last.fm!  Denying these applications the ability to gain traction gives the iTunes ecosystem time to evolve to include their services.  This will make the future allowance of multitasking apps delivering this music less impactful in pulling users away from greatest cash cow in software’s history: iTunes.

First, new work from M.I.A. is eagerly anticipated as she went on hiatus following a tour for her Grammy nominated record, Kaya. I was at the far edges of the crowd with my sister when she told the audience at Bonnaroo in 2008 that it would be her last performance.  Since then, M.I.A. has largely kept away from music creation.

Second, M.I.A. chose to deliver “Space Odyssey” to fans via a twitter update, where she shared the video via TwitVid, a popular 3rd party service for video hosting that competes directly with Vidly.  While M.I.A’s choice of TwitVid as the media player allowed her to use her Twitter feed to deliver new music directly to her fans, it also has forced everyone to listen to this critically important release in terrible quality video and audio.  Check out the embed above.

Most notably, following the surprise release of the song, M.I.A.’s publicist confirmed that “Space Odyssey”  was released specifically in reaction to a recent New York Times story on the Top 31 Places to Go in 2010 written by Lionel Beehner.  In the NYT piece, Beehner acknowledges that the country has been “plagued by misfortune…but the conflict ended last May.” and goes on to suggest that “miles of sugary white sand flanked by bamboo groves that were off-limits until recently are a happy, if unintended byproduct of the war.”

If you are unfamiliar, a brutal civil war was being fought between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).  Leading up to the end of major conflict in May of 2009, many civilians were killed in efforts by the government to put down the rebel group.  The US State Department has issued a report outlining areas of concern (pdf) where International Humanitarian Law is believed to have been violated.

For some time following the end of combat, a quarter million people from the Tamil minority were forced to remain in refugee camps for months.  Between the brutality on both sides during the war and subsequent forced confinement afterwards, Sri Lanka’s international standing is quite low.  M.I.A. is of Tamil ancestry and fled the country as a refugee.  She has specifically decried (see her explanation at 3:25) the violence on both sides of the war.

M.I.A’s made a bold move in connecting her new artistry directly to a major US news publication’s pithy and embarrassing portrayal of Sri Lanka as a top tourist destination.  She did so using her platform of roughly 82,000 Twitter followers, all eager to hear what she would follow Paper Planes with.  M.I.A. has hit upon a near perfect mix of social networking, social action and artistic expression, most certainly setting her apart as an artist to watch in 2010.

The idea is that the iSlate will communicate and be driven in part by nearby iPhones and iPod Touch devices over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.  Authorized iPhone and iPod Touch devices nearby the iSlate will act as sophisticated remote controls.  This use case takes advantage of the user’s likely existing Apple hardware in the Touch platform and focuses on the fact that the iSlate will likely have a large, bright screen with a reasonable viewing angle. Let’s examine a potential killer application of this idea.

The tablet screen will be able to lie flat on a table between two or more people.  Through iTunes, the owner of the tablet will purchase an application that runs full screen on the tablet.  The publisher of the tablet application will also make available free applications that run on the iPhone and iPod Touch and communicate directly with the app running on the tablet.

Using the Apple Tablet as a Centerpiece to Electronic Board Games

A great example would be the classic board game, Scrabble.  In Scrabble, you have a board that requires physical placement of letters on a major center area.  It also requires players to keep the letters in their tray secret from other players.  In a Scrabble for the iSlate scenario, players need only to have an iPhone or iPod Touch to virtually hold their letters.

The iPod Touch or iPhone could vibrate or make a noise when it is a player’s turn and it would be used to send the results of the player’s decisions to the Apple tablet at the center of the table.

One important aspect of this is size, the traditional Scrabble board is a fair bit larger than the expected 10.1″ Pixel Qi powered display.  I believe that this type of thing could be overcome by the tablet giving intelligent focus to the most relevant portions of the board.  Additionally, the iPod Touch and iPhone could be used to manipulate the current viewing area on the tablet, or that area could be manipulated directly using standard multi-touch.

Many other board games would work in this scenario, including Monopoly, where you are handling all kinds of cash, property cards and frequent score calculations. The value you get out of the pairing of a Tablet and the iPhone is that there is a new bridge between physical social interaction and the convenience of an electronic presentation.

Using the Apple Tablet to Share Presentations in Small Groups

There are many other killer applications where the iPhone and iPod Touch serve as input devices to the iSlate or Apple tablet.  One I would use in my meetings for my iPhone application design company, Neutrinos, LLC is a business application is in small group presentations.  The tablet is set up to run a presentation application full screen.

The tablet is handed to one or more clients seated near each other.  The presenter uses an iPod Touch or iPhone to control playback of the presentation.  The presenter’s multi-touch device offers presentation notes, previous and next slide previews and allows them to trigger in-presentation events like animations or even jumping out to a web-view for the clients to explore.  This gives the presenter an opportunity to give a private and engaging presentation in the middle of any cafe, airport or public space.

Using the Apple Tablet for Illustration and as a Supplemental Display Area for Floating Windows

A final use case scenario for using the iPhone and iPod Touch to drive the Tablet is in illustration.  I’ve been working directly with Portland artist Carolyn Main who spends a lot of time with her Wacom tablet.  While the Wacom offers a great deal of pressure point precision that the Apple Touch Platform is unlikely to compete with any time soon, it is reasonable to think that app developers will try to deliver illustration and animation applications that allow creation on the go.

Having an illustration application like Adobe Illustrator running on the tablet, and then being able to use an iPhone or iPod touch for swatch, tool or layer management would leave more of the iSlate’s screen real estate for drawing.

In John Gruber’s recent post about the tablet he writes: “And so in answer to my central question, regarding why buy The Tablet if you already have an iPhone and a MacBook, my best guess is that ultimately, The Tablet is something you’ll buy instead of a MacBook.”  My suggestion is that people buy the tablet because they already have an iPhone or iPod Touch.  Having both a Tablet and a touch makes the Tablet more useful with some great use case scenarios the low-tech realm of board gaming to business.