Apple Musing

One of the posts that I thought of and didn't put up back when the iPhone was about to be released talked about how the Apple website would need to be updated to accommodate it. At the time the top level tab structure of the site looked like this.

The iPhone did not fit under any of these headings, arguably it could go under iPod + iTunes but it was too important for that. Tabs had been added over the years but it was getting a little confused and crowded, as shown when Apple did for a short while between iPhone announcement and release did just add a new tab. My guess turned out to be true and Apple changed their site structure and look to;

 

The new design reflected the changes that had happened to OS X over the years, was more tidy and grouped their products much more sensibly (except Apple TV which to me just doesn't feel right under the iPod + iTunes heading, much as the iPhone would not).

So where will the Tablet fit? As with the iPhone I don't feel that it fits naturally under any of these segments and will be important enough to Apple to require its own section. Might we see iPod +iTunes disappear as a top level heading? Possible but unlikely. We could see Downloads go and Tablet (whatever the name) added.

Or we will see a total design overhaul. This is my bet. I would expect to see the design either again reflect the changes made to OS X on the desktop or it could pull its influences more from the iPhone/Tablet if that's the current big push for Apple.

As with the iPhone, post announcement of the tablet we may well just see something shoe horned into the current design, but I think we should expect a whole new design to appear on release day. Something I find almost as exciting a prospect as the Tablet itself.

Apple has a long history of delivering tools and frameworks to support interactive media. From Hypercard, through Quicktime's various incarnations to the more recent iDVD and DVD Studio Pro. For a long time these technologies were a major part of Apple's line up, but in the last couple of years that has changed.

The last 2 versions of Final Cut Studio have not seen updates to DVD Studio Pro. Only theme additions for iDVD for a while. To the dismay of many Blu-Ray has remained a "bag of hurt", as Steve Jobs famously described it, and seen only token support added. In Snow Leopard Quicktime X is something of a step back with many interactive features removed and Flash, it seems, will never get a look in on the iPhone.

It would seem then that Apple is giving up on modern interactive content, or is it. There are signs that it is instead simply heading in another direction.

• HTML 5
• iTunes LP and Extras 

HTML 5

While it has been keeping Flash off of the iPhone Apple has also been pushing the capabilities of HTML 5 in its Safari browser. The Apple created addition of the Canvas tag and support for SVG allows for interactive vector graphics in an open standard format.

Another integral part of HTML 5 is support for inline audio and video content, which along with Apple's close relationship with Google now opens the door to a Flashless YouTube.

iTunes LP and Extras

With the launch of iTunes 9 Apple brought to the world downloadable special edition content for both music and movies. After a little investigation people soon found that these are created using open standard HTML, CSS and Javascript. Apple have said that they will soon publish the details of how to produce this content.

Tool Support

The one thing that Apple is yet to do is provide any particular tool support for this content. While it was unlikely that they would release something general and broad ranging to support interactive HTML 5 content it seems that there is a much better chance that they will offer a tools to develop iTunes LP and Extras.

If that were the case then where in the their line up of software would that tool sit? It could be reasoned that it is a developer tool and could live in XCode, but that would be more likely for a general HTML 5 tool. The people that would really want a tool for developing iTunes LP and Extras are the content producers themselves, the people that use Final Cut Studio and Logic Studio. The two suites already share Soundtrack Pro, why not software to finalise delivery?

The differences between delivery of music and movies are very few and far between these days. The music industry are relying more and more on DVD/Blu-Ray releases to make up revenues and the movie industry is relying more and more on downloadable content.

So to appeal to all widest potential audience what would such a tool have to do?

• CD
• DVD
• DVD-Audio
• Blu-Ray
• iTunes LP
• iTunes Extras

Both CD and DVD production are already catered for through Logic Studio's Waveburner and Final Cut Studio's DVD Studio Pro.

So if Apple were to produce a tool to support iTunes LP and Extras it makes a lot of sense to add in support to output DVD and CD using their existing software. Also if they ever to add support for Blu-Ray (which they must do or drop DVD Studio Pro completely) then it really belongs in the same place to.

Such a tool would off the unique capabilities of taking content directly from creation through to interactive output on all the formats that count. Having to produce something so complex and that supports the only recently released iTunes LP and Extras could explain why DVD Studio Pro has not been touched in such a long time.

This is of course all my personal pipe dream, but it's a very nice dream.

Monday after work I spent a nice hour and a half at the Apple Store Regent Street waiting to get a new iPhone 3GS. The staff there were coping well, you had to register your name with a concierge and wait to be called (you could go away for half an hour or so as the wait was around an hour).

A quick warning to UK people after a contract phone. The Apple stores stop selling contract phones at 7:30pm each night, moving to Pay As You Go, because O2 close down their activation phone banks which means there would be no one to call if there were any problems.

I was buying a Pay As You Go 16GB black, good as they were out of White phones and 32GB models. The plan was to swop the SIM in from my old phone. I chose this route, rather than buying out my contract or waiting till Jan to get another subsidised one, so that I will be out of contract when the next one is out next year.

Once my name had been called it took only 10 mins for a helpful genius to activate and charge me for the new phone. He swapped the SIM and I was done.

After a strange musicless journey home with a fresh phone I was eager to try the restore process. The new phone dropped into the dock and after a couple of clicks in iTunes was restoring. It was only 45 mins later that my new phone was indestinguishable from ny previous phone. Even my paused Tetris game and the open tabs in Safari were there.

I will post more later but I'll just say that so far I am loving it. Even with apps not compiled specifically for it there's a feel of more speed and smoothless. HSDPA definitely helps and my calls have sounded wonderful. There was a scary moment yesterday when I lost all signal (see image above showing "No Signal 3G") when other iPhone 3G users sitting next to me were fine, but that was a momentary glitch yet to be repeated.

The £440 was well spent, especially when I think about just how much I use the iPhone.

With the internet finally connected to the new flat I am able to bring you my comments on the WWDC 2009 Keynote. As you can probably guess from the title of this post there are going to be quite a lot so I thought that I would kick off with some general observations of the event, opinions in the cloud and the aftermath. They are in noparticularorder, just how they come to me while I am writing this.

Developer Videos/Demos

This seems to be becoming a regular sticking point with many people, most finding that they slow the whole thing down and are boring. I suspect that this is in a large part due to the fact that so many people follow the event through live blogging, a medium which does not lend itself well to describing such things. Most live bloggers seem to just give up during these sections.

If you watch the footage of the event itself, as I always do, you may well find them interesting and enthusing. We're all Apple fans after all and most of the time we seem to love hearing each other praise what's going on. Strange.

Of corse, for those of a more morbid disposition, there is always the chance that something will go wrong as it did in 2 of the demos.

The one demo that did seem to catch people's attention was that of TomTom. Turn by turn route apps is something that iPhone fans have been waiting a very long time for. They didn'tdisappoint. Not being a car owner this isn't something that interests me too much, but I will be fascinated to find out whether people prefer using the app in portrait or landscape mode.

Snow Leopard's Reveal

Okay, so not much was revealed in the show that we didn't already know. It was great to see some indication of the benefits of Grand Central in the Mail demo, but beyond that not much stuck out. It was in the updated Snow Leopard pages at Apple.com that things really got more interesting.

Firstly, after the changes to the laptop range, more on that another time, Apple made a subtle change to the way their horizontal navigation falls on the Mac page at Apple.com.

Previously the default position had been more to the right, framing the laptops between the almost identical LED Cinema Display and the iMac, the Mini and Mac Pro still on the right. Now all they have done is slip it to the right which drops the one item that wasn't a Mac and introduces Mac OS X, now linking to the Snow Leopard pages. A very small change but a very clever one.

We were told some time ago that Snow Leopard was a release to build on, that it wouldn't include any new user features but instead provide new foundations. In line with this the $29 upgrade price must have pleased developers (ensuring that as many people as possible will upgrade) and Apple supporters alike. But dig a little deeper to here and you'll find lots and lots of small changes that will be big benefits to users.

To pull out some highlights that weren't mentioned before the event;

• More reliable disk eject
• Assign applications to spaces
• Navigate folders in stacks
• Faster shutdown and
  wake-up (up to 75%!)
• Automatic updates for
  printer drivers
• AirPort menu signal strength
• Safari resistant to crashes
• Intelligent text selection i Preview PDF
• Screen saver shuffle
• Automatic time zone setting
• Configurable time window
  for screen locking
• Smaller footprint (reclaim 6GB)
• Static analysis in Xcode

There are more, you should go and check them out.

Not all in Snow Leopard is perfect

Maybe I'm just being picky and possibly in practice these things will make little to no difference, but there are some things that have come to my attention which are not as good in Snow Leopard as I had hoped. Not doubt there are good reasons for these, probably out of Apple's hands in some cases. Here they are for you to decide.

1) Not all OS X apps are 64bit

DVD Player, Front Row, Grapher, iTunes and X11 are not 64bit. I can understand X11 being an issue, older tech that doesn't really belong to Apple. Grapher probably wouldn't see much benefit and wasn't worth the money to do. I expect that DVD Player is tied to some tight 32bit CSS encryption code that they didn't really need to change, although it does probably point out further that we are not going to see the Player app upgraded to Blu-Ray anytime soon ... or possibly the opposite and that there will be a wonderful new 64bit DVD Player that also supports Blu-Ray?

Front Row and iTunes are puzzling though. They are not great resource hogs, until your library is very, very large. Even then the last few versions have gotten rid of most of the issues. But they seem so core to Apple's future that theirabsenceis definitely noted.

2) Not all graphics cards are supported by OpenCL

This one cuts me deep. My late 2007aluminumiMac contains a Radeon HD 2600 PRO which is not supported. In fact only NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, Geforce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130 and ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 487 are supported.

3) You need an NVIDIA 9400M for hardware H.264 acceleration

So many of us are out of that one.

4) Exchange support requires Exchange Server 2007

It will be a while coming for some companies.

These are all small niggles and I'm sure I'm just being bitter about the lack of support for my personal hardware.

Overall

I enjoyed the event. I think Apple presented what they needed to, the whole thing being evolutionary rather that revolutionary. They managed to quietly send the PowerPC and to an extent the iPhone 2G off into the night, never to be heard from again. Great though they were, their time has past. Welcome to a new world of speed and power. The foundations have been laid and WWDC was the right place to do it, right in front of the builders.

So what did we all think then? I'm still waiting on the download to watch the video, but I liked what I've read about so far.

The MacBook refreshes and price drops were just what the line needed. There won't be a need to touch them till near the end of the year, if at all.

The iPhone hardware was all as expected. I think the only points that really grabbed anyone's attention were the details on battery life, the main reason I want to get one, and the manual focus on the camera.

Snow Leopard got a launch timeframe, September one month before Windows 7, and a pretty price, $29. Some features were teased and the new techonolgies talked about. I am really excited about this, more so than anything else Apple is doing right now.

The Exchange support is going to propel Mac OS X into the Enterprise market in a way that could not have been achieved before. And I can't wait to see what all those eager developers at WWDC produce using the power of 64 bit/OpenCL/Grand Central accelerated applications.

Roll on September, come to me kitty ...