Dominic Wilcox turned his tie into an erectile business card presenter.
I think I like this guy.
Look, TV executives. I get that you’re not prepared for online distribution. I get that. I mean, the Internet just got sprung on all of us a month ago — it’s not like it’s been around for forty years, in people’s homes for almost two decades, and capable of streaming high-quality video to mass audiences since, I don’t know, 2006. And I realize you have nothing to worry about, since there are no reports of hundreds of thousands of people dropping their cable subscriptions like rabid hamsters or anything.
And a television is clearly an entirely different thing from a computer — one is a box with a screen connected to a digital network, and the other is a box with a screen connected to a digital network and a keyboard (maybe) — so it makes perfect sense that you’d need different and separately-negotiated royalty and advertising structures, and these things take time to get right. Years and years and years and years, unsurprisingly.
But if I’m going to watch your shows online — which clearly doesn’t bother you since Hulu is able to exist at all — if I’m going to watch them and, more importantly, give my affluent, highly marketable attention to your ads — your obnoxious, intrusive, poorly-targeted ads — what fucking business is it of yours which device I choose to do that with?
Sirs: you are already shitting in my soup. Must you take away the spoon?
This is the fun part.
We’re about a week away from Apple announcing a new product. People are pretty sure it’s going to be an iOS-based Apple TV, that its name will be simply iTV, and that it will sooner or later have its own App Store. It’s all very exciting.
But this calm period — this strange time when we know everything and yet nothing — is the fun part, because we get to take our best shots at guessing what our new toys will look like. Here’s mine.
First, what kind of apps would make sense for an iTV? It’s not a touchscreen device, and you don’t carry it around with you. You operate it from your couch. So the obvious category is games.
But you need some kind of controller to play a game, unless Apple is working on its own version of Kinect, which I doubt. An Apple Remote doesn’t really cut it, and while an iPhone or iPod touch would make a great game console controller, as has been pointed out, it’s unlikely that Apple would require one: no game publisher is going to invest in developing a game whose market is restricted to owners of two separately-purchased devices, and iTV sales would be hobbled from the start. At least one standard controller needs to be included in the box for the iTV to be a viable gaming platform, so that controller has to be relatively simple and inexpensive.
What if that simple, inexpensive controller is something like an iPhone without the screen?
Above, I’ve crudely Photoshopped this concept together. It’s the love child of an iPod touch and a Magic Trackpad. It has the same inertial and gyroscopic motion sensors as the iPhone 4, and the same multitouch surface we’re familiar with. A home button. Bluetooth. No screen.
Of course, you’d have the option of using your existing iPhone or iPod instead — just run the free iTV app — and when your friends come over, they can bring their iPhones so you don’t have to buy extra controllers. And some games will make use of those screens if they’re present: you could do the SCRABBLE Tile Rack thing, for example. Games like The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures — an old multiplayer Nintendo GameCube title which used up to four connected Game Boy Advances as controllers, showing some of the action on the small screens — would also work well. But every game would be playable with the standard, screenless controller.
The Magic Trackpad costs about $70 retail. It doesn’t have any motion sensors in it, but it has all the rest of the hardware required by this hypothetical controller. I’m just guessing here, but it seems reasonable that a smaller, handheld Magic Trackpad with a motion chip in it could cost under $50.1
And you know what? I think this device might even work as the only remote for the iTV, even when you’re just using it to, you know, watch TV. No pushbutton Apple Remote at all, in other words: everything is gesture-based. Tap to pause, swipe left to rewind, swipe right to fast-forward. Slide up or down to adjust volume. Home key to exit to the menu, which you navigate by flicking and tapping. And just imagine how much better seeking around in videos will be with a touch surface…
Damn. Now I really hope Apple makes this product I’ve just invented. I’m excited just writing about it. This is the entertainment gizmo that I want to own.
See what I mean about the fun part?
Wii Remotes cost $40, wireless PS3 controllers are $45, Xbox controllers are anywhere from $30 to $60, and all three systems ship with a controller, so that’s about the right price point. ↩
So Camera+ has been pulled from the App Store because it contained a useful but hidden feature that Apple didn’t like. Whether you agree with Apple’s motives or not, if you hadn’t bought the app yet, you can’t buy it now even if you want to. And when it comes back — if it comes back — it will be missing that feature. If you managed to download the version of Camera+ that has the forbidden feature, eventually an update will remove it and you’ll be out of luck. And it’s not the first time something like this has happened.
You can use Time Machine to resurrect old versions of apps if they’re still in your backup history, but that’s kind of fiddly, and Time Machine doesn’t maintain a permanent archive. Here’s what I do instead.
FutureTap responds to the patent situation I wrote about here and here.
Regarding Apple’s patent filing and Where To, Marco makes a good point. For prior art to come into play, the actual claims of the patent would have to cover one or more functions of Where To, and as far as I can tell, they don’t: the patent is entirely concerned with automatic location-based travel notifications. The diagram is just part of an example of one way the technology in question might operate.
Apple references the diagram (Fig. 6) and says that it includes features that are made available as the embodiment of the invention. I’m not exactly sure what “the invention” is, but it doesn’t seem to be referring to Fig 6.
The other clue that this isn’t about an underhanded attempt to patent the Where To app is that various pictures showing several completely unrelated app designs are all used to describe this same patent. None of the other drawings are consistent.
As such, my suspicion is still that this is basically much ado about nothing, but I suppose it’s always possible that Apple ripped off someone’s exact design and is now trying to patent it, thinking that no one would notice. (There’s a bit of sarcasm there, but I’m not saying it’s beyond the realm of possibility, either.)
I think it’s more likely that the people involved in drawing up this patent simply didn’t think about the message it would send to developers. I’m sure it’s not Apple’s practice (or intention) to plunder the App Store submissions bin for new things to patent. But there remains a conflict of interest in Apple acting as the sole steward of the iOS software universe while also filing patents in areas that have long been staked out by third-party developers. If those developers suddenly get cold feet toward submitting innovative apps for fear of their ideas suddenly appearing in Apple’s patent filings, it will be hard to blame them.
And regardless of who’s right or wrong, no one wants to end up in patent court against the biggest technology corporation in the world.
As for the rightness or wrongness of using the likeness of the app, I wonder: Does Apple reserve the right to do that as part of their developer agreement? Apple can presumably use apps as part of their advertisements, etc., and if they’re simply using the likeness of this app to help describe “the embodiment of” a patent invention that would make use of such apps, I’m not sure there’s anything in the developer agreement prohibiting that, is there?
There may be nothing prohibiting it, but there’s also nothing I know of in the agreement — or good developer relations, or even common decency — that permits it.
It’s pretty easy to argue that software patents are bad for the software industry.
Regardless of where you stand on that issue, however, it must at least give you pause when Apple, who not only exercises final approval over what may be sold on the world’s largest mobile software distribution platform, but also has exclusive pre-publication access (by way of that approval process) to every app sold or attempted to be sold there, quietly starts patenting app ideas.
But even if you’re fine with that, how about this: one of the diagrams in Apple’s patent application for a travel app is a direct copy, down to the text and the positions of the icons, of an existing third-party app that’s been available on the App Store for years.
I can’t see how this is even close to OK.
(Update: I’ve posted a followup.)
(Second update: FutureTap responds.)
(Update the third: Apple responds to FutureTap.)
