Tech Evangelist Joey deVilla's blog on startup life and ecommerce/mobile/web development
I guess the graphic makes it official: Apple will be announcing new notebook computers on Tuesday, October 14th at 10:00 a.m. Pacific (1:00 p.m. Eastern). I guess we’ll find out:
This should be interesting…
{ 0 comments }
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
On the off-chance you hadn’t yet heard, Apple has finally dropped its much-reviled NDA for iPhone developers for released software. It was so restrictive that developers were forbidden from discussing or writing documentation on iPhone development, even with or for other iPhone developers.
In the announcement on Apple Developer Connection, they explain why they put developers under the excessively-restrictive NDA:
We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.
This sort of behaviour harkens back to the 1990s, when Apple behaved as if all third-party developers who weren’t Adobe existed on a spectrum ranging from “unwanted houseguest” to “the enemy”. Speaking as a guy with a strong technical evangelist background (note to employers: hint, hint!), this is not the way you foster developer love nor build a developer community.
Expect iPhone development tutorials and tips to start popping up all over the web and for the Pragmatic Programmers’ book iPhone SDK Development to finally see the light of day.
{ 0 comments }
On the off chance you hadn’t heard, Steve Job’s WWDC Keynote address takes place this afternoon at 1 p.m. Eastern. Silicon Alley Insider will be liveblogging it as will MacRumors. You might also do well to check Summize, who will be working with Twitter to help it through the expected WWDC chatter-fest.
{ 1 comment }
This ad for Lenovo’s ultra-portable ThinkPad X300 is a pretty good counter to the ad for the MacBook Air…
…but I think I’ll wait for the Mac version. The ThinkPad may boast that it’s the “no-compromise” machine, but the lack of Mac OS X is a big-ass compromise in my books. Especially when the OS likely to be bundled with this machine is:
{ 5 comments }
It’s official: Rogers will be offering the iPhone in Canada. No word on whether they’re going to lower their ridiculous mobile data rates to reasonable levels.
{ 1 comment }
New York cable operator Cablevision has been trying to roll out network DVR service to their customers for the last year:
In a move that could ignite a major debate about consumer “fair use” of TV programming, Cablevision Systems will unveil plans to test a service that gives cable subscribers the ability to record and time-shift shows using existing digital set-top boxes.
Although it works just like TiVo and other digital video recorders (DVRs) — consumers choose in advance which shows to capture and can fast-forward through ads — the recording itself will be stored at the cable system, not on a hard drive in the consumer’s home.
USA TODAY’s prediction of trouble between Cablevision and Big Content proved prophetic. Last week Cablevision lost a court battle over their network DVR service
A federal judge has ruled against Cablevision Systems’ experiment with network digital video recorders, siding with Hollywood studios who said the devices would have violated copyright law.
Several studios and cable networks sued Cablevision, saying the company didn’t get their permission to rebroadcast the programs.
Cablevision argued that because the control of the recording and playback was in the hands of the consumer, and not Cablevision, the devices were compliant with copyright law.
Are things going so well in Hollywood that Big Content can take their cable-operating friends to court as well as their internet-based frenemies?
Cablevision (and every other cable company) was simply looking for a way to offer time-shifting to their customers, but with a better economic model than putting a box with a hard drive in every home. When you think about it, the studios would actually have been in a much better position to enact content restrictions (such as no commercial skipping, or time-bombing recorded shows) on a network DVR service rather than with a traditional client-side DVR architecture.
And yet, Big Content would rather kneecap a longtime collaborator in Cablevision for the sake of a rebroadcasting right that exists in theory, rather than in practice. In practice, as far as the customer is concerned, this is just the same as any DVR.
For all their protests to the contrary, the movie studios seem intent on empowering interlopers like Apple (hey, even Scoble likes Apple tv), rather than protecting their natural friends in content distribution. For Apple, content is a means to an end (an important one, to be sure). Making Apple’s hardware-based business model more powerful may be the ultimate outcome of Big Content’s actions against network DVRs.
{ 0 comments }