One of the interesting Apple rumors bouncing around is the idea that MobileMe might become a free service.
I really don’t like MobileMe, or .Mac before it. I think it’s badly overpriced, charging $99 for services that are available elsewhere, and are often better elsewhere, for free.
But what I really hate about MobileMe/.Mac is a sense that Mac OS X has long been deliberately crippled in service of MobileMe. Many of the obvious and interesting uses of Bonjour, such as syncing your laptop and desktop, never appeared in Mac OS X and are obvious by their absence… and that absence is explained by the fact that Apple hoped to charge $99 to round-trip your files through their server farm, rather than performing the entire transaction within your household LAN (which, aside from being free, would be faster and more secure). Year after year, when the O’Reilly editors would ping the Mac bloggers about wishlists for MacWorld or other milestone events, I always made sure to put “an end to .Mac” as one of my requests. And I never got my wish. To quote my appearance in Chuck Toporek’s pre-Macworld 2006 ruminations: “Add to this the confusion of explaining .Mac to the switcher or new user, and I think you’ll agree that not only is .Mac overpriced, it may actually be harming the Mac platform. I hope that by the end of 2006 it [.Mac] is either free or dead.”
So maybe now we’re finally going to get it. And this is what makes me think Apple is moving in this direction: AirDrop, an announced feature in Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), offering simple computer-to-computer file transfer, the kind of thing for which Apple had previously told us to use .Mac/MobileMe public folders. If they’re finally using Bonjour for easy computer-to-computer file transfer — like they should have been doing since about 2003 — then that makes me think that MobileMe has finally been sufficiently discredited to allow OS X to add these kinds of features.
What changed? As always with Apple, who the hell knows? But you have to think they’re at least a little surprised by the emergence of Dropbox as the de facto tool for exchanging files between your desktop and productivity applications on your iPad. Not MobileMe, and certainly not the clumsy file-exchange offered by iTunes. I’m actually really surprised by how totally Dropbox has won: all the text editors I evaluated for light on-the-go coding (*) support Dropbox, and few bother with MobileMe. Does that sting Apple? Maybe. Hopefully.
(* Textastic totally won this comparison, by the way. Not even close. If you think you ever might need to touch HTML or C or any other kind of code on your iPad, go get it.)
Now the fun question for me is, if MobileMe becomes free, will it be worth my time? I certainly don’t see a compelling reason to migrate my mail off GMail, or my documents off Dropbox, so except for the “Find My iPhone” feature, which has already been made free and which I still don’t use, it’s not clear that there’s anything there that I care about. Maybe I’m overlooking something… let me know in the comments.
I retweeted this already, but if you care about FCP, read Philip Hodgetts’ A new 64 bit Final Cut Pro? for some excellent analysis about what this could possibly be, given the respective capabilities and release timing of FCP, QTKit, AV Foundation, and Lion:
My biggest doubt was the timing. I believed a rewritten 64 bit Final Cut Pro would require a rewritten 64 bit QuickTime before it can be developed and clearly that wasn’t a valid assumption. Speculating wildly – to pull off a fully rewritten, 64 bit pure Cocoa Final Cut Pro – would require building on AVFoundation (the basis of iMovie for iPhone), which is coming to OS X in 10.7 Lion.
In my recent post about conferences, I forgot to mention that I’ll be speaking tomorrow (Thursday) night, Feb. 24, at MobiDevDay Detroit. Except this time, I’m going to make sure the damn Core Audio demo works (it worked on Saturday morning, but not in the afternoon). Also, even though the talk is already too damn long, I’d like to squeeze in two more slides: one for Accelerate, and the other for AirPlay.
One more nugget about the I-AP subscription dustup (my previous blogs: 1, 2), particularly for all you conspiracy theorists who loves you some nefarious skullduggery!:
What if the real story here is that Apple has decided to release an AppleTV SDK later this year? Streaming media apps would be far and away the most appropriate use of such an SDK — nobody needs Twitter clients for their TV or Angry Birds with a tiny D-pad — and by establishing a 30% tax on content now, it would be a fait accompli by the time the first Hulu, NFL, and Crunchyroll streams roll through port 80.
Not that I have any reason to think this is what’s going on. I’m just putting out there now in case I get lucky and get to do the “told you so” happy dance later.
You’re welcome. Happy conspiring!
Talking with a colleague from Cocoaheads Ann Arbor last night, I stumbled across an even bigger objection to Apple’s new “must offer in-app purchase if app content is available elsewhere” rule, beyond those that I covered in In-App Purchase and Rent Seeking.
The problem is that to make something available for in-app purchase, you need to create an I-AP product for it in iTunes Connect. In this web interface, you enter a product ID, a description in whatever languages you want to support, and set a price. To get approved by apple, you also have to submit a screenshot of the purchased product in the application.
Apparently, the web interface is the only way to create products.
And if you’re thinking “that doesn’t scale”… well, yeah, that’s what we suddenly realized. If you’re Amazon, and you have 810,000 Kindle books, does Apple seriously expect you to submit all 810,000 of those, one at a time, and with screenshots, via the ITC web interface?
Even if that’s possible, even if you think that content providers won’t utterly balk at the impracticality of it, let’s tease this out a little further. Add in the hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of titles available for the Barnes and Noble Nook. And 20,000 Netflix streaming titles, and so on… how on Earth is Apple seriously going to review and approve all these products? If we just assume 2,000,000 products need to be added by the June 30 deadline, and we assume each could be reviewed in about five minutes, then that’s 12 products per person-hour, meaning Apple would need over 160,000 person hours just to approve all these products. Divide again by 8-hour days and 130 days between now and June 30, and they’d need 160 employees doing nothing but reviewing I-AP products for this to work.
This, clearly, is madness.
The benign and simplest explanation for all of this is that Apple has painted itself into a corner, that it hasn’t really thought through all these issues. And if that’s the case, something will have to give: a bulk-submission tool, lax review of products, or (ideally) an abandonment of the new rent-seeking policy.
Conspiracy theorists could also pick up this ball and run with it: the premise that Apple is using an unreasonable and unworkable I-AP system to get content providers off the platform, leaving Apple as the sole seller of books and movies and such on iOS (while still being able to say “hey, they’re the ones who bailed on the platform”), is arguably consistent with the facts. I think it’s implausible… but not impossible.
I have to acknowledge one thing has gotten better: the new auto-renewing subscriptions are restored by -[SKPaymentQueue restoreCompletedTransactions], meaning it’s now actually practical to get a user’s new iOS device to recover subscriptions purchased with their iTunes account on previous devices. This is what I was complaining about in bug 7470096, and the new purchase type looks a lot more practical and thought-out. I feel like I should update Road Tip to use these subscriptions (and therefore gain restorability across devices), but anytime I touch that code, it’s throwing good money after bad, so it will be hard to justify for any reason other than shame that the current version is so compromised by the impracticality of the old I-AP subscriptions.
A quick update on upcoming conference talks…
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Next Saturday, February 19, is MobiDevDay Detroit at the Compuware building downtown. I’ll be doing a talk on iOS Multimedia, a high-level overview of the various media frameworks (AV Foundation, Core Audio, Open AL, Media Library, etc.), with an emphasis on the practical questions of “which one do I pick for my application”. They’ve asked me to do the talk twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, so feel free to check out the other iOS talks from Dave Koziol, Chris Judd, Henry Balanon, et. al.
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In April, I’ll be in Seattle for another round of the Voices That Matter: iPhone Developer Conference. This time, I’m doing Advanced Media Manipulation with AV Foundation, which will cover advanced AV Foundation topics like capture-time media processing, editing with effects (and exporting them), sample-level access, etc. It’s kind of a follow-up to the AV Foundation intro I did at VTM in Philly in the Fall, except that we can’t assume that attendees were there for Philly, so I’ll probably start with an abbreviated AV Foundation intro before getting into the rough stuff. I’ve also told the conference organizers that I could do the intro talk if a spot opens up that they need to fill, though I don’t actually suspect that’ll happen.
I’m going to update the blog’s right colum with a badge for the conference as soon as I post this entry, but in the meantime, here’s a registration code for you: SEASPK2. That’s good for $100. If combined with Early Bird pricing (ends Feb. 25), you’re in the door for $395. Which is, like, what, a quarter of what you’d pay for WWDC? Plus, hey, smaller crowds, indie speakers, Seattle (Shorty’s is two blocks from the conference hotel)… it’s just packed with win.
Annnnnd… now I need to get cracking on my slides for MobiDevDay in a week…
