I just got back this morning on a red-eye from 360iDev (sorry, no link; not practical to do lots of HTML editing on the iPad, which I’m typing this on) and wanted to get a few thoughts out before I collapse from sleep.
It was so nice to get back into the world of iPhone OS, as I’ve been working on a day-job contract on the Mac, with far too much exposure to the broken parts of that platform, principally the installer technologies. The cleanups and relative lack of legacy entanglements make iPhone a more pleasant platform to develop for.
The conference organizers did a bang up job of getting top tier speakers and attendees. In a final panel, the speakers were nearly all people whose apps I used: Doodle Jump, Air Sharing, and so on.
It was also nice to run into my co-author on the iPhone book, Bill Dudney, his predecessor in iPhone evangelism, Matt Drance (who, in an ironic life swap, has replaced Bill in the Pragmatic Studio seminars), MapQuest’s Carl Edwards, Double Encore’s Dan Burcaw, and three fellow members of the Ann Arbor CocoaHeads group: Tom Hoag, Dan Hibbets, and Henry Balanon.
I did a highly ambitious talk on Core Audio, using all of my 80 minutes to get deeply into audio units, applying a ring modulator effect to captured samples from the mic, and mixing it with samples from a file to produce a “Dalek sing-a-long”. I need to clean up the example code, and will likely do a post on it sometime in the future. Still, this was the kind of conference where such an advanced talk would be well received. After Denver and San Jose, it will be interesting to see where they take this conference next.
The business sessions were at least as good as the tech sessions, maybe better. Harbor Master’s Natalia Luckoynova offered a lot of vital real world lessons about making a go of the app store in her talk, and Dan Burcaw’s tales of the enterprise rang all too true.
I’m not a fan of panels, but a wrap up panel on the iPad started well, and probably would be fondly remembered had they wrapped up at the scheduled time rather than going 40 minutes over.
I don’t really have a conclusion, so I’ll end with an observation: Word Press on the iPad offers no way to scroll through the list of category checkboxes. So I will have to save this post as a draft and finish up after getting back to a full-blown computer. Or maybe use my iPhone and the mobile site. Yeah, irony.
Thinking about the iPad and the appealing idea of watching video on this device, the usual objections come up about being limited to the Apple iTunes ecosystem, and being shut out from great stuff, just like the AppleTV is.
But wait a second, there’s a second way to get video on your iPad, just like on an iPhone/iPod touch: apps can stream video. In fact, there are a bunch of these already. In many cases, the apps scratch the itch of certain niches. Apple continues to trot out the MLB app to show off crowd-pleasing baseball video, but I notice that I have downloaded at least four apps for streaming anime: Crunchyroll, Babelgum, Joost, and The Anime Network. Looking on the App Store, I see a few others, including one app that exists just as a container for the first volume of the charming His and Her Circumstances.
Let’s think here. Some of these services (Crunchyroll and Anime Network) offer Flash-based viewers on the web, but they’re not in the Flash business, they’re in the content business, so they use a different technology to get their content to iPhone OS viewers.
And what is that technology? By Apple fiat, it is HTTP Live Streaming, which Apple recently declared as the only permitted technology for streaming video to iPhone OS devices. Technically, it seems like you could also use HTML5 <video> tags in a UIWebView, but there are lots of nice reasons to use HTTP Live Streaming (content providers are probably happy to see DRM in the spec, even if most of us consumers aren’t).
So here’s what I’m wondering. If content providers are going to have to use HTTP Live Streaming to support all the iPhone OS devices, is this eventually going to put pressure on Flash? All that has to happen is for HTTP Live Streaming to become more viable on desktops, and then you’ll have a video distribution solution that skips the Adobe tax and the extra step of Flash encoding. HLS is supported by QuickTime X on Snow Leopard, but I don’t believe that the Windows version of QuickTime handles it yet. Pity.
Still, if I were Adobe, I’d be pretty concerned about HTTP Live Streaming right now.
