Posts Tagged ‘Application Development’

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Apple’s iMac is a sight to behold

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

New Delhi, Feb. 23 — Apple’s latest iMac is a sight to behold. With a 27-inch screen, it’s the largest all-in-one PC we’ve seen. Whether this is excessive for a home PC will depend on your requirements, but there’s always the 21.5-inch version for those with space and budget constraints.

Screen shine

The screen will completely capture the user’s attention. Sitting in front of a 27-inch iMac fills up a large part of your vision, and it’s almost difficult to focus on the entire thing at once. You’ll have to lower the brightness a bit compared to most other monitors since it’s shining in your face! Apple uses high-quality IPS panels and LED backlighting, and the colours are amazing.

The resolution, at 2650 x 1440, is comfortably larger than today’s HD panels. Viewing angles are also spectacular, with no colour distortion till you’re staring at it sideways. This is also the first time Apple has used a 16:9 panel in the iMac line. Photographs jump to life, movies are a treat, and Apple’s wallpaper images really shine. If you use professional applications such as Photoshop and Aperture, or if you work with design and content creation, you’ll never want to go back to anything else.

Initial concerns about cost and practicality are soon replaced with joy.

Looks

The black glass around the screen is now edge to edge, but it’s still reflective – you’ll need to twist around and tilt the iMac to get comfortable under fluorescent lights. Apart from its screen, the iMac looks only slightly different from the previous generation. The entire body is now aluminum, and the metallic “chin” in front is less obtrusive than before.

The DVD drive on the right edge now has an SD card slot for company, while all ports are still at the back. We would have loved to see at least the headphones socket and a couple of USB ports on the side for convenience now that the ones on the keyboard are gone. Features Our review model came with a 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4 GB of RAM, a 1 TB hard drive, 8x DVD RW drive, and an ATI Radeon 4670 graphics card with 256 MB of RAM.

A 21.5-inch model with the same specs had the same configuration, while the lowest-end one has an onboard Nvidia 9400M graphics and half the hard drive space. Interestingly, you can custom-order a 27-inch model with Intel’s new Core i5 or i7 CPU, giving you high-performance quad-core options for the first time – for hefty premiums though. All models come with Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, WiFi N, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, inbuilt speakers and a microphone.

However, Blu-ray drives are absent from all models, which is a massive letdown when you have the huge 27-inch screen at your disposal. With no official online source of HD material in India, it’s a huge waste of this device’s potential. The selection of ports is interesting: audio in and out (analog/optical combo), four USB ports, FireWire 800, Gigabit Ethernet, and a mini DisplayPort video output.

Mini DisplayPort will require an adapter for pretty much every TV or projector out there, which you’ll have to buy separately. But there’s a hidden trick: on the 27-inch model that we reviewed, this port can also be used as an input! The required cable isn’t on the market yet, but once available, you’ll be able to connect a DVD or Blu-ray player, game console, or any other video source to make even better use of the panel.

For those worried about the environment, the new iMac claims to be energy efficient, highly recyclable, and free of toxic chemicals including arsenic, mercury, and lead.

Usability

Probably the only sore spots are the bundled keyboard and mouse. The keyboard is totally wireless and uses Bluetooth to communicate. It’s meant to be used from across a room, but it’s quite uncomfortable that way.

For starters, it’s just too small and dumps not only the number pad but also the nagivation keys (Page Up/Dn, Home, End, Ins, Del) that most laptops pack in. You can choose the older style wired keyboard at the time of purchase, but bundling this shrunken keyboard by default is a very strange decision indeed.

The mouse is Apple’s new Bluetooth Magic Mouse, claimed to be the first one in the world with a multitouch surface. Again, it’s too flat and narrow to be comfortable in the palm; Apple envisions that people will push it around with only their fingers on the surface.

The gestures are also limited to flicks for scrolling and two-finger swipes for page navigation, not the full range that’s available on the current Macbook’s glass trackpad. Mac OS X looks wonderful, but it’s actually easy to lose the mouse cursor from time to time on such a high-definition screen. The iLife apps, especially Garage Band, are good fun, and using Photoshop and Illustrator was never more pleasurable.

However, for Windows 7 users, the new iMac doesn’t play nice without a few extra driver downloads. Your iMac screen will simply go blank midway through the installation. We spent a fair amount of time diagnosing the fault, which turned out to be a missing video driver. Driver disorder Further investigation revealed that we had to download the correct driver (100 MB approximately) from Apple’s website and unzip it to a USB pen drive, which has to be left plugged in during installation.

Windows will search through all available devices and then install the driver, after which you’ll be good to go. After installation, you’ll also need to install an update to the Windows Boot Camp utility (another 380 MB download) even though official instructions say nothing of the sort. Without the new version, you won’t be able to use the Magic Mouse. However, the update caused severe colour banding on screen as the colour depth dropped from 32 bit to 16 bit. So we had to roll back the graphics driver.

This is quite a hassle considering Boot Camp has worked so smoothly on previous Apple machines. All we’re unhappy about is the absence of instructions that might have prepared us for this ordeal. The new iMac is not ready for Windows 7, but if this is not what you’re buying a Mac for, there’s no need to worry.

Performance

Similarly, our audio and video compression tasks took 1 min 7 sec and 47 sec respectively, which are pretty respectable scores. You’ll be able to play even fairly recent games at low settings, but don’t expect earth-shattering frames at the screen’s native 2560 x 1440 with the default graphics card.

Resource:

http://in.news.yahoo.com/32/20100223/1065/ttc-apple-s-imac-is-a-sight-to-behold_1.html

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Posted in Application Development | 7 Comments »

Apple channels Google, Microsoft to attract developers

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

I can’t help but ask after reading Apple’s attack on Adobe’s Flash for being “closed and proprietary,” while dressing itself up as the openness prom queen because of its support for HTML5, JavaScript, and other industry standards.

Flash may be closed and proprietary, but Apple is hardly the patron saint of openness. Nor has it ever seemed to care much about pretending to be anything other than religiously devoted to a beautiful consumer experience, regardless of open standards, open source, open anything.

What has changed? Developers. Lots of them.

Apple is seeing the “light of openness” now that it increasingly must cater to external developers. For years Apple was able to live within its shell, serving a narrow world of devoted consumers and a very limited circle of developers.

No more. With the iPhone, Apple hit the developer mainstream, and has had some growing pains getting comfortable with that audience, most recently with its increasingly restrictive developer agreement.

Apple has a tough sell for developers over the long term, particularly as it faces open alternatives in its various markets, including Google Android. Developers are attracted to the iPhone’s sales volume, but the trajectory of the company may make it increasingly harder to work with the company, a proprietary trajectory ZDNet’s Tom Foremski describes well:

Since the introduction of the iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad, Apple is becoming less and less open, is using fewer standard components and chips, and far fewer Internet technologies common to Mac/PC desktop and laptop systems.

The iPhone and iPad, for example, don’t support common Internet platforms such as Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. That means you cannot watch streaming video from Hulu, or Netflix.

And while iPhone chips are available from other manufacturers, the iPad runs only on the A4 processor–an Apple designed chip that no one else can buy.

This was OK when Apple was the most open smartphone game in town (RIM’s BlackBerry was hardly a paragon of openness), but it’s a tough sell with Google on the scene. Google Android, for all its problems and criticisms, has successfully attracted a host of applications recently through a more open approach, jumping from 6,000 to 25,000 applications in 2010 alone.

Apple may be its own best friend…and worst enemy.

Or, as Redmonk analyst James Governor puts it, “[The] company doing [the] most to grow the Android app base is Apple. The new terms of service are AWESOME for the Android team….”

It’s not that Apple needs to open everything up to compete. But it does need to present a more credible argument than random smears against competitors for being proprietary. After all, let’s be clear: None of these companies is open. Or closed. Not Apple. Not Adobe. Not Google. Each employs a hybrid approach, as CNET’s Stephen Shankland points out. Each includes plenty of openness, and plenty of “closed and proprietary” technology and business practices.

That’s the world we live in.

That’s why, as Shankland writes, we (and particularly developers) should be wary of any vendor bearing gifts of openness:

In general, be very cautious when you hear any computing company wrapping itself in the flag of openness as it promotes its products. There are different kinds–open interfaces, open source, and open standards, for example.

Apple’s reality distortion field afflicts us all at some point: it just makes beautiful technology. But developers aren’t so easily swayed, including Apple’s pot-calling-the-kettle-black moment with Adobe. Some won’t care. Others, like Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard, will.

Apple needs to figure out its developer story, one complicated by Google’s surge into the smartphone market. I doubt we’ll see Steve Jobs sweating to the Steve Ballmer beat, but Apple does need to up the openness quotient in its developer outreach, and soon.

Resource:

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/04/22/google_the_server_chip_designer/

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Google adds remote printing to cloud computing features

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

People using Google Chrome will soon be able to use any printer whether or not the computer has the software installed on it. The information is transmitted through the cloud and Google’s new application Print Cloud.

The company announced the development of the application in April. Although no timetable for its release has been set, the company did release its open source code when it made the announcement. The company cites the lagging wireless printing technology and its overall desire to make life in the cloud easier as the reason for the application’s development.

“Using the one component all major devices and operating systems have in common – access to the cloud – today we’re introducing some preliminary designs for a project called Google Cloud Print, a service that enables any application [web, desktop or mobile] on any device to print to any printer,” Google product manager Mike Jazayeri wrote on a company blog.

Following the hacking attack that the company traced to a pair of Chinese schools in January, it has focused tirelessly on improving customer services and security. An email glitch that affected messages sent from Gmail to Microsoft Outlook was addressed after several customer complaints in late March.

Resource:

http://www.edlconsulting.com/newsdetail.php?id=752&headline=Google_adds_remote_printing_to_cloud_computing_features

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Smartphone Development Is More Than Just iPhone

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

Although it’s clear that the iPhone platform is still the place to be for mobile developers, results from a recent Ovum survey indicate that there’s a lot of development activity around all the major platforms, including — somewhat surprisingly — Microsoft and BlackBerry, often perceived to be the stragglers bringing up the rear.

Ovum Principal Analyst Tony Cripps was quoted in a blog entry as saying that “while all five major smartphone platforms score well, it is BlackBerry OS and Windows Mobile that currently lead the opposition, rather than Android or Symbian.”

By “opposition,” Cripps means non-iPhone (and now iPad) development. Ovum surveyed 217 mobile application developers and found that 81 percent are working on iPhone apps — or planning to do so. That continues to be where the money is, but developers know it’s not the only game in town.

RIM’s BlackBerry OS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 OS take second and third place, respectively, with 74 percent and 66 percent of shops building apps for them. Android comes next, at 64 percent, and Symbian, the OS for Nokia phones, brings up the rear of the “big five” at 56 percent. Symbian’s last-place finish is also a surprise, given that it has the largest installed base and highest shipments of any smartphone platform, according to Ovum.

“Over the last year or so, it’s been perceived that Microsoft and Symbian had been a little bit left behind in public perception of those platforms,” Cripps says, “and [there is] linkage between consumer acceptance of a platform and developer acceptance of that platform. The iPhone shows that.” But even though the iPhone remains king, the other major platforms are still thriving. That’s one indication of how big the market is.

One interesting finding of the survey, Cripps says, is that application development companies tend to develop around similar groups of platforms. The majority that develop for iPhone, for example, also tend to develop applications for both Google’s Android and BlackBerry. A smaller number of companies develop for four or more platforms, and very few have the financial and manpower resources to develop for as many as six platforms, according to Cripps.

That’s been a big help for BlackBerry, Cripps says. “It’s piggybacking on the success of the iPhone. If developers are writing for one [platform], chances are they’re writing for Android and BlackBerry as well.”

BlackBerry’s success hasn’t been all about riding iPhone’s coattails, however. Cripps says he was surprised at “How well BlackBerry came out of this. It’s not just enterprise apps it’s being used for.” RIM’s recently-stated goal of being more consumer-friendly and not just a business phone has “come true,” Cripps says. “RIM deserves credit here. Its showing is surprisingly good.”

Things aren’t so rosy for platforms out of the top five. For instance, Palm can’t seem to get much traction around its Pre smartphone. “It doesn’t look great either for palm or any other smartphone beyond the top five as things stand,” Cripps says. “To rise above will require significant investment in developing products and convincing developers to build an ecosystem around it.”

Resource:

http://adtmag.com/articles/2010/04/16/smartphone-development-is-more-than-just-iphone.aspx

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