Tagging In Real Life !
Spore Evolution from Diaco on Vimeo.
I want an Apple Media Server
I think it’s about time that Apple give us a decent Home Media Server. Have a look at the Windows Home Server offering (currently buggy), and you’ll immediately understand how an Apple quality copycat could enhance your digital lifestyle.
The principle : Instead of filling up your Mac hard drive with music, photos and video, then sync it with your iPhones, iPods, Apple TVs and laptops, you could store all your media on a wifi enabled NAS (Network Attached Storage) running an iTunes server.
For appealing to windows users, it could also run a DLNA (Digital Living Network Association) server for devices that conform to Universal Plug and Play Audio/Video standard (Windows Media Center, Xbox 360, PS3 and most Media Streamers).
There are already numerous products that answer that definition, like the Synology, the QNAP, the Thecus or Netgear ReadyNAS.
But beside looking ugly and making a lots of noise, they are too complex to setup, their interfaces have very low usability (or none), and are designed and marketed to Windows geeks. They probably does not sell much. However they demonstrate the concept, just like the Creative Nomad Jukebox, demonstrated the feasibility of an Hard Drive based personal music player… before Apple created the iPod.
There is a strong need in the market, demonstrated by lot’s of discussion about iTunes Server NAS solutions or guides to build your own geek solution… Clumsy and too expensive but that give an idea of how much money and time some are ready to spend for such a product… still imperfect. Album covers are missing when accessed from an iTunes server, they are incompatible with iPhone Apple Remote, Apple TV, video can’t be accessed using that protocol, so you must switch to UPnP protocol compatible Media Streamer with another crappy interface, etc. A real techno mess.
So why would an Apple product succeed ? Of course it would be a beautiful object, affordable, easy to setup, with good software, … Of course it would integrate with your Mac and PC running iTunes and FrontRow, your iPod Touches, iPhones and Apple TVs. But Apple has other uniques technologies that combined, can turn a good geek idea in a great mass market product.
First, the Apple Media Server would be easy to access from any Internet connection. It would simply register to your Back To My Mac account like your home computers.
Secondly, it would run on 802.11n wifi providing enough bandwidth for streaming video to your Apple TV. It would register itself using Bonjour and appear auto-magically on your iTunes Mac, PC, iPhones, iPod Touches and Apple TV. Maybe even on your iCar. It would mount on your desktop in AFS, just like the Time Capsule or an hard-drive shared using an Airport Extreme.
But now, the killing feature… Your media storage needs will keep growing more and more, years after years. Until then most of us managed our storages need by buying bigger and bigger hard drives. Actually a thousand times bigger every 10 years. Ideally the Apple Media Server should have no drive size limits.
As recently announed, Apple is working at integrating Sun’ ZFS file system in Snow Leopard Server, the next iteration of it’s server grade Operating System. ZFS allow storage pooling and dynamic volume expansion.
Now imagine the Apple Media Server, a NAS (nearly) infinitely upgradable using Firewire or USB hot-swappable drive that you could plug on your Apple Home Media Server running a stripped down version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server with ZFS support on a slightly upgraded version of the motherboard of the Apple TV with the server grade hard drive in the Time Capsule.
Your personal cloud… of unlimited size.
While searching Google for links to enrich this post, I discovered the Mac predictions website. It seems that I am not the only one having the same idea. I think the Apple Media Server should not sit in your living room but in your attic, basement or in a closet, but we basically agree on the product features.
Let’s hope that Apple agree too 😉
White Apple Logo of death ?
My iPhone 3G is dead again so I can’t call anybody. Like thousands of other victims, I have the “Apple Logo of death” decease. I’m stuck at home doing a restore on my main iMac which holds my main iTunes Library, and my iPhone backup, for at least 3 hours. A great opportunity to revenge myself by writing this little blog post about my experience with iPhone.
Tired : blue screen of death
Wired : white apple logo of death
By reading my recent blog posts, one shouldn’t ignore that I am a long time Apple fan. Since about nine months, I had a first generation iPhone. A great toy first, a great tool since, but a great source of pains as well.
I remember being invited by Microsoft at Mix’07 in Las Vegas, receiving as an european guest a Samsung Blackjack running Windows Mobile 5.0 … but everybody at the show kept buzzing about the forthcoming iPhone. I remember getting my first iPhone, a 1.0 firmware one, from a friend travelling back from the US. I remember unlocking “the hard SSH way” my first iPhone on the 20th september 2007, not sleeping for a whole night before leaving for Paris for an important meeting, with a GroupeReflect customer, a daily newspaper. I remember very well selling them an iPhone web app this day.
I remember the joy of demonstrating my new toy to all my friends, like the child I’m doomed to stay forever. I remember the jealousy in the eyes of strangers in public gathering. I remember the silent complicity between iPhone users in business meeting. I remember the countless weekends wasted to upgrade my precious from firmware to baseband to booloader versions, all this to just make it work. I remember walking every day from the Venitian hotel to the Las Vegas Apple Store, to find a 16Gb iphone. I remember coming back to Belgium with empty hands. I remember buying a 16Gb iPhone a month later in an Apple store in Boston suburbs after an hour of taxi drive, after checking Boston central area Apple Store. I remember the taxi bill too.
I remember the easy Ziphone unlock, then the dev team version… I remember the dozen friends to which I did the huge mistake to sell an iPhone that I brought back from the US. I remember the countless nights fixing all of them, upgrading them, explaining to those normal human (= non geek) that they couldn’t click the update button in iTunes. I remember the chat sessions with my belgian twenty hacker network, detailing upgrade procedures for each unlocking method, swapping cool apps repository URL for installer app, … I also remember my 1500 euros bills in data roaming for a 3 day business meeting in the US. Since then I also remember to switch off data roaming 😉
So you can imagine how happy I was on the 11th of July, when I could finally spend 625 euros for the privilege of owning an iPhone, legally, in Belgium, and even being allowed to use it with my mobile operator of choice, Proximus*.
Activation was a breeze, I did a quick Sync over USB as the next day I left for the North Sea Jazz Festival with my shiny precious. I used it in Rotterdam with the Facebook and Twitellator applications to upload pictures and status updates using a 3G connection. It worked great, I was happy. Life was beautiful, especially with a Jazz soundtrack.
After 3 days I came back home and started setting up MobileMe. To be honest, I had to endure a real debacle. I was one of those who couldn’t wait a few hours before having my address book synced over-the-air. I restarted, restored, switched off MobileMe syncing, restored, … I spent days trying to make it work before understanding that I just had to wait more time for my 5000 records address book to sync. It finally worked but I was for days without an working address book, answering unknown people over the phone.
After this first victory on technology, I became bolder and decided to setup Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. First try, after a setup process without any errors, everything seemed to be OK. But once back to the address book I discovered that I had lost all my contacts, and all my agendas. Because of MobileMe it was impossible to sync over USB with my iMac to get it back (the fonctionality is disabled in iTunes). Switching MobileMe off didn’t solve the problem, my iPhone started syncing an empty address book with my Mac and I lost all my contact on my desktop ! Luckily I had a backup as I sync my office laptop with the same MobileMe account, and it was safely switched off, so all my data were still intact on this computer. After a MobileMe reset (upload) from my office laptop, a MobileMe reset (download) with my home desktop, a USB Sync with my iPhone 3G I could finally get my address book back in sync… and reactivate MobileMe successfully. I gave up on Exchange ActiveSync, enjoying a complete address book and the luxury of actually making phone calls.
I started spending (more) money in the App Store, trying most games and utilities. Then one day, luckily during a weekend, I was updating the Facebook app to version 1.1 on the iPhone itself, when in the middle of the update my iPhone 3G rebooted and got stuck on the Apple Logo. I tried switching it on and off, no luck. It kept displaying the Apple logo and vibrating twice a few minutes after each restart. I searched the web and found that it was a firmware bug with early software in the first shipping iPhone 3G. However since the iPhone was on sale a new firmware 1.0 was available through iTunes and the solution was to perform a full restore with the new firmware. I fumbled a few hours trying to get the iPhone in DFU mode but I finally managed to get it back to life.
First you need to restore your iPhone using the latest firmware, a hefty 250 Mb download. BTW did you know that we still have quota here in belgium, mine is 10 Gb / month. Second step : perform a iPhone backup restore, another hour passes. Unfortunately the backup does not restore your medias and applications, so you’ll have to do a full sync before getting your iPhone back in the state before it crashed… with an almost full 16 Gb iPhone, according to my unfortunates experiences, it will take about three hours for a complete cycle. At the end of the process you’ll probably notice that your photos have not synced and will probably redo a quick sync, enduring a another long backup of your iPhone… Then you’ll spend more time shuffling icons and checking settings. After this painful exercise, I decided I wouldn’t update application on the iPhone again but only in iTunes before syncing.
Thanks to my first Apple Logo of death, I had to waste time reading forums again, just like in the prohibition days. But the good news is I discovered users using Exchange ActiveSync in the Real World. I had a whole sunday to waste on geek stuff, I gave it another chance. I tried every combination of setup parameters, and there are many possible … without success. We have around 40 iPhone users at Emakina Brussels (a mix of the first generation with various firmwares, and a dozen 3G). None of them succeeded in their desperate attempts to setup ActiveSync. Only plain old non-push imap access worked, email only. For days, my IT department searched why it did not work with our Exchange 2003 server. We all gave up, some rumbling, some planning to leave for another company with better IT services. (I can’t leave as I’m the founder 😉
… Unfortunately, it seems it’s even worse at the other agencies 😉
I am rumored to blame Microsoft for all my technical problems, even if this blog post demonstrate I can blame Apple too. However in this case the problem was really on Microsoft side. By chance we were just in the process of upgrading to Exchange 2007 and after a few more test, finally finding that ActiveSync must be activated manually per account (or some similar mumbo jumbo from my Exchange self-claimed expert), it finally seemed to work. For those stuck with Exchange 2003, we finally discovered that there is an add-on to install to enable ActiveSync. After a few days I even dared to activate both MobileMe and Exchange Sync at the same time. It now work flawlessly. The only missing piece of the puzzle is on Leopard side which until Snow Leopard can’t sync address book and iCal to Exchange.
Then my life was great again. I had achieved complete victory against technological adversity fighting Mobistar iPhone scarcity, MobileMe launch debacle, my own IT department, iPhone firmware bugs, a major Microsoft Exchange upgrade and mastered the complexity of a setup, full of mysteries, learned the maze of iPhone forums, bookmarked relevant apple support technotes, and in general more Jedi iPhone black arts (like the art of DFU according to iTunes sub-versions).
Still when updating apps in iTunes, for some strange reasons, the updates appeared several times. It wasn’t a big deal and I just applied all updates and synced. Also battery duration was low, with my setup : 3g, wifi and bluetooth activated, push/sync with Exchange, MobileMe and 4 more IMAP account, batteries get low in the middle of the day. So I plug my iPhone at home in my iMac, at the office in my MacBook pro, and in my car in a USB to cigarette adapter.
Suddenly, the iPhone firmware update 2.01 was released. I downloaded another 250 Mb update and applied to my iPhone 3G with no hesitations, confident that, as announced, this firmware would fix the obvious bug with application updates and sync.
It obviously did not!
Today, while syncing normally with iTunes, I got the Apple Logo of death again. Impossible to pass the Apple Logo on reboot, the two vibrations, the heat, … all the symptoms I already had the last time. My first day of holidays…
Now I’m angry. Apple know about the problem since at least the 12th July (see the first post on Apple Forum). There are thousand on view on this thread that can’t be ignored. Apple did not succeeded in fixing the Apple Logo of death in the 2.01 firmware update. Apple does not acknowledge the Apple Logo of death problem. Apple does not answer our questions on the forum about the Apple Logo of death. Apple does not give advices on how to avoid the Apple Logo of death. Apple does not give an date on the next firmware update that will fix this f***cking time waster that is the Apple Logo of death..
Now I’m angry and this is why I have written a whole blog post full of Apple brand, iPhone product name and Apple Logo of death mentions, to spam blog indexes with my anger while restoring my iPhone. I started the process at 5pm and it finally completed at 8pm. I can now submit this blog post.
(*) Disclose : I run Emakina the web agency of Proximus
How Apple will takeover the living room
About two year ago, in my living room, I swaped my noisy MythTV Linux based XPC by a MacMini running EyeTV with an EPG subscription and connected to analog cable TV with an Elgato TV Tuner Stick. The MacMini was connected using DVI to an 51″ Plasma screen. EyeTV integrated with FrontRow and the Apple Remote. I could browse my music library, play live TV, see the Movie trailers fromt the Apple site. It was great.
Then I couldn’t resist buying an Apple TV. It synced over-the-air with my iMac, so I could play podcast, photos, videos in HD Ready over the component connection of my plasma screen. My Apple TV was connected with the optical connection to a Yamaha Natural Sound 7.1 Home Theatre Receiver. I could play my music in full digital from the MP3 or AAC file to the speakers.
Then, with a US voucher, I managed to setup my Apple TV with a US account and started renting HD movies with 5.1 sound, complete TV Series, and more music. All from my couch. It was still great… However to program TV show recording, I had to switch from the Apple TV to the Mac Mini : from my DVI input to my component input on the Plasma, from one input to another on my amplifier, from one Apple Remote to another, and from the Apple TV interface to FrontRow, to EyeTV… that was silly. I quickly realized that I could record a show on the MacMini, let eyeTV compress it to H264 and upload it to my iTunes Library. As my Apple TV was syncing videos with iTunes Library, I could watch my recording from my Apple TV, offering a somehow integrated experience. But I missed the high quality of the original recording. On the good side, I could also watch my recording with my iPod Video and iPhone. Still, the whole experience was a bit clumsy and I had to maintain and update two devices for what should obviously be integrated in one, like does Windows Media Center on the dark side.
Now let observe the Apple TV back panel. You’ll notice an mysterious unused USB connector… So here is my prediction :
Apple will release a USB Stick Tuner, compatible with DVB-T SD and HD (which require no re-compression) for it’s Apple TV and will add an EPG to the interface.
Why the delay ? Apple is probably waiting for DVB-T/DVB-C to become mainstream as they’ll probably want the experience to be qualitative and recorded digital broadcast (Mpeg 2 or Mpeg 4) are identical to the live signal. The codec in Mpeg 4 can even be H264, just like Apple Movies.
It’s not in Apple style to catch up with competition, so now let’s imagine what Apple could add to this product. First they would maybe release not one but several USB Tuner Sticks. One for Freeview (digital terrestrial TV), one for DVB-C (digital cable TV), one for analog, with an hardware H264 chip like the Turbo 264. You could switch them when you move from one channel provider (cable, satellite, Terrestrial) to another, or from SD to HD, or from one standard for encoding to another (still te be invented). Much better than a single build-in interface…
Your Apple TV is in reality a complete, Macintosh computer hidden in a tiny pizza box, running MacOS X (Tiger). When not recording or playing, it could run a background process that would compress the huges Mpeg 2 or Mpeg 4 recording to pristine Quicktime H.264 then sync them with your main iTunes library … which in turn would sync with your iPod Video, iPod Touch, and iPhone over USB. So you wouldn’t even have to do any action to have your favorite recording in your pockets.
As it knows your Apple ID, your Apple TV could also register itself with MobileMe Back To My Mac service and run a QuickTime streaming server. You would be able to stream recordings (those just compressed in H.264) over the Internet from any iTunes client, and even from your iPhone over a Wi-fi connection, just like with the SlingMedia Mobile service or for your music with Simplify Media.
An option would allow the Apple TV (which hard drive is limited to either 40 or 160 gigabytes) to store the QuickTime files ready for streaming to a 1 terabyte Time-Capsule and a firmware update would add iTunes server services to the Time-Capsule.
When watching your recording on your Apple TV, you’ll use the Apple Remote for control, but Apple would add TV show and EPG control in Remote for iPhone (which already control playing Music Videos on your Apple TV when they are in an iTunes synced playlist).
For those without tuner, you could stream your USB webcam video like with Remote Buddy.
Apple would also release an EPG client software for the iPhone that would store your recording settings on MobileMe. Of course your Apple TV would sync with MobileMe too. So it would be possible to program recording from anywhere in the world.
Without recording anything, it would be possible to stream live TV from your Apple TV to any Mac on your home LAN thanks to 802.11n bandwith (like you can do it today with music on Airport Express). From anywhere in the world, you’ll be able to watch a lower resolution, switch channels, start a recording… from your iPhone over wi-fi or any iTunes client on MacOS X or Windows. Just like with Sony’ LocationFree TV and the PSP. In September Sony will launch PlayTV a HD DVB-T tuner with DVR software for the PlayStation 3. They recently launched their HD Movies online store in the US. So you’d better hurry up Apple !
The Web2.0 is nothing new.
A thousand times bigger ?
In the seventies I had my first experience with a digital computer. Actually the word computer is a bit exagerated, it was a TI58c, a programmable calculator from Texas Instrument that could remember a little program in its resident memory even when turned off, which was a revolution at the time. I used it mainly to cheat at the exams. It’s memory capacity was expressed in bytes. That’s all I remember from computing in the seventies.
Then it was the eighties. And in 1981 precisely, I bought my very first own computer, a ZX81 from Sinclair computer. It had a whopping kilobyte of memory. Unfortunately some of those 1024 Kilobytes were used for the display memory. I quickly bought the 16K extension. But it was overheating and disconnected frequently. A few years later, around 1984, I bought a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, with 16 K of memory, that I quickly upgrade to the 48K model. I still own a untouched sample in my office, thanks to my partner John who found one in an attic. One of my best friend was lucky enough to get a 128K Macintosh. But all I could afford was a Sinclair QL… enought to overleap the Commodore 64 K that all the others kids from my school where bragging about. In the eighties we expressed memory in kilobytes.
Then it was the nineties. And in 1991 I founded Ex Machina, a prepress and multimedia studio. My first hard drive was a 20 megabytes hard drive. It was huge, thousand times bigger than my previous storage unit : the 3 1/2 floppy drive. But I had trouble opening a photoshop file the size of an A4 page, and to be able to cut and paste between two scans, I had to backup and empty my whole hard drive. Luckily hard drives where growing fast, and suddenly I was sending 40 Megabytes Syquest disks to my offset film supplier. Then Syquest drive became obsoletes and replaced by optical disks, up to 512 Megabytes, … I started creating CD-ROM of 640 Megabytes. In the nineties we expressed memory in Megabytes.
Then we passed 2000. In 2001 Ex Machina, my first company merged with Emalaya and became Emakina. I can remember my first 1 gigabyte removable magneto optic disk drive. And I had 20 gigabytes in my Macintosh laptop. Then 40, then a hundred gigabytes. Now my iMac has a 500 Gigabytes Hard Drive inside and I burn 4.7 Gigabyte DVD disks. I read 40 Gigabytes Blue Ray disks in my PS3. In the first 10 years of the third millennium the memory unit where the Gigabytes, … but my first Terabyte drive entered my house as an Apple Time Capsule. I have several servers with terabytes drive at my Emakina offices, I have a 30 Terabytes storage cluster at ContactOffice, one of my company that provide webmail and online file storage. I can clearly see that the memory unit of the twenties will be the Terabytes (1000^4).
Every 10 years the memory unit grow by a thousand factor. With little imagination you can forecast petabytes (1000^5) drives in the thirties, exabytes (1000^6) in the forties and zettabytes (1000^7) in the fifties, yottabytes (1000^8) in the sixties… enough to record digitally every sound your ear, every image each of your eyes captures in a resolution higher than your retina, every smell, every taste, every touch feeling, … every bit of the chaotic signals your brain thinks is reality. To remember everything forever. Hope I’ll live long enough to see if I was right.
Good night.
Changed my mind. The next Apple product should be the iCar …
… an in-dash car entertainment, communication and navigation system.
I was reading about the beta firmware 2.1 for the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch and it seems we will be getting turn-by-turn direction in the Google Maps iPhone application.
Now just imagine a standard in-dash unit which at the press of the finger would reveal an touch sensitive LCD screen, controlling what would essentially be the electronic of an iPhone. Add some radio DAB/FM/AM circuitry – similar to the Apple FM iPod remote for the iPod 4G – and optionally a connector for a boot CD changer, and you’ll get the ultimate in-car entertainment (featuring iPod music, video, podcasts, TV series and Movies), communication (with Bluetooth for headphones, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, Wi-fi) and navigation (using Google Maps) solution.
Let’s call it “iCar”, as I couldn’t find a better codename.
With iCar you will be able to drive in town and have restaurants, hotels, museum, night clubs, gas stations, and other points of interest informations pulled from the internet using 3G or Wi-fi internet connection and displayed live on your moving map. Click theirs icons for turn-by-turn driving directions, rating, comments, menus, calling them or send them a message.
Park the car and wait a few seconds for download and watch pictures from MobileMe Galleries and Flickr taken around your car location do a nice slide show. This thanks to your GPS and the localization feature of the iPhone.
When listening a cool song on the DAB or FM radio, a button will trigger Shazam (or an Apple equivalent) and offer you to buy the track, music video or complete album from the iTunes Music Store. After waiting a few seconds to download a track over 3G, you’ll be able to listen to it forever.
When not driving, watch podcasts, videos, tv series, movies, … all on the beautiful LCD screen.
Park your car within Wi-fi distance of your home computer and sync your iTunes media with your iCar automagically, just like with an Apple TV. For those unable to park their computer so close, an iPod connector will permit connecting any iPod or iPhone and syncing media down to the drive or transfer purchases done on the iCar back to your iPod.
Thanks to MobileMe, iCar will also sync over-the-air with your email, calendar and address book. Great to have a look at your agenda without getting your iPhone out of your pocket. But even better, you’ll have only one finger touch to get your driving direction for a contact in your address book, or the next meeting in your calendar!
With Apple Speech Recognition, and Text to Speech technologies currently included in Mac OS X, you’ll be able to ask verbally your Apple iCar to read your day’s agenda aloud, or your latest emails. You’ll even be able to dictate short messages and emails.
This would be a revolutionary product and an entirely new platform for third party application developers. A specific App Store would allow downloading applications to iCar over-the-air. Facebook will release an app that will locate your friends (those who agree) on the map, thanks to their iPhone and iCars GPS. Trip advisor will release an application that allow sharing reviews and rating for any place around your car. Apple will release Remote, an application that allow locking your car remotely and driving it from a distance for Batman like performance 😉
Photo blogging from iPhone
Vedett !
The next Apple product : a digital camera
The current crop of digital camera is great hardware. I have always be a loyal fan of the Canon IXUS range and bought like 5 of them from the first 2 Megs to the latest 10 Megs (accidentally broken). Recently I bought a Panasonic Lumix TZ5 and it’s (mostly) great. It can snap pictures up to 9 Megs and even record video in HD definition. But the interface is just rubbish. I general Camera software is just lame. It almost hasn’t evolved in a decade.
Apple could design a revolutionnary digital camera, the iCamera. First by it’s form factor : a touchscreen, twice the size of an iPhone, slightly thicker. Video resolution would be HD Ready (720p), so the Screen resolution would be 720 x 1320 pixels at the same dpi res as an iPhone.
Then it would also be new hardware combination, built on a simplified version of the electronic of an iPhone (removing the bluetooth, GSM circuitry) and a Casio Exilim (or similar). The rest of the space would be used for batteries and memory storage.
As of course recording would be on solid state memory (Apple bought a lot of memory to manufacturers) or a 1.8 in 4200 rpm hard drive. It will start probably start with something like 64 Gigs of SSD / 160 Gigs of HD, but would quickly evolve to 128 Gigs of SSD or 320 Gigs of HD…
But storage wouldn’t be an issue as Apple iCamera will of course sync over the air (Wifi 802.11n) with a Apple TV, MobileMe Galleries, iPhones and over Firewire / USB 2.0 with Macintoshes and iPods.
But the real revolution would be great Apple software ! Of course the shooting software will allow Photo Booth like live effects, including background replacement, optical and digital zoom, special flash modes, … But the killing feature would be iMovie 08 and Aperture like video and photo software editors, running on the camera device, using the touch screen interface.
This revolutionary product would define an entirely new category of devices that would allow shooting, editing and publishing Hi def still photography and HD quality videos on the field. This will especially makes HD video easy to produce which may leverage the whole HD video economy.
Digital Still and Video Cameras is a category with great hardware waiting for a decent “Apple quality level” software like computers, music players and mobile phones. Please Apple, give the Nikon, Canon, Sony and Panasonic a lesson in software engineering. Millions of families are waiting for a better experience.