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Thoughts On The Daily: The Newspaper, The App, The “Newspaper App”

The problem with The Daily, the long anticipated iPad-only publication launched today in a joint effort of News Corp. and Apple, is that it’s three things in a single package: an app, a newspaper and a business model. Taking an early look at The Daily is difficult because of its intrinsic nature of newspaper that’s an app aimed at making Rupert Murdoch’s wallet larger.

I have been testing The Daily for a few hours now, I’ve read most of its content and played around with the social functionalities, and I still don’t know where the newspaper is going as a daily publication, or what’s the general guideline established at News Corp. After all, you can’t get to know a newspaper and its feeling after a single issue or, in our case, “refresh”. But I do have some impressions to share, some complaints to make about The Daily as an iPad application and thoughts on the potentialities of Murdoch’s promise to re-imagine newspapers in the tablet’s era. Read more

Apple’s “Integrated” In-App Purchases, eBooks and iOS Users

Jason Snell, reporting for Macworld about Apple’s statement regarding ebook reading apps and in-app purchases:

For a couple of years now, Apple has been boasting about how many millions of iTunes IDs are linked to credit cards. Recent rumblings suggest that the company is seeking to expand the footprint of its financial services, too. It’s clear that Apple is tired of seeing companies make money on content served to iOS devices without using its system or cutting it in for a piece of the action. The current 30-percent cut of all content purchases would seem to be an impediment to getting partners to embrace Apple’s system; on the other hand, Apple’s the gatekeeper to its platform and if other companies don’t want to play ball with Apple, they’ll be on the outside looking in.

That’s exactly the point. You have to look at this whole Sony / Apple / everyone else story in two separate ways: the business perspective and consumers’ expectations. Apple does business, and it wants publishers selling content on its iOS platform to pay the fee all developers pay. The fee is 30 percent. Whether or not Apple will ease this fee and allow for lower revenue cut on ebook content is unclear, but it’s a possibility. Maybe tomorrow’s event won’t just be about The Daily, who knows. Read more

The Great Disparity in Global iTunes Prices

Over the weekend I curiously started investigating whether Australians had been getting a progressively worse deal for their iTunes purchases as the Australian dollar rose from USD$0.60 to parity whilst iTunes prices stayed constant. The answer is most definitely a yes but it doesn’t just apply to Australians, and the extent of the price disparity is larger than I had thought.

Whilst Apple is entitled to have different prices for different regions, it doesn’t really need to. Furthermore the extent to which there is price disparity is very extensive for the music section of the store and this article aims to bring the inequity to light. Apple has previously been under similar pressure but the exchange rates reverted back, I would hope Apple again reconsiders their iTunes pricing system now when exchange rates have pushed the disparity to a very high level.

This turned into a bigger article than I had expected so here are the key things I cover and keep reading after the break for a full run down with tables, graphs and more.

  • iTunes uses fixed prices (i.e. $0.99, $1.29 etc.) and for stores outside the US these price levels were converted using a very conservative prediction of the future value of a particular currency
  • The price levels in non-US stores seem not to have been updated in a long time, yet the value of the non-US currencies have mostly appreciated since then. As a result people purchasing from most of the non-US iTunes Stores are now paying more than US customers and Apple is earning more from those customers
  • The conversion rate is different for the App Store and Music store (and likely the other stores too), the App store conversion rates are much more appropriate and the price disparity is less extreme.

Updated on April 27 2011 - see end of article for revised figures and comment.

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The Mac App Store and “Half-Available” Updates

Panic, the developers of popular software for the Mac like Coda, Transmit and Candybar, wrapped up a critical update to their FTP client / file manager / all-in-one solution Transmit 4 on January 6th to fix “important bugs” and correct issues with the Transmit Disk feature and Amazon S3 connection. As they explain in a post on the company’s blog, their original plan was to submit the update to Apple and release it on their website as well once the Mac App Store version got approved.

Apple didn’t approve the update after two weeks, so Panic went ahead and posted the update on the application’s website so that users who didn’t buy the app through the Mac App Store didn’t have to wait any longer to have the bugs fixed. In their own words, Transmit 4.1.5 is now “half-available” as the app in still “in review” for Mac App Store approval. Read more

iOS 4.3 Gestures, Bezels and An Apple Patent From Last Year

In the first beta of iOS 4.3, Apple introduced “multitasking gestures” for iPad: offered as a preview for developers to play with and test compatibility with apps, these 4 and 5-finger multitouch gestures allow users to execute a series of actions otherwise assigned to the Home button. You can switch back and forth between apps, open and close the multitasking tray or pinch back to the homescreens. The gestures need to be activated through Xcode as, again, they are a developer preview of a feature that won’t even be enabled in the public release of iOS 4.3, as Apple let devs know last night.

The presence of gestures that offer some functionalities previously exclusive to the Home button also let the rumor mill run wild, with some bloggers speculating that Apple may get rid of the Home button in the next iterations of the iPad and iPhone. Personally, I think gestures on the iPhone’s tiny screen are a terrible idea – and it gets worse if you have non-average, big hands.

Gestures are a neat new feature for the iPad that provide a glimpse at something Apple is clearly working on: more multi-touch capabilities for iOS devices. These very same gestures, though, gave several developers a hard time trying to figure out how to integrate them with their apps. Read more

The Problems with a High Resolution Display on the iPad 2

Over the past few weeks there has been quite a back and forth discussion on the possible inclusion of a Retina or high resolution display on the iPad 2. Facts seemed to solidify when Engadget ran an article suggesting the second-generation iPad would have a high resolution display, though they did not specify the exact resolution. But then John Gruber yesterday seemed to disagree with that suggestion citing cost issues, uncovered UI graphics of an iPad camera app that are not optimized for a high resolution display and his own sources.

So why has there been so much doubt and to and fro-ing over whether the iPad 2’s display is high resolution? Well put simply, because there are so many barriers that would have to be overcome and issues that Apple would have to resolve.  Click through to read the full article.

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Apple’s 2011: iPad Bigger Than Macs, And Yet The Mac Is Growing

Apple’s Q1 2011 financial results are both unsurprising and, quite frankly, incredible. We all expected Apple to post record, blockbuster sales and revenue figures after the holiday season; yet, seeing the numbers on Apple’s official press release is a completely different story. Apple sold more than 7 million iPads in the last quarter, 16.2 million iPhones and more than 4 million Macs. Apple’s iPod business is “in decline” with 19.4 million iPods sold, but the iPod hasn’t been Appel’s main and only mobile business for four years now. Read more

During Steve’s Absence, Apple Will Be Just Fine

News broke earlier today that Steve Jobs is taking another medical leave of absence to focus on his health. And just like the last time, he has appointed Apple COO Tim Cook as the head of day-to-day operations. This time around, though, Steve Jobs will maintain the CEO position. Long story short: Steve Jobs has to focus on his health and personal life, something you would expect from a man who beat cancer in the past and successfully underwent a liver transplant. Apple employees will have get used to not seeing Jobs on campus or in his office for a few months. But I don’t want to speculate on Jobs’ conditions, habits and role at Cupertino. Instead, I would like to point out how out of this complex and much-talked story Apple as a company will be doing just fine. Read more

Next iPhones and iPads To Lose Home Button? Not So Fast

Jonathan S. Geller over at BGR reports that, according to his sources, we may see Apple removing the Home button from the next-generation iPhones and iPads, to be released this year:

We have exclusively been told that the reason Apple just added multitouch gestures for the iPad in the latest iOS 4.3 beta is because the iPad will be losing the home button.

In addition to the home button disappearing from the iPad, we’re told that this change will make its way over to the iPhone as well. Our source said Apple employees are already testing iPads and iPhones with no home buttons on the Apple campus, and it’s possible we will see this new change materialize with the next-generation iPad and iPhone devices set to launch this year.

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