Apple, The Next Step Is AirFiles

I installed iOS 4.2 beta on my iPad, but haven’t been able to check out the new AirPlay or AirPrint features yet: I don’t have an Apple Airport Express station to configure with my stereo, nor I have a compatible HP printer in the office. Still, I know these two new features pretty well: AirPlay is Apple’s take on how you should be able to consume digital content in the living room, AirPrint allows you to print documents from your iPad and iPhone with a few taps. Both of them are great features. I want to focus on AirPlay, though: as Seth Weintraub puts it, AirPlay is Apple’s “go to market” strategy - in a way that this single feature will let users easily hook their iPhones and iPads to the Apple TV to effortlessly share SD content, and eventually pay for HD versions using Apple’s TV own rental system. Any kind of video content can be streamed using AirPlay, as long as it uses a standard media controller and it’s encoded using the popular H.264 video format.

I haven’t tried it personally, but I already know AirPlay is going to be huge amongst iPad and iPhone owners once the new Apple TV will be available. This kind of one-tap streaming and sharing of content between devices has got me thinking, though: what if Apple shipped “AirFiles”, a built-in system to share any kind of documents across mobile devices and computers? Read more

Walt Mossberg Reviews iPad e-Reader Apps

In his latest column for the WSJ, technology pundit Walt Mossberg has taken a look at three different eBook reader applications for the iPad: Apple’s own iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook app.

The verdict is interesting: according to Mossberg, they’re more similar than different. Read more

Exclusive: RSS Feeds and You

This is an exclusive post written specifically for current MacStories subscribers. If you don’t see it showing up on our home page, don’t worry!

When we launched MacStories 3.0 on Wednesday, we had to make a few difficult decisions about what we were going to do with our RSS feeds, and the announcement came with a lot of anger. “I’ll unsubscribe!” I’d unsubscribe too to be honest, but we had something planned we couldn’t implement at the last minute…an hour before launch.

Our goal was to implement what you see here: exclusive feeds made especially for our current subscribers. In WordPress it should be pretty easy – a lot of things are. However, some of our custom code did not like the publication of this exclusive content. Mainly, we had a lot of problems working with our new featured section you see at the top of the site. We didn’t want to sacrifice some of our site essentials at launch, so we decided to grin & bear it.

These exclusive feeds enable us allow us to introduce exclusive content that nobody else but you can see. And the first thing we wanted to do with our exclusive feeds was announce a special RSS feed free from the excerpt-only BS; everyone who has been with MacStories since the beginning deserves better.

The RSS feed link you’ll find below was made exclusively for our existing subscriber base – for the few thousand of our readers who continue to dedicate a portion of their inbox to our content. For that, we’re incredibly thankful and we really gritted our teeth when we threw you under the bus with our excerpt-only announcement. Future subscribers won’t immediately have the same luxuries you’re receiving this evening.

The full MacStories experience can be had in your favorite RSS reader through the following subscriber link. We call it the MacStories VIP feed.

feed://feeds.feedburner.com/macstories/vip

Again, we had planned to introduce this on Wednesday, but due to technical difficulties, we were unable to share this particular link with just our current subscribers. This wasn’t destined to be too public, as we would like future subscribers to land on the excerpt-only feeds for the time being.

In the future, all subscribers will have a choice between an excerpt-only feed, and a full ad supported feed. We may toy with the idea of a paid subscriber list, but we think that takes it too far if we don’t provide additional exclusive content. Anyone can subscribe to the MacStories VIP if they know it exists, but we really wanted to just share this little gem with our current subscribers - you’ve been with us far too long to be subjected to ads or excerpt-only mania.

Thanks for holding on for a couple of days while our very own Alessandro Vendruscolo (@MisterJack on Twitter) worked out the bugs. We appreciate your readership, and we hope to continue rolling out additional features to MacStories that will improve and diversify the content you read everyday. Next week, we’ll be making an announcement regarding just that - diversifying and expanding our content. In the meantime, we’re huddling and planning the latest features. Please enjoy the VIP feed, and we certainly hope you enjoy the new MacStories.