Posts tagged with "video"

Enable AirPlay for Video In Third-Party Apps

Disappointed Apple didn’t enable AirPlay streaming for video on all apps on iOS 4.2.1 for iPhone and iPad? Well, we are too. We thought we’d be able to stream just about anything from our iDevices to the new Apple TV, but it turns out you can only stream video using AirPlay from Apple’s native apps. Streaming video in Safari isn’t enabled, nor is it in 3rd party apps and Apple’s own camera roll. Bummer.

Fortunately, TUAW’s Erica Sadun has done some good hacking to find out what exactly is going on under the hood. She decompiled the frameworks and got ahold of Apple’s APIs and, without entering the most technical details, it seems like the whole concept is still a little bit rough for the average developer.

So caveat hackteur – this isn’t going to be appropriate for the casual developer. Yet.

Having gotten this proof of concept working, there’s still a lot left to get done to transform this into a stable solution that works with general applications. Keep in mind that you’ll be working with unpublished APIs, so the above classes and code are not App Store Safe. That’s why we have a jailbreak world, after all.

Head over the video below and see what Erica got working on her iPad. AirPlay for video in 3rd party apps isn’t impossible, I guess we just need to wait for Apple to officially enable it. Maybe in iOS 4.3? Read more

What Happened To App Subscriptions? [Video]

Last night we reported Apple is already working on a new build of iOS that should be coming as early as mid-December to support plans for recurring subscriptions in App Store apps. The first app to take advantage of these new options? The Daily by News Corp.

Well, at least that’s what the rumors say, and of course we won’t be hearing anything official from Apple until the day the collaboration with News Corp. goes public. But plans for recurring subscriptions have been going around for a while at Cupertino, although they didn’t play out the way we wanted. Or perhaps Jobs and Forstall wanted. As a matter of fact, yesterday I remembered Forstall had mentioned “subscriptions” as a new business model for developers in iPhone OS 3.0. At the iPhone OS 3.0 preview event in March 2009, he clearly stated that many developers (especially magazine app publishers) were asking for a way to renew subscriptions in-app. So what did those publishers get? Recurring subscriptions? No, they got in-app purchases, which are far from being a way to automatically renew a subscription.

So we took the part from the preview event video where Scott Forstall mentions subscriptions and re-uploaded it. Looking back, it’s not clear whether Apple really saw in-app purchases as a way to automatically renew magazine subscriptions in-app or not. Maybe they wanted recurring subscriptions to be part of the in-app purchase system but they had to remove them from the final version of iPhone OS 3.0. I mean, blogs back then really seemed to think subscriptions were a go. Thing is, Apple hasn’t changed its position since then (not even when the iPad came out) and we think it’s about time to have a proper system for recurring subscriptions tied to iTunes accounts.

Check out the video below. Read more

The Coolest Thing You’ll See Today: iPhone Seen Through Oil & Water

We have seen many videos about the iPhone screen in the past: some of them focused on the magic of the Retina Display, some of them aimed at capturing pixels on our old 3GS. The same pixels we didn’t think were so important before we got our hands on the iPhone 4.

Today’s video is about the iPhone’s screen, as seen through a Canon EOS 5D looking down a piece of glass with oil & water on it. Jesse Zanzinger, the photographer who realized the video, set the maximum level of iPhone brightness, placed a piece a glass with oil and water above the iPhone and looked down with his camera to capture both science’s best enemies and the screen in a single shoot.

The result is kind of surprising. Check it out below, but don’t this at home kids. I don’t want oil to end up all over your iPhones. [Vimeo] Read more

AirPlay Notes: Netflix, Hulu Plus, Youtube Website & App

With the release of iOS 4.2 today, Apple introduced one of the features they’ve been busy promoting in the past months: AirPlay. While based on complex technology and a variety of Apple’s proprietary frameworks, what consumers get is really simple: streaming of audio and video content from any iOS 4.2 device to Apple TV, an AirPort Express station with connected speakers or AirPlay-enabled speakers. It’s one-way streaming from iOS to other Apple “living room devices” made simple and fast.

AirPlay went through a complicated iteration during the iOS 4.2 developer betas and GM seeds, but what we have today is a fairly stable feature easy to use for anyone. Apple, however, was apparently forced to remove some functionalities and some content providers decided to exclude AirPlay’s streaming support from their apps. Read more

Apple Posts “iAd Highlight Video” Ahead Of European Launch

Earlier today Apple posted a video on advertising.apple.com to showcase the various iAd campaigns the company has launched up until today in the U.S. The video features brands such as AT&T, Nissan and JCPenney.

Apple announced yesterday iAds are coming to European countries in December. The first companies that will launch iAd campaigns in Europe are L’Orèal, Renault, Luis Vuitton, Nespresso and Perrier & Unilever. Despite some initial concerns of excessive control and a cancelled Adidas campaign, Apple has already signed on over half of the top 25 US advertisers. Read more

New iPhone 4 Commercial Is All About The Battery

Last night Apple launched a new iPhone 4 commercial focused on the amazing battery life of the device. The commercial, first spotted by TiPB, still isn’t available in a high quality version on Apple’s Youtube version, but you can find an embed below anyways.

As TiPB reports:

It’s broken up into work longer (Mail), play longer (a hockey game), laugh longer (Pixar’s Monsters Inc. movie), listen longer (iPod), shoot (Camera), edit (iMovie), share (MMS), update (Facebook), download (App Store), read (iBooks), write (SMS), and even FaceTime longer.

Apple also reminds people this is the “world’s thinnest smartphone”. We think it’s a good commercial, simple and effective as always. Check it out below.

StreamToMe Streams Music and Video From Your Computer To iOS

With all the talk about iTunes’ “exciting announcement” and the possibilities of a cloud-based iTunes streaming and storage solution, I decided to take a step back to cover one of my favorite apps for iPhone and iPad, an app that allows you to stream audio and video from any computer to any iOS device.

The app is called StreamToMe, and unlike the popular Air Video it can stream music just fine, whether it’s organized in your iTunes library or stored somewhere else on your computer. I keep mine in Dropbox and it works just fine. Not to mention video, which works flawlessly with StreamToMe. So let’s see what you have to do to get things up and running. Read more

iPhone 4 Not So Great At Grilling Contest

iOS, Windows Phone 7, Android…each one of them comes with its pros and cons, advantages and shortcomings. It is up to a user’s perspective and needs to find the best platform and device. So from the video you can watch below, it appears that grilling is a priority for this user, who decided to see which device between a T-Mobile G2, HTC Surround and iPhone 4 would survice the terrific grilling contest he set up.

The iPhone 4 doesn’t win. There’s no app for that. The result, however, might surprise you. Check out the video below.