Microsoft’s Xbox One: the battle for Input One

Microsoft’s announcement event for the Xbox One did little to negate the strong narrative brewing amongst so-called “core” gamers: that Sony has their best interests at heart while Microsoft are pursuing a broader market that compromises traditional games in the name of offering broader features like media integration and Kinect. What it did offer, though, was a single clear message: Microsoft want to own the default input channel for your TV. It wants everything you do on your television — watching live TV, renting movies, playing games — to come through a box it controls, so that wherever possible it can encourage you to buy content from Xbox Live in preference to your cable firm’s pay-per-view, iTunes, Amazon, or any of the other multitude of competing services.

This is not a new concept. Owning input one has long been the justification behind the rumours/wishful thinking of an Apple TV. Certainly, making an entire TV is one way to guarantee that your company is in the driving seat. Microsoft have ducked that approach, though, and stuck with the traditional set top box approach instead.

The difficulty with set top boxes is getting at live TV. The juicy stuff — the most recent Game of Thrones episode, the live football game — is jealously locked up behind a complex and expensive web of international viewing rights that has so far defeated the likes of Apple and Amazon. If you want the best stuff, consumers still need a cable box, and that cable box is probably going to be on input one — it’ll be consumer’s natural first choice.

So how has Microsoft squared that circle? It’s the HDMI input jack on the back of the console. By integrating this, Microsoft hopes to turn the cable box into a slave device - something you only access through the Xbox, not instead of it. Effectively, your premium TV subscription will become just another service your Xbox can show to you, sitting alongside the likes of Netflix today.

The icing on the cake for users is that Microsoft is going to integrate a rich TV guide experience (remember, as Wes Miller reminded me, that Microsoft already has this data — with good international coverage — for Windows Media Center) which is navigated via some slick voice and gesture controls. That part certainly looks good in demos, although I’m rather cynical about how tedious it’ll be to wave my arms around to change channel in practice — it’s hard to make any physical gesture as straightforward as tapping a few buttons on a remote control.

[Update: vg247 reports that live TV integration will be US-only at launch.]

I also have some questions about how well this can actually work in practice. How will the cable TV firms feel about being relegated to secondary devices? One could imagine, for example, that pay-per-view movie rentals would drop off as customers naturally reached first for Microsoft’s movie streaming service.

I’m also curious about how it works on a technical level. I understand that the cable box pushes a signal out of its HDMI output and the Xbox displays that on the screen, perhaps as a straight passthrough or perhaps with some added frippery like the ability to run Internet Explorer alongside your video content (which I think sounds utterly hateful, but I’m a fuddy duddy).

But with the Xbox guide presumably completely supplanting my DVR’s interface, how to do I program shows to record? How do I select those recorded shows for playback? I’m sure the Xbox is going to be leveraging HDMI control channels to do what it can (although note the IR output jack, presumably for interoperating with more primitive devices) but I don’t believe DVRs can be programmed via HDMI. Tricks like buffering and pausing live playback could be handled entirely within the Xbox, but how could I watch one show while recording another? That’s a pretty common use case for DVRs; I suspect people wouldn’t want to be without it, no matter how slick the Xbox One’s interface.

It could be that Microsoft have a way around that, although as is frustratingly often the case details are scant right now. It’s just about possible that it could try to integrate (perhaps with only grudging support from cable TV firms) support for all the most popular DVRs all around the world, although that feels like a rather Herculean task. Or perhaps it’s gambling that people don’t care about DVRs as much as I think they do. Time will tell.

For now, though, I certainly think as a tech watcher that the Xbox One is a fascinating and bold move to place Microsoft at the centre of the living room — although as a consumer and a gamer, I find myself drawn to Sony’s approach.

Update: Two weeks after I wrote this post, this picture emerged of Microsoft’s banners at E3:

Ads in the stream, Tumblr? Really?

That’s a monetization idea that justifies the years Tumblr has been working on it. Innovative!

Edit — to be clear, I don’t begrudge Tumblr a business model, not at all. It’s just a bit… well, lame, I suppose. I wish I could pay to become a premium user and avoid this nonsense, but I accept that that ship has (seemingly) sailed for VC-backed social networks.

iPad content creation versus consumption: again (again)

Penny Arcade’s Jerry Holkins absolutely nails the hoary chestnut of iPad content creation vs content consumption for me:

I had a plan to travel with an iPad 3 and a Bluetooth keyboard, thinking myself incredibly efficient, master of all I surveyed, etc. There are people who can do that. Maybe they’re better than me. Because while I can write under those circumstances, I certainly can’t edit. It was fine, and I felt clever or whatever, but it was (mechanically speaking) like trying to pound in a nail with the back of a screwdriver. It was and is entirely possible to do that and be unhappy. There is apparently some kind of ongoing online discussion where people say you can’t make things on iPads, but that’s not entirely true; Kiko edited card art for the Paint The Line ECG on one, so whatever. I think what’s more likely is that many of the people who own them don’t care to create on them, and I can’t. Reaching up to touch the screen and pushing it or smudging it or having to hold it or using one hand to stabilize it while I use my other hand is concentrated NO. It was a nice idea.

After I linked to this on app.net, Dave, Harry and Dan asked exactly what I find so hard about iPad content creation.

I have two parts to my answer. The first one is, I believe, an objective list of ways in which the iPad is worse than a laptop for user input. Not a lot worse, mind; just a bit. I wrote about this at some length for TUAW back in 2012, in a poorly received post. The tl;dr version goes something like:

  • Talented artists can achieve astonishing results with an iPad, but are generally going to capable of more astonishing results with an input surface with a bit more precision than the iPad’s splodgy finger-sized input. Hence the Wacom Cintiqs.
  • For creating text, there’s a host of small niggles:
    • On-screen keyboard has no tactile feedback and can be uncomfortable after a while of drumming your fingers on an unyielding surface
    • On-screen keyboard swallows up half the screen
    • On-screen keyboard difficult to use in your lap or on a desk for prolonged periods (the low angle of the iPad causes overhead lights to reflect in the screen and it’s not easy to balance on your lap)
    • Switching keyboards to get to lesser-used punctuation and the like is slow
    • No control over text highlighting etc with on-screen keyboard
    • Slow and awkward to switch tasks
    • If you add an external keyboard, you’ve now got a composite device barely thinner or lighter than an 11” MacBook Air
    • Even with an external keyboard, you can’t control the cursor without touching the screen, provoking gorilla arms
  • A lot of stuff that’s not typing out words or drawing pictures (so, say, audio creation) is of practical interest to relatively few people. Garageband’s interface is quite lovely, but I’m willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of Garageband’s purchasers used it half a dozen times as a toy and then abandoned it.

How much does this matter? As I mentioned, there was a fair bit of vitriol aimed at my TUAW post, so I suspect to most people it doesn’t matter much at all. My gut feel was that I was tapping into an unspoken trend but I called that one wrong, plain and simple. That’s a pile of nitpicks I’ve written up there for damned sure. But it matters to me a lot, and this is where my argument switches from the objective to the intensely (and unapologetically) subjective.

The biggest gripe I have stems in my sheer bloody-minded impatience. I get enraged — properly angry — using my fire breathing iMac with I try to cmd-tab away from, say, iTunes and am prevented from doing so with one of those damned beachballs it likes so much. When I am in full flow (which is far less often than I’d like) I think and work very, very quickly and any aspect of the computer that can’t keep up with me becomes the source of so much frustration that I find it unbearable. I am unusual in this regard, I freely admit; but it means that in the course of an hour writing a post on an iPad the list of subtle snags I’ve put up there starts to feel like a collection of anvils chained around my neck and dragging me down into the waters of procrastination.

A Bluetooth keyboard helps with some of these issues (I favour the Logitech Ultrathin), and I can bash out first drafts relatively happily with one. I don’t really like the angle of the screen but then I have that issue with laptops too. However, I still find two scenarios troubling. The first is when I need to go to a web browser and fact-check something or get a source link. Perhaps it’s my bad process, but I do this while writing rather than in a discrete step, so this is a continual thing for me. I find the task-switching that this requires annoying because of its unpredictable nature. Suppose you are switching back and forth between Safari and a writing app. A swipe to the right might switch from Safari to the app, but then you need to swipe left again to get back; I find myself forgetting which apps are to the left and which are to the right. On a Mac, of course, cmd-tab always switches to “the app you used last”, and I have muscle memory for that command dating back over two decades of using Windows. If I am switching between more than two apps, I can easily arrange them (on my voluminous 27” screen) so they are overlapping and switch with the mouse, if I so desire.

(An aside for Writing Kit, which has that built-in-browser doobry; that’s the best answer I’ve found but still bugs me in a few ways, not least that it pastes Markdown links with a load of stuff I have to clean up like the HTML meta title.)

The second is editing. Although I’m a pretty heavy keyboard user, I guess I’m not heavy enough because I still routinely find myself reaching for the cursor which involves moving my entire arm up the screen. I suffer from some mild RSI — I have tennis elbow — so this is often uncomfortable for me, and again, I find it irritating because I’ve got so much time invested in touchpad and mouse control that it just happens without me thinking about it. iOS, by comparison, feel clumsy and imprecise to me, even after three years with an iPad and five years with an iPhone. Perhaps I should put some effort into learning the emacs-style keyboard shortcuts that I believe iOS uses to move the cursor around by paragraph, word, and so on; I’ve always been a vim user, so they don’t come naturally to me. That might help.

The thing that bothers me the most, though, is the tiny, almost imperceptible pause that happens between you selecting some text and the pop-up menu with “cut/copy/paste” in appearing. It’s barely a beat, and yet I find that pause annoying beyond all rationality. At least this is alleviated when I’m using an external keyboard, although as I still find myself resorting to the on-screen for cursor control it’s not a complete solution for me.

One task I haven’t mentioned the iPad is great at, in my opinion, is photo editing; I really like iPhoto for iOS. However, I’m a serious enough photographer that I shoot raw and post-process in Aperture, so iPhoto doesn’t really fit in my workflow. I really, really wish Apple would release a viable “Aperture sidekick” app. I believe iMovie is also pretty credible too, but I don’t shoot video so I can’t comment.

So there you go, Dave, Dan, and Harry. Hopefully that stream-of-consciousness post has at least partially answered your questions. The bottom line is that I’m very picky about my computing environments so the iPad’s compromises loom unusually large for me, plus I’ve got so much experience with a mouse and keyboard that I can use them entirely subconsciously.

Note, however, that none of this makes me think any less of the iPad, by the way. I use mine every day, and I still write on it with almost genuine good cheer when I’ve decided that its extreme portability outweighs my creature comforts. But I wrote this post on my iMac!

Writing in C++ again is like making biscuits. But the simple baking procedure is preceded by growing the wheat, which entails clearing the farmland, digging a well, defending it against the native hordes, establishing irrigation and a working agrarian economy, buying a bunch of fertilizer, plowing the field behind a great big smelly ox, planting the seeds, waiting all winter while the wolves howl outside your cabin, THEN (buried amongst all the templatified, exception-safe and const-driven madness) writing a kernel of meaningful code. Wait, what was I doing? Building a tectonically secure infrastructure for feeding billions of people, or just making biscuits for breakfast? It’s hard to remember after all that epic bullshit.
Landon Dyer.

Source: dadhacker.com

Apple, the iPhone, and “incremental improvements”

John Gruber:

[The iPhone 5] was only an incremental improvement over the iPhone 4, which was only an incremental improvement over the 3GS, which was only an incremental improvement over the 3G, which was literally just an original iPhone plus 3G.

Not only is this spot-on, but I’d go a stage further. I’d argue that any two of those incremental improvements equals something worth paying for, and that that is perfectly fine.

Who changes their mobile phone every year? No-one but hardcore nerds, I contend. The overwhelming majority of people are buying phones on contract, and they are locked in to those contracts for between 18 months and two years (and sometimes even longer). So when the iPhone n+1 launches, it doesn’t have to appeal to owners of the iPhone n; it only has to appeal to owners of the iPhone n-1, who are now eligible for upgrade.

Time and time again, tech reviewers compare iPhones to the last launched model and declare it wanting, despite the fact that this is a comparison which is irrelevant to almost everyone on Earth.

Not convinced? Still think Apple could be doing more to drive the iPhone forward? Let me take another tack.

When the iPhone launched, spec-wise, it had mostly unremarkable hardware. Compared to contemporary smartphones from Nokia or HTC, it lacked 3G, it wasn’t particularly fast, it had an awful camera, and so on. It wasn’t even unique for being all-screen no-keyboard; there were similar Windows Mobile phones around that time. The two things that really made it stand out were the enormous screen size and the capacitative, no-stylus-required touch surface.

So let’s say the iPhone started from the middle of the pack, in terms of hardware. Let’s accept for a moment the hypothesis that Apple has spent the last five years making only boring tiny improvements, and it could have (and should have) done better. Logically, then, the pack will have pulled away, right? Everyone else will have improved their hardware faster than Apple did, and now the iPhone must be languishing far behind.

Except that didn’t happen. The iPhone 5 boasts CPU performance broadly equivalent to its competitors. Battery life is better. Camera performance is close to identical. The iPhone 5 has LTE, so the wireless side is, again, broadly equivalent to the best you can get elsewhere. You could argue that some Android phones have larger screens, but then you’d have to concede that that means they fit in fewer pockets; screen size is a trade-off, not an upgrade (although a trade-off many are happy to make).

So: the iPhone started in the middle of the pack and has risen to the top of the pack. So it follows that Apple must have kept apace with new developments in mobile phone design, and that any attempt to dismissively declare the iPhone as a series of incremental upgrades is, inherently, bollocks.

Why Google's new Nexus 4 doesn't have LTE

Dieter Bohn and Nilay Patel:

Android head Andy Rubin calls the lack of LTE a “tactical issue,” and cites cost and battery life as major concerns with devices that have to support multiple radios.

MG Siegler has a followup to that:

Make no mistake, when Andy Rubin tells Dieter Bohn and Nilay Patel of The Verge that “costs” and “battery life” are two major factors in the decision, it’s pure misdirection. Said another way, it’s bullshit. How do we know this? Just look at the iPhone 5. It’s rolling out on LTE networks around the world just fine with its thin design, multiple antennas, and solid battery life.

The iPhone 5 is not “rolling out on LTE networks around the world just fine”. For example, in the UK, it will work with EE’s new LTE network, but it won’t work with LTE from our other major carriers when they go live next year. This is because international LTE support is hard, just as Rubin suggests.

Furthermore, the iPhone 5 (16 GB) is £529 SIM-free. The Nexus 4 (also 16 GB) is £279, just slightly more than half the price for broadly equivalent hardware. The cost issue doesn’t sound like “bullshit” to me.

Siegler goes on:

And yet, Apple has no problem shipping iOS updates over the same networks. Why? Because they strong-armed Verizon into the same deal they got with AT&T. They fought for the user. Google sold us out to sell some phones. Now the devil is collecting.

Apple has kowtowed to AT&T numerous times: over Faux-G, over Facetime-over-cellular, over tethering charges. Apple isn’t invulnerable to commercial pressures, nor does it have an unblemished record of putting its user’s interests before its own (or those of its partners).

Is Siegler too much of a bigshot now to engage his brain before writing a post, or something? I’m sure he used to be better than this lazy, knee-jerk, only-Apple-can-do-right stuff.

iTunes Match is broken in iOS 6

Steve Lawrence on Apple’s support forums

iTunes Match functionality seems to be crippled in iOS 6:

  • You cannot swipe delete an individual song from your iPhone
  • You cannot swipe delete an entire album from your iPhone
  • You cannot download an individual track from an album, only the entire album
  • When ‘Show all music’ is selected, you cannot tell which songs / albums are stored on your phone as it shows them all with no indication of whether they’re stored locally or in the cloud.

The impacts of all of this are:

  • Once you have downloaded music to your iPhone, you can no longer delete it. Which means that eventually your iPhone will be full.
  • You cannot decide to download just the tracks you want to listen to from an album any more. It’s the whole thing or nothing.

He’s right, too. My iTunes Match expires in December; based on this, and some other annoyances I’ve experienced, I don’t think I’ll be renewing the service, even though my full music collection won’t fit on my 32 GB iPhone. Perhaps I should have gone with the 64 GB model after all.