Posted 10/09/08 at 11:14:50 AM by Paul Lilly

We don't always agree with sister site MacLife.com's outlook (we recently had to slap the site silly when it went on the offensive towards PC users), but this is one time we find ourselves on the same side of the fence. Is anyone expecting great things out of Flash for the iPhone?

MacLife says no and points out several reasons why iPhone owners may rue getting what they wish for. Chief among the fears is a lack of usability in which the desktop experience for Flash heavy sites might become a convoluted mess when ported to the iPhone. Other concerns include irritating ads (you know they're coming), more frequent crashes back to the home screen, and a tug of war over standards.

Agree or disagree? Hit the jump and sound off!

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Software, apple, iphone, flash

Posted 10/03/08 at 05:55:39 PM by Andy Salisbury

A collective sigh of relief was let out Thursday, as a panel of federal judges who determine royalty rates for recordings ruled to renew the current royalty rate until 2012.  The ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board, a panel of three judges appointed by the Librarian of Congress, applied directly to mechanical royalties (which as we mentioned before, are the fees paid directly to songwriters and publishers of music, not the performers).

The currently royalty rate of 9.1 cents was lobbied to receive a 66 percent increase by music publishers, concerned about losing income as music sales decline. Labels and retailers pushed to judges to adopt a new model that would determine royalty payments as a percentage of wholesale revenue, however neither of these suggestions made the ruling.

One document in the hearing, submitted by an Apple executive, had threatened that a significant inflation in royalty rates could potentially force them to shut down the massively popular iTunes music store, which has sold over 5 billion songs to date. While Apple sees substantial sales, they operate with very thin margins.

There are still some in the music industry that have claimed that new rulings such as these might not be enough to satisfy the insatiable rise of illegal file sharing. “Whether these developments will be sufficient to return the music industry to health is not clear,” said Jonathan Feinstien, a music lawyer at the Krasilovsky & Gross firm in New York.

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Software, apple, itunes, music, Royalties

Posted 10/01/08 at 07:16:50 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Apple’s iTunes service is to legit music downloads what Napster was to file sharing. Napster went out of business more than seven years ago after loosing a fierce legal battle against the music industry. Now, Apple’s iTunes might go out of business despite occupying legally sound ground.

Apple has threatened to close its iTunes music store, if the Copyright Royalty Board approves a hike in the royalty rate on music sales. The board is to give its decision on Thursday. The National Music Publishers’ Association is pleading for a hike of 66% in royalty rates. On the other hand, digital store owners are demanding a cut in royalty rates.

"If the [iTunes store] was forced to absorb any increase in the ... royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss -- which is no alternative at all,” Apple’s VP Eddy Cue warned the board in a filing.

Do you believe Apple can take such a drastic step?

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Software, apple, itunes, royalty rates

Posted 10/01/08 at 12:20:05 PM by Paul Lilly

By our own admission, MacBooks aren't half bad. In Maximum PC's Apple's Notebooks Take On the PC Competition, Apple's MacBook walked away as best-in-class in the professional segment, much to the dismay of the PC faithful. But that doesn't mean we're willing to squeeze our wallet dry to own one.

On average, you can expect to pay twice as much on an Apple PC versus a Vista computer. And people are doing just that. Windows PCs still dominate the lion's share of the market at 80 percent, but Apple continues to cling to a respectable 20 percent slice of the pie. Making its piece even more savory, Apple's making over 35 percent of the revenue share. Think about that. Despite claiming one-fifth of the market, Apple's cashing in on over a third of the revenue.

These numbers come courtesy of the latest NPD sales information, but some feel that Apple has done as well as it ever will at the current price point. Joe Wilcox from eWeek writes, "What's next? I predict that Apple's grab for dollars has gone about as far as it can, without price cuts. Apple's higher prices buck industry trends."

That may be the case, but can trendy hipsters be expected to buck the trend of overpaying?

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mobile, notebook, apple, laptop, macbook

Posted 09/11/08 at 08:07:07 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Yahoo's Douglas Crockford, the man who created JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), says it's high time for a new browser war, eWeek reports. In his keynote address to the Rich Web Experience conference earlier this month, Crockford claimed that the last time core building blocks of the Internet such as HTML and and ECMAScript were revised (1999) was the result of the Internet Explorer versus Netscape Navigator browser war.

While Crockford says we need a new war, I'd argue that we've already got a dandy one going on right now: IE is being challenged by Mozilla Firefox, while Google Chrome has just entered the ring to go head-to-head with Opera and Apple Safari to fight for third place.

To find out why I think Browser War II is already on, and why it might turn out a lot better than the first war of the browsers, join us after the jump.

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microsoft, operating system, apple, Google, firefox, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari, Opera, web browser, chrome

Posted 09/09/08 at 06:57:43 PM by Nathan Grayson

If you play vidoegames, there's something wrong with you.

No, no, not in the "And your face is dumb and those pants do, indeed, have people mistaking you for a land-walrus" sense; I mean that you're genuinely dissatisfied with some aspect of your life. At the very basest level, you're bored. Life, at the clock tick during which you choose to plop down with a controller, just isn't giving you the pulse-pounding rush you desire. That's a problem, and gaming is your escape.

Thus, we walk right into the term "escapism." The moment you hit the power button and leave a game world's towering doors swinging wide in your wake, your mid-level job, your annoying roommate, and your walrus-pants are all left pounding their fists on the other side.

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gaming, microsoft, Software, apple, news, nintendo, bethesda, mini black holes that will devour us all

Posted 09/05/08 at 08:21:49 PM by Pulkit Chandna

After a few eyebrows were raised over Chrome’s highly libertarian end-user license agreement (EULA) – almost a proclamation of a man’s fundamental right to piracy, an amendment or an explanation was inevitable. Chrome’s EULA stated that users were at liberty to use anything posted online through the browser. But Google has amended the EULA. The web juggernaut also downplayed the entire episode as a mistake. Setting the EULA aside, a few chinks in Chrome’s armor have already been sighted. Avi Raff, a researcher, has discovered that Chrome is vulnerable to carpet-bombing a la Safari.

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apple, EULA, Google, threat, browser, Safari, Attack, chrome, carpet-bombing

Posted 09/02/08 at 06:01:17 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Microsoft is no stranger to digital distribution: its popular Xbox Live service was a first for game consoles. However, the company has no effective digital distribution channel to sell the myriad of third party apps for its Windows Mobile OS. But Microsoft seems to have finally taken a leaf out of Apple’s book with news of an application store for the Windows Mobile platform doing the rounds.

The application store will be called “Skymarket”, if a blogger, Long Zheng, is to be believed. The blogger sighted a couple of job postings that shed some light on Microsoft’s plans regarding an application store for Windows 7 Mobile, which is the next scheduled installment of its mobile OS. Digital distribution is all set to take off on mobile phones.

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apple, Google, iphone, android, windows 7 mobile, app store, skymarket