How will Roku’s little Internet TV boxes fare in the market against the generally similar new $99 Apple TV which will ship in the next two or three weeks? We still don’t know. But now we know that Apple will compete with an all-new lineup of Rokus. There’s nothing radical about them, but they sport some nice tweaks to an already appealing gizmo–and all three models deliver more oomph for your buck than the ones they replace.
Author Archive | Harry McCracken
Netflix Hires Fake Consumers
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Analyzing Ashok Kumar
I’ve said that that analyst Ashok Kumar frequently comes up with scoops that turn out to be anywhere from not exactly correct to flat-out wrong. My colleague Ed Oswald made the same point earlier this week when Kumar said a 7-inch iPad is on its way. So in the interest of fairness, here’s a post defending Kumar by TheStreet.com’s Scott Moritz–a frequent author of stories based on scuttlebutt from the analyst.
Moritz says he’s listing Kumar’s five top tech calls–although by my count, two of them involve predictions that yet to pan out.
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FileMaker Go Gets an Upgrade
A couple of months ago, I wrote about FileMaker Go, the iPhone/iPad version of the venerable database that does such a good job of blending power and simplicity. The company has released a version 1.1 update that makes its mobile offering a bit more powerful still.
Among the changes: The new version lets you e-mail copies of your databases, create PDFs of them for sharing, and insert photos you shoot with an iPhone or have stored on your device. There’s also an intriguing option that lets developers of third-party apps transfer information–such as a bar code–into FileMaker Go. (It’s intriguing partially because it’s easy to forget that there’s any way for iPhone apps to talk to each other at all–it’s neat to be reminded that they can.)
As before, FileMaker Go is $19.99 for the iPhone version and $39.99 for the iPad one, and it’s not a completely stand-alone product–it’s for working with databases created with the Mac or Windows version. (The company also offers iPhone/iPad versions of its more consumery Bento database that can work in completely standalone mode.)
FileMaker Go 1.1 is available at the App Store now.
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BlackBerry Tablet Imminent?
Interesting scuttlebutt from the Wall Street Journal: RIM may announce the BlackBerry tablet next week at its developer conference in San Francisco. And both it and future BlackBerry phones will be based on the QNX operating system which RIM bought last year, say the WSJ’s sources.
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Gmail for Android Gets Priority Inbox (Sorta)
I’m still deciding how I feel about Gmail’s Priority Inbox. But it’s good to see some of its functionality migrate to Google’s Gmail app for Android. (Now Google just needs to deal with the absurd fact that Android has one e-mail app for Gmail and another for everything else–each of which has only some of the features you want.)
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New Adobe’s Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements For Windows…and Mac
For years, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements have had a simple, appealing modus operandi: Provide a surprisingly high percentage of the features from full-strength Photoshop and Premiere with an easier interface and more features aimed at amateurs, at an affordable price. Adobe is rolling out Photoshop Elements 9 and Premiere Elements 9 today: They’re $99.99 apiece ($79.99 after $20 rebate) and can also be bought in a bundle for $149.99 ($119.99 after rebate). A $179.99 version ($149.99 after rebate) includes both versions, 20GB of online storage for photos and videos, and additional training materials and art.
The Elements strategy still works, and these new versions are reasonably meaty upgrades. I tried the OS X versions.
OS X versions? In the past, only certain um, elements of Elements have been available for Macs: Adobe shipped the OS X version of Photoshop Elements with the industrial-strength Bridge media management tool rather than the more consumery Organizer, and didn’t bother with Premiere Elements at all. The biggest single piece of news about the Elements 9 apps is that they’re available for Macs in forms nearly identical to their Windows counterparts.
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Internet Explorer 9: Finally, a 21st Century Browser From Microsoft
My Technologizer column for TIME.com is up: It’s a look at the Internet Explorer 9 beta:
Last week, Microsoft unveiled the first beta release of Internet Explorer 9, or IE9 for short. It’s easily the most impressive browser upgrade to hail from Redmond, Wash., since the original skirmishes with Netscape. And I don’t think it’s mere coincidence that it’s the first one the company has hatched since its scariest current competitor, Google, got into the browser business by launching Chrome two years ago this month.
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Twitter’s Security Mess
Looks like I should be glad I slept in this morning: I managed to miss what sounds like a nightmarish period of worms gone wild on Twitter. (Ars Technica’s Peter Bright has a good recap of what happened, and why.) In retrospect, it looks like the culprits took advantage of a ginormous Twitter security flaw; it’s surprising it took this long for something like this to happen.
Here’s Twitter’s own account of the mess, and an apology for it.
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Napster is (Allegedly) Available for iPhone
The original Napster was a scandalously easy way to get music for free. I’ve just been trying to use the new iPhone app from the latter-day, not-free service that carries the Napster name–and so far, it’s proven to be an annoyingly difficult way to pay for music.
Actually, I haven’t gotten it to accept my money at all. I began by downloading the iPhone app from the App Store and trying to upgrade my existing Napster event to the $10/month plan needed to stream and cache unlimited music on an iOS device. The app sent me to Safari to do the upgrade–and when I got there, I was greeted by an error message.
I tried doing the upgrade on a PC. Same error. Figuring that something might be wrong with my aged Napster account, I started to sign up for a new one, and didn’t see the $10 iOS plan among my options.
Then I noticed that there was no mention of iPhone compatibility on the Napster site. Scratch that–there is a reference to it…one that says that full-blown Napster doesn’t work with Apple devices.
I see no reference to an iPhone app on the Napster blog or in its press releases, so I wonder if the software wandered onto the App Store a bit ahead of schedule.
Maybe some of the dozens of folks who wrote about Napster for iOs today were able to get it up and running, but I’m giving up. With MOG, Rhapsody, Rdio, and Thumbplay already offering worthy on-demand music services for iOS, Napster is pretty darn late to the iPhone game. (Me, I’m currently partial to Rdio.)
If you’re able to make Napster work on an iOS device, lemme know what you think…