This Week's Sponsor:

Washing Machine X9

Spring Clean Your Mac Effortlessly

Posts tagged with "video"

Richard Branson Talks Project Mag for iPad, The Daily, Dinner with Jobs

So the Project for iPad came out this morning and we weren’t really impressed with it. The app surely looks good, but in my opinion it fails at delivering a more innovative experience then, for instance, the one seen in the Wired app months ago.

It is no surprise, anyway, that Project has quickly become the top free app in the iPad App Store. In the following video, you can listen to Sir Branson talking about the iPad as the platform of choice to launch Project, the plans for future versions on multiple devices, and a dinner with el Jobso. [via 9to5]

Read more

Steve Jobs Confirms AirPlay Video Streaming For 3rd Party Apps Coming in 2011

Finally, our questions have been answered by Steve Jobs himself. We love AirPlay, but we can’t stand the fact that the current version that ships with iOS 4.2 comes with many limitations, especially when it’s about video streaming to the Apple TV.

You can’t stream video through AirPlay from Safari or any 3rd party app. This lead me to think that the AirPlay we’re playing around with now is just a teaser of better things to come in the future.

Now, a Steve Jobs email posted by MacRumors confirms that Apple is planning to add the feature in 2011:

Hi, I recently updated both my iPhone 4 and iPad to 4.2. I think my favourite feature is airplay. This is seriously amazing and makes sharing content seamless. I just purchased Apple TV and was wondering are you ever going to make airplay video work for videos in safari and 3rd party apps? I hope to get a response.

SJ: Yep, hope to add these features to Airplay in 2011.

A number of hacks and tweaks to enable AirPlay for video have surfaced recently, including packages jailbreak users can download from Cydia and install on their devices. We also detailed that it’s possible to turn any iOS device into an AirPlay speaker.

Here’s to hoping 2011 will bring the AirPlay we’ve always wanted.

Found Footage: Steve Jobs Demoes The Daddy Of OS X

This one’s an awesome finding via Reddit: while many of you may have already seen the following video (it should come straight from 1991), for all those who haven’t – well, it’s about Steve Jobs demoing the father of OS X, the NeXT computer.

In the video you can see Jobs talking about many features that eventually made their way to OS X, such as Interface Builder or the Dock. It’s also interesting to notice how, almost 20 years ago, Jobs and the team at NeXT were focused on making an operating system suitable for business users.

Fast forward today, and we’re waiting for 10.7 Lion that should bring more consumer-friendly features such as the Launchpad or fullscreen apps.

Jailbroken iPad Gets Android-like Animated Wallpaper [Video]

One of the neat features of Android devices is the possibility to install custom “animated” wallpapers that will display moving elements behind or through icons. The effect’s pretty cool and some of those wallpapers are simply crazy.

It turns out, people have found a way to achieve a similar setup on the iPad. Thanks to a tweak called vWallpaper and a video specifically resized for the iPad’s screen, it is possible to set an animated background and keep swiping on the homescreen.

Check out the (brief) demo video below, and go download the butterfly video wallpaper here. Read more

Today’s AirPlay Is Just A Teaser

Yesterday we posted a tutorial on how to turn your iOS devices into AirPlay-compatible speakers using a jailbreak hack that involves copying two files to iOS’ filesystem. 24 hours into using it, I have to admit this has already radically changed the way I think of AirPlay – Apple’s streaming functionality for audio and video content introduced in iOS 4.2.

This is a taste of the AirPlay that’s going to be, and it looks a lot like an integrated model, all over again. Read more

Finally: Cydia Tweak Brings AirPlay’s Video Streaming To Every App

Looks like jailbreakers are giving users yet another reason to jailbreak their iPhones and iPads by activating what Apple leaves behind. So after the hack that turns the mute switch back to an orientation lock button, here comes AirVideo Enabler, which brings AirPlay for Video support to any app: Safari and 3rd partys apps.

You’ll be able to stream video from your device to the Apple TV no matter what, and I guess it’s based on Erica Sadun’s method.

This simple and must-have tweak is available in the following repository:

http://cydia.zone-mr.net

So if you have an Apple TV and have been missing the possibility to stream from Safari, AirVideo app or StreamToMe – go download it right now.

European iPad Signed By President Obama [Video]

At a rally at the University of Washington in October, president Barack Obama signed an iPad. Maybe you remember the viral video that made the rounds of internet where this guy was staring at the president with his finger pointing at the tablet’s screen, on which he had prepared a sketching app for the president to put his signature on.

Pretty much the same happened a few days ago at the NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal. Obama walks his, security all around him, a man approaches him and asks him to sign his iPad. “Sign my iPad. I’ve done this once before”, jokes the president, clearly aware of the fact that the Washington video was posted on basically every tech blog out there.

Very cool. Check out the video below. Read more

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