Hints for Apple: Tablet coming, please give us iPhoto for Windows
I love it when the Apple rumour mill starts whirring! Cringely figures that the Apple Tablet will be the link between your PC and the TV, using a pre-standard version of UWB -- a very high speed Personal Area Network (PAN) wireless spec that will be capable of streaming video.
Next up, BusinessWeek Online pleads with Jobs to come out with a version of iPhoto for Windows.
Read on for some article quotes and my take.
So Cringely figures that the tablet should have digital hub applications as their killer app to drive sales beyond just the "comfortable" market of graphics professionals.
The tablet PC killer app for the mass market is functioning as a digital hub, a general concept both Apple and Microsoft have been pushing for a couple years. It's the idea that your computer ought to control your TV and your stereo and your VCR. The only problem has been that there isn't a good way to link these things all together, and even if we do, that digital hub isn't anywhere near your TV, at least not yet.
I just don't see it. A dedicated multimedia PC or home server driving the TV through a 10ft interface seems much better than a tablet -- the tablet can be just another client. His thoughts on UWB and Apple are interesting to speculate about, though.
Just like everyone loves iTunes and the iPod, it seems like everyone loves iPhoto, too. BusinessWeek figures there's a fair bit of money in it for Apple:
So how big a market could this create for Apple? That's hard to tell. If Apple could convince even 3% of all digital-camera buyers to purchase iPhoto software next year -- say, for $30 -- then it would grab revenues of $45 million. That could conceivably climb to $100 million or more within a few years if Apple manages to merely maintain that market share.
With the only real contender against iPhoto that I've seen being the Adobe Photoshop Album, this could definitely work.
The article also covers some of the potential downsides of releasing more programs for Windows -- such as a decrease in demand for Mac hardware -- but the fact that all these programs come bundled for "free" with every Mac means that sales won't be negatively affected. And perhaps, as Windows users see more of the cool apps on the Mac side, there might be more switchers.
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Wireless Hub, memory footpring.
First off, the large memory footprint on Apple software is typical of all software - it's always bigger when running on your competitor's OS. This was true for Adobe's first PC products; it's true for Microsoft's software on the Mac, and vice versa. There are both technical and market-influenced reasons for this, the technical reasons are the DLLs, unknown or important-vendor-only APIs that Microsoft is notorious for using. The marketing reason is simple - make a product that runs faster on your competitors' systems? Heck no. It’s why StarTrek was cancelled (the project that discovered that the Mac OS ran faster on the PC, but was quietly ended and forgotten).
As for running the hub, I think Bob is severely confusing two things - a remote control, and a tablet. What Bob talks about in his article is not a Tablet PC, it's a high-tech wireless PDA-style remote control, and a wireless laptop, as separate devices. If you've ever seen a very expensive home A/V system from the likes of Sony and others, you've probably seen that huge touch-screen remote control that manages everything wirelessly. Bob is talking about a much more advanced device that controls all content, not just A/V between the various digital devices at home. Sufficiently advanced PDAs could even view that very same A/V content on their screens with a fast enough UWB net, and could probably add all sorts of other features, like "intelligent home" controls that turn lights on in the room you are entering, display personal art, things in Bill Gates' own home today.
So perhaps Bob is talking about some ubiquitous UWB PDA tied into home systems for remote control. Tie that in with Intel's idea of future wireless sensor nets, one per electronic device in the home, and you get the "Intelligent Home" or whatever name the concept had several years ago.
That, plus a wireless laptop with broader access privileges, is what Bob is talking about.
He isn't talking about a tablet; he started off talking about applications for the tablet in graphics, and made a leap from Tablet as graphics tool to Tablet as your home digital hub nerve center.
I think a PDA-remote control will sufficiently fill that space, I've been asking for a remote control for years - it is practically a "Steve saying": great artists ship, all digital devices need remote controls.
Doesn't surprise me
If you think about it, QT will be running all of its own "stuff" -- APIs, dll's, etc. Whereas all of the rest of them will be taking advantage of a variety of MS-specific hooks and frameworks. These also take up memory, but since they are already loaded by the OS, it doesn't look like it is attached to the app itself.
was wondering about that size thing
so I just took a look on my iBook. iTunes the app is 4.1MB. however the interfaces/GUI resources for the 15 languages that it supports requires 19MB.
svelte *and* multilingual ;)
I was referring
to runtime memory footprints.
Quicktime 6.4 uses ~167% more CPU than Xvid, DivX and WM9, with little apparent visual diff, earlier vers used even more.
UWB is the only safe
wireless PAN interface I would use day-to-day, it has low effective radiated power.
There's a common medium not bad for HD video (~45mbps), it's called GigE. The idea of running a media hub on a wireless node is nearly laughable.
not if their appz are as big
...resource hogs as iTun3s and Qu1ckt1me for W1nd0ze.
How a music player can sit on 30MB is beyond me, W1namp & WMP use 5 to 7MB.
Qu1ckt1me 6.4 is better than all previous versions in resource utilization but it still uses 18MB, about the same as the far more capable W1nDVD, and more cpu than any other video player I've seen in Win32.