Five ways Apple could make itself look less evil

It’s appropriate that the Apple logo on the iPad is black. The Cupertino company’s image is taking on some awfully sinister tones lately.

For a company that made its name fighting for the little guy, it’s a surprising reversal. In the past, Apple touted itself as the computer company for nonconformists who “Think Different.” Now the company is making moves that make it look like the Big Brother it once mocked.

First Apple tightened its iron grip on the already-stringent iPhone developer policy, requiring apps to be made with Apple-approved languages. A short while later, Apple rejected some high-profile apps based on their editorial content, raising journalists’ questions about press freedoms in the App Store. Then, police kicked down a Gizmodo editor’s door to investigate a lost iPhone prototype that Apple had reported as stolen. 

It’s tough to imagine customers will stay loyal to a company whose image and actions are increasingly nefarious. We want to like the corporation we give money to, don’t we?

Here are five things Apple should do to redeem its fast-fading public image.

Publish App Store RulesAs I’ve argued before, the App Store’s biggest problem is not that there are rules, but that app creators don’t know what the rules are. As a result, people eager to participate in the App Store censor themselves, and that hurts innovation and encourages conformity. The least Apple can do is publish a list of guidelines about what types of content are allowed in the App Store.

After all, Apple has had nearly two years and almost 200,000 apps to figure out what it wants in the App Store. Tell people what the rules are so they know what they’re getting into, and so they can innovate as much as possible. That would also tell us customers what we’re not getting on our iPhone OS devices.

Formalise Relationships With PublishersPublishers are hypnotised by imaginary dollar signs when they look at the iPad as a platform that could reinvent publishing and reverse declining revenues. But after recent editorial-related app rejections, journalists are slowly waking up to our forewarning that Apple could control the press because news and magazine apps on the iPad are at the mercy of the notoriously temperamental App Store reviewers.

If Apple wants to look a little less like the Chinese government, it should work with publishers to ink formal agreements regarding content to guarantee editorial freedom to respected brands.

Tweak iPhone Developer AgreementApple’s stated purpose of its revised iPhone developer policy is to block out meta platforms to ensure a high level of quality in the App Store. Also, from a business perspective, there is no lock-in advantage if you can get the same apps on the iPhone as you can on other competing smartphones. Fair enough, but Apple would be silly to think it can keep the mobile market all to itself, and its developer agreement comes off as a piece of literature holding developers hostage.

It’s hard to create new rules, but it’s easy to abolish existing ones. Apple should loosen up its iPhone developer agreement by snipping out a part of section 7.2, which states that any applications developed using Apple’s SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store.

That implies that if you originally create an app with the Apple SDK, you’re not allowed to even modify it with different languages and sell it through another app store like Google’s Android market. In other words, iPhone apps belong to Apple. This rule is basically unenforceable to begin with, and Apple should just remove it, along with other similar policies.

Apologise to Jason ChenReasonable people can disagree over whether it was ethical for Gizmodo to purchase the lost iPhone prototype, but the police action -- kicking down Jason Chen’s door to seize his computers -- was overboard.

It was self-evidently a clumsy move: After damaging Chen’s property, the police paused the investigation to study whether the journalists’ Shield Law protected Chen. The proper action would have been to issue a subpoena to get Chen to talk about the device first. Apple, which instigated the police action by filing a stolen property complaint, should publicly apologise to Chen (no relation to the author of this post) and reimburse him for the damages.

Get Gray Powell on StageWhen Apple accidentally leaked its PowerMac G5 a couple of years ago, Apple’s legal team forced MacRumors’ Arnold Kim to pull down his post containing the information. But a humbled Steve Jobs joked about the slip during his WWDC 2003 keynote, calling it a case of “Premature specification.” (See the video below.)

He should do a similar thing when he officially unveils Apple’s next phone, by having Gray Powell -- the engineer who misplaced the next-generation iPhone prototype -- make a stage appearance. Powell could walk out and hand Jobs the phone, saying “Hey Steve, I found your lost phone,” or something similar. Some comedic relief, provided by the engineer who lost the iPhone prototype in a bar, can remind us that Apple is still a company guided by a man with a sense of humour.

Google Android now translates foreign menus

Google Goggles, the visual-searching tool for Android powered smartphones, has been updated with perhaps its most useful functionality yet.

The powerful app can provide all sorts of pertinent information by analysing photos taken with an Android handset. Goggles can identify a snap of objects such as a landmarks, paintings or book covers, and pull up complimentary data from the web.Now, the app takes its first step towards having a Hitchhiker's Guide-esque service, by translating text from one language to another just by snapping it with your Android. Useful for menus, signs and documentation, Google hopes it will prove essential for monolingual travellers in Europe.

As of now, Google Goggles can read text in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, and translate it to many more Latin-based languages. The team hopes to expand functionality in the future, and even support non-Latin languages such as "Chinese, Hindi and Arabic".

The team at Google Labs admits that the technology is in its infancy, and is plagued by technical hurdles. "Computer vision is a hard problem." Google's blog says, "we know that there are many images that we cannot yet recognize."

That's why the development team is so dedicated to keeping Google Goggles updated with new functionality and tweaks. Alongside the translation service, the new Goggles update features improved barcode recognition, a massive update to the image database, a fresh user interface and the ability to initiate searches from images on your phone's memory.

The translation update to Google Goggles is available now for handsets running Android OS 1.6 or newer, which include the Motorola Droid and Google's own Nexus One. 

Scribd ditches Flash for HTML5

Online docs editor and sharing site Scribd is moving its entire web app off of Flash and is rebuilding it using HTML5 and web standards.

The company has been developing its free browser-based app -- which most of its customers use to make and share presentations and documents, and which provides a more elegant experience than Google Docs or Zoho -- in Flash for the past three years.

The announcement was made by Scribd CTO and co-founder Jared Friedman, who spoke on Thursday morning here at the Web 2.0 Expo developer conference. The news was leaked on Wednesday to TechCrunch, who ran a report with screenshots of the new interface.

Scribd’s move comes amidst a fiery debate over the future of rich content presentation on the web, whether Flash or emerging web standards likeHTML5 is the right tool for the job. Most online document editors now, like those from Google and Zoho, offer standards-based experiences using HTML5, but they are lacking somewhat in advanced text and layout capabilities.

Friedman says Scribd isn’t porting its entire web app off of Flash for any particular political reasons, but rather because web standards have finally reached the point where the company can use them to offer a feature set close enough to the Flash experience for it to make the switch. He says Scribd makes extensive use of multiple emerging standards, including HTML5 markup, the Canvas element and CSS 3, especially the @font-face element.

He did, however, point to one big drawback of Flash -- its “browser in the browser” problem. In order to present a web-based app like Scribd’s Flash app, you have to essentially embed one interface (the reader and editor) inside another (the web browser). It adds a layer to the experience that Scribd didn’t feel was elegant.

In a live demo, we got to see a glossy magazine laid out in Scribd, complete with searchable, standards-based text rendered in a fancy font and transformed to be positioned at non-horizontal angles. There were overlays, background images and nicely styled bounding boxes for text, and all of it was editable through a JavaScript-powered toolbar at the bottom of the screen.

Docs can be viewed in a slideshow mode, which moves from slide to slide for presentations and page to page in documents using JavaScript. You can also scroll through the document like it’s a very long web page. Links to your document can be tweeted or shared on Facebook.

Friedman says that by ditching Flash, Scribd is allowing itself to fully compete on mobile devices which don’t support the Flash Player. The current platform to beat -- the iPhone and iPad -- most famously does not run Flash. Friedman showed off the new version of Scribd on an iPad as part of his presentation.

He also says his company’s initial testing shows that over 90% of browsers can use new Scribd -- even IE6(though we don’t have any way of testing that claim).

Apple iPad's UK release date and price confirmed

After a month long delay, and setting an ambiguous "late May" date almost down to the wire, Apple has finally revealed its plans for releasing the iPad outside of the United States.

On 28th May, customers in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK can finally pick up their shiny new tablet that Apple fanatics across the Atlantic have been so fervently championing these past few weeks. 

Pre-orders for the tablet begin Monday, 10 May at the Apple online store, retail Apple shops and "select Apple Authorised Resellers".

Pricing might come as a bit of a blow to some fans, as the iPad has come out a little worse for wear after a fight with a currency conversion machine. The Wi-Fi only, 16GB model translates from $500 to a hefty £429; a good £90 premium for the privilege of living in the UK.

The full pricing list is as follows:

Wi-Fi only models

16GB: £429

32GB: £499

64GB: £599

W-Fi and 3G models

16GB: £529

32GB: £599

64GB: £699

Other pricing, such as accessories and 3G data charges have not yet been announced, but Apple has confirmed that the bookstore app iBooks will be available to download, for free, on 28 May. Also, no confirmation of the freeWinnie the Pooh iBook. Where are Apple's priorities?

If you're still left without the iPad, in countries such as Ireland and New Zealand, Apple plans to get the tablet to a further nine countries in July, with local pricing and pre-order information soon.

Top 5 film gadgets that now exist (in some form)

Fuelled by Hollywood, I thought that when I was older I'd be taking a jet pack to work. Apparently the future isn't panning out quite as I'd expected. It’s not all bad news though, as there are in fact plenty of film inspired gadgets that you can now have for real.

Here are my top 5 films with gadgets that are now a reality, what are yours?

Star Wars - The Force: From the moment Obi-Wan Kenobi advised Luke to use the Force it sounded like something I wanted. No gimmicks or gadgets just the power of the mind. Who didn't want to go home and use the Jedi mind trick on their mum, maybe that’s going to far over to the dark side! Now we’ve got devices like the G.tec intendix that allow us just that. The power of the mind to move a ball through a hoop? It’s not what Obi-Wan had in mind but it’ll have to do… for now.

Back to the Future 2 - Hoverboard: Possibly the best gadget from a film ever! Who didn't want one of these? I didn’t know how it was powered, how to steer it, I just knew I had to have one, even if it didn’t work over water. Well we’re not quite there yet but the chaps at Five's Gadget Show have figured out how you can make one yourself.

James Bond, Thunderball - Jet Pack: The ultimate in personal transportation. Although I’m not old enough to have seen this in the cinema, watching the opening sequence on Thunderball on TV still had enough of an impact to tell me everything I needed to know about how I would be getting around in 30 years time. If you have a few (thousand) pounds to spare you can place an order for your very own Martin jet pack. Not quite in shops yet.

Star Trek - Communicators: Federation-issue communicators with their gold flip cover were oh so achingly cool on Captain Kirk, but no so much when Motorola delivered its own take in 1989, heralding the onslaught of personal mobile communications in the 1990’s. It took them a little while to get closer, but the Motorola Razr fitted the bill pretty well.

Superman - X-ray vision: From comics to TV to film, the must have super power for schoolboys across the globe was X-ray vision. Many school changing room discussions will have ended at the same conclusion.  But at last, every schoolboy's dream has become a reality at your local airport with their Backscatter X-ray machines. Almost like magic.

What are your favourite film-gadgets-that-now-sort-of-exist? Let me know in the comments.

Twitter re tweet

RT @GuyKawasaki: Let the Apple conspiracy theories begin: Verizon cuts Nexus One http://om.ly/iiBU More on iPhone: http://om.ly/iiBV

Can Infinity Ward survive?

The studio responsible for the multimillion-selling Call of Duty series has seen several senior staff leave amid a growing legal storm. But this doesn't necessarily spell doom.

Modern Warfare: Infinity Ward is apparently working on another, but is the series as we know it safe?

A month ago, Infinity Ward was one of the most successful and admired development studios in the world, worshipped by fans of its Call of Duty series and surely adored by accountants at its parent company, Activision.

But then one morning in early March it all started to unravel. Studio heads Jason West and Vincent Zampella were escorted from the premises; the duo claimed they were the victims of a trumped up indiscipline charge, formulated by Activision to avoid paying them substantial royalties on Modern Warfare 2. They slapped the publisher with a $36m lawsuit, formed their own development studio, the ironically titled, Respawn Entertainment, and announced a distribution deal with EA. Then, in early April, Activision slapped them back via a counter lawsuit, characterising the twosome as "insubordinate and self-serving schemers."

Amid all this, an exodus of Infinity Ward staffers began. Starting with Lead designer Todd Alderman and lead software engineer Francesco Gigliotti at the beginning of April, it's alleged that up to 13 senior staff have now left the studio, though it seems none have conspicuously joined Respawn. So far. And the mood inside the stricken company? US news site Kotaku has heard from two unnamed staff members, one of whom claimed that the studio is effectively dead, and another that:

"We are not dead, we definitely lost original team members, but not all of the talent. When you talk about the people who left, they are the best in the business, but equally everyone at Infinity Ward deserves that same credential. We are here for the long haul of keeping the Modern Warfare name..."

Meanwhile, Activision is doing its best to jam a lid on the spluttering cauldron of controversy. Last week, Thomas Tippl, the company's chief operating officer, told the LA Times, "we treat our developers extremely well." He also stated that Infinity Ward has "interim leadership" in place, countering the fantasies of certain videogame news sites, who are picturing something akin to Lord of the Flies in there.

But the fundamental question is, can Infinity Ward recover?

Well, on the one hand, history shows that the most successful studios are those with a stable upper echelon. The likes of Blizzard, Bioware and Epic Games have had the same people at the top for years and have duly prospered. At the same time, many strong developers have collapsed when the head honchos walked: legendary Britsoft studio, Bullfrog, keeled over when Peter Molyneux left; Sonic Team never shone again when the mascot's unsung creator, Naoto Ōshima, abandoned ship in 1999; and Cavedog, the creator of the critically acclaimed Total Annihilation series, never recovered from the departure of the game's creator, Chris Taylor.

Structure is a vital element of the video game studio. In the west at least, game development is a democratic pursuit, typically involving strong-minded staff confident in their own creative ideas. Without a respected figurehead, factional disagreements can destroy the sense of common purpose. It's like a premiership football team filled with superstar players - if the manager can't cope with the inherently combustible mix of talents and egos, the side is unlikely to be challenging for a Champions League position.

But the thing about Infinity Ward is, it's working on a highly stable and successful series that doesn't need a lot of reinvention and innovation. This is not PlatinumGames or Team Ico - the world isn't expecting a paradigm-shifting classic with every release. Let's face it, Modern Warfare 2 is a rigidly constructed video game, but it's not a stunning reinvention of the series. What this 'franchise' probably needs is a competent, skilled and experienced workforce capable of producing compelling variations on what we've already seen. And that's exactly what it's got.

Ultimately, I'm not sure I understand the growing schadenfreude surrounding the developer's difficulties. Much of it seems to be connected to the usual 'all publishers are evil' nonsense that gets whiplashed round the games forums. Sure, if Infinity Ward collapses, that'll be a mighty punch in the stomach to Activision boss Bobby Kotick who seems to have become a pantomime villain in the eyes of some vocal online pundits. But it'll also be 100 people looking for new jobs, and a fabulous game series - Modern Warfare - virtually consigned to the history books.

I think Infinity Ward will survive because the demands on it are such that a dedicated team ethic is more important than a visionary leadership. I also hope it survives because I still love Call of Duty and Modern Warfare - just as they are, thanks. Just as they always have been.

How about you?

Super secure data encryption gets faster

Researchers at the Cambridge Lab of Toshiba Research Europe have solved the problem of transferring highly sensitive data at high speed across a long distance network.

The team were able to demonstrate the continuous operation of quantum key distribution (QKD) -- a system that allows the communicating users to detect if a third party is trying to eavesdrop on the data communication -- at a speed greater than one megabit/sec over a 50 km fibre optic network, thanks to the use of a light detector for high bit rates and a feedback system which maintains the high bit rates during data transfer.

Having previously been able to only transfer secure data over such a distance at speeds 100 to 1,000 times slower, this development is particularly important as it could extend the real world uses for the system to hospitals, banks or anyone transmitting sensitive data.

Speaking about the research, Dr Andrew Shields -- who directed the development at Toshiba Research Europe -- said, "Although the feasibility of QKD with megabits per second has been shown in the lab, these experiments lasted only minutes or even seconds at a time and required manual adjustments."

Importantly, the technology will now work without user interference, and allows sensitive information to be distributed using "one-time pad" encryption -- a theoretically perfect (uh oh!) system for secure data transfer that requires the key length to be the same character length as the message, and for each encryption key (or pad) to be totally random and unique. Due to the length of the keys and slow transfer speeds one-time pad is only commonly used amongst security forces and the military to transmit short messages.

The faster one megabit/sec data handling will allow the one-time pad to be used for the encryption of video -- a vast step forward over the current ability to only encrypt voice data.

Development of the study will now extend to the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Tokyo where, according to Tokyo QKD network coordinator Dr. Masahide Sasaki, a quantum key distribution demonstrator will test the secure key across a wider "metropolitan network", which may ultimately lead to the technology becoming commercially available.