simoncoles.org   Simon Coles Personal Blog

I must confess I don’t understand why the Apple TV isn’t more successful.

Think of it like a TV-connected iPod. Plug one into your TV and magically all your iTunes content is available on the TV. It Just Works.

I’ll confess we have three of these beasts at home, and a little Mac Mini (with attached Drobo) acting as a media server. Works really nicely, and I’m in the process of converting the DVDs we have bought so we can cut down on the optical media cluttering up the place.

It took a little effort to get all this setup but as long as the wireless network is functional, it all works like a charm. We can have all our media in any room we choose.

Today I found out you can teach the Apple TV to use your TVs remote, which was icing on the cake. One less bit of clutter.

The only fly in the ointment is Apple have structured the menus so that they list the ones that involve you buying new content from the iTunes Music store first, and it’s a couple of clicks down to get to the stuff you’ve already bought. Which seems a little childish really. But that’s a small complaint.

Otherwise, highly recommended…

I’m on holiday at the moment, and have been amusing myself with BrightKite which is quite a nice way of sharing your movements around the country/globe. Not sure if I’ll use it all the time when traveling for business, because it’s a bit of a competitive intelligence leak – but it’s lots of fun for personal travel.

I’ve put a couple of Widgets on this site – Lifestream combines my Twitter and BrightKite streams (nifty plugin!) and another shows a map of where I am.

I am continuously impressed by WordPress and the WordPress ecosystem – this was the work of minutes.

Seems that Apple are doing an Amazon and shooting themselves in both feet in the most public way possible.

Clearly with the App store they’ve got themselves a potential minefield as they act as Judge, Jury, and Executioner when deciding what iPhone Applications to list. That’s unavoidable given they want to act in a “Quality Guardian” but to some extent manageable if there’s transparency and predictability.

However, Apple are running things in a manner which is anything but transparent and predictable. Which gets people upset, and then they start talking to each other, and then at some point the dissatisfaction will get more widespread, Grandma will get Mad and then you’ve trashed a brand image that took years to develop.

Sadly Apple have never been all that good at treating Developers well – but with the iPhone, there are more of them, and they are more connected. Which spells trouble.

Someone in Apple must have set this conversation up. I wonder if they considered the fact that it would become public, and what kind of reaction would be forthcoming.

Fortunately the FCC want to know what’s going on, I suspect the European Commission will find it interesting to.

Such a pity – this is corporate self-harm, so easily avoidable – makes you wonder what the communication paths are inside Apple/AT&T/Google, and what the various players are pushing for.