A few days ago, Apple announced that the iPhone App Store had served two billion downloads of 86,000 3rd-party applications. It’s hard to remember, but when the iPhone launched in 2007, the closest thing the iPhone had to 3rd party apps was the included YouTube app, the Yahoo-backed Weather app, and the Maps application built on Google maps. Now it looks like Apple may be preparing for a post-Google world.
It came out this week that Apple quietly acquired a mapping startup called Placebase earlier this summer. The first clue was actually a tweet by a Placebase business partner in July and was confirmed when someone checked Placebase’s CEO’s, (Jaron Waldman) LinkedIn profile and found he listed himself as being on the GEO team at Apple. Placebase’s CTO also lists himself as an Apple employee. Placebase might be viewed as a mapping also-ran, but they actually launched after Google Maps debuted, and as of the summer of 2008 Om Malki reported that they had managed to carve out a profitable niche providing custom mapping with a product called PushPin that went above and beyond what was possible with Google Maps.
No one outside of Apple know’s what their plans are for mapping in general, and Placebase in particular, but there is plenty of speculation that it means that Apple is getting ready to kick Google Maps off the iPhone. That’s possible, Apple isn’t as close to Google as it once was now that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has left their board, but I don’t think it is anything like a foregone conclusion.
For one thing, apparently the iPhone Maps application has recently started showing mobile, location-targeted ads delivered by Google. It’s widely believed that this is going to be a huge new advertising market, and you can be sure Google is giving Apple a cut. Given the required scale of a location-targeted ad market, it is hard to imagine that Apple could do as well on its own as it could by taking advantage of Google’s relationships with vast number of advertisers, and given that the iPhone is the only clear winner in the web-Phone market, so far, Google needs them to provide the users to help make that ad market happen.
We’ll have to wait and see what the outcome of this acquisition is. Apple is already incredibly well positioned to capture a big chunk of the value from mobile location-based apps. They can let others do the hard work of figuring out what applications people will find compelling while taking a cut of every app store sale, a subsidy from mobile carriers, and, of course, a nice fat profit from each iPhone sold to run those apps.
A lot of interesting news at the Apple event today, it’s iPod focused, but it brings news that the new 3.1 version of the iPhone firmware has been released. A few quick highlights:
- “Genius” app recommendations in the app store. I haven’t tried it yet, but I think its
- Premade ringtones “only” $1.29 available directly from your phone.
- Saving video from mail and MMS into the camera roll.
- Ability to save edited video as a new clip, rather than overwriting the original video.
- Various other little improvements.
The iPhone and iPod Touch make fantastic remote controls for multimedia applications running on your Mac or Windows PC. One of the earliest is the Apple’s free Remote app, which lets you control iTunes and the AppleTV. Apple also released the Keynote Remote app for $0.99 that lets you control their Keynote presentation software, but 3rd party developers have created dozens of remote control apps. Some are designed to work with specific applications, others provide remote trackpad/keyboard functions that you can use with any application, and a number combine the two approaches. All of these work over WiFi, though Bluetooth might be a powersaving option in the future.
I’ve been really interested in remote control applications lately because I’ve been looking for a better way to control the Windows computer I have hooked up to the TV in our living room and now that my wife has an iPhone too, I don’t have to mess with an infrared remote anymore. I thought I’d share some of what I found. I’m planning on separate posts for the one’s I’ve tried out.
App Specific Remotes:
These are designed to work with specific applications. They often offer special features, like the ability to display “cover art” and playback controls for the album or movie being played:
Boxee Remote (free) Works with Boxee media center software for Mac, Windows and Linux. Automatically detects when Boxee asks for text input and brings up keyboard. Playback controls during playback. Cool gesture mode for quick navigation.
Remote (free): Apple’s application for controlling iTunes and AppleTV. Provides media library browsing and playback controls. Works with both Mac and Windows versions of iTunes.
XBMControl (free): Looks like it tries do duplicate an XBox DVD remote for controlling XBMC. Doesn’t look like it has keyboard support.
XBMC Remote ($2.99): Provides media library browsing and playback controls for XBMC (and the XBMC-derived PLEX and Boxee media center applications), open source media center software for Windows, Mac and Linux.
VLC Remote $2.99. Provides file browsing and playback controls for VLC Player, a free, open source media player for Mac, Windows & Linux.
vmcMote ($7.99): Provides library browsing and playback remote control for Windows Vista and Windows 7 Media Center.
Multi App and General Purpose Remotes:
Air Mouse Pro ($2.99 on sale): Provides a remote trackpad, an accelerometer controlled mouse, remote keyboards, and applications specific remotes for controlling Macs and Windows PCs. This looked really nice, but when I was researching it a couple weeks ago, it was hard to tell how well it worked with the Windows apps I wanted to control.
HippoRemote ($4.99): Provides a remote trackpad and keyboard for Mac, Windows & Linux PCs. Also has custom control profiles for dozens of applications. It uses the keyboard & mouse portion of the popular VNC remote desktop protcol which is already part of OS X Leopard and most recent linux distributions. They provide a custom VNC server for Windows, but I chose to use a generic VNC server. This is what I ended up buying, and it’s worked really well. I plan to do a more thurough review soon.
Keymote ($3.99): Custom control profiles for many popular Mac applications and allows creation of custom remotes. This seems to be focused on creating shortcut key combinations, and it’s not clear to me whether this provides remote mouse & keyboard support.
Remote Jr ($4.99): Works with Mac & Windows with installation of remote control software. Quick launching of apps using the OS X Dock and Windows quick-launch toolbar. Can be used remotely over EDGE or 3G. When I looked at it a few weeks ago, their Windows support seemed pretty weak, but now they have support for a variety of popular Windows apps. Looks pretty cool and full-featured.
RemotePad (free): A bare-bones open source remote mouse and keyboard app. Works with Windows, Mac, Linux. I found it too limited and unreliable for my use.
Rowmote & RowmotePro ($0.99 & $4.99) Rowmote emulates the Apple hardware remote for controlling your Mac. The Pro version adds a remote keyboard and trackpad.
Snatch ($3.99): Trackpad and remote keyboard for Mac and Windows. Also allows creation of custom remotes for Mac and Windows.
Other Remotes
These work with additional hardware to serve as universal remote to existing equipment, like DVD players, stereo systems, TVs, etc.
Bobby Universal Remote ($19.99): Works with a $135 remote control unit + additional hardware.
RedEye (free): Works with an $188 IR dock.
poster photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaqian/ / CC BY 2.0
RemotePad is a free, open source, application for your iPhone that provides a remote trackpad and keyboard to control your Mac, Windows or Linux or BSD PC. You can find the RemotePad application in the app store. You will also have to download and run a small program on the computers you want to control.
I was enthusiastic to find a free remote control application, but my enthusiasm waned once I tried it out. When I tried using it against a Windows XP machine I found that responsiveness was often very poor. In addition, the remote keyboard didn’t provide keys you’d find on any keyboard, like page-up and page-down, etc. I still applaud the developer for creating the application and releasing it as OpenSource. I hope people with more programming skills will help them improve it.
In upcoming posts, I’ll look at a few of the inexpensive commercial options.
I won’t belabor the point, but the new transit planning feature added to Maps in the iPhone 2.2 update kinda sucks.
The route and stop options it offers are often, um, distinctly suboptimal.
