News for Monday, 28 July 2008

Some researchers from the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University (Germany) have been working on a Cocoa Multi-Touch Framework for Mac OS X. Being part of a group conducting research in Media Computing and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) aiming to bring next generation graphical user interface, they are currently working on the first public release and will soon provide an early version of the framework. A demo of the Cocoa Multi-Touch Framework is available on YouTube:

As mentioned by the developers, the beauty of the system is that you can develop and test your multi-touch application on your standard desktop Mac, using your iPhone as multi-touch input device. It really looks promising.

Apple has posted a job description for an iPhone Security Engineer aiming to strengthen current security measures of the Mac OS X Mobile and the iPhone architecture. Details of the required experience make this job offer dedicated to the current iPhone hackers:

Required Experience:
* A genuine passion for analyzing security technologies and developing "proof of concept" attacks
* Demonstrated creative and critical thinking capabilities and troubleshooting skills
* Industry exposure to and knowledge of OS security and UNIX internals
* A strong software development background
* Highly professional, with the ability to deliver solid work on tight schedules

As in IT history, Apple is looking for talents initially working on the dark side spending their time in hacking and cracking security measures, to turn them into White Knights who will protect the iPhone "Grail". This is not new, as some antivirus-developing companies are currently run by old hackers in the PC world.

After being acquired by Nokia, Symbian is now an Open Source project, with its status the company expects to boost its development. Some analysts expect to see a merger between Symbian and Android in a near future. The main goal would be a create synergies between the OS and the common mobile platform supported by Google in order to compete with leading Windows Mobile and the quickly growing Mac OS X Mobile, the recently introduced OS powering the fast selling iPhone. The AppStore is a powerful tool for customers as well as a mean for Apple to collect money and push developers to support Mac OS X.
If the possible merger between Symbian and Android are currently most likely the fruit of expectations of some analysts, it seems that the main players are getting ready for the next war for OS Mobile dedicated to handheld devices, 20 years after the first one supposed to define a final winner for desktop and notebook OS. As in the past, Apple will be alone due to its policy for not licensing its OS X mobile. If it strongly improves the user experience by having the right OS for the right hardware, it also limits choice or alternative for end users while letting Apple alone against all the others.
If Apple can successfully repeat the strategy developed around the iPod/iTunes ecosystem with the iPhone and AppStore, it might well be imposing its model to the other main player despite being the last one to have entered the market. This might also require/imply the future release of smaller iPhone models, aka iPhone nano, which will be cheaper to manufacture/distribute and might allow Apple to extend this offer beyond the current exclusive partnership deal.

Following the recent announcement of its online music store and its dedicated DRM servers, Yahoo has been under public pressure receiving critics for not properly dealing with its customers. The company decided to offer several ways to compensate shut down of its servers:
- Yahoo Music will refund customers based on songs purchased
- Help customers to migrate their current Yahoo Music library to Real Networks' Rhapsody subscription service, including the lower 10 USD monthly rate carry over for a limited amount of time
- Customers should also have the option of converting their songs to DRM-free songs from Rhapsody instead of receiving the refund.
This is definitely a better offer than the one offered by Microsoft to its customers after announcing the shut down of its MSN Music Store and its DRM servers. Indeed, Redmond's giant simply decided to let the DRM servers running for additional 3 years, and then latter decided what to do. It will then most likely stop them, expecting that most customers will have then moved to another service, limiting the impact of a shut down of its servers as well as the number of unhappy users.
This is again the proof that DRM mostly affect customers who have legally purchased their music, demonstrating how usefulness they are.