News for Saturday, 6 December 2008

Not long free from Psystar, Apple faces a new polemic on its attitude qualified as anti-competition. This time it relates to the iPod and the iPhone since it is impossible fill the device with music and video without passing by iTunes. To arrive at this result, Apple has not hesitated to encode files essential to the support of its devices, and to change code if this had been discovered.
We think that they will have much more difficulty if they are seriously attacked on this subject compared to defeating Psystar. Indeed, it is impossible to qualify the position of Mac and Mac OS X as a monopoly, however the situation is quite different for the iPod and the iTunes Store which do not have any serious competitors.
The biggest problem for the competitors of Apple is certainly the fact that iTunes software and the online Apple boutique are inextricably linked.
In all honesty, and although we are fans of the Apple world, we cannot say that their actions are correct. After all, we would certainly have criticized this behavior if it had been another company, such as Microsoft.

In firmware 2.2 of the iPhone and of the iPod Touch there is an undocumented library that after study allows one to use a television set as external screen.


Freeverse succeeded in very little time to make use of this feature in a special version of its software Moto Chaser and all functions perfectly. The display is done on the screen while the iDevice (that no longer displays anything) is used as remote control.
Of course, since Apple have not made this thing official, no software using this library can be made available on the AppStore, but this is clearly foreseen and they will prepare it in the next few months.
A note to finish: it is much more pleasant to play Moto Chaser on an iPod Touch V2, Apple having pushed the frequency of the processor well beyond the other iPod touch and iPhone. One speaks about 532 MHz compared to 412 MHz.