Apps for HDMI inputs

WWDC is upon us and it's good to see so many rumors about Apple's hobby. Let the speculation begin...

Of course we're not going to see an 'Apple TV [set]' but there might be tools for developing apps on the existing 'Apple TV [box]'.  But that won't answer the question of how do you bring an Apple-like experience to the whole sorry mess.

I suspect my arrangement is not uncommon here in the UK. The TV programming comes through a cable company (Virgin Media) and they're not likely to be changing their UI anytime soon. I have children who love their XBox and who don't want to see it change. I use the cable companies catch-up services but I increasingly find myself watching content from Airplay enabled apps on an iPad.

This means that the only things I use the [rather large] TV remote for (together with it's clunky and slow interface) are:

  • switching the TV on/off
  • selecting the correct HDMI input
  • adjusting the TV volume



I was excited when I read John Gruber's Apps are the new Channels but I would settle for 'Apps are the new HDMI inputs' -  with a bit of wishful thinking, you can see how it would be possible to connect up a suitably improved Apple TV [box] to a monitor to make the beginnings of an Apple TV [set]:





Treat the HDMI inputs as apps - there must be some way to give them a name and icon - and immediately things are much improved. Switch on and you are presented with a modern app-based home screen with one less remote/UI style to worry about. Select the XBox app and you get the XBox experience. And if the TV can decode channels itself then you can still use apps as channels.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SmartLink

Image
In a previous post I tried to describe how I thought technologies like SmartTags and AutoLink ought to behave. With greasemonkey in Firefox I've been able to build a proof-of-concept demonstrator. For the moment I'm calling it Smart Tag/Auto Link. SmartLink is based upon the idea that content authors should mark-up content that can be 'smart-linked', using standard XHTML constructs. This has two advantages: it effectively provides an 'opt-in' mechanism for content providers it doesn't require 'magic' to identify what can be smart-linked and thus provides a much more extensible approach. of course there is one fairly major disadvantage: there isn't any suitably marked-up content out there, with the exception of some test posts I've put together for the purpose. Getting Started If you want to know a bit more about SmartLink then click here . Alternatively if you want to see how SmartLink behaves and you're using Firefox t
Read more

A Review of hReview

microformats may well represent a path from where we are today to the [lowercase] semantic web. If so, one of the first waypoints along such a path could be the emergence of aggregators capable of taking advantage of suitably marked-up content. Applying a 'microformat' approach to tagging, Technorati introduced the rel="tag" approach to marking-up tags. Technorati also supply the corresponding aggregation service, e.g. see posts tagged with microformat . Given this minimalist approach to tagging, the hReview specification comes as something of a surprise. It seems to represent a format developed independently of the environment in which it is most likely to be used. The rel="tag" approach makes a major, simplifying assumption. This is that the tag refers 'to a major portion of the current page (i.e. a blog post)' . I am assuming that it could apply equally to a blog entry in an RSS/Atom feed. Thus an aggregator can associate a tag with two p
Read more

Speculations about developing with iCloud

It's been three months since Apple revealed it's vision of the cloud to the world. After its introduction, much was written (e.g. It Just Works ) about how iCloud compares 'philosophically' with others, most obviously Google. Now, supposedly close to launch and with iCloud in the hands of developers, there seems to be surprisingly little written about how that philosophy translates into developing a modern iOS app. Apple promises consumers that things 'will just work'. Just keep using apps in the same way and they will magically remain up-to-date across all your devices - in truth I'm not sure more magic was promised. Apple might be making a similar offer to developers. In principle iCloud means that an ObjectiveC developer with XCode can create and distribute apps containing this magical ingredient without having to learn any new skills, without having to develop any cloud-based components at all. What's more, with relatively little extra work, they c
Read more