Roku's new dedicated box for streaming content from Netflix's Watch Instantly service offers a fairly large but somewhat eclectic variety of decent quality movies and TV programs at a very reasonable price, particularly for existing Netflix subscribers. While frequently pitted against Apple TV, the two products are actually more complementary than directly competitive. Here's how they stack up.
Netflix and Roku are stepping up to the plate with a media hub that promises a much less expensive way to watch movies online without a per-movie cost. In this preview ahead of our full review, we unpack the device and give our first impressions on how it stacks up to Apple's offering.
While Apple's share of the entire US PC market hovers between 6% and 8% depending on the source, its share of the 802.11n WiFi base station market is even higher.
Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, scheduled for June 9-11, has sold out for the first time ever. Attendance at the event has rapidly grown as interest in the Mac platform has snowballed in proportion to rapid new sales of Macs.
Quark, Inc. is preparing to release a major new version of its flagship QuarkXPress software this fall, aimed at cementing its lead in the market for professional desktop publishing against Adobe's rival InDesign product, AppleInsider has learned.
Flash has plenty of enemies and obstacles, but it also enjoys wide deployment and familiarity. Two areas where Flash can offer real value is in displaying and packaging video on the web, and in serving as a Java replacement for developing applets. Here's a look at how Adobe is working to defend its strengths in the face of competition, and how its efforts to open the Flash specification in the Open Screen Project play into these efforts.
While widely deployed as a web plugin and among the few web technologies that have become a household word, Adobe's Flash has more than a few substantial enemies that would like to see it replaced, cloned, or erased.
Pitted against Microsoft's efforts to crush Flash using its own copycat Silverlight platform, open source projects seeking to duplicate Flash for free, and Apple's efforts to create a mobile platform wholly free of any trace of Flash, Adobe has scrambled to announce efforts to make Flash a public specification in the Open Screen Project.
According to an article in Hollywood Reporter, Apple is expected to announce as early as Thursday a new deal with a wide array of major and mini studios to offer many new movie releases, including a broad slate of top-shelf films, for direct purchase at its iTunes Store at the same as their DVD release. [Update: Apple has formally announced the deal.]
The next generation of iPhone appears set to claim exclusive access to advanced graphics core and video decoding technology, thanks to a secret licensing deal between Apple, mobile graphics leader Imagination Technologies, and Samsung, the iPhone's ARM "system on a chip" manufacturer. The result may be an ideal platform for handheld gaming and high definition video playback.
Exclusive Preview: With the deluge of data hitting users in the modern age, managing piles of information has become increasingly important but also more difficult. Evernote is on its way to both the Mac and the iPhone, and promises to simplify the effort needed to catalog, tag and organize web clippings, text and handwritten notes, photos, emails, audio clippings, and more, making it easy to search and review all those bits later without having to think too hard about how to do it.
Scheduled delivery of Apple computers to schools run by the New York City Department of Education have been temporarily suspended due to problems related to connecting to the DOE's wireless network infrastructure.
A Michigan company has set its sights on promoting wireless power, and suggests the technology could quickly find its way into devices like the iPhone.
Time Capsule expands the wireless base station into a file and printer sharing solution and Time Machine target. This segment, the last of six exploring Time Capsule in depth, provides a review of its features and limitations as a wireless file sharing and backup appliance, along with comparisons to alternative products and previous AirPort models.
Time Capsule is billed as an ideal backup target for Time Machine. At the same time, networked drives (and particularly wireless shares) are often slower than a directly connected USB backup drive. This segment, the fifth of six exploring Time Capsule in depth, compares the pros and cons of using a solution like Time Capsule and the AirPort Extreme to perform Time Machine backups relative to using a directly attached hard drive.
Time Capsule, like most of Apple's earlier AirPort base stations, can handle both wired and wireless networked devices, but is optimized for serving wireless clients. This segment, the fourth of six exploring Time Capsule in depth, highlights the differences between wired and wireless networking on Time Capsule and the AirPort Extreme.
Earlier versions of the WiFi specification all used the 2.4GHz radio spectrum. The new 802.11n standard, supported in Time Capsule, the square AirPort Extreme, and recently shipping AirPort Express units, allows users to alternatively select the use of 5GHz channels. This segment, the third of six, compares the pros and cons of using this new section of frequencies, which can be both problematic and provide a major boost in speed.
Time Capsule, announced earlier this year, is a base station with an integrated hard drive and power supply. The previous segment of this series exploring Time Capsule in depth looked at the differences in members of the AirPort family. This segment, the second of six, compares the differences between the hypothetical maximum data transmission speed and typical real world performance of Time Capsule's SATA, USB 2.0, Ethernet networking, and WiFi Wireless networking interfaces.
Time Capsule, announced at this years' Macworld Expo, serves as a simple rebranding of the AirPort Extreme with an integrated hard drive and power supply. Apple sells the new Time Capsule next to last years AirPort Express and the compact AirPort Express. This segment, the first of six exploring Time Capsule in depth, highlights the differences between the members of Apple's AirPort family.
Intel next quarter will introduce several new high-speed solid state drives (SSDs), including a 160GB model that will more than double the amount of storage capacity that Apple could offer customers of its SSD-based MacBook Air.
Epocrates, Inc., the developer of mobile applications used by more than 500,000 healthcare professionals, has announced plans to bring its clinical software products to the iPhone.
Apple's SDK roadmap announcements were expected to primarily introduce the company's plans for releasing development tools for casual developers, but chief executive Steve Jobs started the event by introducing broad initiatives to greatly improve the iPhone's features to satiate the demands of Enterprise users.
Following our introduction and teardown of Time Capsule, we were deluged with questions from readers about the product and how it works. Here's what we've found, along with some discoveries reported by readers.
Time Capsule moves Apple's popular AirPort line of wireless base stations one step closer into the realm of embedded servers, providing shared file and print services in addition to acting as a target for Leopard's Time Machine feature. Here's a look at how it works with Leopard, Tiger and Windows clients, and what components are inside the device making everything happen.
Over the last year, many observers have wondered when Apple would deliver Adobe Flash support on the iPhone. At the company's shareholder meeting on Tuesday, Steve Jobs made comments that indicate that support isn't coming anytime soon, thanks to architectural limitations in Flash itself. A full explanation of those limitations follow.
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