iPhone 4 Ubiquity

With the release of iPhone 4, the UK joins the Czech Republic and Australia on the list of countries where all mobile networks (and Tesco, an MVNO) offer the iPhone. Apple have even just started selling the iPhone unlocked with no contract.

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iLike Ads

I like ads. Always have done. Good ones that is. As a teenager my walls were decorated with framed mini-proofs of poster campaigns that my dad worked on. There are some very effective TV and cinema campaigns that I enjoy watching, where each ad is part of a serial and I look forward to the next execution.

Are there any web ads I’d place in the same category? Web ads I’d mention to a friend ‘hey have you seen the latest Acme Widgets banner?’ Um, nope. Mostly they annoy the hell out of me, they make noises or enlarge, unbidden when I mouse over them, (hey. Wired, I’m looking at you) and worst of all are designed to hijack my attention and take me away from the content I want to read.

But the iAds that are demoed in this Stevenote (skip to 45 mins in unless you want to learn about the new features in iPhone OS 4.0), now they looked like the kind of advertising I wouldn’t mind on my phone.

Essentially they’re small ads when when clicked open in a layer over the app you were in. Then what you have could be described as a mini-app within the app, or a micro-site (depends on what paradigm you’re familiar with). Except unlike a standard micro-site there appears to be the ability to interact with the iPhone on a relatively meaningful level – like setting the wallpaper on your iPhone. I can only guess at the other possibilities.

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Of Prams, Toys and Throwing Stuff Out

Sorry for straying off-topic. If you’ve no interest in the iPhone, or Flash, skip this post.

Adobe’s ‘Flash evangelist’ Lee Brimelow isn’t happy with Apple:

Now let me put aside my role as an official representative of Adobe for a moment as Speaking purely for myself, I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple.

His beef is with Apple’s proposed change of terms in the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK agreement that state that you can’t use third-party frameworks. However I can see their reasons:

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From free to paid

Something flagged up an iPhone app to me this week called Air Video.

Here’s what Air Video does for me: it lets me stream videos stored in designated folders on my Mac (there’s also a PC version of Air Video Server) over wifi to my iPhone. Sounds simple? I guess it is, because it does exactly what it’s supposed to – but what it’s doing ‘in the background’ is converting on the fly the video file I want from a format that won’t play on the iPhone to one optimised specifically for the iPhone.

They provide a free version of the app that is limited in terms of how many files in a folder it will show when you’re connecting to your computer’s Air Video Server – it shows three files. The things that made me buy was that the list is random – it shows three items from however many you have in the folder. Refresh the list and it shows three different files. This means that someone who is extremely cheap could save themselves the $2.99 and work around that limitation by refreshing the list lots of time to get the file they want to show up. It shows a respect for their users, instead of “we’ll only let you watch the first 3 files in a folder” InMethod’s approach is “we’ll let you get almost all the functionality, we won’t stop you from watching any video in your served folder, but you’ll have to roll the dice to get it” thereby giving the user the opportunity to decide how much their time/irritation is worth.

Advanced users can also set it up to stream over the internet – instructions are in the FAQ for the software.