Austin Seraphin, on ‘Rejoining the Apple Family’:

I joyfully look forward to the day when blind people finally catch on and realize that for $700, HALF the cost of JAWS for Windows, the most popular software used or rather pushed on the blind, they can get a fully functional computer that delivers a superior experience and comes with a superior screen reader with superior speech. May the Mac relegate Windows to the recycle bin, where it properly belongs.

Macworld reports that Warner has declined Apple’s invitation to offer 99-cent rentals for Apple TV. It reasons that the low price would harm the sales of full seasons of hit shows, and said it didn’t want to “open up a rental business in television at a low price”. Instead, Warner wants to continue charging viewers three bucks per TV episode.

Warner doesn’t get it. TV—even good TV—is relatively throwaway, but people are willing to pay if the price is right. $2.99 for a TV show is terrible value. $0.99 is directly in impulse purchase territory. For that price, people would try out way more stuff, and would be likely to grab each new episode as it came in, or just buy a season pass if they’d ordered a couple of episodes of a show that they ended up liking. Also, when prices fall and availability is immediate, people can’t be bothered to deal with torrents. For 99 cents, someone will pay for the latest Doctor Who. For three bucks, they’ll instead fire up their favourite BitTorrent client.

But wait! The industry says that lower pricing results in studios becoming paupers, right? Not quite. Stuart Campbell has written about premium versus low-end pricing in the iOS games market. With well-known properties—which TV shows mostly are—lower pricing equates to higher revenues overall, as shown by Pac-Man leaping into the top-grossing chart when at 99 cents (59p) and then disappearing without a trace when Namco returns to its rather ambitious pricing for a conversion of a 30-year-old arcade game. With TV shows, there are a lot of Pac-Mans, but, sadly, a lot of Namcos that own them

Apple’s thinking with TV is in enabling viewers to free themselves from buying loads of crap they don’t need in return for grabbing what they do at a reasonable price; it’s about low-cost entry but long-term profits, for Apple and for studios. It’s a pity Warner doesn’t get it, but it almost certainly won’t be alone, and I suspect the future for Apple TV may well be bleak unless studios wrench themselves out of the 1990s and embrace the idea of more flexible delivery mechanisms and pricing for TV shows.

Given Apple’s recent guidelines stating that developers must not mess with hardware controls for fear of confusing users, it’s a pity to discover Apple’s killed the screen rotation lock on the iPad. Numerous sources, including The iPad Guide, state that iOS 4.2 changes the lock button to a mute switch.

Apple’s argument will probably centre on hardware consistency, rather than legacy consistency—the iPhone 4 uses its equivalent button for mute, but I think Apple’s making a mistake. On a phone, the need for muting is common; on an iPod touch—a very portable mobile system—one might make a similar argument. However, on the iPad, muting is not such a common requirement, but the screen rotation lock is regularly used, especially in-app, notably in browsing environments (Safari, Instapaper, Reeder, etc.) and when reading electronic books.

At present, you can lock the screen rotation temporarily, whenever you need to, moving the iPad in and out of the locked-screen state as and when required. All this needs is the click of a button. As of iOS 4.2, the process will change to match that on an iPhone or iPod touch:

1. Double-click the Home button, to access the multitasking bar;
2. Swipe right to access controls;
3. Locate and tap the rotation lock.

Even for seasoned users, this is ungainly, awkward and time-consuming. Worse, for newcomers to the platform, these controls are twice hidden: not only do users need to know that the multitasking bar exists, but also they need to be able to find the controls by swiping to them. I suspect that many will never see them, reducing the usability of the iPad. (For muting fans, it’s also worth noting that the iPad currently provides fast access to mute by click-holding the volume-down setting of the volume rocker switch.)

I hope Apple provides some kind of option for users regarding the functionality of the soon-to-be-mute button. Losing the rotation-lock option by default wouldn’t bother me in the slightest if I could get it back with a quick trip to the Settings app. Sadly, this isn’t the way Apple rolls, and so I guess we’ll all be waving goodbye to a great piece of iPad functionality come November.

The Macalope‘s latest column for Macworld nicely sums up why people are so boneheadedly wrong with the whole ‘Android is Microsoft in the mobile wars’ thing:

Everyone wants to compare the Apple/Google mobile OS wars to the Apple/Microsoft desktop wars of the 1990s. But if Compaq ever got out of line, Microsoft always told them to go jump in a proverbial lake. And then it pushed them in an actual lake. Filled with sharks. A special breed of freshwater great white sharks that the company had genetically engineered for that particular purpose. And then it poured petroleum into the lake and lit it on fire.

He argues that Google being ‘forced’ by operators to do things like make Bing (instead of Google) the default (and sometimes impossible to change) search engine means Google’s a world away from Microsoft; it also highlights that Google has significantly less leverage than Microsoft had over PC vendors before mobile became so astonishingly important.

I’d add that it also seems that Google appears to have less leverage than Apple in this space. Can you imagine a carrier forcing Apple to install apps that can’t be deleted, or telling Apple to use Bing for search and also remove Google and Yahoo? Rumours at the moment reckon this is precisely what’s going to happen with a Verizon iPhone in the USA; frankly, I think hell will freeze over first. To that end, one might argue that the company closest to playing the role of Microsoft in the mobile wars is Apple.

So I just installed iOS 4.1 on my iPhone and started farting about with Game Center. Like Ping, it does make me wonder if Apple understands that when it comes to social networking, it’s best not to avoid the ‘social’ and ‘networking’ bits.

The good

Game Center has a pretty straightforward interface that shows up the likes of OpenFeint as being even more of a mess than you originally thought they were. I can take or leave (well, if I’m honest, leave; well, if I’m really honest, set fire to) the casino-like gambling table green-fuzz and wood visual appearance, but at least the navigation is fine.

The bad and the bonkers

In the case of Game Center, ‘the bad’ and ‘the bonkers’ are both the same thing. Currently, most of my social gaming happens on Facebook, but via iOS games that happily connect to my Facebook account. I sign in, and immediately I have an arcade-game-style high-score table, populated with my friends’ scores. It’s great, and it’s simple (one click and a sign-in).

Because Apple hates relying on others, it’s eschewed this approach, instead forcing you to go through a protracted set-up to get your Apple ID talking to Game Center, followed by an invite system that’s either by known username or by email (seriously).

The modern web and online services are entirely based around networking, and are successful when these services all talk to each-other. By sealing itself off from the rest of the world and existing social networking (be it Facebook, Twitter or other services), Game Center irks. I don’t doubt it’ll be a success—there are too many iOS gamers and excited developers for it not to be. But it is awkward, unwieldy and unnecessarily time-consuming to deal with, and these are direct opposites to the things Apple has historically been known for.

Update: Game Center also cunningly provides usernames only with friend requests. I’ve already had a request from someone who I’ve no idea who they are. Gnh.

Update 2: ‘The Rev’ writes in the comments: “It’d be nice if it worked, too – the Flight Control leaderboard is showing my first score today, not the better score from my next attempt and not my best score from before Game Center launched.” Oh dear. Follow-up-o-tron: “It’s actually my FIRST since GC – not best since. I’ve done better today and it’s not uploaded. Other people okay, though.” Fire up the Bug Kill Machine, Walter!