So The Guadian’s waded in with its size-tens, running an op-ed by Charles Arthur about Jobs being all grumpy with a trainee journo. She complains that Apple PR hasn’t responded to her questions (welcome to my world, baby journo!), and there’s a brief to-and-fro before Jobs says “Please leave us alone”.

I write for a bunch of Mac magazines, and am regularly frustrated with Apple PR. Those I deal with are friendly, courteous people, and they help when it benefits Apple very directly (they’re quick to supply review software, for example), but that’s basically it. The thing is, everyone in this industry knows the score with Apple, apart, apparently, from this trainee.

She says:

Unfortunately, for a journalist in the professional world, lacking the answers they need on deadline day won’t just cost them a grade; it could cost them their job.

That’s pretty unlikely when it comes to Apple, unless you’re working for an editor that’s gone mental and actually expects you to get a comment from the company. Even if that’s the case, whining to the CEO won’t help matters, and, frankly, if you’re going to be a journo, you’ll need to figure out some other course of action when things don’t go your way. In her case, an article on “implementation of an iPad program” at her school, was Apple PR really the only source she could use? Did she really expect the PR arm of a huge multinational to be at her beck and call?

Arhoolie sums it up nicely in the Guardian article’s comments:

[…] the whine of “don’t you realise you are threatening my grade” is quite common. Perhaps if the students made sure the work they have chosen to pursue is practical first much of this grief could be avoided.

Commercial firms, charities, and Govt Departements [sic] are not in existence to be a training resource for student journalists.

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.

Oh my. The BBC reports that all is not well at Pope HQ. Senior adviser and old git Cardinal Walter Kasper, when recently interviewed, referred to the UK as a “Third World country” marked by “a new and aggressive atheism”. Hole dug, the Vatican then said that the cardinal had not intended “any kind of slight” (oh, so that’s OK then), and was referring to the UK’s multicultural society (oh, so that’s—what? Wait a minute!). Kasper’s comment had in fact been “when you land at Heathrow you think at times you have landed in a Third World country”. Nice.

The UK’s got all sorts of problems when it comes to tribalism, but, by and large, it doesn’t do too bad. This island’s been a melting-pot nation of immigrants for centuries, and that’s part of what has made it great. To criticise the UK on the basis of its multiculturalism shows up Kasper and co. as being an even bigger shower of arseholes than most Brits thought in the first place.

TechRadar reports that Angry Birds is to get a new Mighty Eagle character. Available only as an in-app purchase, it changes your weapon to a sardine tin, which upon landing causes a gigantic eagle to come down and obliterate everything. Rovio argues that this will aid users who cannot get past certain levels.

Since Angry Birds has several difficultly walls—levels that abruptly require an insane level of precision to complete, despite being surrounded by far more forgiving ones—adding a paid-for cheat is a pretty loathsome tactic. It’s a band-aid to cover up for poor level design and a rather cynical way of generating revenue (rather than adding value with extra levels, which would be worth 59p).

Still, at least Rovio hasn’t broken Angry Birds in terms of scoring. Using the eagle doesn’t enable you to get a full three-star quota for the level it’s used on. Compare this to Bejeweled Blitz, totally ruined by PopCap when it added ‘boosts’ that can be bought using Facebook credits. With these, PopCap rendered its online high-score tables largely irrelevant, since players no longer start on an even playing field. It’s the rough equivalent of pitching two Pac-Man players against each other, only in one case a player’s yellow dot-muncher is accompanied by the Ghostbusters and a priest. Here’s hoping Rovio stamps on the brakes regarding ‘cheats’ before Angry Birds suffers the same fate.