The big iOS news of this week was actually tvOS news — lots of folks discovering tips and tricks on the Apple TV. For example, I wish I had known the trick about pressing play/pause to shift from lowercase to uppercase back when I was first setting up my own Apple TV and entering passwords. This tip and many more are included in the news items of note from this past week:
Marc Newson is a famous designer who helped Apple to design the Apple Watch. He is now an Apple employee and spends about 60% of his time working for Apple. James Chessell of the Autralian Financial Review posted an interesting interview with Newson.
We are in the first week of the new Apple TV, so it was in the news quite a bit this week. Jason Snell discusses the future of Apple TV in an article for iMore.
One of the nice features of the Apple TV is that you can connect Bluetooth headphones, so that you can watch a show or play a game without disturbing others in the same room. Brent Zaniewski of iMore recommends Bluetooth headphones to pair with an Apple TV.
Security expert Rich Mogull gets to the bottom of reports that a security broker recently paid $1 million for a browser-based iOS 9 hack, in an article for TidBITS.
As attorneys, we often make arguments that parties are bound by the terms of their contractual agreements. Thus, I won’t ask you how many times you yourself have tapped a button on your iPhone or iPad acknowledging that you have read the iTunes Terms and Conditions; you would have to plead the Fifth, because we both know that you haven’t actually done so. The current version (revised Oct. 21, 2015) is 20,624 words long. It is a running joke that virtually nobody has ever read it.
New York artist Bob Sikoryak is famous for his masterful cartoons drawn in the style of other artists, such as his Masterpiece Comics collection which combines classic literary works with modern comics (for example, The Stranger by Albert Camus as a Superman comic). This year, Sikoryak has been working on a new comic book in which each page is drawn in the style of another famous comic book artist. Sikoryak explained to Brady Dale of the New York Observer how he came up with the subject for his latest work: “So I was thinking, ‘What would be an interesting thing to adapt?’ And I made a joke to someone that: ‘I should do the iTunes agreement.’ And the more I thought about it, I realized, I had to do it.”
The end result is an illustrated version of the iTunes Terms and Conditions. All of the words that you know and love are there, and they are incorporated into wonderful illustrations that feature a cartoon version of Steve Jobs. But each page is different — and thus each Jobs is different — because each page is done in the style of a different artist.
For example, here is page 6 of the comic book, illustrating the ‘Pre-Orders” section of the agreement, done in the style of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts:
And here is page 15 of the comic book, illustrating the “Automatic Delivery and Downloading Previous Purchases” section of the agreement, done in the style of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes:
(All images posted with permission of R. Sikoryak)
Sikoryak is posting each page of his book to a Tumblr page called iTunes Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel. He started in September and he is now up to page 49. New pages are added to the top, so if you want to read in order starting at the cover and then page 1, page 2, etc., you’ll have to scroll all the way to the bottom of that page and then page up towards the top of the page.
This graphic novel is great fun. You’ll find pages done in the style of:
Rex Morgan, M.D. (Dal Curtis, Marvin Bradley, John Frank Edgington)
Dilbert (Scott Adams)
R. Crumb
Little Lulu (John Stanley and Irving Tripp)
Amazing Spiderman (Stan Lee and Steve Ditko)
The Walking Dead (Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard)
Archie (Dan DeCarlo)
Garfield (Jim Davis)
Cathy (Cathy Guisewite)
Richie Rich (Warren Kremer)
Dennis the Menace (Hank Ketcham)
The Flash (John Broome and Carmine Infantino)
Beetle Bailey (Mort Walker)
Rube Goldberg
Tintin (Hergé)
Saga (Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples)
…and many, many more.
I never thought it was possible for someone to come up with a way to make me want to make my way through every page of the iTunes Terms and Conditions, and then want to go through and look at it all again, but Sikoryak has definitely done it. Sikoryak has truly found a way to turn the iTunes Terms and Conditions into a page turner.
Bravo on a job well done, and I look forward to the upcoming additions!
The fourth generation of the Apple TV went on sale this past Friday. I bought one and have had a chance to use it over the weekend. If you have used either of the two prior models of the Apple TV (the second generation came out in 2010; the third generation in 2012), there is much that is similar. You still have a home screen with icons, and you scroll down to see more icons. Some features have barely changed at all from the prior model except for an updated interface, such as the ability to use Home Sharing to stream your music, photos and videos (purchased or home videos) from a Mac on your home network that is running iTunes. But one thing is very different, and it has the potential to make the Apple TV infinitely better than prior models: the ability to download apps.
Third Party Apps
When the iPhone App Store was introduced on July 10, 2008, there were 500 apps available. A year later, there were 65,000 apps, and today there are well over a million apps. But even on day 1, many recognized that the true value of the iPhone App Store was its potential. Developers could create apps to give the iPhone, and then the iPad, capabilities that their creators at Apple probably never dreamed of. For example, we now have a large number of fantastic legal-specific apps.
Apps on the Apple TV have the same potential. There are a limited set of TV apps available today, and some of them — like Netflix and YouTube — provide the same capabilities that that had been baked-in to previous versions of the Apple TV. But already we are seeing some pretty neat TV apps. Games were a popular app category on the iPhone, and I’m sure that the same will be true on the TV. For example, this weekend my kids and I enjoyed playing Beat Sports, which is pretty fun. And while I’m normally not a big fan of Crossy Road on the iPhone or iPad, I must admit that my kids and I had a ton of laughs when we played the two-player version on the Apple TV (using an iPhone as a controller for Player 2). There are some interesting non-game apps already available; here is a list of some from Rene Ritchie of iMore.
But again, what really interests me is not what is there today, but the idea that the App Store can grow in quantity and quality. Many attorneys use an Apple TV in trials, mediations and meetings so that they can display information on an iPad for others to see. It is probably a question of when, not if, before we will see Apple TV apps designed for lawyers.
Siri remote
Another new feature of the fourth generation Apple TV is the Siri Remote. As the name implies, you can press a button on the remote to activate Siri and ask it to play movies or TV shows, or even search for specific episodes. This is nice because the alternative way of entering input into a TV device — using a small remote to select letters, one letter at a time — is slow and maddening.
Unfortunately, right now Siri is mostly limited to videos, although there are a few other questions that it can now handle (and I’m sure that this will improve in the future). For now, you sometimes need to provide other text to the Apple TV, such as a username or password, and you have to use the old, slow and maddening method. Fortunately the Apple TV removes a little of that misery by offering to connect to your iPhone and learn some basic information from it, such as your WiFi network and password. Every little bit helps.
The Siri remote also has a touch surface at the top where you can swipe and click to navigate the Apple TV. I find this much easier to use than the old Apple TV remote.
The Siri remote can also measure movement, so you can use it to play Wii-style games on your Apple TV.
Volume buttons on the remote can control the volume on your TV or even on your receiver. There is a fantastic interface for learning your receiver without having to type in four digit codes or anything like that. Just follow the instructions and hold the volume up and down buttons on your receiver’s remote when asked.
Unlike the iPhone 6s and Apple Watch, the Siri remote does not include the ability to sense how hard you are pushing down (Force Touch / 3d Touch). That might be a useful feature for a remote, so perhaps we’ll one day see an updated version of the Siri remote.
I like the new remote because it is both easy to use and powerful. My main complaint is that sometimes it is hard to figure out which end is up, especially in the beginning, but that is no longer an issue for me now that I added Apple’s $13 Remote Loop to the bottom, making it easy to see which end is up (and preventing my kids from flinging the remote across the room while swinging a bat in Beat Sports).
Speed and Responsiveness
The new Apple TV uses a much faster processor inside. This is important because the unit is very quick to respond to your controls, which makes the experience of using the Apple TV much better.
Apple also did a nice job with the user interface, with all sorts of little touches that make it super easy to move around the screen. The nice interface makes the Apple TV seem easier to use.
Responsiveness is especially nice when you are watching a video and want to move forward or backward (scrubbing). You can tap the left or right side of the touch pad to jump forward or backward 10 seconds, and doing so is incredibly fast. Or you can slide your finger across the touch pad to move through the video timeline. On many other TV-connected devices, scrubbing is so difficult that I often just don’t do it. But on the new Apple TV, this feature works amazingly well.
Note that Apple sells both a $150 32 GB version and a $200 64 GB version. The more expensive version has the potential to be even faster because it can store more data locally without the need to stream it. Apple says that the 64 GB version is recommended if you plan to download and play a lot of games. I opted for the 64 GB version just in case it is noticeably better and because the $50 difference is not large, but at this point I have no idea whether the extra memory makes a big difference.
4th generation = 1.0
Apple calls this the fourth generation of the Apple TV, but because this is the first version to run the tvOS system, a close cousin to iOS, in many ways Apple TV has the hiccups of a new version 1.0 product — even when it comes to technology that is under Apple’s own control. For example, Apple TV doesn’t work with Apple’s own Remote app on the iPhone, which is a huge surprise and disappointment because it means that for those times when you need to enter text on the Apple TV, you cannot just use the familiar keyboard on your iPhone.
Another noticeable omission: iCloud Photo Library. My iPhone and iPad now have access to every single one of my almost 50,000 digital photographs because they are stored on iCloud. But this feature doesn’t exist yet on Apple TV. For now, there is a workaround that I noted above — make sure that your computer is on the same network and running iTunes, and use Home Sharing. But the Apple TV would work better with the same full photo access that exists on iOS devices. I’m sure that this is coming in an update, but I was surprised that it wasn’t ready on Day 1.
I’m sure that Apple was eager to get something on the market in time for the holidays and had to leave a few unfinished features for a future update. Nevertheless, it is a shame that the device has some missing pieces. Fortunately, other functions on the Apple TV work great, and I have no doubt that Apple will soon release software updates to address these and other initial limitations.
Conclusion
The 2015 version of the Apple TV has a few missing features, but it is still an amazing device today and will get even better with a few updates. It is clearly the first step towards a much better TV experience. It will be great fun to see what developers come up now that they can create apps.
