iControl Everything

I firmly believe that within a couple of years, expensive universal remotes will be all but dead, as more home theater devices ship with Wifi built in and a phone or tablet app that controls them.

However, I'm worse than an early adopter- I'm an early experimenter. That's why rather than waiting for this to come built in to my next generation home theater/TV/cable box, I am going to spend a bunch of money and go through a bunch of hassle to try and make it happen right now.

My goal is to have total control of my media centers- both television and house-wide streaming video- from my iDevices by the end of this month. Here's what I am using to accomplish this:

Redeye Universal Remote System for iPhone and iPadThis is a clever device that joins your Wifi network and translates control inputs from your iPhone, iPod or iPad to IR control signals for your home theater. It's well reviewed by the users who seem to have realistic expectations about it. The few negative reviews seem to come from people with very large homes, and apparently the IR signals aren't powerful enough to propagate very far.

Overlarge rooms certainly won't be a problem for me, but the need to place this in front of the devices it controls is a problem- that will place it squarely in range of my 1 year old son, who will undoubtedly yank it off the coffee table the moment he sees it.

To avoid that, I'm going to pair it with a set of remote IR emitters. That way, I can hide it from prying hands and keep my family room coffee table a bit cleaner, too. It will add a bunch of wires to the rear of my entertainment center, but it's a rat's nest back there anyhow- a little more won't make much of a difference.

Music is going to be a little more complicated. I could go out and spend a bunch of money on a Sonos multi-room music system, which comes complete with an iPhone app for control. However, I already have a few parts that should allow me to (in theory) approximate the benefits of a Sonos without much extra money and work.


One of those pieces I already own is an Airport Express, which allows me to use a Remote app on my iPhone to play downloaded songs and streaming Internet radio from an existing Mac Mini. However, that setup misses on important piece of the Sonos experience - the ability to easily play different playlists and sources to different rooms, and seamless integration with Pandora and Sirius XM streaming radio. To enable that, I'm looking at Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil, which seems to have a few solutions to allow for that kind of flexibility using the Airport Express/Mac Minin/iPhone combination.

Sonos fans typically aren't satisfied with cheaper workalikes, but perhaps never having samples the Sonos goodness will allow me to live with a more "hackish" solution for the time being. However, if I have to keep running down to the Mac Mini to reboot something or restart the server software, I will probably relent and crack open the wallet eventually.

The goal is to have this stuff up and running in the next couple of weekends. I do know that juggling nine total remotes for three TV systems is going to get old quickly. If nothing else, the savings from AA and AAA batteries alone should be significant...

Why Safari on Windows? Here's Why.

Om Malik asks, 'why Safari on Windows?'

Om notes that alternative browsers don't thrive on the Windows platform, and that releasing software (even a free browser) to the wider Windows platform opens Apple up to the slings and arrows of outrageous (and unfriendly) pundits.

Om speculates that Apple's motives center around switchers- the more Apple interfaces you can acclimate Windows users to prior to their switch, the easier the transition becomes.

I think there's a more subtle, longer term motive to this plan, and it can be summed up in one Ballmeresque sentence: "Developers, developers, DEVELOPERS!"

Here's my reasoning:

1) The iPhone runs Safari.

2) The only way to write 'apps' for the iPhone is to create Safari-compatible widgets.

3) Making Safari available to Windows users makes it easier for Windows developers to create iPhone widgets, widening the pool of potential iPhone developers by a factor of 10.

Safari on Windows, and all the costs and PR headaches that go along with it, are a component of Apple's master plan to democratize mobile application development and create a platform owned by device makers (like Apple) and less dependent on carrier control.

Windows in a.... window

Although I buck the corporate trend by using a Mac as my primary machine at work (I'm one of four in my 55-person group), I still need to occasionally use internal websites or utilities that function only on Windows.

In the past, I've had to go so far as to find a Windows machine that someone wasn't using and borrow it for five minutes to fill out a form, approve a ticket or take a 'preventing violence in the workplace' course. Unfortunately, tincupping for IE time on coworker's computers didn't help support my smugly superior Mac user attitude.


Thankfully, the fine people at Parallels have come to the rescue of my frail Apple ego. With Parallels Desktop for Mac, I can boot up Windows in a window on my desktop, and launch Windows apps like Internet Explorer and go about my business of learning why I shouldn't batter my subordinates.



Sounds like a good setup, right? Well, it gets better. Recent versions of Parallels allow me to shrink the Windows window down to the specific application windows I'm using- this is called 'Coherence.' This allows me to use Windows applications without having to look at the rest of Windows:



Since the distinction is rather subtle in this mode, that's a screenshot of IE running in Windows, acting like a windowed application within Mac OS X.

An interesting artifact of this method is that it's actually a better experience running Windows in this mode. Since all the hardware is virtual, Windows doesn't have to fuss about installing drivers for this screen adapter or that USB device- Parallels manages the inputs, and makes everything on my Mac look like a plain vanilla PC to Windows.

The lack of hardware predictability has always been Window's main downfalls; the Mac OS has the luxury of a limited set of hardware profiles to support. By relieving Windows of the burden of playing a technological twenty questions every time I want to change a setting, its user experience goes from actively frustrating to merely goofy.

Microsoft benefits by selling another instance of Windows (I had to pay full price for it, something like $300) since it doesn't come pre-installed with Parallels, as it would on a physical PC. Since I'm not trying to make Windows work with a homemade PC using a video card manufactured by Frank's Discount Electronics and Fishing Lures, they don't have to spend money on a support person to tell me it's not Window's fault that the machine isn't working.

Of course, this does throw a wrench into Microsoft's plan to be the software that runs everything everywhere- on my hardware, Windows is a effectively a very complicated and bloated application runtime environment, like the Java virtual machine or the Flash plug-in.

One of the arguments coming from the Mac camp against virtualization went something like this: When Macs can run Windows apps, no one will bother writing Mac specific apps, and that will eventually lead to the end of the Mac software market- we'll be forced to use Windows versions of everything from Adobe Photoshop to SpaceWard Ho!. That might have been the case when Macs had proprietary, unique, expensive hardware- but now that Macs have Intel inside like the rest of the club, and the cost differential between Mac hardware and its PC equivalent has narrowed or disappeared, I'm seeing a different dynamic at work.

The logic I'm hearing nowadays is 'Since Macs can run both Mac OS and Windows, why would I buy a machine that can only run Windows applications?' Hardcore developer colleagues of mine are now switching over to MacBook Pros, confident they can still boot Vista to do their industrial work, but switch back to the Mac OS to organize their photos or videos with the iLife suite, or do super-easy video chatting with iChat and the nifty built-in camera on all Mac laptops.

Apple loves this, since they make very little money off their OS anyhow- it's mostly a shiny toy to get you to buy their computers. If they can add 'Windows' to the list of applications that run on the Mac, then they've got the world's largest software company effectively marketing their machines.

There's a few ways this story can go from here, but I'll leave the wild-eyed extrapolation for a future post. Suffice to say this is starting to evolve along the same lines of other tech vs. tech stories- as the technology behind a market advantage becomes widespread and commoditized, other qualities, such as brand, ease of use, reliability, and customer focus begin to reassert themselves. Steve Jobs should be thanking Gordon Moore and his eponymous law for chips that are powerful enough to render moot the OS as the overriding definition of the computing experience, and let task-based applications float to the top based on their merit.