Since getting my Macbook, I’ve not looked back. The PC has been turned on about four times since the macbook arrived back in April…and when it has been turned on it’s been to transfer some files from it to the Macbook! I think my love of all things Mac has stemmed from something I often heard other mac users say and generally scoffed at – things just work! I shut the macbook, it goes to sleep. I open it up, it wakes up within seconds. Simple things like that, but features that can’t always be taken for granted. I put Windows 7 on my Dad’s PC for him – put into hibernate mode. It didn’t like it and woke itself back up. I guess Apple having control over the hardware and OS gives them a significant advantage. I just love using the Macbook, and I’m now considering getting an iMac at some point in the future as a bigger desktop computer. The 27″ screens and breathtaking (when they are not suffering from flickering issues!). How things change!

One of the main things I thought I’d struggle to give up PC’s for was gaming. Browsing the web, watching movies, making music, photo editing are pefect on the Macbook. Gaming….not so good. Then along came my 360. I did buy one in early 2008 but sold it a few months later. For some reason, it didn’t work for me at the time. Partly because it was so bloody noisy when spinning up the DVD, partly because I was in the middle of some games on the PC so saw no point in also buiying them for the 360 and partly because I was all thumbs on the controller. A year went buy, and I began to use the 360 controller when playing PC games more, I got frustrated that I dropped a load of cash upgrading my PC to a high-spec and I still couldn’t play Crysis above Medium settings (considering most PC’s still can’t max that game out even now, says a lot about how demoralising trying to make it look good was!), games like FIFA came out on the PC as a console’s poor relation and then Microsoft let you install games on the 360 hard drive. The time came when I decided to go and get a 360 Elite and I’ve loved it ever since. That took PC-gaming out of the Mac vs PC conundrum.

One of the other reason I decided to give Mac’s a try (I’d always sort of wanted to at least try out OS X but had been put off by the prices before) was the iPhone. I got it back in 2008 and it made me realise that if the iPhone OS could be so good, maybe it was finally worth giving some other Apple products a shot. The iPhone still amazes me – I usually buy a gadget, get all excited about it beforehand, excited about it for the first few months and then get frustrated by its limitations or my eye gets drawn to something else. It’s been nearly 18 months since I got the iPhone and it still amazes me and is still a pleasure to use. The app store gives you a never ending supply of new toys and utilities. It’s the greatest gadget I’ve ever owned, and it will take some topping.

Anything else of tech note? Spotify has to be up there. I’ve only opened iTunes on the computer or the iPhone to listen to the odd track that I can’t get on Spotify (Beatles, AC/DC and Metallica are the few that come to mind). I’m a Spotify Premium member and I can’t get enough of the iPhone app. I can have an artists entire back catalogue on my iPhone all set up, synced locally before I go to work in the morning. I can listen to albums that I’d probably never have paid for, or even downloaded illegally to be honest. It’s just so easy to listen to new music. The playlists are a tad cumbersome and I hope they get improved, but as a core product it’s astounding and whether or not it lasts the distance I think streaming music is the way forward for me.

Those are the big 2009 changes for me. I’ll be posting some 2010 tech predictions and hopes for the year ahead soon…

Let’s take his points:

• Video compression – it’s highly likely there will be artefacts involved here – however he also shows that 30fps SD video looks pretty damn good. So things are already possible on a certain level. Things can only get better from there – think about how much video compression and streaming technologies have progressed in the last 5-10 years. Who’s to say there won’t be just as many strides in the next 5-10 years? He said his colleagues reactions were often laughing at the thought of what OnLive are claiming, but why can’t a company come along that has made some real innovations? Just because you are an expert in the field at this moment, doesn’t mean someone won’t come along at some point and re-write the rulebook.
• Latency – he admits that with an IPTV-style model this could give you enough bandwidth in theory but then talks about how much ISP’s complained about the bandwidth used by BBC Iplayer and how they reacted to that, but again, where have we come from? Imagine the thought of streaming TV over your net connection when we were using 14.4K modems! Things have progressed and adapted and I see no reason why things won’t change and adapt in the future. If you just look at business models of ISPs now and how things are currently set up, it does seem like a service such as OnLive could struggle with real world conditions but things evolve. I see no reason why OnLive won’t be another reason for ISPs to evolve further.
• Hardware – this is probably the biggest point he raised. If thousands of people want to start playing GTAV on the day of release how are they going to cope with that? Think of the thousands of servers needed, how powerful they’d need to be and then think of the costs!…but again, think outside the box here. People are thinking about just adapting the same game that runs on a console or PC to run on a server, but as this technology grows code will change to be more efficient on this kind of platform. New hardware technology will be produced for this exact sort of use once demand grows.

An interesting article at PALGN puts a more positive slant on things here. They quote an article on game response times, i.e. input lag – with Virtua Tennis 3 having a 67ms response time and GTAIV 167ms. The report concluded that anything beyond 167ms felt sluggish. So if OnLive are building datacenters which are up to 1000 miles away, it’s going to create latencies of around 30ms. Video compression technology has been pretty slow (500ms+) but the technology OnLive seem to be trumpeting is the fact that they can do the same thing in 1ms – and why not? They have been working on the technology for 7 years – maybe this is where their breakthrough has been. So add another 5ms or so on to the total figure for decompression at the client end and you could be talking sub 40ms. This is still well within the game response times people experience on a console, so in theory it all seems feasible.

Maybe OnLive is just sowing the seeds. Maybe it will fail as it’s still a bit too early for their business model to work, especially where hardware costs are involved, but I don’t think this is a flash in the pan. as I keep saying, the key is to think outside the box – many technologies we take for granted now were laughed at when they first came on the scene. ‘It’ll never work’ people say. Well, sometimes things don’t quite live up to the claims but generally as technologies mature they do in the end. The whole concept of OnLive is a rule-breaker. People comment about how Sony or Microsoft will think about this, and how they won’t want to stop their lucrative console/game tie-ins…but that’s thinking about the whole thing with today’s rules. Rip up the rule book and things have to change.

PALGN sum it up nicely when they say “OnLive still has a lot it needs to show, but it does look like it has the ability to live up to the hype. Its possible impact on gaming over the next 5 years can’t be understated.”

What OnLive seem to have made serious attempts at cracking is video compression that is buffer and lag free (well, 1ms). When you split up what these guys are actually offering it seems all seem very plausible. Streaming games from a server isnt a new idea – streammygame.com has been around for a few years and although the results weren’t amazing even in a LAN, it was just using normal hardware – nothing custom there, just custom software. Then you think of steaming video. You may think of YouTube with its low quality videos and buffering but think of IPTV and Cable. Homechoice was streaming SD video over a broadband connection to my TV years ago, and now over Cable I can watch on demand HD video pretty quickly which is basically streamed across the fibre from their servers.

So if these guys have monster servers with custom hardware which spits out the compressed video as fast as it gets fed it, it’s not a leap of the imagination to have it streamed down to your TV with controls sent back the other way to change what happens in the game, and therefore what you see on your screen. The only issue here is guaranteed bandwidth with your ISP. I’ve got a 10mbps Virgin Media cable connection, but there are times this goes a lot slower – but that is Virgin Media’s choice. If they wanted to guarantee me a certain amount of speed and bandwidth to use something like OnLive they could do that. Homechoice used LLU at my local exchange, so they had more control over my broadband connection, which meant they could guarantee that at least 2mpbs was reserved for the TV signal which came down over the wire. If something like OnLive takes off, I can see this changing the way companies offer their services. Maybe you’d need to pay more for guaranteed speed/bandwidth to make it work and work well, but I’m sure an extra £10/month for the ‘Game’ service on top of my cable TV, phone and internet bill would be welcomed if it gave you the performance you needed.

Early reports from hands-on articles show that this is however in its relative infancy. The front-end does what it says it should – its slick streamed on a low end laptop. You can view other peoples games and launch your own game with ease. Lag is sometimes not noticable but other times it is there a bit – e.g. spinning round quickly in Bioshock. Hardcore CSS gamers etc.. will probably not touch it until that is ironed out. There are also evidence of compression on screen, e.g. patchy artefacts. It’s not enough to stop you playing – and I remember that kind of thing watching TV on Homechoice now and again – but it’s enough to make you want to be playing it on your own hardware where it’s all pinsharp! Again, as the technology improves I can see that becoming less and less of an issue, but how long that could take is anyone’s guess.

It may be there are two tiers of gamers for a while – people who want to just play a game casually and can put up with the odd bit of lag or artefacts and those who won’t touch it until it’s just as good as their console or powerhouse PC at home. Ulitmately though I can see games going the way of movies, which is what they are beginning to rival in terms of $’s. They are both a form of entertainment. When I get the latest blockbuster film on DVD, I don’t have to make sure I’ve stuck a new graphics card in my DVD player so I can see all the special fx – that’s all done by the film companies on their powerful servers when they render them and edit them together. Wouldn’t it be great with games where games companies only have to worry about getting the game to run exactly how they want you to see it on the OnLive servers – as for the consumers, we just want to be enterainted. We log on to a service such as OnLive, select the latest game, and we’re playing it and being entertained with no worry of hardware.

This is defintely the future, and I think I’ve just seen a glimpse of it. Other areas of computing are moving this way – virtual desktops, application steaming etc.. Why get a powerful PC to run the latest version of Photoshop, when I could run it in the cloud and have no difference in useability running on a little solid state device. Then it becomes all about what’s ultimately important to us as users – software. Hardware then becomes something which will compete on form and design, not function. The function at our end will be fixed. The development will happen at the back-end.

The whole issue of 3D graphics seemed to be the missing bit of the puzzle when looking at the movement of software into the cloud. OnLive has brought that vision a little closer to reality…

Hardware wise….what would I want to make me upgrade early (if that’s possible with my contract)…more space! 32GB would be great. Obviously, the more the better but 32GB would give me enough room for all my music, some videos and loads of apps.

Next – better camera. I’m not asking for anything with loads more megapixels. Just something that gives sharper photos and ideally with a flash!! Something that could do quality video would be very nice – I know jailbroken ones can do 15fps, but something with 25fps, decent quality and the ability for devs to plug into the API so you can upload videos to the web would be amazing.

Lastly – better battery life. This isn’t a big one for me. I charge it everyday, so I’ve never been in a situation when I run out of juice. At the very least it would be nice to get a bit more juice to cover any more power needed for push notifications. Even better would be the ability to go a few days without a charge, even with relatively heavy usage. I could live without that though.

Software-wise? There’s so much great stuff in 3.0. People I’m sure will rave about copy and paste, but I’ve rarely found myself in the situation where I was wishing I had the ability to do it. Turn by turn maps will be very useful, but the great thing is now 3rd parties will be able to create hardware add-ons or talk to 3rd party hardware via bluetooth to bolster any features or give you new ones. In the example of turn by turn GPS – I have my doubts that the iphone GPS is sensitive enough to replace a TomTom – but if that was the case, TomTom can bring out some new hardware that plugs in the bottom which contains a much more suitable GPS receiver, and maybe even a flash drive that contains all the maps you need – no need to waste your iphone storage…or even a receiver/flashdrive which communicates via bluetooth. It may even be possible to plug more storage in the bottom of the iphone for the times when you need a library of films to watch and don’t have enough space for them! I’m sure we’ll see some very cool new products on the horizon. Features like peer to peer comms makes things even more interesting!

So – things missing? Well, none of these are definitely not in the product – we probably won’t know until the devs have a good look at the new API but three that come to mind are wifi syncing, video recording app possibility and flash support (although when asked, Apple said “We have no announcements on Flash today”…the same answer they said when asked about an Apple netbook…interesting… There’s still hope on those features.

One of the smaller features I’m looking forward to is caldav support – if I could sync over wifi, or over the air, the iphone calendar with the gmail calendar I’d be very happy indeed!

http://www.spotify.com/en/about/jobs/software-engineer-iphone-platform/

Fingers crossed! That, over 3G or wifi with playlist caching and we have a game changer on our hands!

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