MacOS X Leopard, iPhone and Stereo Bluetooth Headphones - A2DP

Over a year ago I bought stereo bluetooth headphones on eBay, its a multifunction unit the OMIZ OMS600, and it includes an MP3 player (with MicroSD slot), FM radio, Stereo A2DP headphone and Headset with Mono audio/Microphone. When I tried to configure it on MacOS X Tiger it didn't work because there was no A2DP headphone support.

MacOS X Leopard now supports A2DP and "just works" with this headset. The Mac sees both the Headset (Mono audio/mic for Skype etc) and Headphone (A2DP Stereo) as separate devices. After the usual Bluetooth device wizard setup, simply put the OMS600 into the headphone mode and pick "Use Headphone" from the Bluetooth dropdown menu on the Mac, the Mac's internal speakers mute, and the Headphones play. It worked over a 10 foot range walking around a room, crackled a bit at the limit and dropped the connection if I went too far away.

I don't see the OMS600 for sale any more, but there are plenty of A2DP headphones out there now, and its nice to see that Apple finally got the devices to work, and made it "Just Work" as usual.

The headset mode also works on my iPhone, but the A2DP mode doesn't. I paired the headset with the iPhone and was able to make calls and receive them. When using the FM radio or the MP3 player built-into the headset it paused and resumed for incoming calls. However when the Headphone mode was paired with my Leopard machine the iPhone didn't route calls to the Headset. The OMS600 headset has the microphone built into the left side earpiece with no voice tube or boom down nearer my mouth, and it doesn't pick up very clearly. The noise cancelling Jawbone headset works far better.

I listened to some music on iTunes (Radiohead In Rainbows and Gorillaz D-Sides are my current albums for serial listening) and waited forever for XP to start up in Parallels so I could fire up IE7 and see a Netflix Watch Instantly show about the Pixies reunion tour (called LoudQuietLoud). [Yes I know it would be nice if it worked natively on the Mac, but the studios only approve Windows DRM, and the alternatives all have issues that are taking way too much time to sort out].

Happy new year...

Leopard review, iPhone 1.1.2 release and the Google Phone

There is an excellent in depth review of Leopard at Ars Technica, it talks about the Core Animation feature which seems like a very powerful way of specifying device independent animation effects that will work on a desktop or (eventually) on an iPhone.

Now that Apple has got Leopard out, their next move is the UK launch of the iPhone on November 9th, and as I have mentioned before, there is some additional localization needed for this and it appears that this is going to be the main feature of iPhone 1.1.2 release. The UK press is starting to get its hands on the UK product, which is running 1.1.2. The main features are a fairly complete set of worldwide localized languages, a closing of the hole that is currently being used for hacking into the iPhone, and some local features related to the UK deal with O2 and The Cloud for WiFi access, and the UK iTunes music store. There doesn't seem to be any new applications in this release.

There has been a lot of speculation about Google releasing a set of phone applications or perhaps a complete phone OS. They have been working closely with Apple, so there may be some additional/optional iPhone applications coming directly from Google. However, there is currently no support for Java on the iPhone, and some of what Google has been doing is building a suite of Java based mobile applications, so this could be seen as a broadening of Google's mobile support. If Google decides to support a fairly generic mobile Linux (like OpenEmbedded) then it opens up their applications to OpenMoko and the homebrew mobile club's myPhone. What we have today from Google is three mobile applications:

Google Maps on the iPhone (which is probably a native re-write in Objective-C). Google Maps for everyone else (which is written in Java), and I think Google Maps for PalmOS also appears to be a native application. I've used this on Treo, Blackberry and iPhone. Its obviously based on the same backend web services but the user interaction is a little different on each.

Gmail reader, which I have used on Treo and Blackberry appears to be a Java based client. I'd like to see this on the iPhone, so I'm hopeful for a full function iPhone Gmail client.

YouTube viewer on iPhone. This looks more like an Apple application, running against the Google/YouTube web services, and required coordination to get the encoding standardized on H.264. It also supports the AppleTV. I suspect that Google will have a YouTube viewer for other platforms, probably written in Java. It could also be an mp3/music player.

The web browser is a problem that the iPhone has solved, but everyone else has a very fragmented approach, caused in part by lack of memory and CPU power on most phones. There are some open source projects that have got going recently to develop Mobile Mozilla, and there are more mature products like Opera. If Google has been working on its own mobile web browser, then they have been keeping very quiet about it.

Google's office suite is based on AJAX front ends and a back end set of web services that handle presentations, documents and spreadsheets. A mobile front end application could make these much more usable, and I would suspect an iPhone version and/or a more generic Java version could be in the works. The main problem with Google's existing online office suite is that it can't be used when there is no data connection. It would be much more useful to allow some subset of useful operations to work while disconnected.

iPhone SDK, Leopard and 1.1.2

As I suspected, Apple plans to release an SDK for native apps on the iPhone next year. The official word is on Apple's Hot News site. They appear to have pre-announced the SDK which is likely to have its official announcement at MacWorld in January, and they say it will ship in February. I'm sure that this was the plan all along, and the developer frenzy has managed to flush out a pre-announcement to give some guidance to the market, which I think is a good move at this point.

There has also been speculation that the iPhone "runs Leopard". I think that the truth is likely to be a bit more subtle than that. There has to be a master code base for MacOSX, and efficient engineering management practices should try to minimize branches in that code base. The master code base has a release branch called "Leopard" and another one called "iPhone", but the differences between them should be as small as possible. Bug fixes and features get checked back into the master code base whenever possible. So the work put into Leopard is leveraged for the iPhone, and we should see some of the feature set that was announced for Leopard transfer to the iPhone.

I think there is a good chance that Apple will release iPhone 1.1.2 immediately after they release Leopard, and that some Leopard features will be included. One obvious feature would be localized versions of Mail and other apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, bringing the iPod Touch more in line with the iPhone's application set. There is a new and upgraded iChat in Leopard, and it would also make sense to release this for the iPhone/Touch.

I also noticed that the DTrace analysis/monitoring framework from Solaris 10 is included in Leopard. This is very cool, it provides a huge upgrade in observability for performance analysis of both desktop and server applications.