Macgasm

Square-Enix has announced that the first two installments in their popular Final Fantasy franchise will be coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch. This isn’t Square-Enix’s first entry in the App Store. However, this is the first implementation of their most popular franchise.

No real details about the games have been released at this point, but looking at their current pricing for their App Store games gives us an idea. The lowest priced Square-Enix game is $2.99 and the highest is $9.99. I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to bump the Final Fantasy titles to the $12 to $15 range during the launch.

So, what would you pay to play these games on your iPhone or Touch? Comment here or hit me up on Twitter.

(via Slashdot)

Photo Credit: spratmackrel

In this weeks episode Brennan and I talk about streaming television to your iPhone using the France 24 application.  Despite his being in love with the application, we see some flaws in the concept.  We also chat  about a couple of iPhone applications that let us conduct business while we’re out and about.  Things, Assistant, Cha-Ching, and Billings all let us conduct business then sync our entries to our desktops.  Talk about handy.

By the way, you can make this a whole lot easier by subscribing to our audio and video feeds on iTunes.

(Music Credit: Siktransit)

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Are you the type of person who needs to carry around your entire music library, or could you live with just streaming your music from a cloud based service? What if you could get that streaming service for free?

Apple has been in talks with some big wig music executives hoping to take everything old and make it new again. Reports are that iTunes.com, which will probably be run on the backbone of the Lala acquisition, is going to start offering a free music streaming service. It sounds great for those of us who sit at a computer all day, but what about those of us who are on the move all day?  Can the 3G or even a 4G network handle this kind of load, or what about the traditional broadband services? Aren’t we stuck in a giant disconnect where broadband providers are trying to packet shape our connections because they can’t handle the explosion of multimedia on the internet? What are they going to say when instead of downloading a new album once, I’m downloading it 50 times because I just want to stream it over and over again? I hope we’re ready for a huge cryfest because it’s going to happen sooner or later.

From the RIAA groups perspective

If we’ve learned anything from the years of litigation the RIAA does not think that consumers own the rights to any music we’ve purchased over the last 50 years. You don’t really “own” that CD, instead you’ve purchased a right to listen to it, and that’s where it ends. No right to copy it, no right to move it to an iPod, and certainly no right to lend it to your friends. So, a streaming service is something they can easily get behind. Taking away consumer rights and forcing them into a corner by only allowing them to stream music might be a bit far off now but we should probably be looking for signs of that becoming the norm in the future.

It’s win-win-win situation for the RIAA.

From a consumers perspective

When it comes to consumers there’s bit of an ambiguous grey area when discussing the reality of streaming music from a cloud service. First,  mobile devices are attached to spotty data plans with pathetic limits, so being able to stream your music when you want and how you want isn’t really all that feasible in the current telecommunications paradigm. What about those people who can’t even get “broadband” yet?

Second, a streaming concept is something that will work for people living in metropolitan areas, but those in surrounding areas will be left out of the loop. Sure, it doesn’t make all that much of a difference today, as physical media is still being sold, but what about in five to ten years when the RIAA starts pushing streaming technology instead of “purchasing” options? Things could get a little messy, and the FCC has a spotty track record at best when it comes to being proactive instead of reactive to technological innovations. Heck, in Canada the CRTC, which is the equivalent of the FCC, is a joke. They can’t handle a paradigm shift if their life depended on it. So, relying on them to insure that both respective countries have the technology backbone needed for streaming service is probably a bad idea.

Some final thoughts

If this streaming service is going to be a new alternative to purchasing music then it’s something that I can get behind, but if the real plan is to eventually phase out the purchase of music altogether, then I have a serious problem with Apple trying to implement a streaming service.  We all know how much of a music buff Mr. Jobs is so I’m hopeful that this is a move to ensure that everyone on the planet will have access to great music, but the skeptic in me isn’t 100 percent sold on that concept.

[Via TechCrunch]

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In this episode, we talk about finding the right Mac for you.

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Things change quickly in the tech world. One moment you’re going to bed dreaming about ways that you can integrate a tablet into your family lifestyle, and the next thing you know you’re waking up to find out that Apple actually sees families using one Tablet. I said it, just ONE tablet. The Horror!

Sure, maybe it’s a companion to our already existing technology, but when was the last time owning just one of anything was the answer to our needs? Just one car, quickly becomes two. Just one laptop, turns into a family of them when your kids grow up. Just one more bite, turns into a bunch of smaller bites of that fine taco salad every time your significant other turns around. Just one can’t be the answer, can it?

According to the Wall Street Journal it just might be,

The device has been purposely designed to be shared between members of a household as easily as possible, according to one of the Journal’s unnamed sources.

I wonder how the Telcos are handling the news that Apple plans on families sharing this ‘iPad’ instead of making everyone get their own. I like to imagine the AT&Ts of the world having to do away with some new fan-dangled family-plan data package. I makes me happy, but something tells me they’re not too happy about it. Who are we kidding, they probably rejoiced because the extra load on their network won’t be as big as originally anticipated. That is, if the 3G integration rumours hold true.

Sure, Just One Might Be Their Intention…but…

The news has got me thinking well into the night. It’s currently 2:00am EST, and I find myself wondering just how many people might be planning on picking up a couple Tablets. I have a really hard time seeing a family of five sharing one single device. We don’t share so well, and we already feel separation anxiety when we’re separated from our iPhones. Something tells me that our anxiety’s going to be even worse when the shiny new tablet hits our coffee tables.  Do you plan on picking up one, two, none of these things? What’s the magic price point that would encourage you to purchase multiple devices?

[Via Wall Street Journal]

I use Apple’s DVD Player application to watch all of my DVDs. It is a small, easy to use playback application that works flawlessly with my Apple remote. I have a lot of good things to say about the application in general. In fact, I only have one real complaint for the entire application.

Sometimes I fall asleep while watching a DVD. Usually after the movie plays, it goes back to the DVD menu. It then continually loops a small section of music in the DVD menu OVER AND OVER again until I go completely crazy in my sleep. I have turned the application upside down looking for a way to stop this, but no dice.

I have a proposal to fix this annoying loop ordeal: Menu timeouts. See, you don’t want the DVD to stop at any ol’ point just because you aren’t active. I never want the movie to stop in the middle because I wasn’t waggling the mouse. However, a timeout in the menu only would solve this problem. If there is no activity for, say, ten minutes at the DVD menu, the menu would stop looping, and the disc would spin down.

Do you see any problems with this solution? How about a solution of your very own? Comment here or hit me up on Twitter.

Photo Credit: kaibara87

Finally a gaming company gets it right.  Instead of complaining about the existence of ROMs and emulators being installed on jailbroken iPhones, Sega has decided to give the people just what they want. Sega is planning on releasing an application for the iPhone that will bring their classics into the new age. Previous to this announcement Sega had previously released a handful of games that people could buy independently of one another, but now with the ability to have in-application purchases they’ve taken the next step in game sales. Sega has decided to give away an emulator for free, but instead of selling games independently they will now charge for the games within the Sega application.

We might be seeing a new type of console war. Can you imagine having all the big game companies vying for control of the iPhone. With Nintendo having the DS, and Sony having a PSP, I would certainly doubt that we would see any of their classic titles ported to the iPhone, but for Sega it’s an excellent move.  Hopefully the move is being watched closely by the executives at Sony and Nintendo, and hopefully we’ll start to see some of their titles moving to the iPhone as well.

The genius of the move is that Sega doesn’t have to spend time developing their own hand-held device. Instead, they can piggy back on the success of one of the worlds most popular mobile computing devices which would give the gaming company the ability to focus on game sales. It makes sense for a gaming company doesn’t it?

Could you imagine having access to all your favourite gaming titles on one device instead of having to pick up a DS, a PSP, and an iPhone. Surely giving up on those revenue streams might seem a bit difficult for the gaming companies, but it’s time they start looking at it as giving people what they want instead of forcing our hands into purchases.

The next decade is going to be rife with arguments about content availability on multiple platforms. Why should we have to purchase a certain piece of hardware to get our favourite game?

Would it be profitable for a Nintendo or Sony to provide their catalog on their proprietary gaming devices as well as putting the games on Apple’s AppStore? Without doing too much economic research, I’d have to argue that it would be–increasing market size translates to more sales which then translates to more profits. The only real question that would remain is whether or not such a move would cannibalize the sales of a DS or PSP. Logic dictates that some cannibalization would occur as consumers would flock to a device that gave them access to all the games they want without having to make hard choices about the hardware.

How it will all play out remains to be seen but it could get interesting over the next few years.

[Via Gizmodo]

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In this episode, we talk about GTD applications.

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