The Deck
  • Posted on February 11, 2013

    The gOLEDen iWatch

    I’m on a prediction streak ! My new one is based on the two following pieces of information that surfaced recently :

    • the New York Times writer Nick Bilton says Apple is developing a curved screen watch (and it’s been also “confirmed” by the WSJ)
    • the numerous reports of last week stating that Apple has recruited a Samsung’s OLED expert.

    Well, that’s easy enough now to join my mental dots : the future Apple Watch will sport an OLED screen and is therefore, real.

    I think that a great case has been laid last week by an ex-Apple designer on his blog about the potential of such a device. Go read, it’s a fascinating (and lengthy !) piece describing a lot of possibilities that an iWatch may unlock. Of course, this potential won’t be fulfilled overnight and will take many years to be realized. But I think we’re very close of the release of a first version in a very Apple-like way :

    • release a first very limited version
    • refine
    • refine more
    • repeat steps 2 and 3

    And what about OLED I hear you, dear readers, say ? Well, that’s a part in the solution to the main problem that such a device would face : power consumption. Nobody want to plug its watch in a power outlet every day. Let alone several times a day … According to wikipedia, OLED displays consume only 40% only the power used by an equivalent LCD. It’s not enough by itself but if you combine it with the new low power bluetooth connections, specially crafted private APIs in iOS and maybe one or two new secret innovation … you’re much closer of a working first step towards this new iWatch.

    Oh, one more thing (ever heard that sentence somewhere ?) : yesterday Tim Cook disparaged the possible use of OLED screens by Apple at a Goldman Sachs conference. I think that his point what about the use of OLED as a replacement of LCD in its current usages at Apple. Image quality, colors saturation … etc. are much less important on a 1 or 2” screen tucked on your wrist than on a 27” iMac screen. And to put this argument in context, it’s important to remember that another of OLED strength is a very good readability in direct ligth.

    Might be useful for a watch, don’t you think ?

  • Posted on February 4, 2013

    Game changer

    From cleantechnica.com :

    According to a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) between El Paso Electric Company and First Solar, electricity will be sold from First Solar’s thin-film solar panels to El Paso Electric Company for 5.8 cents per kWh. The highly unusual thing about this is that the average residential retail cost of electricity in the United States is 11.4 cents per kWh, which is twice as much as the price at which this power plant will be producing electricity !

    The article is very short on details about how they can provide solar electricity at such a discount. But if this is the beginning of a trend, the world is going to change very fast …

  • Posted on February 3, 2013

    Doctor Who killed my Adsense

    A lot of you, dear readers, probably don’t know that one of my side projects is a little web site called pdfy.me

    As the name imply (at least that’s my hope), it is meant to convert a web page to a pdf file for archival / latter or offline reading. It works through a bookmarklet, a Chrome extension or a simple api. This project comes from a client of mine who needed to be able to convert the pages of its wordpress site to pdf. Rather than running the code from his shared hosting I decided to turn it in a webservice and host it myself on a spare server I had.

    Most of the users come from the Chrome extension so I decided to add an adsense baner for them in order to recoup their bandwith costs. To help adsense target their ads, I created a special page that would open when a pdf conversion was done and would use the title of the converted page to give adsense a little context.

    The whole thing was more to experiment with adsense targetting than for money … I only made a few bucks out of the whole experiment.

    But really, that’s not my problem with adsense. At all.

    My problem is that a few weeks latter my account was suspended. And why would you ask ? Well because one of the user of my site converted to pdf a bittorent tracker page that (probably) linked to an episode of the “Doctor Who” show. Not that Google may know which url was converted, that information is never disclosed to anybody of course.

    But the simple fact to have on a page of your site the words “Doctor Who” close to “DVDRip” is enough for Google to ban you.

    Seriously, fellow bloggers, watch out for what you write on your site. The big Mountain View Eye That Never Sleeps is watching you.

    Suffice to say that I’m personally done with Adsense for my more serious projects. As a publisher and as a client.

    Well played Google.

  • Posted on February 1, 2013

    I want to believe

    Just to reiterate on my yesterday’s post about the Apple TV : Ars Technica is running today an article titled “The rumor that won’t die: Apple’s perpetually pending video game console”. In this piece, the author try to dismiss the possibility of exactly what I was implying : that the silent refresh of the Apple TV may be the harbinger of third parties apps.

    One of the argument used I find interesting to refute : basically it goes by saying that third party apps aren’t coming anytime soon because current iOS game apps are not designed to be controled by anything other than touch (obviously a non-starter for a “gaming console”).

    But what the autor is missing in my opinion is this:

    1. If the Apple TV is to get third party apps, those apps will have to be updated anyway to adapt to the 1080p resolution. Today, only the iPhone 5 has a 16/9 aspect ratio so I don’t think that there’s a simple efficient way to upscale all those iPad titles to native HDTV resolution.
    2. While the developers are busy updating their apps’ resolution, why not allow users to make use of a bluetooth controller as permitted by the lastest iOS Apple TV update ? (see for exemple this article)
    3. Granted, the only bluetooth hardware currently supported is a keyboard. But is it really far fetched to imagine a bluetooth connection with an iPhone or … gasps … a joypad ?

    As usual, time will tell. But I think the days of the gameless Apple TV are numbered. Just ask Nintendo … Nintendo Cuts Outlook After Soft Demand for Wii U



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