Yeah, the lack of news has been discouraging. You would think they would at least have a date in mind, but that seems to indicate that they really aren't ready.


Yeah, I'm certainly not saying I'm a fan, and even the networks that created Hulu are slowly abandoning it and creating their own portals on their own websites.

I'd be more excited about it if the case weren't so asinine. What's wrong with standard stereo component size? Failing that, what's wrong with something that at least allows greater packing density?

True, though I give them some credit for doing something different. They simply couldn't make something standard stereo size, as people would wonder why it's so much larger than every other device like this on this market.

But I don't care about the form factor. The capabilities will be more than enough to make up for it. Besides my WDTV Live is already on the top of my other equipment.

Too bad Boxee didn't go to Sony for styling. They could have had something that looked this good:



That's a current product. Based on something from 2003. I think if I had seen that back in 1982 I would have thought it looked like an out-dated piece of crap.

I thought the same when I first saw it to in renders and some pictures. But then I saw it on a video somewhere and realised that it is quite small, and the RF remote lets you put it pretty much anywhere. It could hide behind your TV, away in a corner somewhere. Even better than it looking nice is not having to look at it at all.



Pretty cool, looking forward to getting one in the UK.

Its a tape boom box. It by definition is a out-dated piece of crap even before the horrendous styling on it. I think all AV equipment should come with walnut trim like that boombox however and some chrome.

It's not the looking nice (or not) that I care about. It's the "can't put anything on top of it, and beside presents a problem, too"-ness.

Then make it half-width. Clip corners if it needs flash. Being designed to rest at a tilt is absurd, though.

I don't like the layout of the box either, but more horrendous still is the "powered by DLINK" on it. It's most certainly NOT powered by DLINK. The only things you can claim power that device are "Boxee" or "NVIDIA"

My box will live forever hidden inside my base cabinet, so in practical use, its styling won't bother me.

Half-width? Once you do that then the box is going to be relegated to near the top of your AV stack anyway. I have one other thing in my home theater stand that could fit on top of a half-width device, so if it came down to it it's not the end of the world to have to put one thing on top of the other.

But as was pointed out, it can go anywhere with that remote. You never have to see it. It could fall behind all your other equipment and it wouldn't matter.

You don't need access to that slot on the side?

I think the slot in the side is an SD card slot, but I don't think I'd ever use it - all my media lives on my NAS and anything temporary would come on a USB thumb drive anyway. I'll use the USB port to add an IR receiver though. Or a cable linking to my URC MSC-400 which can act as a keyboard in response to IR.

They could have made a solid black brick like Lacie is fond of doing:



That blue LED would bug the shit out of me...

That's why they make electrical tape.

Oh good lord no! I really wish companies would stop putting SD card slots on everything.

I long for the day when the Eye-Fi becomes standard. I bought one for my wife and it's one of the most magical bits of electronics I've ever used.

Flash on Android sounds like a real winner to me:

Looks like Adobe hasn't really improved anything with the final release of Flash for Android:

http://blog.laptopmag.com/mobile-flash-fail-weak-android-player-proves-jobs-right

But again, this is just a geek thing. The consumer space doesn't care about Flash running on a phone or personal media device. In my expert opinion, Apple wouldn't have sold as many devices had the browsing experience been destroyed with a Flash player.

Most consumers don't know what flash is or what it's for, and they won't until they try to use something that requires flash on a site that requires it.

Personally, I don't care if my phone runs flash, but if I'm buying an iPad, which is primarily a media consumption device, then I want it to consume all the media available to it. The difference between myself and the average consumer is that I know what media the iPad won't consume when I make my purchase decision. I think a huge number of users will assume the best browsing experience on the planet includes using all the web sites they can on their desktop machines.

I really have no real love for Flash, but I do not like it when a company strong arms the industry. I think Apple may kill flash (and potentially Silverlight) off with this move- and that saddens me. This is NOT the consumer choosing their browsing experience, it is Apple choosing for them.

Apple simply put their foot down and said they are no longer waiting for Adobe to get their act in gear. Ultimately if Flash dies off due to it, it's because Adobe failed to deliver on their promises. Safari on iOS supports plugins and has since day 1 back in summer 2007. Apple sat waiting on Adobe to deliver Flash for mobiles for nearly 3 years before moving on. To put in perspective how long 3 years is in the mobile space, this was Android in late 2007:

Google mobilized quickly and changed the direction of their platform before it even shipped, and is now looking forward to version 3.0. Adobe in that time well, just now delivered a kinda working Flash solution.

Not only is Apple moving on, so is most of the web. There are plenty of free and cheep games on the iOS platform, more and more appearing on Android, and I'm sure a number will appear on Windows Phone 7, all without Flash. Nearly every video I want to watch on the web works fine on my iPad, either right in Safari, or from a a dedicated app providing an even better experience then a website.

It was easy for Google and Android handset makers to move onto something new after late 2007. They simply copied the iPhone. I say that in all seriousness. Most Android phones out there have stolen a large amount of Apple IP, in both physical and software design. LG and Samsung are still releasing handsets today that look like a 3 year old iPhone. It's going to be a while before anyone else has anything as remotely attractive and solid as the iPhone 4.

Had the iPhone not come to market, the phone pictured above would likely have been very similar to marketed Android handsets. Ok, back to Flash...

The link I posted takes a good real-world look at Flash on Android. It's shipping now. Was it worth any kind of wait? I think the author is very generous (toward Adobe) in the way he expresses his "no" sentiment.

The web browsing experience on an iPhone and iPad is still better than on Android with Flash, on websites that feature Flash content. Many webmasters and large corporate sites have come to the conclusion that Flash simply sucks, never mind that it sucks especially bad on a mobile platform. Many sites have already made other arrangements. Personally I try not to browse the web at all on a handset because it mostly sucks, regardless how good the browser is - the screen is just too small for a non-mobile-specific site.

One thing I do want is an equal footing for desktop systems that don't want to run Flash. I long ago changed over to the YouTube HTML5 beta, I just want them and Vimeo (and similar) to make that the default for everyone.

The only place I regularly miss flash is on the BBC website as all their video and audio (except iPlayer) is still flash only.

I can't agree with Bruno on the usability of the web on a phone though. I find the web very usable on mobile safari, even places like empegbbs

Maybe I'll change my mind once I've gotten a bit more time on an iPhone 4 with the retina display and an alternate browser - I hate mobile Safari. It's in the way when you don't want it to be and then when you need something from it, it's missing or a PITA to use. Webkit page scale rendering is also fairly shite - it introduces a lot of broken seams and odd font sizing. On the desktop version of the browser the fonts don't tend to be an issue, but the seams are still there on things like adjoining graphics, etc. Firefox didn't have that issue when I last looked at it.

I guess when it comes down to it I only really care that the content is readable, navigable and accessible. I care less about minor visual glitches, but having seen how beautifully crafted your HTML/css is I can understand that it is painful to see Safari breaking it

Though it has to be said I also don't see that many sites where Safari introduces as many "tears" in the design as it does on yours.

Why? Flash is just another alternative for delivering web content. If programmers can use it to make better sites, then why limit their options? If they end up delivering crappy sites because Flash is crappy, then the customers will voice their opinions and use sites that deliver a better product. But that's a different thing than taking the option away altogether.

I'd rather have multiple options for developing rich web content- competition drives everyone to step up their game. As I've mentioned before, we are using Silverlight and it is just awesome. The XAML approach to writing software, whether web or desktop, is very powerful. It was designed from the ground up with writing applications in mind (unlike HTML, which was designed for presentation, causing us to wrestle with it for years as we try to deliver decent web applications). Now I know it isn't all about making my life as a developer easier, and I sure want to deliver what is best for the customer, but the better tools I have the faster and better I'll be able to build software.

I'd love to see a web where flash, HTML5, and Silverlight are all solid options for web development depending on your needs or preferences. The customer would only benefit from this, as these three technologies (and maybe even more) would compete to offer more features.

I don't want to get started on another Flash is not the web rant, so I'll try really hard not to.

My comment was directed toward video streaming. If sites have non-flash alternatives in place, then I'd like to be able to use them on the desktop as well. I've seen sites that default to HTML5 video on a mobile product that then default to Flash on the desktop - with no option to change that. I don't keep flash enabled on my notebook. I have to click on a placeholder to fire up flash on an object by object basis (or override the blocker for that site).

I also think it's super-lazy and poor design to include embedded Flash video on the main page of a blog instead of an image attached to particular story. If you want people to be able to play the video on the front page, then throw in some javascript as well to swap out a static image for the flash content. At least that way everyone, whether Flash is enabled or available can see the image. And if they can enable flash they can then decide whether or no to do that. One super-guilty site is The Unofficial Apple Weblog - bloody annoying.

As a web designer, with today's landscape, I think it's silly to develop a site in Flash. I mean, Flash is fine if you wanted your "site" to run standalone outside a browser or in a kiosk environment, but it just limits your exposure tremendously. The web seems very divided over Flash, and that's on top of a large number of devices not supporting it. Just not something I'd ever do, even if I personally didn't object to Flash. As it stands, I won't use it in web design, even if someone asks me to add a Flash feature to their site.

It should tear the same way on other designs that use multiple images positioned next to each other.

My main site actually has some table markup which I want to get rid of, but I've seen the exact same problem on purely CSS-driven layouts. I used to see it on Apple's site as well, but it was harder to notice because everything was near white.

EDIT: You can see it on Apple.com right now actually. If you zoom (in or out) you will notice a white gap appear between the "support" and "search" rectangles in the top navigation.

I didn't say I didn't see it on other websites. I was saying that yours was one of the (relatively small set) of sites that is very badly affected by it.

If I zoom right in on the Apple site I think I can see the tearing you are pointing out. Whereas without any zooming on yours I can straight away see half a dozen obvious bits where it clearly isn't looking how you wanted it to. I come across very very few sites that mobile Safari causes anywhere near that level of problems, so much so that I can't name a single one at the moment that I have noticed having tearing issues.

N.B. this isn't a criticism of your designs in any way, I am impressed with the level of visual design that you managed to wring out of HTML

I take it back, I really can't see the tearing on the Apple site that you mention. This is on an iPhone 4 and I guess it is entirely possible that mobile Safari handles these cases differently with more memory/cpu to throw at the problem.

On the Apple site I am seeing the issue with the regular version of Safari. I haven't gone on recently with the mobile version. On my site, Mobile Safari used to display the site correctly when no zooming was being done. I probably have to look at it again as I haven't done so with the latest iOS update. I may also need to adjust the default Safari page width which tells the browser how many pixels nominally make up the width of the un-zoomed page. That's what it bases its scaling off of I believe.

Here's another nice video showing real-world Flash usage on a Nexus One with WiFi on a 25Mbit FiOS WAN connection. Abysmal.

The bottom line is that sites and video need to be re-implimented to support MOBILE Flash. So you still can't use 10.1 to browse the "real internet."

http://www.technovia.co.uk/2010/08/just-how-bad-is-flash-on-android.html

And this is why Apple doesn't have Flash on their mobile products. Video works on the iPhone and iPad right now without Flash. We need a major web browsing platform to not support Flash to make sure it doesn't continue its grows and become a defacto web standard.