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QuickTime Creator Brings Flash and Office To the iPad, By Subscription
New submitter adycarter writes "Steve Perlman, the man responsilbe for QuickTime and WebTV, has recently launched OnLive Desktop which now offers a 'plus' service enabling iPad users to use Flash, Microsoft Office and the ability to use a Gigabit-speed version of Internet Explorer. The service runs on the same basic technology as their game streaming service in that you're using your iPad as client to access a machine located in the cloud."
Thanks for ruining my awesome iPad experience. :)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Presumably this plays nicely with third party keyboards for the iPad, but I'm skeptical of how useful Office would be without a precision pointing device. And even with the keyboard, while that would be great for entering a bunch of text, it's not clear to me whether key combinations would make it across intact (Ctrl+V, Shift+End etc.).
If you're within range of Wi-Fi, you're probably in a position to use a full-fledged MacBook Air instead of an iPad. If you're not, how fast will OnLive eat up the 5 GB/mo cap of 3G/4G Internet?
For someone who MUST have Flash (almost no-one) this is a perfect compromise.
I'm not sure I'd pay a monthly fee just to view restaurant menus though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ever since I got my iPad I was unable to unlock the full potential of Zombocom because of Flash absence. Now I feel like everything is possible again.
Thank you, OnLive.
This has been going for a while, and one might argue that remote sessions are not a new thing by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly a useful service if you need it - especially for Office apps.
Word on the grapevine is that Microsoft are working on a native iPad app (or suite of apps) for Office, however - better late than never for those who want to be able to do more than just view Office formats on a tablet.
(and yes, yes, tablets suck for real work, yadda yadda, no one is using them for real work, toy os etc etc - just heading off that stuff at the pass.)
The data cost to use this will be high and drain the battery fast.
Also with input lag as well.
Five dollars a month buys you a cloud-accelerated web browser (that would be Internet Explorer 9, complete with fully functioning Adobe Flash and Acrobat plug-ins) and priority access to the OnLive Desktop service -- freeloading "standard" subscribers can only access the service on an as-available basis.
Running remotely on powerful PCs in the cloud that are connected by Gigabit Ethernet to the Internet
So THATS what the poster means by "a Gigabit-speed version of Internet Explorer."
Just sayin- iPad users can already use a "cloud-accelerated web browser" - for free. One of the best browsers out there: Opera.
Opera needs some love....
with people now dropping Flash, and free work-arounds available, a paid Flash experience is doomed. As for Office, if you need it, buy a Macbook Air, or similar. BTW, there are rumours of Office for iPad floating around, and an MS-Works for iPad would sell well, IMHO.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Master-Blaster says "We no want subscription, We want FREE!". We are using iPads at my plant in the engineering dept with some success, they do have a niche. The ability to use a blue-tooth mouse at times would be a tremendous improvement.
The fact that something like this is coming and will undoubtedly be popular is confirmation of what I've long suspected.
Tablets in their current form are shiny, popular media consumption toys. To really get work done, you need the PC/Mac desktop and productivity environment.
Of course, this begs the question as to why so many businesses are getting tablets for their employees in the first place, other than the obvious "Because it's trendy."
There is already a service that works like this. An app called iSwifter gives you a Linux Firefox window that runs flash based content. It works decently, though can get a hinlegalgy at times. iSwifter is a one time fee. They do Not charge per month (I think they originally did, but nobody wanted to pay). I use iSwifter for King Schools flight training programs, which are flash based. Works pretty well.
Is it impossible to code a flash-compatible player that can run on iDevices?
He is not the "QuickTime creator". Steve Perlman was a contracted tester on portions of QuickTime. His main claim to fame in that timeframe is that when the people actually responsible for QuickTime (like Bruce Leak) left Apple for elsewhere shortly after it shipped, he stayed behind at Apple.
He was however a co-founder of Catapult who did the X-Band modem and service as well as founding WebTV as listed here.
He subjected the world to QuickTime and WebTV, and now he's trying to bring Office and Internet Explorer to the iPad? What will he do to us next? This monster must be stopped.
he created Quick Time AND Web TV?
can we pitch in and buy him an Exit Bag?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I sent them an email, a few weeks ago, asking about other options besides Windows. Like, Ubuntu or Mac OS X, for the remote OS.
I also asked about clients for other platforms.
No response yet.
I doubt I'd use it for flash things or word processing (I use Dropbox to keep documents synchronized). What I would more likely want it for is a persistent IM presence, with centralized logging. Currently, I also use Dropbox for centralizing the logging, but I have to do some over-head to check and be sure that I don't try to run it in 2 places (I use an Automator Script and a Perl script for that). I've also looked into various web based IM clients ... none of which were satisfactory to me. So, one of my main uses of something like this would be to simply keep open a persistent IM session that I could check and update from my various devices. Especially if it's more usable, and has less latency, than doing that on my own "server" via VNC.
When office for iPad ships later this month.
SO how do we roll a DIY version of this with my existing windows or mac desktop? I RDP into my machines now, but the interface isnt as useful on touch as the one OnLive presented. Bandwidth restrictions aside, how to get my 'RDP' session to work like this?
Good-bye
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and adding injury to insult: charging for the privilege.
In 21 months of iPad-use I've noticed the lack of flash perhaps five times.
On the other hand: it saved me from annoying adds about a gazillion times.
No thanks, I'll pass this one.
for Android.
I understand that the average user is not going to use a tablet in the same way they would use (or in lieu of) a laptop. I'm ready to dump my laptop for a tablet, however, and the only thing that's keeping me from taking the plunge is the lack of a full-featured productivity suite. I've got a Transformer Prime with its keyboard dock and its precision pointing device and I'd like to actually do something productive with it. Documents to Go, Polaris Office, Google Docs, etc are all great for viewing documents and putting together the most rudimentary of spreadsheets or presentations, but fail utterly in delivering any useful power-user level functionality. Office 365 just plain doesn't work on any mobile browser. I jumped for joy when I saw TDF was going to port Libre Office to Android but just about wept when they said they were going to aim for a high quality viewer first and then introduce limited editing functionality.
Come on, people! I'm ready to take the plunge. Just give me something...anything!
People are quick to jump on Google because they track your searches and can follow you with their ad engine, so I'm surprised that no one mentioned the privacy implications of this service. This opens up a whole new world of trackability (likely more even than Amazon's Silk browser) - running MSIE in a hosted server session gives the provider visibility into everything you do in that browser - everytime you scroll a page, every time you zoom in, every text box you fill in (even if you leave the page without submitting), all of that is trackable.
On my PCs, I leave ads on but turn off Flash for sites not on a whitelist (e.g. dailymotion, youtube, newgrounds, weebls-stuff, ytmnd). If advertisers want to show me a picture of what they're selling, they can go ahead and use JPEGs like everyone else did before the Flash ad was invented.
"You have 5GB bandwidth, therefore anything that uses it is useless!" Um, you have it in order to use it. How is this not obvious?
What's not obvious is how many minutes of monthly usage you can get from 5 GB, and that depends on the bitrate coming down from OnLive's server. Another Slashdot user pointed out that HSPA+ phones can burn through a 5 GB allowance in ten minutes.
I'm sitting in a comfy chair right now, browsing /.
As do I on my netbook.
On my iPad, if I need to use Flash (super rare these days, but let's just pretend), do I want to get up and go to where my notebook or desktop are?
On your iPad, if you need a keyboard to compose a longer comment, do you want to get up and go to where your Bluetooth keyboard is? If you need to use Eclipse, Visual Studio, XCode, IDLE, or another comparable developer tool, do you want to get up and go to where your PC is?
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/using-onlive-downloads-around-3gb-of-data-per-hour/085785
'nuff said
The basic technology OnLive has is remote desktop. Mainly they do this for games. Their games client runs on an array of platforms (PC, Mac, Android phones and tablets), and could probably be ported to many more without much difficulty.
As far as I can tell, the client is a souped-up rdesktop. They've paid close attention to doing the right video and audio compression and other things to minimize bandwidth and latency. The remote system behaves like local (convincingly so in most cases I've seen). (Decide for yourself, there's a free trial.)
So at this time you can play a variety of PC games on your client, and that client can be running on your PC or your Mac or your mobile device, eventually your iPad, possibly your iPhone.
But really, as noted, it's just a remote desktop. So they can run on Office suite and let you access it from any device. Right now it looks like their client needs to be tailored to do it, so they don't have the Office stuff working in their regular client but in one specifically for the "Onlive Desktop" feature. I bet eventually they merge it into a single client. You'll be able to play games or do Office from your array of devices.
And I expect that eventually they'll throw other systems into the backend instead of just the PCs they seem to have. So then you'll be able to play OS X games from your array of devices. Or your, uh, Linux games from your Windows tablet.
A well-working remote desktop makes a decoupling layer between OS you're on and applications (or OS) you want to run. Commoditizing the platform has historically been met with hostility, especially by Redmond (thanks for holding back web tech, you fuckers), so I'm wondering where this will lead.
Just like quicktime and webtv. This guy shouldnt be allowed to create anymore
Kind of like PCAnywhere for the ipad.
(Or whatever your favorite remote computing software is.)
You can't even use the base version over a wireless connection with two out of three bars. Says it's not of sufficient quality to get decent video. Don't bother if you don't have a damn near perfect connection at all times.
PS: LogMeIn is on iPad, free, and brilliant.
The Man who created QuickTime? Really? The guy was gone by 1990. He brought WebTV thanks to Keith Ohlfs and other technologists to a market no one wanted and sold it ironically to Microsoft for bank and that was a write off for them. He's perfect as a VC guy--incubate, hype up, sell for unjustifiable value, dump and repeat.
From his wiki page: ``In 2011 Perlman announced that he and colleagues at Rearden have invented distributed-input-distributed-output (DIDO) technology, which a Wired article claimed to be "an experimental wireless communications system that could render cellular connections obsolete".
Someone should shoot the Wired writer for such a bs claim.
The man's all hype and no results.
Even better after being lightly toasted, eh?
Tanks 4 da lulz, knothead.
Mwahaha, only fools have caps on their data plans! Sprint+Android=inf iPad data! Only problem is some iPad apps think the wifi connection is cable-high-speed, so it by default requests too high of quality of video stream and buffers video instead of falling back to a lower bitrate.
How much will we pay for an iO2 app that will allow us breath while we use the iPad?
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Who sees this as a FANTASTIC way to test my web applications in Internet Explorer? I don't run windows at home.
Thank you OnLive!
This app isn't available in Canada, so I presume it's only available in the US. The rest of us can tune out.
It's a shame, really, as I would have liked to try it out.
www.clarke.ca
By your logic, nothing is good, since everything has limits that people will hit at one point or another.
Nothing is good in excess. Some things are fine in moderation
You worry too much about things that don't even effect you.
1. Affect. 2. "First they came for the Communists." I just fear that opponents of general-purpose computing will end up coming for the micro-ISVs. This has already happened in a couple cases, where big businesses have access to entire classes of computing platforms to which micro-ISVs have no access.
The iPad is more comfortable to consume content on, though the netbook has the advantage for creation.
The problem comes when people buy a device on which to consume, short-sightedly assuming that they're never going to want to create. This sunk cost discourages them from spending the money need to get started with creation come the time that they do end up wanting to create.
In my experience, what you're describing doesn't correspond to the realities of what people expect to use these things for.
But there needs to be a critical mass of people who create on the side in order to maintain enough demand for devices for creating. Otherwise, only people who create for a living will absolutely need devices for creating, and as such devices lose economies of scale, prices are likely to rise.
I'm not really willing to pay extra to have features in my device that I don't use so that your hypothetical content creator can also buy his device at an affordable price. That's just me subsidizing you. Why would I want to do that?
So that you can view works that express the views of people who live somewhere other than Austin, Boston, or Seattle. CronoCloud keeps telling me that if I want to develop video games in genres that work best with an input device not commonly bundled with a PC or phone, I have to move to a city that's a hotbed of the mainstream video game industry, and there appear not to be any such cities in my home state.
Who is an opponent of general purpose computing?
The people who see dollar signs in locking down computers by taxing all programs that run on the computers that they make, taxing all works that are viewed on computers that they make, and taxing the production of computers that they don't make. The first two are done using mandatory verification of the device manufacturer's digital signature, as video game console makers have done since the NES and Atari 7800. The last is done with patents, as Microsoft and Apple have lately been doing to Android device manufacturers.
no one is going to remove the "totally open" end from that scale
Back in 2005, Alsee wrote a comment on Slashdot that proposed an application of Trusted Network Connect that makes "totally open" incompatible with home Internet service providers. What has changed since then?