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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.).
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.)
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.
No it's impossible to get it past the gatekeeper.
Unfortunately, that may be one of the prices that needs to be paid when one chooses a platform where you're not allowed to run anything you want. It also may turn out that some of the services like this will actually speed up the experience, like with Opera mini. Anything heavy on processing and light on moving graphics will be much faster run like this. It may turn out that Office runs faster than it would natively.
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.
People who have an iPad but not a MacBook Air?
That's like stealing from Apple. Are you a thief?
Is it impossible to code a flash-compatible player that can run on iDevices?
Ask all the Android fanboys who stopped using it as a bullet point.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/using-onlive-downloads-around-3gb-of-data-per-hour/085785
I was going to say that it would be useful for people who are walking around while using their iPads (that's a big chunk of my use-case - writing down notes while going to different spaces at a site) but then, I don't need to surf the web at high speed while doing that, nor am I using office since it doesn't do handwriting recognition.
I do only bring my iPad + a bluetooth keyboard when I travel since it's lighter than a laptop and I usually just connect to a workstation remotely if I'm in a laptopish use scenario, so I guess there's that.
But I don't think it's terribly compelling.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
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.
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.