Technology news
The talks represent Apple's most ambitious crack at infiltrating the living room after years of trying.
Apple's New Front in Battle for TV
Apple Inc. is in talks with some of the biggest U.S. cable operators about letting consumers use an Apple device as a set-top box for live television and other content, according to people familiar with the matter.
The talks represent Apple's most ambitious crack at infiltrating the living room after years of trying.
Apple doesn't appear to have reached a deal with any cable operators. One obstacle may be the reluctance of operators to let Apple establish a foothold in the television business.
Apple would also need to persuade significant numbers of consumers to buy a set-top box for what could be hundreds of dollars rather than rent one from their cable operators for $10 to $15 a month. Electronics makers such as TiVo Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. already sell set-top boxes, so far without making a big impact on the market.
Microsoft Windows Phone Dev Center Glitch Fixed
For two days, new Windows Phone apps couldn't be published to the site after a site upgrade caused a glitch. The problems are now resolved, according to Microsoft.
Microsoft has apparently repaired a "hiccup" with its newly rebuilt Windows Phone Dev Center that prevented the publishing of new phone apps to the site for about two days.
App publishing was temporarily put on hold during the glitch, which was originally reported Aug. 14 in a post by Microsoft's Todd Brix on The Windows Phone Developer Blog.
In an Aug. 16 update, Brix announced that the problem was related to digital certificates and was finally resolved.
"We fixed the digital certificate problem and last evening resumed publishing new apps," wrote Brix. "It will take a day or two for the repair to fully deploy and newly published apps to begin appearing in Marketplace again. If your app was in the process of being published, you don’t need to take any action. We have applied the fix and the app will continue through the certification and publishing workflow as normal."
During the outage, Windows phone developers were unable to post new apps to the Windows Phone Dev Center, which has been subject to a massive rebuilding since Aug. 3, including a completely rebuilt backend infrastructure, according to Brix. "In an earlier post, I mentioned the possibility that we might encounter some hiccups during this complex rollout and changeover. [On Aug. 14] we did."
The digital certificates issue only impacted phones that upgraded to Windows Phone 7.5 from an earlier version of the operating system and only affected apps published in the last couple of days.
Meanwhile, even though a fix has been implemented, "some customers who try to download a new app may see an error message," wrote Brix. "If they’re attempting to update an existing app, they might repeatedly be prompted to retry the update. We don’t recommend that people uninstall these apps because they might not be able to download and use them again until we deploy our fix."
Microsoft's developer's Web team is continuing to work to resolve the problem and resume certifying and publishing apps as quickly as possible, he wrote. "I apologize for any inconvenience caused by the publishing downtime and will update you when I have more news."
Microsoft also created a new thread in their MSDN forums for questions and answers about the problems.
The company had announced back on July 30 that they would be undertaking a long-planned upgrade of the infrastructure that ran the former Windows Phone App Hub and Marketplace.
Brix warned developers at that time that "delays in app certification and publishing" could occur during the site upgrade timeframe.
The new Windows Phone Dev Center, the new online home for Windows Phone developers, went live Aug. 7. The site, which has been redesigned from the ground up, is for Windows Phone 7.5 or earlier apps. It features a cleaner look and a streamlined set of menu options.
In addition, the Windows Phone Dev Center introduces new analytic tools for tracking app downloads and performance. Developers can now see downloads by purchase type—Free, Paid, Trial and Beta. Paid downloads are now broken down by “without trial” and “after trial,” providing more useful insights into how customers are acquiring developers’ apps. And the new My Money report shows monthly payouts—and will soon include exchange-rate info for developers.