Finally, my own website at markpesce.com also fails this test. I’m hanging my head in shame, and - with luck - by the time this column reaches you, I’ll have fixed that.It’s a little complicated to create an authenticated and secured HTTPS website, but generally no more than a few hours of work.Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's keynote at the annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco is usually a theatrical affair, but his company may have outdone itself this time.The three-hour session featured sets by the ageing Beach Boys, a Hawaiian dance spectacular and blessing ceremony, and a drone delivery by Coca Cola. But Benioff briefly took to the stage himself to show off the firm's new cloud analytics engine, Wave, and an upgrade to Salesforce1 that includes a new app builder dubbed Lightning.All of this software is going to be built around mobile users, Benioff said, recounting how he runs his company from his smartphone and doesn't bother to take a laptop on business trips any more. All Salesforce's products are going to be built around mobile in the future he promised, as well as for smartwatches.
Wave was the brainchild of Alex Dayon, now head of products at Salesforce and the former CEO of InStranet, which Benioff bought in 2008, who wanted an analytics platform that could be used any anyone.The new Wave system uses data from Salesforce but also from outside sources like social media. The user interface is built around a gaming engine so that graphics can be altered and animated by the user, and then streamed to the nearest large screen or tablet.The introduction of Wave will cause some worried eyebrow furrows from those companies that make a living analyzing Salesforce content, but maybe not too many. Compared to some of the analytics engines out there Wave looks somewhat basic and, while it's easier to use than many, we saw little of the depth of data needed by serious software.Wave will be initially be released next week for iOS, but an Android version will be out shortly, as will builds in languages other than English. Prices range from US$125 per user per month for end users to $250 over the same period for developers.
Also on display during Benioff's keynote was the upgrade to the firm's Salesforce1 customer platform, which now comes with the app-building program Lightning – which was introduced by Salesforce cofounder Parker Harris dressed (inadvisably) as a superhero.Here at Salesforce we have some of the best developers in the world, he said. But you don't have those developers, so Lightning makes their skills available to you.In essence, Lightning takes the application framework Salesforce's internal developers have been using and prebuilt components from the firm, which Harris promised would be updated regularly. A series of design tools is built in and the applications are run within the Salesforce app on any platform.Harris demonstrated a delivery app built using the platform and there was a staged drop-off on stage of a four-pack of Coke by a quadrocopter in the Moscone Center. Harris looked a little uncomfortable under the flying blades but the stunt went off without injury.
In all, this modest amount of news took nearly three hours of customer videos, song-and-dance routines, lengthy expositions about the admittedly impressive charity work Salesforce is doing, and interviews with such tech visionaries as Will.i.am – who will announce the formation of his new wearables company at the conference tomorrow.A similar arrangement gives you access to Digital Concert Hall, an app from Berliner Philharmoniker offering concerts and live streams. A third party app called TV Player gives you access to Freeview channels including BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.Fire TV streamed smoothly in my tests, and makes sense for Prime subscribers. Whether Prime is good value is moot. The free content exists; but search for a movie and most of the time it comes up as a paid option, even for older titles.Roman Holiday (1953): £3.49 to rent, £7.99 to buy. Gone with the Wind (1939): £2.49/£4.99. More recent offerings have their own quirks, for instance, Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) is £7.99 to buy but no rental option. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) on the other hand: watch for free with Prime. The best advice is to check out the list on Amazon’s site and decide whether it is worth it for you.
Music is less well served. Fire TV connects to Amazon’s cloud music service, which means anything you bought from Amazon MP3, auto-rip CDs (you buy the CD and Amazon automatically adds the MP3s), and up to 250 other tracks manually uploaded. However, there is no music store on Fire TV itself. I also found the selection of concert videos poor, whether free or paid.There is a Spotify Connect app, but this is not full Spotify; rather, it's a receiver for Spotify played from your mobile or tablet.Fire TV has a few party tricks. One is voice search, which operates via a microphone built into the remote. Press and hold the voice button, speak, release, and your words go up to Amazon’s cloud voice recognition service and back down to perform a system-wide search.Voice search is mostly good. It does make sense for a sit-back experience, and searching for something like a movie, actor or app generally works first time. There are occasional frustrations. A search for “TuneIn Radio” is recognised as “Tune in radio” and does not find the app. That said, it works well enough for you to use it.
There is also an Amazon Cloud Drive app which you can instal on your Android or iOS device (Windows Phone users are out of luck) which automatically uploads your photos and videos, which then sync with Fire TV for viewing. A handy feature.What about casting a screen from another device to the Fire TV? There are two separate features. Second Screen only works with Kindle Fire or HDX tablets, and lets you project photos or videos from the device to the Fire TV. There is also Miracast support, accessed through display settings, which in theory should let you project the screen from any Miracast-compatible device. I tried two, one Android and one Windows, and neither worked for me.Mac OS X isn’t quite the RAM gobbler that Windows is, but since the Mini uses integrated graphics, that’s a big chunk of RAM nabbed before you’ve even started running applications, especially if you’re using multiple displays or even a single screen with a greater-than-HD resolution.The Mini I have here has 8GB of RAM and I would‘t take anything less. Mac OS X Yosemite, pre-installed on the new Mini, demands rather more memory than its predecessors did — more daemons, more backgrounded apps, more memory leaks. Even with only a handful of basic applications open, this Mini is already consuming just under 7GB of the installed eight.
Trouble is, I can't do anything about that. I can’t assess my memory usage on a new platform and then expand the memory as necessary. Who cares if no other Mini user wants to do this. I do. For the sake of perhaps five dollars for the memory slot and the tooling for the removable base, Apple has made its little machines far less attractive for anyone not seeking an appliance. And surely those people are among the iMac’s natural constituency, not the Mini’s?If you do open up a 2014 Mac Mini, it’s still an engineering marvel. All kitted out in silver and black, it’s as attractive on the inside as it is on the outside, as the iFixit disassembly pics on here reveal. Better than anything I can take, these shots will show you exactly how accessible the new Mini isn’t. Getting to the 5400rpm 500GB hard drive (in the base model; others have bigger drives and even a Fusion Drive SSD cache) is a chore, but doable.In use, this box, based on a 1.4GHz dual-core Core i5-based 4260U CPU feels fluid, and unlikely to trouble any but the most power-hungry users. As I say, it’s the lack of memory expansion that’s the problem here.
There’s a problem for users with Firewire peripherals too: Apple has dropped the Firewire 800 port it had placed on the back of the 2012 model. In its place is a second Thunderbolt port which will come in handy if you’re driving your monitor off the other one. The new Mini, like the old, has HDMI, but that limits you to 1920 x 1080. Thunderbolt drives my 2560 x 1440 Dell display very well.The Mini still has a useful four USB 3.0 ports and the SD card slot. Once again, the PSU is built in; no brick hanging off the back here. Gigabit Ethernet rounds off the new Mini’s port array; the internal Wi-Fi has been upgraded from 802.11n to 802.11ac.An optional extra for the Fire TV is a Bluetooth-connected game controller. This is a solid affair, larger than the Fire TV itself, and relatively expensive at £35. It has a full array of controls: two analogue sticks, D-pad, 8 buttons plus three multimedia controls (play, rewind, forward), two triggers and two shoulder buttons.Unfortunately the controller is so-so. The D-pad is stiff, the sticks are imprecise, and it lacks the polish of the best console controllers. The good news: I plugged in a wired Xbox 360 controller and it works perfectly, save for a few inessential missing buttons.
The idea of the controller is that it converts the Fire TV into a budget games console, with games priced at mobile app levels. Amazon even has its own game studios, and the controller comes with a free exclusive offering, a first-person shooter called Sev Zero, normally £4.99.Hard core gamers will be snooty about this, but the graphics are good enough for Fire TV to have real potential as a low-end gaming box. Sev Zero is humdrum, but Asphalt 8: Airborne is good fun with the controller. Fire TV supports OpenGL ES 3.0 which means rich graphics are possible. The snag here is the weak ecosystem. The selection of games is small, and they are mostly designed for tablets and touch control, so whether the controller works as expected is hit and miss.The more time I spent with Fire TV, the more annoyances I discovered. The biggest issue, which is not Amazon’s fault, is lack of third-party app support. Fire TV runs Fire OS 3.0 which is based on Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean); however it does not include Google Play Services. Apps are downloaded from Amazon’s store and developers have to tweak their apps to run on Fire OS, and deploy them to Amazon’s store. Most have not bothered, which is why the Fire OS store is sparsely populated. Going it alone is a difficult and largely friendless journey.
The USB 2.0 port does not support storage devices unless you hack your device and even that is proving more difficult with more recent Fire TV software blocking rooting. So, unlike the Roku 3 (that's £20 more), you cannot play videos from external storage. Amazon’s guide states that “The USB port currently does not support any accessories,” but this is not true; I plugged in a keyboard and it worked, as did the Xbox 360 controller. Attach storage though and you get nothing, though potentially an app might be able to access it.Hack and flash: rooting the Fire TV allows access to the Google Play Store and enables the USB port to work with storage media, but Amazon is keen to block the options to allow this
There is a mysterious lack of closed captions – text in movies showing the dialogue. The Help Tips state that pressing the menu button on the remote will display them, but I could not find an example where this works. The US listings for Amazon Instant Video show “cc” against titles that support captions, including, for example, The Dark Knight Rises.