Posts in news

“Exciting Announcement from iTunes” Coming Tomorrow

Oh, look what we have here. Apple just updated its homepage on apple.com to include this banner, which states an “exciting announcement” from iTunes is coming tomorrow at 7 AM PST. “Tomorrow is just another day. That you’ll never forget” – that’s quite a thing to write up on Apple’s homepage.

We know that iOS 4.2 should drop tomorrow at 10 AM PST, and we know that iPhone and iPad users will be able to download the software update using iTunes. Will Apple change the system underlying the whole software update process? But then again, how would that be something we’ll never forget? It definitely must be something else than iOS 4.2-related rumors.

What comes to mind if the long-awaited “iTunes in the cloud”, based on that huge data center Apple is building in North Carolina. Apple could deploy a cloud-based sync and streaming solution for apps and media, or the rumored iTunes subscription service for music. The possibilities are really endless, and it’s just up to Apple and how much they’re willing to deploy in the first version of “the new iTunes”. What we’re sure of is, Steve Jobs doesn’t hype something so much unless it’s totally revolutionary and breakthrough. So the cloud would be, in my opinion, the most plausible answer.

We’ll check back tomorrow at 7 AM PST. Is there going to be a live streaming of the announcement, anyway? Or just text and screenshots? We’ll keep you posted as we find out more.

Update: more speculation here.

Steve Jobs: iOS and OS X Keynote Presentations Coming To Apple TV

According to a recent email from Steve Jobs to a user asking whether the Apple TV would be able to display Keynote presentations at some point, iOS and OS X presentations are coming “soon” to the Apple TV.

“Soon”, as in Keynote ‘11 for Mac and an updated iPad version? That would be an option, or maybe a simple update to the existing iWork suite to support the feature. Speaking of which, that would be something like AirPlay for presentations, right? It makes perfect sense to be able to output presentations on a bigger screen powered by the Apple TV in an Apple-focused office environment, although the functionality wouldn’t obviously be that big of a deal for “home workers”.

Anyway, we’re looking forward to new AirPlay feature, iWork ‘11 or whatever a Steve Jobs email can tell us about new things coming to Apple devices.

Apple Seeds Xcode 4 Preview 5 To Developers

A few minutes ago Apple released the fifth developer preview of Xcode 4 to developers. It’s available in the Mac and iOS Dev Center. The release comes a month after the fourth developer preview.

This is a pre-release version of Xcode 4, a major new release of Xcode for both Mac and iOS development. This release requires Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and includes the iOS SDK 4.2 GM seed, to develop apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

As for this very specific build, new features for tabs, editors panes and alerts are introduced:

This preview introduces new features and enhancements for tabs, editor panes, and alerts.  These features are designed to scale the single window interface of Xcode 4 to more effectively use available screen real estate, from the 11” MacBook Air, up to Macs equipped with multiple monitors.  Please experiment with these new features to see how Xcode 4 can speed up your daily development tasks.

Hide and Disable Ping in iTunes 10.1

iTunes 10.1, launched a few hours ago, introduced two new options to hide Ping from the sidebar and disable it completely using parental controls. First, check out our previous post detailing how you can hide Ping’s dropdown menu using a Terminal hack.

If you want to hide the Ping element from iTunes’ sidebar, open iTunes’ preferences, hit the General tab and deselect Ping in the “Show” section. That will remove it from the sidebar.

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Microsoft Targets Mac’s Lack Of Blu-Ray Support In Latest Windows 7 Ad

I haven’t really ever felt like needing to watch a Blu-Ray movie on my MacBook Pro, but apparently the folks down at Redmond think it’s worth producing an ad focused on it. In order to promote entertainment on Windows 7 machines versus Mac machines through the support of Blu-Ray disks, the video we’re referring to shows a Mac and a PC on flight, watching Avatar on the PC’s screen.

It’s nice and well-realized, overall. Check it out below. Read more

Apple Releases New iOS 4.2 GM Build For iPad (8C134b)

As we previously reported, Apple just released a second GM build of iOS 4.2 for iPad to deal with the WiFi issues. It’s available in the iOS Developer Center. Build number is 8C134b, and it’s a 551MB download.

This build is meant to address the WiFi issues experienced by several users. From what we’re hearing, Apple wants to get testing done as fast as possible – iOS 4.2 might drop next week.

Apple didn’t change the date of the original GM build, you’ll still see “November 1” on the dev center. The iPad build, however, is new.

Apple Releases iTunes 10.1, Brings iOS 4.2 Support

iTunes 10.1 just went live on Apple’s website. iTunes 10.1 is required to update your devices to iOS 4.2. You can download it here.

iTunes 10.1 introduces overall performance and stability improvements, sync support for iOS 4.2, video streaming to the Apple TV. After Mac OS X 10.6.5 and iTunes 10.1, iOS 4.2 is the next step.

Hacker Runs Microsoft’s Kinect on OS X

A few days after Microsoft released Kinect (and years later Apple’s interest in the device), a motion-based game controller for the Xbox 360 console, a group of hackers managed to modify the device’s settings, hack it and let it run on Windows 7.

Microsoft of course isn’t interested in this kind of hacks and will never support such efforts – also because there’s not really much you can do with Kinect on computers. It “runs” and  displays the images it captures from the camera, but you can’t do much after all. Read more