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Apple Expands iTunes Match To 19 Countries Across South America & Europe

iTunes Match has today gone live in 19 more countries across South America and Europe, taking the total number of countries that now have iTunes Match to 37. iTunes Match first launched in the US just over two months ago, followed by Brazil and then Canada, Australia and some European countries in December. Today’s launch brings iTunes Match to the following countries:

Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Guatemala, Honduras, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.

Most of these countries already had support for iTunes in the Cloud (the ability to re-download iTunes Music purchases for free), but Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Netherlands did not until today.

Apple is making quick work of finalising licensing agreements for iTunes Match, the service is certainly rolling out faster internationally than some of their previous efforts. The iBookstore or even the availability of TV Shows (which is still only available in a small selection of international iTunes Stores) come to mind as examples of Apple taking a long time to seal agreements internationally.

[Via MacRumors]

Apple To Announce “GarageBand For E-Books”?

Apple is holding an education-themed media event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on Thursday, with rumours suggesting it will heavily revolve around textbooks and the iBooks platform. Ars Technica is this morning reporting that part of the event will also be the announcement of a “GarageBand for e-books”.

The gist of this idea is that whilst anyone can create an ePub for iBooks distribution, the process is not simple - particularly if you want to go beyond the basics and add multimedia or other interactive elements. Ars Technica’s sources say Apple will announce a tool on Thursday that makes the process of creating iBooks easier. Ars points out that Apple doesn’t want to get in the textbook or book industry, just like they don’t want to enter the movie industry as content creators. Instead they have offered tools from GarageBand and iMovie to Logic and Final Cut Pro to allow anyone from consumers to professionals to create content.

The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand.

Ars also believes that Apple will announce support for the ePub 3 standard in iBooks on Thursday. Apple had used the ePub 2 standard along with some HTML5-based extensions for further multimedia and interactive elements, but the new standard removes the need for the proprietary extensions - ensuring that ePubs are compatible across platforms.

[Via Ars Technica]

Quick Review: Wikibot

Aside from jokes about a name that sounds like a Tapbots app, I’ve been using Wikibot, a Wikipedia client by Avocado Hills, on my iPhone, iPad and Mac regularly, earning a spot on my Mac’s dock as well. Whilst Wikipedia’s website is mostly fine to quickly check on something you don’t know (albeit I’d refrain from lacking particular amounts of knowledge on January 18) and desktop launchers like Alfred made it extremely easy to query the service for anything you need, Wikibot stood out to me because of its clean interface and integrated approach to languages, history and bookmarks.

On the Mac, Wikibot starts up as a minimal window onto Wikipedia’s database with a button in the upper toolbar to display the app through Lion’s full-screen mode, one to load a random article, and a search bar. Search is where you’ll be entering your keywords and there is an option to visualize results as text (title + preview) or just title. You can open multiple tabs (CMD+T), change your preferred language from the menubar item, and “copy link” or “open in browser” via a keyboard shortcut.

The nicest features of Wikibot on the Mac, however, are Favorites, History, Read Later and the overall page design, which as I mentioned above is very uncluttered and clean. Not Articles-clean, but still very readable. As for the other functionalities, you can tell Wikibot to add a page to your favorite items, or access your entire history for all the things you looked up. These options are located in a sidebar, which can also display contents of an article (such as sections and references) and categories (as you can see in Instapaper’s case, “iPad” and “iPhone software”). Favorites can be organized in folders, and it’s easy to add a page to your bookmarks using a keyboard shortcut or drag & drop. If you, however, don’t feel like building a permanent database of bookmarks while you’re using Wikibot, but just want to quickly save a link for later inside the app, you can use the local queue functionality.

At $2.99, Wikibot for Mac is a fine desktop app for Wikipedia meant for those who don’t want to keep lots of tabs open in their default web browsers.

I, however, very much prefer the iOS versions of Wikibot, which work like their Mac counterpart but add iCloud sync for History, Favorites and Settings across devices, intuitive font size controls, visual history, gallery for images, sharing options for Twitter and Facebook and offline caching. Wikibot for iOS is a powerful Wikipedia client with a simple interface, and I’m told iCloud sync will soon come to the desktop as well. I especially like the app on my iPad, where visual search and image galleries have more room to shine and “it just feels right” to spend hours augmenting your knowledge.

Plus, Wikibot for iOS is $0.99 right now, which is a great price. Get it here.

Apple Planning “Nearly Transparent Store” For France→

Apple Planning “Nearly Transparent Store” For France

Today’s cool Apple retail news comes from ifoAppleStore’s Gary Allen, who points to an article first appeared on AixEvProvence.fr magazine, which claims Apple is planning a nearly-transparent, all-glass retail store for the town located in the south of France.

A rendering posted by the magazine shows a one-level structure set back on a broad stone plaza, with a tan-colored rear wall, and all other encompassing walls made of glass. A second rendering shows the store is an extension of a design roughly based on the Upper West Side (NYC) store. Typically for Apple, the rendering does not show any Apple-like features and there are no visible Apple logos. According to the magazine, the city required Apple to build to new earthquake standards, and harmonize with the surrounding picturesque streets.

Of course, Apple isn’t new to state-of-the-art glass engineering. Steve Jobs famously said that they’ve been able to design Apple’s proposed future campus in Cupertino thanks to their expertise in durable glass constructions, which date back to 10 years ago when the company started opening retail stores featuring Apple’s distinctive glass. Most recently, Apple launched a redesign of its 5th Ave. Store in New York City using less glass panels and a patent for glass staircases was attributed to the company’s late CEO Steve Jobs.

This is a photo of the current Office de Tourisme in Aix en Provence.

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Jeff Broderick’s “QuickContact” Creates Call & Message Home Screen Icons

It appears a new trend among independent iOS developers is that of creating shortcuts to save time on tedious iOS tasks such as activating WiFi and Bluetooth, open third-party applications, or call someone. First came a bunch of web-based tools to create this kind of home screen shortcuts, including design extraordinaire Jeff Broderick’s Settings. We’ve covered this whole shortcut phenomenon quite extensively on MacStories, including Siri and the iPhone’s URL schemes (links that redirect iOS to apps or specific sections inside an app) and Launch Center, an app that spurred a debate around shortcuts and Apple’s review policies after the app was rejected from the App Store, whereas similar tools had been approved for sale. It was also discovered that Apple plans on making Settings unaccessible via URL schemes on the upcoming iOS 5.1.

Now Jeff Broderick is back at it, pouring his typical style and attention to detail into a new project called QuickContact. QuickContact allows you to create Home screen icons for people to call or send a text message to; you can choose between 15 icons designed by Broderick or upload your own upon creating a new shortcut, which is done through Safari on your iPhone or iPod touch. I won’t lie – I like Jeff’s style a lot, but I wish the web app was capable of supporting email addresses, too, besides phone numbers; I’d also like to launch the Phone or Messages apps directly without opening Mobile Safari first. Last, the app requires you to install a certificate on your device for this automation to work, and Broderick specifies on his website that “No information is saved”.

For those interested in trying out this first version of QuickContact, you can check out the project’s page here.

Thomas Brand On The History of Camino→

Thomas Brand On The History of Camino

Thomas Brand has published a detailed overview of Camino’s timeline and unfortunate demise earlier this year due to Mozilla’s decision to officially discontinue Gecko embedding, which Camino uses. For those not familiar with it, Camino was the advanced browser in the early days of OS X when Safari wasn’t out yet and IE was still the only decent choice for Mac users.

Even though I still have Camino installed on my computer it fails to qualify as a reliable alternative browser less than two months since its last update. I am saddened that Camino must die in the effort to save Firefox, a browser that has gotten just a bloated as the Netscape Suite it once replaced. By losing Camino we will not only see the end of a browser that once made the Mac great, but the end of development community focused solely on the advancement of a Macintosh only application.

As written on Camino’s blog back in March, the future beyond version 2.1 (current release) is “unclear”.

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Phraseology for iPad: Write, Remix, and Markdown

You could choose to write in Helvetica Neue, Marker Felt, or Georgia, but Phraseology has a personality all its own that’s best reflected in American Typewriter or Courier. Plenty of text editors on the iPad offer one or both of these font types, but there’s something about Agile Tortoise’s sandy colors and subtle paper-like textures that make Phraseology feel more tangible. It’s the modern equivalent of a typewriter explained through a text editor.

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New Apps for 2012

With the new year, many people make up resolutions that often involve losing weight or spend less time checking email and Facebook. Whilst those are certainly noble resolutions, they don’t quite fit the goals that I have set for this year when I began thinking about 2012 and the things I’d like accomplish in the next 12 months. Instead of working more to make more money, I’d like to work less but work smarter, as Shawn recently mentioned in an episode of Shawn Today. I want to spend more time with my family and friends and use the “time for work” with better tools to get the same things done, but better. I’m working on a series of completely new projects, too, but I also would like to optimize my existing tasks to require less time yet yield better results.

Which means I have to get new tools and understand how to properly use the ones I already have.

So instead of making up new year’s resolution and give up on losing weight after three weeks as most people do (but won’t admit), I actually went ahead and got new tools. Which, in my case, means I bought new apps and gear to get work done.

I recently wrote about how I’ve switched from OmniFocus to Remember The Milk, Calendar and Todo.txt to effortlessly manage my tasks, events, and articles. I’d like to quote for the sake of context:

I don’t have access to my Mac 24/7 anymore. I work from different places, and 80% of the time I prefer to keep my iPad with me than a MacBook. Obviously, the tweaks and adjustments I had made on my Macs didn’t carry over to iOS devices.

Articles, app releases, website management and finances are all different kinds of tasks. I used to keep them in OmniFocus, and tweak the app and its view options to fit the way I worked. It turns out, having separate tools for different sets of tasks is helping me focus more and avoid distractions. Articles need research and are more text-oriented; app releases only need a quick ping or alert; finance and website management can go into a proper GTD app with lists, due dates, etc..

These are two key points: access and writing. I don’t have access to my Mac(s) 24/7 anymore and I have to give up on pretending my articles are tasks that need to be managed with tags and due dates. Writing is a creative process (even when I’m breaking news or analyzing a rumor, I try to offer a perspective for debate and analysis), and I don’t think creativity can be managed with strict rules and app badges.

So here’s a short list of new apps that are helping me rethink my workflow. Some of them will stick around, others will probably be deleted – I don’t know. What matters is that taking a step back and reconsidering your work habits is a healthy practice (clearly better than telling your friends you’re going to lose weight or quit smoking) that, I believe, can lead to better relationships, a new knowledge of your workflows, and, ultimately, better results. Read more