It appears that the engineers over at Amazon Germany let a very brief detail slip though the lines of code: if you head over iLife’s product page and check on the “All Offers” box in the sidebar, it’ll tell you that iLife will be available on October 20th. Ring a bell?
As 9to5mac also notices, the US version seems to be less expensive. Hopefully we’ll know more on Wednesday.
If you care about your digital music library and you care about quality, I guess you know what the FLAC format is all about. The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an advanced (free and open source) audio compression codec that allows decompression into a perfect copy of the original audio data. Basically, it’s a high-quality compression method that generates state-of-the-art rips and (here’s the downside) huge data files. If you lose a CD you care about but have a FLAC digital copy, you have an exact duplicate.
To give you an example, a standard 13-tracks album can go up to 450MB in size. Now think about encoding that Beatles collection you have in FLAC and you get the idea.
FLAC is great, but isn’t as supported by hardware makers as other standards such as MP3 are. Luckily enough for iPhone owners, there’s an for that (sorry Apple, I know it’s a trademark now). FLAC Player for iPhone (and iPad, it’s a universal app) is a simple way to import your lossless albums and songs on your iDevice and listen to them. Read more
N.O.V.A. is one of my favorite games for iPhone and iPad. I don’t usually talk about games here on MacStories, but N.O.V.A. 2 is a thing I’m excited about: a sequel to one of the most successful and critically acclaimed games in the App Store, which Gameloft has confirmed through its official podcast will be available “this fall on Apple devices worldwide”.
It’s likely that N.O.V.A.2 will come out before the holiday season in both iPhone / iPod Touch and iPad editions. Check out the screenshots and footage from the Gameloft podcast below. Read more
Two days ago iRamadah reported (Google Translation) that FaceTime in the Middle East was working fine using an iPod Touch 4th gen. It turns out that the units they used carried MC544FD, MC540FD and MC547FD model numbers, which are the ones Apple sell in Switzerland, SaudiMac reports. Read more
Following last week’s rumors about a new MacBook Air set to be announced by Apple at its “Back to the Mac” media event on Wednesday, Cult of Mac has now posted a mockup of what they think will be the final design of the new model.
ShowPass is a new Safari extension by Canisbos (makers of extensions such as PopSearch, Placemaker, Moofmarks and TabKeys) that reveals your saved passwords when you move the cursor over the password input field. When you move your cursor out, your password is hidden again. Easy and simple! Read more
Starting November 2nd at 00:00 PT, HyperMac won’t be selling charging cables for MacBooks anymore. HyperMac’s external batteries will still be sold, but you won’t be able to charge your MacBook without the cable. The reason behind all this? “Comprehensive licensing negotiations with Apple” is what HyperMac claims, though it’s pretty clear that Apple’s recent lawsuit over Sanho’s use of the MagSafe connector played an important role.
Here’s your last chance to get a full HyperMac external battery set before November 2nd, stock is limited. As Engadget reports, there’s still hope for a legal solution - but if I were you I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Since we last covered Sparrow, a new email client for Mac, the application has improved a lot. Thanks to a relatively huge community in such short time and helpful feedback from bloggers and users, the developers managed to implement much requested features, keyboard shortcuts and, with the latest beta, a new design.
It seems like autonomous, driverless cars are the next big thing. First Google announces that many of those Google-branded cars you’ve been seeing around were actually robotic cars they’ve been working on for years, now we have a scientific project from a group of researchers at Berlin’s Free University which shows that it’s possible to call a cab using only your iPad.
The taxi is completely driverless. Read more
