TheAppleBlog

Like many users, I’m pleased that the labels are finally allowing Apple to sell music free of DRM copy protection. Given that the labels have allowed this for many other vendors (Amazon, Wal-Mart, Zune Store, etc.) I think they’ve been flirting with collusion on the iTunes store for a while anyway. 

What I’m happiest about is the higher quality — which I don’t think Apple would have needed permission for  – since Apple’s FairPlay DRM was pretty transparent anyway. Of my nearly 8,000 songs, about 200 of them are iTunes, most belonging to my daughter. The DRM has simply never been an issue since they play on every Mac and iPod device we have. I’m not even sure I’ll upgrade them, but a lot of that has to do with price, as we’ll see.

What I’m most curious about are the details and consequences of this deal as it pertains not just to Apple, but also the competion. Here are some questions I have…
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Imagine sitting down to talk with the guy who just broke into your apartment and stole your TV. You might ask him, “Why did you steal my TV?” and he might answer “Because I wanted it.” or “Because I wanted to sell it.” In the real world, a thief’s motivations are generally not very complicated. On the internet, though, those who crack or otherwise pirate software usually aren’t after money, since they generally give away the fruits of their labour. Since that’s the case, a conversation between thief and victim might prove a little more useful.

And it did, for iPhone developer James Bossert, who together with his wife, Constance, developed the Whack’em All game, which is based on the concept of the popular carnival Whack A Mole game. According to an article at TorrentFreak, James took matters in to his own hands when he noticed one day that his user base had spiked, gaining over 400 users in one day, compared to the usual ten. Excited, he looked into the purchasing numbers via Apple, only to find out he’d only sold 12 copies, which was pretty much par for the course.
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TheAppleBlog attended the Macworld Expo keynote presentation by Phil Schiller yesterday to bring you all the news from San Francisco. For your convenience, here is an overview of everything that Apple announced yesterday in one place. If you are interested in watching the full 90 minute presentation for yourself, Josh Pigford has the info on how to watch the keynote video stream.

iLife ‘09

Apple has updated the media software suite with some impressive new features. After playing around with it a bit yesterday, I really think that many home users will enjoy the new Faces and Places features. Personally, I think Faces and the Facebook integration are going to be the killer combination for the casual photographer that just wants to share their snapshots with friends. In a sense, Facebook becomes a crowd-sourced solution for identifying people in your photos. That’s cool. Read our review of iPhoto ‘09 to get the full story.

I’m still not convinced that the Garageband lessons will really teach people to play (I played guitar semi-professionally for several years in cover bands), but it sure is cool to see top music artists appear inside the music product. In general, I think it’s a great direction for Apple to bring music tools to even more people. Check out the first look at Garageband for the details.

Phil Schiller admitted that iMovie ‘08 took away some of the tools that people liked in iMovie ‘06 and one of the goals for ‘09 was to try to reach everyone with both ease of use and powerful editing tools in the same product. To a large degree, it appears that Apple has succeeded. The demonstration of video stabilization we saw at the keynote was astounding and the Precision Editor seems to be exactly what iMovie ‘06 holdouts have been asking for. David Appleyard hit all the highlights in his article about iMovie ‘09.
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It was fitting that Tony Bennett, beloved for his amazing contribution to his profession but largely irrelevant to the current market, was chosen to close out Apple’s keynote address at a Mac institution that is still well loved and respected for its long history but is now becoming irrelevant to the next generation of Apple customers.

The keynote itself was a mixed bag. I’ll admit to being floored by the new features in iPhoto and iMovie. Faces, Places and the new Facebook/Flickr sharing options are just great. The new precision editor in iMovie looks to be an amazing update. Garageband lessons have a definite wow factor. iTunes Plus for all 10,000,000 songs means no more DRM. The new iWork ‘09 and iWork.com have promise and add some great new features. Eight hours of battery life from a 17″ laptop still blows my mind. There was lots of cool stuff to get excited about.

A few hours later, there’s some time to reflect on what we didn’t hear. No new Mac mini. No new iMac. No new Mac Pro. There was no info on Snow Leopard, which many thought was sure to be featured at this Macworld Expo. Very little was introduced that is going to generate buzz and excitement outside of the show.
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iPhone To Be Tethered This Week - It’s a rumor that’s been around the block and then some, but according to TUAW, the eagle is finally landing this week. They think it’ll come out as a press release announced sometime during the show. Previously published details put the price of the plan at an extra $30 a month, which’ll net you 5GB.

Best Buy Joins in Refurbished iPhones Game - First it was AT&T selling them, now Best Buy is jumping on the bandwagon, selling refurbished iPhones at a $50 discount. That’s with the standard two year AT&T contract, of course. Us Canadians are still stuck paying full price.

SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone to Bring Your Living Room to Your Pocket - They said they’d do it, and now they have, at least in limited demo form. Six months after Sling Media told us all they’d bring SlingPlayer to the iPhone, they’re almost making good on it. Almost. They gave NewTeeVee staff a demo of the working product, but they haven’t submitted the App yet.

Picasa for Mac Receives Condemned to Death One Day After Its Birth - They just announced the official release yesterday of Picasa for Mac, and according to one internet publication, at least, today we’re hearing its death knell, courtesy of Apple’s new web features for iLife ‘09. iPhoto specifically, has all kinds of Picasa-killing features.

Why Apple Announces Things on Tuesday - Gizmodo has a pretty neat article about the reasoning behind Apple only announcing new things/holding press events on Tuesdays. I won’t go into detail, but it has to do with the filthy, lazy print press folks and their prissy habits.

When iWork was first announced, I will admit that I had a sinking feeling there was a strong danger that the suite wouldn’t see a second release. I wasn’t particularly optimistic about Apple’s chances of producing a word processor and a presentation app that would survive, especially when Apple skipped releasing an update in ‘07. Today, I’m quite happy to see that iWork has not only survived, but is thriving in a third release, iWork ‘09.

Keynote

Apple broke out the polish for Keynote this year, adding several new features that pretty up your presentations and make advanced animation techniques even more accessible. There are several new themes, graph types, and textures for charts, including some chrome, wood and stone textures that just look beautiful.

Magic Move tracks objects from slide to slide so that Keynote can build transitions from one slide to another and animate the movement of the object across the page. This feature shows up when creating transitions that involve images for some very polished object transitions, but also works on text where it treats letters as individual objects that can be animated across the screen. One of the impressive demonstrations involved a pile of scattered playing cards that then flew around into neatly fanned stacks of cards in the next slide. Text effects included an “anagram” transition that reused the letters by rearranging them into a new word, flying unused letters off the screen and flying in new letters to complete the word.

Also new is a Keynote Remote iPhone app that gives you control over your presentations from the iPhone. The app is smart enough to present you with the slide and speaker’s notes when in vertical orientation and it switches to the current slide and the next slide when horizontal.
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Apple’s last Macworld Keynote Address is now available to view online.

It was announced last month that today’s keynote would be Apple’s last at the Macworld Expo. It was also announced that Steve Jobs would not be delivering the address but that Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, would be instead.

The keynote went off without a hitch and Phil seemed well received by the crowd.

The video taps in right around an hour and half and is a great way to check out the new iLife and iWork ‘09 features.

Today the 17 inch MacBook Pro joined its younger siblings with a unibody construction. While many of the improvements were expected — based on the existing unibody models — and there are some worthwhile performance enhancements, Apple also had a couple of nice surprises in store. Let’s take a look…

Expected Unibody Improvements

First and foremost, for the same base price of $2,799 as yesterday, the new 17 inch model provides the following:

• Solid unibody construction. We’ve learned the unibodies are indeed very solid and seem like tanks. The 17 inch takes that even a step further, as we’ll see below.
• Dual core processor at 2.66GHz (up from 2.5) on a 1066 MHz bus (up from 800MHz)
• Utilizes fast DDR3 memory at 1066MHz.
• It is actually about a tenth of an inch smaller in width and depth, and also two-tenth of an inch thinner. Yes, these are pretty small improvements, but for a device so big any relief is better than none. (Recall that the 15 inch model actually got slightly bigger in unibody trim.)
• The wonderful glass track pad with gesture support.
• The improved 9600M mobile graphics with 512 MB video memory (same as the high-end 15 inch model).
• 9400M mobile chipset and graphics for very good performance while saving an hour of battery life.

On the down side, the new model loses the separate FireWire 400 port, getting by with just the one 800 port (which supports 400).

Further, the new model uses the mini Display Port, which means to use it with your existing screen you’ll need to by a new adaptor.
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When highlighting the new updates to iLife ‘09 today, Phil Schiller probably spent the most time highlighting the new features in iPhoto. There’s lots to like in this ‘09 update and the crowd was definitely “wowing” at some of the cool stuff that was demonstrated.

First up are two brand-new features to help you organize your photos. Apple has had a really positive response to the Events feature in iPhoto ‘08 and now Faces and Places will allow you to further organize your pictures by who appears in the picture and where it was taken.

Faces

There are two aspects to Faces in iPhoto ‘09. The first is face detection which allows iPhoto to automatically discover all the faces that appear in the photo. This allows iPhoto to present the people to you for identification, but also shows up in other features like slideshows where the photos are automatically centered and cropped so that the faces in the frame will be visible and prominent. The tech worked beautifully in the demo we saw at the Keynote.

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Apple announced today that it’s bringing some major changes to the iTunes Music Store. Most notable among the announcements is their shift to making its entire 10M-plus song library completely DRM-free.

Prior to today, Apple’s iTunes Plus selection was fairly slim. Now, all songs from the four major labels, as well as the plethora of independent labels, will be available by default as DRM-free iTunes Plus downloads. Previously purchased songs can be upgraded via iTunes’ “Upgrade My Library” option in the Music Store at 30 cents each, music videos for 60 cents, and entire albums for 30 percent of the original price (roughly $3 if it was purchased at $9.99). According to Apple, 8M songs are available in the iTunes Plus format now, with the remaining 2M-plus tracks to be converted by the year’s end.
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iMovie ’09 adds powerful, yet easy-to-use new features to let you create a movie quickly, or add refinements and special effects to your project if you have more time. There are a whole host of new features, each of which can aid in the quest to have family and friends gasping in awe at your home movie.

Advanced Drag and Drop

iMovie ’08 introduced drag and drop editing, and the latest version takes the facility to new heights. When you drag and drop one clip on top of another, you reveal new advanced editing options, including replace, insert, audio only, and even picture-in-picture or green screen. These new features allow you to make visually stunning movies, while retaining the simple drag and drop interface iMovie is renowned for.
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GarageBand ’09, the updated version of Apple’s popular software used by millions to play and record music, now gives budding musicians a fun new way to learn to play piano and guitar.

Basic Lessons

Basic Lessons let you learn the fundamentals at your own pace with Apple instructors in beautiful HD video synchronized to animated instruments and notation. You’re able to practice either the piano or guitar, playing through nine different lessons which prepare you for playing an entire song. Speed and repetition can be controlled until you’ve perfected the stage.

When ready to play the entire song, GarageBand allows you to do so with the full backing band. The video shown in the Keynote presentation looked to be of excellent quality, though it was noted that the piano lessons appear somewhat easier to follow than the guitar counterparts.
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Well, the Macworld keynote has come and gone, and we received a lot of new software from Apple, but not too much on the hardware side. In fact, the long-awaited missing unibody MacBook Pro is the only machine to come out of the event. But it might not be the laptop itself which becomes the biggest headline. In fact, the notebook’s battery is much more deserving of attention.

As rumored, the 17-inch MacBook Pro will have a built-in, non-removable battery (or not removable without major surgery, at least) when it ships later this month. The reason for the battery being locked in, rather than switchable? According to Phil Schiller and Apple’s engineering department, the new design increases space efficiency immensely, allowing the 60% boost in battery life Apple is claiming for the new laptop. That’s 8 hours (or 7 running the dedicated graphics card), compared to only 5 claimed for the last gen Pro.
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One of the early treats of Macworld this year is the release of a new Skype beta which boasts some big improvements over the existing stable release. The beta was demoed during ShowStoppers yesterday at the Macworld trade show, and released today for public download. Among the improvements it brings are a few entirely new features, which, for now at least, can be found exclusively on the Mac platform.

As is usually the case, this latest update brings improvements in audio and video call quality as well. I found that incoming audio was definitely improved, and outgoing seemed to be better as well, although it was hard to tell because I was using my MacBook’s built-in microphone, which probably wouldn’t show as significant gains as, say, a high quality USB mic. Likewise, video did seem improved, but it was hard to tell how much using my MacBook’s internal iSight cam.
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We’ve made it in to the keynote, have decent seats, and currently really solid W-Fi. Crossing our fingers that the Wi-Fi (and our batteries) will stick around.

The vibe here is update and people are handing out “Bring Steve Jobs Back” apple-shaped flyers.

We’re not planning on doing any live blogging of the event, but I will be live twittering assuming my connection sticks around.

Immediately following the keynote we’ll be getting posting our initial thoughts and reviews of the tech-gold that Schiller is set to announce.

Stay tuned.

Ecamm Network have announced the world’s first webcam with Bluetooth wireless technology. The new BT-1 webcam combines top-notch video and sound with complete freedom from wires. This is the first Bluetooth webcam supported by OS X, and will be priced at $149.99 when launched in a few months time.

Technical Details

The BT-1 streams H.264 video and AAC audio, taking advantage of Mac OS X’s rich media capabilities to provide a truly seamless experience. The detailed specifications are:

• 640×480 H.264 video and 48 kHz AAC stereo audio
• Compact 2″ x 2½” x 5/8″ design
• Compatible with iChat, Skype and more
• Standard tripod mounting screw
• 4 hour talk time
• Includes a flexible mini-tripod and USB charging cable
• Works on all latest Macs with Leopard and Bluetooth v2.0+EDR or better.

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It could certainly be argued that the iPhone has sparked a new revolution of multi-touch capable mobiles phones and handheld devices. iPhone-esque phones seem to be rearing their heads every day, all sharing one common problem; they don’t recognize a tap from a gloved finger.

For many users in warm climates this simply isn’t a problem, though Apple fans in the northern hemisphere struggle on a daily basis. In the UK, I find gloves to be an issue for only a few months of the year. That short period, however, is enough to make me realize that if the weather was cold for any length of time I’d be thoroughly disgruntled.
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I have been a frequent user of Truphone since it launched its mobile VoIP service over two years ago. What started as a simple VoIP client for Nokia Symbian S60 devices is fast becoming a unified client that does it all. You can make low-cost calls using Wi-Fi networks, utilize the wireless networks for call-back services and send SMS messages on the cheap.

Read the full article on GigaOm.com →

yellowsn0w Disrupts The White Stuff - The iPhone is no longer pure as the driven snow. The dev team, true to their word, has delivered the iPhone 3G unlocking tool to the public. Dubbed “yellowsn0w”, it appears to work well enough, based on Stephen Fry’s anectdotal evidence via Twitter, at least.

28″ iMac A Possibility - It might be one of the more out-there rumors surrounding Macworld, but there is some evidence to suggest we might see a 28″ iMac unveiled tomorrow. The bigger all-in-one would begin shipping in February, alongside revamped Mac Pros, if the rumors are correct. I think anyone who needs a 28-incher is overcompensating. So there.

iGlove Patent Could Help You Avoid iPhone-Related Frostbite -  I don’t know about where you are, but here in Toronto, it’s frikkin’ freezing. So yes, Apple, I would like these gloves. Soon, please.

Microsoft Sings That Old Familiar Tune - In a somewhat lame attempt to take some of the wind out of Apple’s sails ahead of tomorrow’s Macworld keynote, Microsoft released a statement to news outlets today that brings up the old spectre of the Apple Tax yet again. Nothing new, but that’s their point. They claim Apple is being negligent in not addressing the supposed “tax.” Here’s our answer, yet again, Redmond.

Less DRM, New Pricing Structure Rumored for iTunes Store - CNET is reporting, based on information gathered from a “source” close to negotiations between Apple and major music labels, that more DRM free tracks will be coming to iTunes. The deal also involves the introduction of an alternate pricing structure for the iTunes store that allows for three levels of pricing.

Day 1 of Macworld is nearing an end (although some of the parties may continue well into the night) and activity at the Moscone center in San Francisco is winding down. Last minute additions to the booths were being made all day today and there was a steady stream of exhibitors carrying in various and sundry gear. Apple’s booth was finished early. They actually come in a couple of days ahead so they can put everything up and cover up the banners before anyone else comes into the hall.

Across the way, conference sessions on a wide range of subjects were being conducted for paying attendees. The real focus of course, is on the keynote tomorrow morning, and details on what Phil Schiller will be showing to the assembled throng. In fact, one dedicated fellow has been waiting in line since this morning.
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