Okay,they did the iTunes Music Festival London last year too, but that doesn’t make this years iTunes Live: London Sessions any less provocative.
According to Apple:
“Over 11 magical evenings, starting on Thursday February 21st, 2008, iTunes will host a series of unique recording sessions. More than 25 of the world’s most talented musicians — including KT Tunstall, José González, Tom Baxter, Roísín Murphy, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Spiritualized and many more — will perform solo and collaborative sets in London’s legendary AIR Studios. The performances will be recorded and sold exclusively on iTunes in March.”
By recording live performances and selling them it erases any doubt that Apple is indeed in the music biz. Hopefully, the blokes at Apple Corp. records are too busy counting their money from last years settlement. to notice this new turn of events.
BTW, looking at the artist pictures on the Website, since when did Nick Cave start sporting the sleazoid mustache?
So you may have heard that there is a rumor going around that the Adobe Flash Player is coming for the iPhone very soon. But I’m inclined to doubt it.
I updated my Apple TV the moment I got home tonight. The update was fast and went without a hitch. Take 2 includes a new menu interface that seems simpler, but otherwise has the same functionality. But of course there are the new parts: renting movies, Flcker and .mac photos, getting podcasts directly from the net, and the ability to buy music from iTunes directly, without a computer.
Apple has never encouraged anyone to modify their computers in the slightest way, in fact, dire threats of warranty violations abound at every turn. So that’s why its strange to see Apple actually linking to mod sites on the Mac Mini page.
Apple released a major upgrade to its Aperture professional photo editing software. Some of the new features are; highlight recovery, color vibrancy, local contrast definition, soft-edged retouching, vignetting and RAW fine-tuning as well as smooth publishing workflow to a .Mac Web Gallery for viewing on the web, iPhone, iPod touch and Apple TV.
Another new feature is “tethered” shooting, which is the ability to shoot images directly to a Mac from a camera via USB or FireWire and save the photos directly in an Aperture project.
Aperture 2.0 is available now for $199 at the online Apple store.
The price is a hundred dollars less than Adobe’s Lightroom photo editing software and trumps many of the older Adobe product’s features.
Aperture can also handle Adobe’s .DNG format files for smooth integration with Photoshop, but Lightroom still has the advantage of being a cross-platform application.
Both programs have free trial downloads, so you can compare the programs side by side.
Aperture 1.0 users can upgrade to Aperture 2.0 for $99 and recent purchasers of Aperture 1.5 (Jan 1-Mar 14, 2008) can upgrade for $9.95.
With Leopard 10.5.2, the Stacks feature of the dock now has a more sensible, “List” view. Rather than the fancy “Fan” view that is nothing more than a list with icons on a curve, or the “Grid” view, which is just a grid of icons, the “List” view is a nice space-optimize list. But even better, it includes multiple levels.
Starting now, you can use Software Update to get version 10.5.2 of Leopard. There are some bug fixes for iCal, Mail and iChat. In addition, we’ve also got some improvements.
One is a new list view you can use with Stacks. This looks like the way folders in the dock used to work. You can also make menus non-semi-transparent. Time machine is also now present in the menu at the top of the screen. iPhoto will now handle the RAW format of more cameras.
You can find a complete list of changes at Apple’s site.
The Mac blog site Macenstien reported last week that Apple would not be purchasing a booth at this year’s National Association of Broadcasters convention. Apple has traditionally had a huge presence at the annual event which is held the first week of April in Las Vegas. The NAB is the largest convention for broadcasters, video professionals and filmmakers in the US. Apple has used the convention to launch it’s professional video and film applications like Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio.
We’ve just added two new games to our iPhone Games collection. The first is a Pyramid Solitaire game. This is a pretty easy and fun card game. The second is a version of a game at the free online games that is also affiliated with MacMost. It is Add It Up, a number puzzle game. That makes a total of 18 games. We’ve got plans for two more by next week. Of course these also work on the iPod Touch.
