Would you pay $30 a month to watch TV via iTunes?
That's the pitch Apple has been making to TV networks in recent weeks. The company is trying to round up support for a monthly subscription service that would deliver TV programs via its multimedia software, multiple sources tell me.
Apple isn't tying the proposed service to a specific piece of hardware, like its underwhelming Apple TV box, or its long-rumored tablet/slate device. Instead, it is presenting the offer as an extension of its iTunes software and store, which already has 100 million customers.
A so-called "over the top" service could theoretically rival the ones most consumers already buy from cable TV operators--if Apple is able to get enough buy-in from broadcast and cable TV programmers.
That's a big if: Apple has told industry executives it wants to launch the service early next year, but I have yet to hear of a single programmer that has made a firm commitment to the company, which has tasked iTunes boss Eddy Cue with promoting the idea.
But industry executives believe that if anyone jumps first, it will be Disney, since CEO Bob Iger has shown a willingness to experiment with Apple and iTunes in the past: In 2005, Disney was the first player to sell its programming on iTunes, via a la carte downloads. And Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney's largest single shareholder, a result of Disney's 2006 acquisition of Jobs' Pixar animation studio. Apple didn't respond to requests for comment.
Network executives I've talked to are intrigued with the idea--they are eager to find new revenue streams--but are also wary, for multiple reasons.
... Read moreStory Copyright (c) 2009 AllThingsD. All rights reserved.
Additional stories from AllThingsD
- Weekend Update 11.07.09?Big Trouble in Little China Edition
- Sun's Business in Shambles Thanks to "Uncertainty Associated With the Proposed Acquisition by Oracle"
- Droid Has Landed All Right?Right on Google's Homepage
- All Is Forgiven: "It's a Clean Slate," Says Andreessen About Lawsuit-Mad Skype Co-Founders
Apple released iTunes 9.0.2 today an update that included additional improvements to app sorting for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
In early September, we offered a bug fix for arranging apps on iTunes after the release of iTunes 9.0 and later that same month Apple released iTunes 9.0.1. Progress was made in squashing some of the bugs we found, but the app sorting feature was still pretty tedious to use and nearly impossible to use if the number of apps on your iPhone exceeded 176.
Apple has resolved this problem by displaying the apps past the first 176 onto home screens that are grayed out. These home screens, numbered 12 or higher, will not currently display on your iPhone, but at least now you have a chance of grabbing apps from these screens and moving them to another visible screen. You should keep in mind that any apps on the home screens past the first 11 will only be accessible via a Spotlight search.
iTunes app sorting note grayed out home screen.
Problems sorting apps were not completely resolved by this iTunes update if all the home screens and the extra ones are completely populated. In this case, you lose any chance of moving the apps around effectively. However, there is a work-around--simply sync one more app back to your iPhone and iTunes will add another grayed out home screen. The exception being that this screen will now be mostly empty giving you the work space you need to get your apps sorted the way you want them. When you are done, make sure that extra app is the only one left on the extra home screen and delete it once you are satisfied with the way your apps or home screens are arranged.
This last step is optional; however, I recommend you perform it to prevent apps from accidentally being placed onto this screen. If you add more apps by syncing or purchases iPhone OS will recreate it.
iTunes app sorting--make some room for temporary workspace by syncing one extra app back to your iPhone.
Additional information about iTunes 9.0.2 enhancements, bug fixes, and download links for Windows or Mac OS X can be found at download.com.
Say Tweetie, and most folks think: "I tawt I taw a puddy tat."
But as a social-networking kinda guy, Tweetie is the name of my favorite iPhone Twitter app.
Tweetie lets you access all the standard Twitter features on your iPhone. You can see and respond to the tweets you follow, post your own tweets, and search for tweets by keyword.
Tweetie has always offered a clean, simple interface. But with its newly-redesigned version 2.0, the app is even friendlier. The buttons to tweet, check mentions of your name, send a direct mail (DM), and search for tweets are now within easy access at the bottom of the screen.
Checking your own profile is also smoother. A single Profile screen displays your bio, location, and URL, as well as the number of your followers, those you're following, tweets, and favorites. Tapping on a category like Followers displays the names and photos of all the people tracking your tweets.
Tweetie 2.0 also sports a neat, new feature to let you update the list of tweets that you follow--simply drag your finger down the screen, and the newest tweets appear at the top with a pop.
Tweetie provides its own interface for viewing Web pages and other linked content in a tweet. Courtesy of the iPhone 3.0 update, the interface works in both portrait and landscape mode and offers options to view the page in Safari, e-mail a link to the page, or repost the link in your own tweet.
Options are plentiful when creating your own tweets. Like Twitter, Tweetie keeps track of every character you type, so you know when you're approaching that 140-character limit. You can attach photos or videos to your tweets, either by snapping them with the iPhone camera or grabbing them from your library. Your followers can then view them on yFrog, a site that lets you share images and video via Twitter.
Geotagging is another hot trend that Tweetie offers. You can add a Google Maps link to your current location in a tweet and search for other Twitter users in your area.
Like several other iPhone apps, Tweetie ran into trouble earlier this year with the Apple police, who initially denied approval of its 1.3 version over alleged naughty words in its Twitter Trends feed. Of course, Tweetie is just a conduit that displays whatever appears on Twitter, so it's ridiculous to ding the app for the content. Fortunately, Apple eventually OK'd the update, and it's been smooth sailing for Tweetie since then.
The Apple's App Store is loaded with other Twitter apps, and I've tried a variety of them--both free and paid, including Twitterrific and TweetDeck.
Twitter fans all have their own preferences. You can even vote for your favorite Twitter app.
But Tweetie is the app I've stuck with the longest, and the one I heartily recommend.
Tweetie 2.0 will set you back $2.99--even those of us who migrated from Tweetie 1.0 have to pay for the new edition. But the upgrade is well worth it. Tweetie 2.0 requires iPhone OS 3.0 or higher and is compatible with both the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Graphic artists who work with Pantone colors may appreciate the latest iPhone offering.
Designed for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the $9.99 MyPantone app lets mobile users create and share palettes of colors drawn from the familiar Pantone libraries.
The app opens with a fan deck of Pantone color swatches, a virtual replica of the print Pantone swatch guide that designers carry with them. A color bar also resides at the top.
MyPantone offers colors from virtually all of the standard libraries, including Pantone Matching System (PMS) and Pantone Goe, which provides more color variations than PMS.
To create a palette, move your finger along the colors until you find the swatches you want to use. Clicking on any swatch displays its colors in a more detailed view. You can then drag any color down to the palette well below to store it.
From the fan deck, tapping on a specific color displays its values in Pantone, RGB, HTML (hex), and L*a*b (a color scale that plots values for luminance, red-green, and blue-yellow). From the palette well, tapping on a color brings up additional buttons, including a window that displays a cross-reference of harmonious colors.
You can also create a palette from a photograph. Load any photo stored on your iPhone, and the app will grab its dominant colors and automatically save them to the palette well. You can even move your finger around the photo to select a specific color shade.
Once your palette is created, you can view your colors against a different background rather than just in the palette well. This shows you how the colors might play against each other in an actual image or application.
You can save each color palette in formats compatible with popular graphic apps, including Adobe Creative Suite, QuarkExpress, or CorelDraw. You can also share your palettes by e-mail or by posting them to the MyPantone Web site.
Andy Hatkoff, Pantone's vice president of technology licensing, recently told me more about MyPantone.
Pantone thought it was important to move to a mobile environment because the company had noticed a shift in the way people work. "Designers, in particular, don't have to be or don't want to be at their desks or carry their laptops around them," said Hatkoff. "But they do take their phones everywhere, in particular their iPhones."
Pantone felt the iPhone was the right playing field for its first mobile app because, more than any other mobile device, graphic designers probably have iPhones.
MyPantone lets designers take their Pantone library with them. But it's not meant as a replacement for traditional color guides, more as a supplement. Hatkoff sees the app as playful and fun to use but with a serious side that renders it a useful tool.
"We wanted to let people use the Pantone language in a creative way, but still take advantage of a lot that the iPhone has to offer with a playful and touchable user interface," said Hatkoff.
MyPantone isn't the first color palette app for the iPhone. Color Expert from Code Line ($9.99), Palettes ($9.99) by Rick Maddy, and Color Stream ($2.99) from Sahil Lavingia serve up similar features.
The iTunes App store also offers color picker applications, more for homeowners and hobbyists, than for graphic artists. Free apps such as ColorSnap from Sherwin-Williams and Ben Color Capture from Benjamin Moore fit into this group.
But Hatkoff pointed out that most apps don't support Pantone colors (Color Expert was the only one of the bunch), and that MyPantone is the only one that can display harmonious colors.
MyPantone does have two significant limitations. It doesn't offer CMYK conversion data, disappointing to people who need to bounce between RGB and CMYK. But Pantone said it's received requests from many users for CMYK data, and that it's considering this and other features for the next update.
Also, because it's on an iPhone, you can't calibrate colors or adjust for ambient light as you can on a monitor. So the app can't offer the precise colors that a print swatch or a calibrated monitor would provide.
As a result, Hatkoff explained, MyPantone is not intended to be a color-correct environment, but more of an inspirational or directional use of color. For accuracy, designers would still need to rely on the traditional Pantone guide or a calibrated monitor.
I asked Hatkoff if color calibration and ambient light adjustment would even be possible on an iPhone? "I'm not going to say it would be impossible (to calibrate an iPhone), but it's something we are certainly investigating," he said. "We don't know the feasibility at this point. It certainly would address some interesting questions, although I don't know if iPhone users would want to calibrate their iPhones."
Correction 11:35 a.m. PDT: This story initially gave an incorrect title for Andy Hatkoff. He is vice president of technology licensing.
Apple now has the support of a USB industry standards group in its battle to keep the Palm Pre from using the iTunes music service.
The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) said in a statement Tuesday that Apple can block the Pre from connecting to iTunes. The group issued a letter to both companies warning Palm that further attempts to use iTunes would violate the group's policy.
The voice of the USB-IF is strong in this case since the group is responsible for issuing Apple the hardware vendor ID that lets its devices connect to iTunes via USB. Palm has used this process to its advantage by simulating the same ID for the Palm Pre, tricking iTunes into thinking the Pre is an Apple device.
That scheme worked until the recent release of iTunes 9, which broke the Pre's access, prompting Palm to complain to the USB-IF that the vendor ID blocks competitors.
But the group supported Apple's stance and cautioned Palm by letter that any further attempts to use the code would be a violation of its rules.
In its initial complaint, Palm told the USB-IF that the latest update of its WebOS would restore iTunes functionality to the Pre. In response, the USB-IF quoted policy and reminded Palm that it may use only its own issued vendor IDs, not those of any other company. The group asked Palm to clarify its intentions within seven days.
Palm and Apple were not immediately available for comment.
Even before the Palm Pre was released in June, people discovered that the device could connect to iTunes. Since then, Palm and Apple have fought a tug-of-war over iTunes access. Apple has issued various iTunes updates to block non-Apple devices, triggering Palm to find a way past them. Despite not-so-subtle warnings from Apple, Palm has remained persistent.
Like products in the real world, iPhone apps often go on sale. But those deals are hard to find and usually don't last long.
Free iPhone app PandoraBox can help you track down the latest and greatest sales on iPhone software.
On the surface, PandoraBox is similar to the App Store. You can search for software by name or browse by selecting among categories. The New Apps section points you to the latest software, while the What's Hot and Wish List sections display cool and popular apps. You can keep tabs on an app by adding it to a Favorites menu. PandoraBox also provides most of the standard details about an app. You'll see the full description, screenshots, ratings, and stats. If you want to read the user reviews or download a program, PandoraBox will lead you straight to the App Store itself.
(Credit:
AppZap)
The real secret inside PandoraBox is its virtual sales bin. The On Sale section in PandoraBox uncovers all apps that have dropped in price or are now free. Updated several times a day, the On Sale page shows you the original price crossed out and the new sale price. You can even switch the list between paid and free apps as you browse the sales bin.
I've found a lot of great apps on sale through PandoraBox, both free and low cost. I just picked up one app called Battery Magic for free (normally 99 cents) to keep tabs on my battery power, and another one called iProRecorder Premier for $2.99 (normally $4.99) to record high-quality audio.
Compatible with both the iPhone and iPod Touch, PandoraBox was developed by a small German company called AppZap. Led by IT consultant Dmitriy Glebenok, the AppZap team is composed of young developers who have designed other iPhone apps.
Released in March, PandoraBox has captured around 70,000 downloads. The AppZap team has already updated the program since its debut and promises more changes in the near future.
If you were hoping for Apple to announce a subscription-based music service for the iPhone and the iPod Touch on Wednesday like I was, suppress your disappointment: early this morning, Apple approved Rhapsody for iPhone, and it's available in the iTunes Store.
It's the second such service Apple has approved, but the first, Spotify, is not available in the United States. (The Rhapsody application is not showing up in search results quite yet, but it is showing up within iTunes.)
(Credit:
Rhapsody)
Rhapsody was a pioneer in subscription-based music, and I'm a big fan of the service; in 2005, it was the first one to turn me on to the thrill of chasing your whims and surfing randomly among genres, which you can't do with per-download services like iTunes.
In my most recent trial late last year (in conjunction with the Sonos multiroom audio system), I wasn't able to find any significant gaps--if anything, there was too much music, including more versions of the novelty song "Kung Fu Fighting" than I ever imagined--and there is some excellent curation and editorial work, particularly for indie rock artists.
The iPhone app is pretty straightforward: you can search for songs, surf genres and chart-toppers, and create queues and playlists. If you're a fan of Pandora, you'll also appreciate the Rhapsody Radio feature, which creates tailor-made stations built around particular artists or genres. As long as you have an active Wi-Fi or 3G connection, the music should keep playing without interruption.
It's a free download, but to use it, you'll need a Rhapsody to Go subscription, which costs $14.99 a month. That's not quite as good a deal as Microsoft's Zune Pass, which costs the same and gives you 10 permanent MP3 downloads a month, but of course that service requires a Zune, which means that it applies only to about 1.1 percent of the MP3 player market (according to a statistic that Apple snarkily included in its presentation Wednesday) and exactly zero mobile phones.
Apple appears to have seen the light, as it is now allowing subscription-based music to come to the iPhone. It makes my phone's 8GB storage size seem a lot less limiting.
Follow Matt on Twitter.
This post has been updated. See details below.
I was excited to try out the new Home Sharing feature in iTunes 9. The feature isn't as new as some reports suggest--it's been possible to share iTunes libraries among computers in a home network for years now, but the experience was pretty limited.
You couldn't play DRM-protected songs in a shared library, couldn't create playlists from a shared library, and most importantly, couldn't physically transfer songs from a library on one computer to a library on another. Home Sharing promises to change all this, so I gleefully updated iTunes on my Windows XP PC and my MacBook (which my wife has adopted), and enabled Home Sharing on both.
For a brief shining moment, my Mac (which is almost music-free) was able to see the 3,500 songs stored in iTunes on my PC. The transfer button was just sitting there, waiting for me to start moving as much of my music as I wanted over to my Mac.
Now you see it...
But instead of moving ahead, I had to mess around. Long story short, my wife and I have separate user accounts on the PC. There are some songs by some artists (like Journey) that are in my wife's iTunes library on the PC but which I've made sure never show up in mine (I can't stand Journey). So I decided to try to share her library with the Mac.
I closed iTunes on the PC, logged off, logged onto my wife's user account, opened iTunes, and tried to set up Home Sharing. It let me authorize with iTunes--which is necessary for turning Home Sharing on--but as soon as I authorized, the Home Sharing icon in the left-hand column disappeared.
OK. So I logged off my wife's account, logged back on to the PC as myself, and went back to my iTunes library. Now I couldn't see Home Sharing at all. I used the Advanced menu item to turn Home Sharing off and back on--no luck. I went to the Mac and turned it off and back on--no luck, and that made Home Sharing disappear on that copy of iTunes as well! I rebooted both machines multiple times--no luck.
Now every single time I want to turn Home Sharing on, it lets me authorize, then as soon as I hit the "Done" button, the Home Sharing icon disappears. My guess is that it has something to do with trying to authorize two libraries on the same PC with the same iTunes account, but there's no online support for iTunes 9 yet, so I can't tell. (And before you ask, yes, I have both the "Share my local library on the network" and "Look for shared libraries" boxes checked on iTunes on both computers.)
Now you don't.
Lesson: if it's working, don't touch it! Transfer that library, and get the heck out. And if anybody else has had this bug and knows how to fix it, please let me know in comments below.
Update, September 11: I turned on my Mac and PC this morning, started up iTunes, and the Sharing folder and Matt Rosoff's Library icon appeared on both. I haven't changed any settings in iTunes or in my firewall software. I'm not sure what happened, but my advice to those of you who are seeing this apparent bug--and judging from the comment stream, it's not uncommon--is to shut everything down, start up again, and make sure that iTunes is open on both computers.
Follow Matt on Twitter.
Steve Jobs announces iPhone OS 3.1.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Updated at 2:00pm PT with screenshots
At its special event Wednesday, Apple announced the latest iPhone software update iPhone 3.1. We're still downloading it now, but below you can read the list of changes as provided by Apple. Keep in mind that the ability to save a video from a multimedia message is dependent on MMS going live on September 25.
- Genius recommendations for Applications
- Support for iTunes 9 (Mac and Windows downloads), which offers Genius Mixes, app organization in iTunes, improved syncing options for music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, and photos, iTunes U Content organization
- Redeem iTunes Gift cards, codes, and certificates in the App Store
- Display available iTunes account credits in the App Store and iTunes Store
- Browse and download ringtones wirelessly from the iTunes Store
- Save video from mail and multimedia messages into Camera Roll
- Option to "save as new clip" when trimming a video on iPhone 3GS
- Better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on
- Remotely lock iPhone with a passcode via MobileMe
- Use Voice Control on iPhone 3GS with Bluetooth headsets
- Paste phone numbers into the Keypad
- Option to use Home button to turn on Accessibility features on iPhone 3GS
- Warn when visiting fraudulent Web sites in Safari (antiphishing)
- Improved Exchange calendar syncing and invitation handling
- Fixes issue that caused some app icons to display incorrectly
Our cameras were rolling Wednesday morning at Apple's San Francisco press conference as the company played up iTunes 9, iPod price cuts, games for the Touch, a video camera for the iPod Nano, and much more.
But the real spotlight was on Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who made his first public appearance since returning from medical leave after receiving a liver transplant earlier this year.
Here's a roundup of our video coverage, beginning with Jobs' standing ovation and opening speech.
... Read more
