Apple’s September Music Event: The Good, The Bad, and the Meh
Filed under: Apple Bashing, Apple Fanboyism, Opinion, iPhone, iPod, iTunes
Well, another Apple special event has come and gone, and odds are you have no idea how you feel about it. Well, fear not, I’m here to tell you what you think. So without further ado, here is what was Good, Bad, and Meh about today’s music event.
The Good
iOS 4.1 – HDR photos, Game Center, Proximity sensor and other bug fixes…. Well, obviously we’d have to test these things out to know for sure, but as a fan of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, I am really pleased to see this come to the iPhone as a native implementation. As for Game Center, Read more
iTunes book store hacked?
A quick look at the books category on iTunes and it’s no wonder that rumors of an iTunes hack are surfacing.
It seems that suddenly a certain Thuat Nguyen (who has no website or contact info on iTunes) now has 40 of the top 50 books being sold on iTunes, and what’s more he/she is buying them with other people’s iTunes accounts (up to $200 worth per account) if the comments being left on the titles are any indication.
Now of course, we COULD all just be jumping to conclusions, and maybe these 40 Vietnamese/Manga titles just happen to kick so much ass that they are rocketing up the US charts on their own merit, BUT… it still might be a good idea to check your recent purchases and freshen up that password.
[via TheNextWeb]
7 things Apple can do to REALLY clean up the App Store
Filed under: Opinion, You Bet I'm Pissed, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, iTunes
When Apple decided to make its somewhat arbitrary iTunes “porn” (and I use the term loosely) purge last month, one of the made up reasons it gave for justifying the move was that developers and customers were finding it hard to find quality apps amidst all the “adult” material. Well as we saw, removing those 5,000 apps (or less than 3% of all apps) did more or less nothing to fix the issue.
While we certainly do not wish to see ANY developers’ livelihood taken away from them (adult themed or otherwise) we have come up with a list of apps that are causing far more damage to the iTunes store than the adult apps ever did. So if Apple actually IS serious about cleaning up the app store and helping developers get noticed, here’s 7 sure fire ways they could do just that. Read more
This is why I never jailbreak my pumpkins
Filed under: Apple Fanboyism, Awesomeness, Humor, iTunes
Sure I love all the cool things I can do with a jailbroken pumpkin, but when things go wrong, they go horribly wrong. I resolved last year to stop jailbreaking my pumpkins, and this picture reminds me of exactly why I decided to suck it up and just make do with the firmware that ships natively with the fruit.
It takes roughly 2 hours to restore a 12 pound pumpkin via iTunes, and the 20 pound model takes up to 3 hours. It just isn’t worth it.
Thanks to faithful Macenstein reader Glen for the link!
[via imgur]
Random thoughts: Apple’s 100,000 iPhone apps and the Google GPS app
Filed under: Apple Bashing, Cynicism, Opinion, iTunes
Two things happened today that filled me with a resounding feeling of… “meh”. Well, actually lots of underwhelming things happened today (I’m rather hard to overwhelm thanks to various mood evening drugs)) but two Apple-related things happened.
Apple to hit 100,000 iPhone Apps
The first announcement did not officially come from Apple itself, rather it came via the blog-o-sphere. Apparently Apple has now passed (or will reach in the next day or so) the 100,000 mark of apps on iTunes. I’m not all that sure that Apple should be all that proud of hitting that milestone. If anyone should be proud of that astronomical number, it is the developers of Apple’s iPhone Software Development Kit. They apparently did such a good job at designing the SDK that even people who have zero talent, originality, programing or artistic ability can now easily create a horrible app that does basically nothing. Read more
Write a caption, win a prize
Filed under: Apple Fanboyism, Free Stuff, contests, iTunes
[Thank you WE HAVE A WINNER! This contest is now closed. Congrats to Faithful Macenstein reader Dick Nick who won with "At least I got the two important things in the divorce." There were actually quite a few truly good captions this time around, and many variations on certain themes, so this was indeed a hard choice to make.]
Just admit it, you lost your ball.
Think you’re funny enough to be the next Margaret Cho? Well, now’s your chance to prove it to the world. Write your best caption for the above photo. 
If we think it’s the most clever, we’ll send you off a $20 iTunes gift certificate.
The contest is open to everyone in the US (sorry, iTunes won’t let us buy gift certificates to non-US accounts), and runs until Friday (Oct 30th) at 11:59PM EST. You can enter more than once if you are feeling “Carrot Top“-prolific. Good luck.
(Oh, and be sure to put in your e-mail, or else we won’t be able to contact you).
[Original image courtesy of soopahgrover via flickr]
Wage war on your out-of-control iTunes library with Song Sergeant
Through a series of unfortunate events this year, my iTunes library had become a shell of its former self. Over the years I had amassed a library of about 13,000 songs (yes, all legally purchased) but due to not one, but TWO hard drive failures and the theft of my iTunes backup drive, I now had a pieced together Frankenstein of a library that despite my best efforts to repair, was becoming clear that all the duct tape in the world wasn’t going to be able to hold together much longer. More often than not these days I would find myself clicking on a song and coming up up with the missing “exclamation point” icon and a message saying the song had disappeared. Sometimes I could find the song and manually relink it to my library, but just as often it appeared the songs had just disappeared.
Above: Adding 52,000 songs to your iTunes library is asking for trouble.
I had just about resigned myself to the idea of spending 3-4 weeks redigitizing the dozens of boxes of CDs I had moved to the attic when something amazing happened. A friend of mine (who shall remain nameless) offered to lone me his drive containing over 52,000 songs. (I’ll assume he too came about acquiring the tracks legally as well). Well, never one to look a potential timesaver in the mouth, I graciously accepted his offer, not realizing at the time that adding 52,000 more songs to an already dying 13,000 tracks would end up costing me more time and braincells than anyone would want to spend. And that’s when “amazing things 2″ happened – the folks at Lairware (apparently sent by angels) out of the blue asked if I would like to review their iTunes-fixing tool Song Sergeant. Read more
Apple’s not so subtle “F U” to the Beatles
Is a giant multi-billion company above petty squabbles? Doesn’t look like it.
One of the most popular rumors leading up to Apple’s “It’s Only Rock and Roll” music event this week was that the Beatles would finally be announcing the availability of their newly remastered catalog on iTunes. In fact it seemed like a dead lock once word of a Beatles Special event was announced for the same day. Well, the event came and went with nary a mention of an Apple/Beatles partnership, or even an Apple/Ringo partnership. But should we have been surprised?
We pointed out earlier that Apple’s choice to use a Rolling Stones song to promote a Beatles-themed music event seemed a little odd, and it turns out we were right. Real or imagined, music fans have historically considered the Beatles and the Stones to be “musical rivals”, and while they do not quite have the public Blur/Oasis feud we were using an example, there’s enough of a “who’s better?” debate to make Apple’s motivation of lyric choice highly telling.
In hindsight, it would appear that Apple knew in advance that The Beatles’ 9/9/09 multi-format musical event was going to diss iTunes, and they were none too happy about it. Perhaps Apple even purposely scheduled their music announcement to coincide with the Beatles’ to steal a little Beatle thunder – after all, it’s not the 1960’s anymore, and these days a new iPod announcement tends to generate more buzz than a re-re-re-release of 30 year-old songs with slightly less hiss than before. Apple’s little jab at the Beatles in the invite should have stopped the iTunes/Beatles speculation dead in its tracks, but I suppose the Beatles still have an optimistic fan or two.
Oh and by the way, if you were wondering, the Stones are better than the Beatles.
Is iTunes 9 sporting “Marble”?
Filed under: Apple Fanboyism, Rampant Speculation, design, iTunes
Looks like Apple’s rumored “unified interface”, code-named “Marble” might be a comin’ after all… starting with the somewhat UN-unifying iTunes 9 interface.
Faithful Macenstein reader Patrick writes:
“Hey, if you notice the new look on itunes 9 it is very different than snow leopard etc etc. But is this the marble theme apple said would be included into snow leopard but never turned up. Remember in the past itunes received the new “leopard” look before leopard came out. HMMMM whatd’ya think?”
I think you’re onto something. It certainly looks quite different than iPhoto and iTunes 8 and even Snow Leopard’s Safari…
God, I wish I cared about this event…
Filed under: Cynicism, Rampant Speculation, Rumors, Slow News Day, iTunes
Faithful Macenstein reader The Boston Spangler writes:
Hi Doc,
A friend of mine works at EMI music, and he just posted this pic up on facebook… Thought it might help fuel the Apple/ Beatles debate until we hear a real announcement today…
So, whaddya think?Thanks!
The Boston Spangler
