Today we're taking a look at our Top 10 applications for the iPhone followed by a list of some of our other favorites. For those of you who have your own favorite apps, let us know what they are in the comments...
Apple apparently likes to do whatever it can to push its applications and services onto as many Windows users as it can. A good example of this is when trying to download QuickTime where you are required to install iTunes as well. Similarly Apple recently pushed Safari onto Windows users as an "update" regardless of whether it was previously installed.
The next 24 hours is going to be pure chaos for Apple fans, and the madness started early this morning when Apple released iTunes 7.7. That was then followed by the App Store launch, then a "leaked" iPhone 2.0 firmware, and more. It's madness I tell you.
Apple has good reason to celebrate today after iTunes reached its five billion songs sold milestone. Five billion songs is a lot if you think about it. To put it into perspective, here are a few examples involving the number five billion...
The Al l Things D conference is going on right now and one of the most interesting things to come from it was when Walt Mossburg was interviewing Jeff Bezos, founder, president, and chief executive offer of Amazon.com. Bezos announced that within the next couple of weeks, Amazon will be launching a streaming movie service that users will pay for.
When Steve Jobs first announced the Apple TV, a device for playing digital content from iTunes, he was probably expecting it to become more of a hit than what it is. Sales aren't exactly stellar which leaves plenty of room for competition to come in and steal the show. In this case, it's Netflix's first streaming box made by Roku which in some ways, is coming in to shine brighter than the Apple TV.
Rumor had it that HBO shows would be appearing at the iTunes store soon. This was yesterday and now today, sure enough, HBO has made it's grand entrance. The official Press Release from Apple explains that programs like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Deadwood, and Rome, Flight of the Conchords and The Wire.
Today we're taking a look at Apple's Front Row vs. Windows Media Center. We're not really sure if Front Row can be compared to Media Center because right now, they serve different purposes. Front Row is more of an interface for controlling the media already on your computer while Media Center will do that in addition to recording television shows.
Last week we wrote about how iTunes was getting new movies and making them available to purchase the same day as the DVD release. This is a pretty big step for Apple, and now we're learning that they're actually losing money on these new movies. The Wall Street Journal reported that while Apple is selling newly released movies at $14.99, they're actually paying the studios about $16 for each movie.
Purchasing movies from iTunes continues to get better and more convenient for buyers. If you've bought movies from them before, you know that it usually takes at least 30 days from the time a movie comes out on DVD until the time it's available to buy on iTunes. Yesterday the big news was that Warner Brothers was saying that they were going to be making their movies available online sooner.
On this day five years ago, the Apple iTunes Music Store launched. The date was April 28, 2003, and ever since the launch, the store has managed to become more successful than I think anyone ever imagined. By early this year in 2008, over 4 billion songs have been sold through the store.
The ad:tech conference is currently going on at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and one of the most interesting things to come out of it came from the mouth of NBC's Chief Digital Officer George Kliavkoff. In a nutshell, he said he wanted Apple to build a piracy detecting iTunes and to offer flexible pricing before NBC would allow their content to return to iTunes. Here's what he said:
Over the last year or so, we have watched as Apple's iTunes has become an ever increasing influence in the music industry. It was just last June (2007) when they passed Amazon and took over the #3 position as largest music retailer in the United States.
Apple is obviously trying to attract some new users to the Safari 3.1 web browser that was just released on Tuesday, but I would say that they are using questionable methods to do so. I'm not sure how well you remember the World Wide Developers Conference last year when Steve Jobs announced how they planed to distribute Safari for Windows.
There are three questions in the news today regarding Apple that need to be answered:
It's been a hard day's night, and we're sure Steve Jobs and company over at Apple have been working like a dog to convince Paul McCartney that iTunes should be able to sell the Beatles Catalogue.
When Apple added iPod Touch/iPhone bookmark synchronization to iTunes they, for whatever reason, didn't include Firefox as an option. As it stands right now you can synchronize your iPhone bookmarks with Safari (available on Windows and Mac) or Internet Explorer (available on Windows).
Album art seems to be the hot new craze these days, and with Apple's Cover Flow (pictured below) more people want their library of music to be filled with gorgeous artwork. Cover Flow has changed the way that I find songs to listen to, and for that reason I wanted to show how you can use iTunes to retrieve your favorite album art.
The latest forming trend in digital music downloads seems to be that everyone wants to start offering DRM-free music. Both Amazon and iTunes offer a DRM-free catalog of music as well as several other sites like eMusic. People like DRM-free because it means once they download a song or album, they can play the song on multiple devices. When Amazon's service launched, it got rave reviews.
Back in September when there was a ton of hype surrounding the new iPod Touch and the drop in price of the iPhone, there was also another big story over at Apple. They announced that NBC didn't intend to renew their contract with iTunes once their current contract ran out in December. December came and went and sure enough, NBC didn't renew their contract.
