The first of many Singapore sites and web-services that are not Mac-friendly.
The Nokia Music Store, which was launched recently provides legal downloads of music for Singaporeans on their Windows PC and their Nokia Phones.
With people crying out for legal and DRM-free music downloads, there are still companies willing to go cahoot with greedy recording labels to tie their consumers down with draconian DRM measures.
For Mac users, Nokia Music Store will be a big FAIL.
Kirk McElhearn’s rant on iTunes Plus upgrade policy written for Macworld probably reached the eyes of those in Cupertino. There has been a change, for the better.
As of January 28, 2009, Apple has changed their policy, and you can now upgrade individual albums or songs (if you purchased the songs on their own). I would like to think that my Macworld article had something to do with this change…
From a twitter tip by @Stroughtonsmith, you can enable zooming on maps in iPhoto ’09 with the scroll wheels or using two-finger scrolling to zoom by typing this in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.iphoto MapScrollWheel -bool YES
(via TUAW)
I love the Faces feature in iPhoto ’09 that I spent hours just trying to match photos of friends and family. And according to Jason Kaneshiro, Faces also recognises his cats and were able to identify the two cats he has. Think the pattern recognition works as long as there are clearly defined features on the subjects’ faces. So are you going to id your dogs too?
CNet did a comparison with a few of the more popular Web services that provide HD video hosting and with the availability of more affordable HD cams like Flip HD and Creative Vado HD, and applications like iMovie ’09 that comes with stabilization feature, having a good HD Web service site to host your movies will be a bonus.
Not surprisingly Youtube is named the best, not just for its low cost of FREE, but also for its good HD encoding and additional tools like adding subtitles and annotations.
As the One last thing at PhilNote, three changes to the iTunes Store were announced before Tony Bennett slide out from the back to sing Macworld goodbye. These changes were not surprising as news leaked out days days before Macworld of deals that were agreed with the four major music labels.
Almost two years after Steve Jobs posted his Thoughts on Music where he discussed about DRM and the iTunes, Apple finally announced the removal of Digital Rights Management (DRM) from all the music available in iTunes, starting with 8 million songs immediately and the remaining 2 million tunes by April 2009.
When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices.
What prevented Apple from sealing the deal earlier, like Amazon did in September 2007, was Apple’s reluctance to allow variable pricing for the music as the labels will prefer to mark-up prices for new hits.
Along with removing DRM from all tunes, there will be three tiered pricing of all tunes. Although not specified by Apple, most speculated that the pricing will be as follows: 69 cents for back-catalogs, 99 cents for standard songs and US$1.29 for new or popular releases. This tiered pricing structure will begin from April.
Those tunes that are DRM-free, will be available with higher-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding that is comparable to what Amazon is offering. For existing tunes, you can update them to the DRM-free format via iTunes for just 30 cents per song or 30 percent of the album price.
However, with the current setup of iTunes, Apple doesn’t allow you to upgrade selectively – its either you upgrade ALL of your old tunes or not, which can be an expensive affair at 30 cents per tune.
Lastly, for iPhone users, they can purchase the music over the air via Edge or 3G network, in addition to WIFI.
With iTunes going DRM-free by April, will it mean Apple fans in Singapore hoping to access the world’s biggest online music store will get their chance? Though there are music stores available (like SoundBuzz, Nokia Music store), they have almost always tagged their music with Windows Media DRM, even their websites don’t welcome Mac users. Should Apple launches iTunes Music store in Singapore, I won’t be surprised should it become the main source for legal online music within the shortest time.
(REUTERS/Robert Galbraith)
Phil Schiller took slightly more than one and a half hour presenting Apple’s final keynote address at the Macworld Expo. It was, a mostly good and efficient presentation by Phil and though what he presented wasn’t earth shattering, Apple is pacing themselves for a difficult year ahead.
Here is a quick recap of the products that were presented:
So after looking back at the recap of pre-Macworld rumors, here are the items that didn’t turn up:
No surprises there. With the current economy situation, introduction of any new revolutionary hardware might faced with lukewarm response from the consumers, pair that with increasing cost of manufacturing, we were stuck with only the introduction of the 17-inch MacBook Pro, while many, including myself, were hoping for a make-over of the Mac mini. This and other hardware revamps, will definitely pop up sometime over the next half of the year.
As for the iPhone nano, I believe we won’t see it appearing anytime in the future.
Snow Leopard, as we already know, will not be one with many new features, but more an improvement of OS X 10.5 Leopard. There will be more bug-fixing, code optimizing and bloat reduction, and we will probably see the announcement of its delivery at WWDC’09 in June.
As for the keynote address itself, Phil Schiller performed remarkably well, considering he has such huge shoes to follow. We felt that he started off with a tinge of nervousness, his pacing was a tad fast and he rattled on and on about the feature lists like a robot. As my friend Wai Keong said, he needs to learn to be a cocktease and milk the crowd with the new features. But as he progressed, he sounded more relaxed and the pacing was much better.
Having Tony Bennett I guess was a hit and miss for the audience, though the choice of songs – The Best Is Yet To Come and I Left My Heart In San Francisco – sure leaves many with more things to discuss, especially with Apple leaving Macworld Expo after this year.
I will look into those new products announced yesterday in the next post.
So that, is the end of Apple’s involvement with Macworld Expo. No more anticipating at every start of the New Year for new products from Apple. No more pre-Macworld Expo speculations and rumors flying around.
Predicting the next new Apple products has just been made more difficult by a few notches. Instead of the annual events, we just have to wait for Cupertino to start sending out cryptic press invites to know when they will make any announcements.
You know, that might be more fun.
