I’ve had a rant building up for a few weeks. A rant about developer’s treatment at the hands of the App Store submission procedure. However unlike many rants on the topic, mine is not directed towards Apple. It is directed towards the iPhone developers who complain about the poor, unfair treatment they get, carrying their bleeding hearts in their palms while claiming Apple is bludgeoning the life out of them.
Two recent news headlines, seemingly separate, are intrinsically tied together and the synergy of them have made my eyes dislocated from the continued rolling they involuntarily perform.
Read more at The Apple Blog.
Recently, Elgato released EyeTV for the iPhone (AppStore Link). At a cost of $4.99, its marketing blurb offers the following functionality:
With the EyeTV app, you can watch, record, and enjoy live and recorded TV on your iPhone or iPod touch. At last, you don‘t have to leave all your great TV shows at home; the EyeTV app puts the power of award-winning EyeTV in the palm of your hand.
The EyeTV app accesses EyeTV running on your Mac at home to deliver these great features to your iPhone:
- Watch live TV and change channels anywhere (Wi-Fi connection required)
- Watch your EyeTV recordings
- Browse the comprehensive Program Guide
- Start recordings back home on your Mac immediately or schedule them for later
- View and edit your recording schedules
Now that we know the promises, how does the functionality work in practise and does it live up to the hype? To set the picture accurately; my set up is a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini with 2GB of RAM and two Elgato Digital USB Tuner sticks. This is hooked up to an Airport Express, which extends my existing wireless connection from another room. Between myself and my wife, we have an iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 2nd Gen, so I will be testing EyeTV on all three looking for differences.
There are few iPhone games that I will immediately buy. Most of the ones I do, however, are the classic games I played as a teenager.
The iPhone/iPod touch is more than powerful enough to handle these games and it seems that there are many people like me who are keen to experience these classics again. So, here’s a roundup of modern ports of classic games. Only official ports of classic games are detailed here — clones and the like do exist but I had to draw a line in the sand. I’ve also included links to Wikipedia for those interested in the history of the games
See the list at The Apple Blog
Smart Playlists in iTunes have always been a powerful way to create specific playlists to meet your needs, from creating a rotating fresh playlist for syncing to an iDevice to creating a specific playlist for a party. Being able to say “give me my music that hasn’t been played in the last month, that is of at least 320kbps and is rated 5 stars” is pretty sweet.
In iTunes 8 and earlier you could create all of these multiple rules and have them applied with a ‘match operator,’ which could be ALL (all rules have to match for a track to be included) or ANY (if any of the single rules apply the track will be included).
iTunes 9 has quietly and substantially expanded the level of complexity that you can create in these rules by allowing you to create nested rules. This lets you build up substantial logic with multiple ANY and ALL match operators being applied.
Read more at The Apple Blog
One of the most compelling new feature in Snow Leopard is Grand Central Dispatch, which can make it easier for developers to write software taking advantage of the multiple cores in our computers. On Sept., 10 Apple released the user library component of Grand Central to the open source community.
Read more at The Apple Blog
The open-source project team that released Sequel Pro 0.95 three months ago has just released 0.96. The update adds polish to the application, making working with it more pleasurable — if you can ever call working with databases pleasurable.
They’ve also added some new core functionality and optimized the backend. To me, this feels like more than a 0.01 update. With every update of Sequel Pro, the open-source project continues to close the gap between itself and commercial competitors such as Querious.
Read more at The Apple Blog
The Apple TV, as envisioned by Apple, is truly a very niche market device. You’re basically paying money for something that lets you pay more money to buy or rent music, movies and TV shows from the iTunes store. Sure, you can also stream content from iTunes on a computer, but when trying to stream from a central generic media device, the out of the box software just doesn’t cut it.
It is, however, possible to customize your Apple TV with unauthorized third party software (much like a jailbreak for iPhones/iPod touches) to transform it into a fantastic cheap media player (with certain limitations).
Read how at The Apple Blog
If you were to navigate to lingon.sourceforge.net or smultron.sourceforge.net today, you would see the following text on your screen:
“Hi!
First of all I’d like to thank you for your interest in my applications. But I have now come to a point where I don’t have the time to spend on the applications that they deserve so I have decided to not release any more versions for the foreseeable future.
Cheers,
Peter Borg”
Read more at The Apple Blog
The Boy Genius Report is claiming to have received a tip that Blu-ray support will be coming to iTunes 9, which may be arriving as soon as next month. Also reportedly in iTunes 9 is the long sought after ability to arrange iPhone/iPod touch icon positions from within iTunes, instead of having to do it on the device itself. In addition there will be some kind of integration with Twitter/Facebook and Last.FM — presumably this would allow sending the currently playing song to the social networking sites, removing the need to run a separate application to do this.
Read more at The Apple Blog
As much as we all love our Macs, we still generally live in a Microsoft business world and need to connect and work with Windows boxes. While Microsoft does release its own Remote Desktop application to facilitate Mac users connecting to Windows machine, I’ve never been impressed with the interface for it (on either Mac or Windows). I’ve much preferred using the open source CoRD project.
Two years since the last release of CoRD, its development team have finally released version 0.5 bringing a whole heap of polish to an already excellent software package. For me the killer feature that CoRD has over Microsoft’s official client is the ability to have multiple connections going at once, all selectable from a list. The work flow becomes similar to a tabbed interface (although its not actually tabs).
Read more at The Apple Blog
