iTunes - page 15

Steve Jobs publicly vowed to make the iTunes app market porn free, telling customers if they want smut they should get an Android. Whether you want sexy stuff on your smartphone or not, there’s undeniably an appetite for adult material.

That’s why developers keep submitting salacious apps to the iTunes store – playing peek-a-boo with the public as they are approved and then shut down. Big names like Playboy and Hooters iTunes offerings are, kind of a tease – lots of skin, but no nudity and “games,” like a squeaky-clean screen washing app. Android is another story.

While there is no adult material in its official app store, almost exactly a year ago a company called www.mikandi.com launched a porn app market for the Android platform, billing it as the world’s first mobile adult shop. (See our post about what Android users get a looky-loo at when they use it).

Google adopted a hands-off policy towards this parallel porn shop – and following its pattern of keeping mum about it, a Google spokesperson declined to comment for this post. It’s also worth noting that Android’s open approach allows users to use and install third party apps without jailbreaking phones.

Cult of Mac talked in exclusive with MiKandi (it’s pronounced “my candy”) CEO Jen McEwan about what’s hot in the store and where the market is headed.

To prove seeing is believing, we downloaded MiKandi, the adult app market for Android about to celebrate a year in business, and took a little tour of the apps offered there.

Mikandi (pronounced “my candy”) was a quick download on the Nexus One phone we used. To install, users must agree to allow the app to have access to the phone store and location (info they need to combat the Android’s ongoing fragmentation problem) then a lengthy end-user agreement that begins with the caveat that users must be over age 18.

In a few seconds – the waiting message reminds us it’s “loading goodies” — and the store opens. (If you’re concerned about prying eyes, you can also register for a secure account online or through the app store itself).

On Tuesday, Apple made the addition of the Beatles’ repertoire to iTunes the story of the week (ho-hum though the story was), and this Sunday, the company made the new partnership the centerpiece of every NFL game, flooding the airwaves with multiple ads drawing on still images from the Get Back/Let it Be sessions (and occasional Ed Sullivan performances).

It’s all a bit retro, but there is some kind of nice unifying warmth to the band that made Helvetica rock-and-roll being featured by the company that made Helvetica high-tech.

The ads are nice, though, particularly if you’re enjoying a holiday beverage or two and are feeling nostalgic about the excitement of four friends, a recording studio, and creativity. Take a sip, sit back, and remember that love is all you need.

iTunes offers a ton of free podcasts in its educational section geared towards making you a little smarter. Or at least sound that way. The best part: most of them are short, weekly series so you can cram in some good water cooler ideas or conference coffee break chat material when you have time.

Here are some of our favorites – educate us with your picks in the comments.

1. Stuff You Should Know

These quirky podcasts run about half an hour each, and explain often topical questions like how rehab works or how to go about house swapping. One of the informative podcasts from the folks at How Stuff Works, this is probably our favorite, though Stuff from the B-Side and Stuff Mom Never Told You are also excellent.

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With thousands of courses and resources available for free on iTunes U from some of the top universities around the world, we argued, only semi-facetiously,  that it’s better than brick-and-mortar college.

Have you ever downloaded an iTunes U course?

Let us know why or why not — and what you got out of that lecture on Drinking Games in Ancient Greece — in the comments.

If you recently used Limera1n or GreenPois0n to jailbreak your iOS device, and want to make sure that iTunes doesn’t automatically update your device’s firmware whenever the next update is released by Apple, then here is a quick fix to prevent you from accidentally updating your iPhone/iPod/iPad.

Apple released a 3rd beta build for iOS 4.2 on Tuesday, along with a 2nd for iTunes 10.1. It looks as though new builds are coming at roughly two week intervals at this point.

If, for whatever reason, your brand new iOS-driven AppleTV gets thoroughly corrupted, rest assured you won’t need to take it to your local Apple store: you’ll be able to restore iOS to your AppleTV yourself just by hooking it up to iTunes like any iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

It’s a little different, of course: the AppleTV doesn’t have an iPod Dock Connector, so you’ll use a standard mini USB cable. You also need to make sure that neither the power nor HDMI cables are connected, or the AppleTV won’t show up in iTunes.

The Observer’s John Naughton wrote an interesting piece for this weekend’s paper arguing a point that many of us would raise our hands and agree with: iTunes is bloated beyond belief, and Apple needs to do something about it.

Naughton points out that iTunes is at the center of the new Apple empire. Apple’s success depends largely on iDevices, and iDevices tend to get plugged into computers. And when that happens, they need iTunes to hold their hand.

The problem is that iTunes has become less than the sum of its parts. Weighed down by the multitude of tasks it has been assigned, iTunes has become slow, unwieldy, and confusing.

If you’ve updated iTunes to 10.0.1 in the last day or so, you might have noticed that Ping is pushing itself in your face rather more forcefully than before.

One thing: there’s the Ping sidebar on the right. Another: there’s a new Ping drop-down menu that appears in your music library, alongside any song you have selected.

They’re fine if you use Ping, but if you don’t, you might want to get rid of them. The sidebar is easy to deal with, you can hide it with a click. But the drop-down menu requires a little more tinkering to get rid of.

Apple has issued an update to iTunes today which brings with it several bug fixes, and adds some small features for its social music network, Ping. Version 1.0.1 weighs in at 86.4 MB, and it fixes the following bugs:

• Addresses an issue where the picture quality of a video changes depending on whether the on-screen controls are visible.
• Resolves an issue where iTunes may unexpectedly quit while interacting with album artwork viewed in a separate window.
• Fixes a problem that affects the performance of some third-party visualizers.
• Addresses an issue where the iTunes library and playlists appear empty.
• Resolves an issue that created an incompatibility with some third-party shared libraries.

As well as these bug fixes, new features for Ping now make it even easier to share your favorite music with your friends – instead of having to ‘like’ or post about music from the iTunes Store, you can now do it straight from your library. There’s also a new Ping sidebar:

iTunes 10.0.1 makes it easier to share your favorite music with your friends on Ping. You can now Like or Post about music right from your iTunes library. You can also easily see the recent activity of a selected artist in your library, or of all artists and friends you follow on Ping using the new Ping Sidebar.

Grab the update now via Software Update on your Mac, or from the Apple website here.

Now that Apple has made iBooks available on all iOS devices users can read their purchased eBooks on a number of different devices. But what if you have a couple large RTF, DOC, TXT, or LIT files of your own that you want to view in iBooks you’re out of luck. In this tutorial we’re going to show you how to get digital and convert your documents into eBooks so that you can enjoy reading them on your iPad, iPhone or new iPod Touch.

Apple’s new social network for music fans, Ping, has had a rough start.  People didn’t expect it to be a Facebook for music right away but they did expect more from Apple.  After years of social media hype many people thought Apple would have learned from the mistakes others have made.  While Ping might not be the best idea Apple has ever had, I think when will look back years from now we will wonder what took them so long! For those of you who have turned on Ping, here are some things Ping should have and a few tips to make your Ping experience a little better. Read more after the break.

Ever been singing along to a new song and wondered just what the heck the lyrics really are? Searching for the lyrics on the internet isn’t the fastest of solutions to avoid lyric confusion. Here we’re going to show you how to utilize scripts and a widget to search out the lyrics for all of the songs in your iTunes library and automatically save them to song’s meta data, so that next time you can correct your friend when they sing “where’s my Asian friend,” when the lyrics really are, “what’s my age again.”

iTunes is huge, and getting huger every day… but so are its operating costs. According to a new report by Asymco, iTunes is pushing almost a billion dollars a year to run.

Currently, Apple’s iTunes operating costs come in at $75 million a month, which is two and a half times what it cost to run iTunes just last year. Multiply that by twelve and you have the yearly budget.

Right now, iTunes is only $100 million shy of the $1 billion mark, but if you assume iTunes will continue to grow at 2009’s rate, iTunes might just cost Apple over $2.25 billion to keep afloat by the end of 2011. Somehow I’m guessing they’ll be able to afford it.

[via 9to5Mac]

iPods are great nifty little devices that allow you to take music off of your computer and carry  it around town with you inside a magical Apple electronic device. But what happens when you want to transfer the music that’s on your iPod and put it back on your Mac? Despite all of its friendliness, iTunes is unwilling to pry the music of your iPod or iPhone. In this walk-through we’ll show you how to reclaim your music from your iPod and get it back on your Mac.

Here are three of the best alternative iTunes 10 icons so far, and instructions how to install them:

When we posted on Friday that iTunes 10 had killed off old Automator workflows, it had all the hallmarks of a bug… and as it turns out, a but it is.

As it turns out, the problem is caused because Automator detects iTunes 10 as being a lower version number than iTunes 9, because Automator apparently sorts version numbers alphabetically instead of numerically.

As it turns out, the fix isn’t entirely onerous: simply open up the info.plist inside the packages of your non-functioning workflows and manually change the version number. If you absolutely can’t live without your iTunes Automator workflows until Apple managed to issue a Software Update, here’s your stop gap solution.

Got Ping? Wish you’d not bothered?

You might be over the moon about Apple’s baby social network, but on the off chance that you’re not, here’s a quick’n’simple guide to de-Pingifying your iTunes. It’s not difficult.

Ever feel like Steve Jobs is messing with you just for fun? That’s what I thought when I opened up iTunes 10 and saw the minimize, maximize, & close buttons on the left hand side of the window, instead of aligned at the top.

Moving the buttons over there goes against everything OS X design is about. It’s an uncharacteristic move by Apple, unless they plan to move the buttons to the side for all of their applications, which doesn’t seem likely. Don’t worry though, there’s a super simple fix for this weird quirk if you want to bring uniformity back to OS X.

Why does Apple dominate all aspects of the digital music market — hardware, software and content deals? For example, more than two-thirds of every media player sold in the world is an Apple product.

That’s amazing when you consider the company’s reputation as one that doesn’t listen to customers. Come to think of it, Google Search, Facebook and Twitter are all dominant products created without customer input.

Is ignoring customers Apple’s secret to success in consumer technology?

Read more on Datamation.

Apple’s Automator is a fantastic way to manage your iTunes tracks… but with Apple’s iTunes 10 update, many iTunes-specific Automator workflows have simply stopped working.

According to upset users in Apple’s discussion forums, the vast majority of iTunes Automator actions go missing when you install iTunes 10. Try to run a previously created iTunes workflow and you will ironically be prompted to install iTunes 4.6 or higher. Ugh.

The good news here is that none of the functionality has disappeared from AppleScript, so it should be able to replicate the functionality if you change gears. Still, the sudden absence of iTunes functionality in Automator is mysterious: did Apple purposely drop the functionality, or is this a bug? If the former, what was Apple’s rationale?

It seems the situation is more confused than I thought; some people have been able to connect Facebook with Ping, and other haven’t. See end of post for a number of updates.

OK, I give up. I’m confused. I have no idea what’s going on with Ping and Facebook.

On the one hand, we have the above screenshot, taken from Apple’s own Ping web page just this morning.

It clearly says you can connect Ping to Facebook. But. You can’t.

Here’s iTunes 10, and the first thing you’ll notice is a sleeker, cleaner look. There are fewer lines, there’s a little more space. The application is still bloated with far too much stuff, but at least it looks a little less crowded now.

At tomorrow’s iPod Event, many of us are expecting some sort of announcement about iTunes entering the cloud by offering media streaming functionality, but CNet is reporting a much more mundane development in iTunes’ likely streaming capabilities: they expect song preview samples to double in length come Wednesday.

The move is seen as an attempt to address criticisms that 30 seconds simply isn’t enough time to preview a song. That might seem rather silly — 30 seconds of a three minutes song is one-sixth its length — but the competition (YouTube) gives you the whole song to listen to for free, including the ability to buy the song on either iTunes