iTunes - page 17

A 15-year old teen is pointing the finger at social networking iPhone app Grindr for being assaulted by a 54-year-old man.

The incident happened in Vancouver, where Brent Tynan is being charged with sexual interference, invitation to sexual touching and sexual assault following an incident that took place last August. Tynan, who was arrested April 13, is expected back in court today.

Tynan met the teen through free app Grindr, which uses GPS in order to connect users to nearby gay and bisexual men.

So the iPad is a runaway hit and there’s no stopping the iPhone: the Telegraph still finds reason to harrumph at Apple with a “Bottom Ten” of what they consider the Cupertino company’s worst products.

The surprise: iTunes tops the list as Apple’s worst product to date.

If these schadenfreude rankings are evergreens for news outlets, they are usually topped by obvious turkeys like the Lisa and Apple III. Both of these commercial flops are still “less bad” than iTunes, however, ranking six and eight respectively.

Surprise surprise. There’s a new morsel of PC malware out there plaguing Windows machines. Nothing to write about there: it’s non-news, the equivalent of Paris Hilton getting a polite note from the Center of Disease Control.

What makes this bit of malware interesting to Apple heads, though, is the way it’s propagated: through an e-mail urging victims to download a new version of iTunes that has been upgraded for “best iPad performance, newer features and security.” Download the infected executable and the code, called Backdoor.Bifrose.AADY, then tries to slurps up the victim’s software serial numbers, IM, e-mail and protect storage login details.

Needless to say, even if you’re on a PC, you’re better off going directly to Apple.com or allowing iTunes to alert you to a new update than downloading a strange executable from even the most earnest of Russian malware mafioso.

This incredible infographic from Information is Beautiful really puts the iTunes business model in perspective: for the vast majority of artists, iTunes gives them a significantly larger share of the revenue than traditional retail outlets, and orders of magnitude more cash than any other digital music service out there.

Full infographic and breakdown after the jump.

The introduction of the iPad is a clarion call for major music labels to finally recognize the future of the music industry and embrace the development of applications made to run on Apple’s new device, according to a feature article in the latest issue of Billboard Magazine, which officially hits news stands Saturday.

Once the province of industry insiders, filled with reams of stats and reportage on music industry minutiae, behind-the-scenes comings and goings and gossip, Billboard is now a smart and snappy magazine with its finger on the pulse of the larger forces at work in the music industry, with articles seemingly targeting a more general audience while remaining the go-to source for the numbers that drive the industry.

The cover of the current issue promises a look at The Next Killer Apps, though what the article inside actually suggests is that – generally – the next killer apps on the iPad are going to be music-related offerings tied to artist branding that will give consumers something more than the aural experience provided by CDs and music downloads, and will provide the industry new realms of revenue producing products that go well beyond the marketing value of the web content and promotional aspirations of most mobile offerings produced to date.

OPINION: Steve Jobs saved the most important part of his iPhone 4.0 announcement today till last — the new in-app advertising system, called iAds.

The iAds system is important because it allows the App Store to create a completely self-sustaining app economy that is sealed off from the wider Web.

Tech guru Tim O’Reilly says the App Store is already becoming a rival to the web itself. The App Store, he says, is “the first real rival to the Web as today’s dominant consumer application platform.” Consumers will have no need to visit the web on their iPhones and iPads if they get everything they need from apps, which is bad news for companies like Google.

“This is a new phenomenon,” Jobs said about apps at today’s presentation. This is the first time this kind of thing has ever existed. We never had that on the desktop, so search was the only way to find a lot of things.”

The App Store economy is already pretty well developed. There is the app purchase mechanism itself through iTunes, and in-app purchases, which allow consumers to buy stuff from inside apps themselves. But there was a big hole: advertising. Ads are already a big part of the app economy, but clicking on them typically takes consumers out of the app and into the browser, an experience Steve Jobs describes as jolting.

But now Apple has built a sophisticated ad-serving mechaninsm right into the iPhone (and iPad, natch), which will make the App ecosystem like AOL in the early days —  a walled garden. And one that has it’s own economy: in-app purchases, and now in-app advertising. There will be no need to go to the wider web anymore — and that cuts out Google.

“What’s happening is that people are spending a lot of time in apps,” Jobs said today. “They’re using apps to get to data on the internet, rather than a generalized search.”

No wonder Apple and Google are at war. Google swooped in a bought AdMob just to keep it out of Apple’s hands (so Apple snapped up Quattro instead). Of course, Google isn’t on the ropes yet. Android is Google’s attempt to keep it relevant in mobile, and so far it’s holding its own against the iPhone.

But if early numbers are any indication, the iPad is going to be an iPhone-sized hit. Combine the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, and that’s a lot of mobile devices in Apple’s walled garden.

Last week’s release of iTunes 9.1 was largely noted for enabling the use of the iPad, no small feat. Of potentially far more use for those of us who haven’t yet managed to scrape together the pennies to buy an iPad is the ability to downsample all music for devices, whether iPad, -Pod, or -Phone, to 128kbps AAC. What this means is that you can keep high-quality (even lossless) audio files on your computer, and still carry a ton of songs without investing in a 160 GB iPod classic.

This is incredibly welcome news for me. I have a 28.07 gigabyte iTunes library, more than enough to take up nearly all the room on the highest-capacity iPhone 3GS. And lately, it had gotten to the point that I couldn’t even update my larger apps unless I deleted some music. So I synced my iPhone, clicked on its icon in iTunes, and then checked the box under Options reading “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128kbps AAC”. And voila — my phone was out of commission for eight hours! Seriously, don’t stop this process if you start it — there are grave consequences for interruption.

But when I woke up, the magic had been done. I went from eight spare megabytes (really) to 8.5 spare gigabytes — a thousandfold improvement. It’s like Apple upgraded me to a 40 GB iPhone while I slept. The music isn’t noticeably worse (to my ears, anyway), and it means I can carry a lot more of it. Brilliant. Thanks, Apple.

It’s a small change, but a nice one: Apple has just modified the App Store to make it easier to browse for iPhone and iPad apps, and distinguish universal binaries from iPhone-only apps.

It’s a simple change. Previously, iPhone and iPad apps were combined on one page, with only the Top Charts section offering the option between switching between iPhone and iPad view.

Now if you go to the App Store in iTunes, you’ll now see a couple of small tabs at the top of the page that allow you to switch between iPhone and iPad app browsing. Universal binaries will be listed under both headings, but non-universal apps will be exclusively listed under the iPhone heading… pixel doubling just does not an iPad app make.

[via TUAW]

There’s been a tremendous amount of peek-a-boo over racy apps in the iTunes store lately. Following a purge of apps with names like Epic Boobs — which once squeezed their way past censors — some of them were re-instated.

Most of the offending apps, however, were produced by small shops. The hotties available on the iTunes store from big franchises — like Playboy and Sports Illustrated — were left untouched.

In this now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t fest, Apple, however, seems to have ignored an implicit gentleman’s agreement with German publisher Springer.

Springer owns tabloid Bild whose “Shake the Bild Girl” app undresses women with a shake of the device, leaving them naked, like the babes featured in the print edition.

Apple now wants them to remove the Teutonic ta-tas from the app — leaving the women in bikinis — raising the ire of the publisher. Springer reportedly sold 100,000 downloads of the app which costs €1.59 a month ($2.15, circa), also available with a PDF edition of the print tab for €3.99 ($5,40)  a month.

“Today they censor nipples, tomorrow editorial content,” Bild Digital CEO Donata Hopfen told local media.

The issue has raised enough ire that the Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) asked The International Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP) last week to approach Apple over the issue.

More to come.

Via the Guardian

Over six months after it was first unveiled, iTunes LP is a total bust. Apple launched its interactive album format with a library of six iTunes LPs: since, only 23 more have been added to iTunes.

What the heck happened? According to Paul Bonanos writing over at GigaOm, it all comes down to two things: the iTunes LP is incredibly expensive to produce, and Apple really never wanted to do it in the first place.

Just a shade over nine years ago, Apple launched iTunes, a fairly late, fairly average MP3 player with CD burning built in. And though it lacked many of the features of Audion, then the best music player for Mac, it not only became the market leader, but it set the stage for the iPod, widespread legal music downloads, legal TV, the iPhone, and soon the iPad. It would be no exaggeration to say that iTunes saved Apple. It would be no exaggeration to say that iTunes is now Apple’s most successful piece of software ever in terms of users.

But it would also be no exaggeration to call it the worst piece of software Apple makes and the one thing that could disrupt Apple’s current march to mobile device dominance. It has bloated into a crashy kludge that the rest of the Apple universe depends upon. Despite a lot of good intentions from amazing software developers, iTunes has become Apple’s Internet Explorer 6 — an unmitigated disaster.

iTunes finally sold its ten billionth song, and as promised, Apple has given the lucky downloader a $10,000 iTunes gift card (or one ten thousandth of a cent for every iTunes song ever sold).

But sorry, guys! It wasn’t you… well, unless your name is Mr. Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia, in which case, congratulations. Sulcer’s magic download was “Guess That’s The Way Things Happen” as sung by Johnny Cash.

I guess that is the way that happens. That lucky bastard!

[via TUAW]

The iTunes store is pulling off and putting on sexy apps faster than you can stuff a dollar bill in a g-string.
Case in point: the Hooter’s girls are back in bikinis to “clean” your iPhone screen. Hooters Calendar Screen Wash was quietly reinstated Feb. 24 and is now back on sale. The $0.99 app is for a +17 audience, though it doesn’t seem to be any more prurient or wholesome than some of the babes-in-bikini apps that were yanked over sexual content. Another five Hooters-related apps, from several different app makers, also appear to have been reinstated.

No one seems more surprised than the creators, On the Go Girls, who remarked on the company blog:
“Wow! Surprising! We are shocked!  Our Hooters Calendar Sexy Screen Wash was restored to the App Store last night 2am PST.”

No-name bikini apps still seem to be AWOL from the iTunes store, which makes me wonder whether it’s more a question of brand-name franchises like Playboy and Sports Illustrated flaunting their stuff than one of women complaining about them.

Nice that it looks like Apple will give some lucky punter $10,000 in iTunes gift card on Steve Jobs’ birthday.

The counter looks close to reaching the magic number today — remember you can also enter the contest without buying anything here.

Just check to make sure your country is eligible — outside the U.S. about 20 are including Canada (parts), Mexico, Japan Australia and a handful of European countries.

Downloaders seem to be buying at alarming rates, if the ticker is accurate, and all of the top downloaded songs are a lot more recent that seven-year-old iTunes. The top five right now : “I Gotta Feeling” (Black Eyed Peas) followed by “Pokerface” (Lady Gaga) “Boom Boom Pow” (Black Eyed Peas) and “I’m Yours” (Jason Mraz) and “Viva la Vida” (Coldplay).

Via Yahoo

Complaints from women are behind Apple’s recent purge of sex-themed apps, Phil Schiller told the New York Times.

Philip W. Schiller, head of worldwide product marketing at Apple, said in an interview that over the last few weeks a small number of developers had been submitting “an increasing number of apps containing very objectionable content.”

“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see,” Mr. Schiller said.

Well, that’s certainly nice: in the span of a couple of months, Apple has been making a lot of progress bringing iTunes to the web browser, including letting users see item information and even preview tracks without launching iTunes. Now Apple’s taken it to the next step: you can now browse actual categories of the iTunes Store in HTML.

This isn’t likely to be a feature you’ll use regularly, but it’s indicative of an ongoing trend, where Apple has brought iTunes, piece-by-piece, to the web. Maybe it means nothing, but I think what we’re looking at here is the beginning steps of the online, cloud-based iTunes we’ve all been waiting for.

[via TUAW]

Apple’s policy on what constitutes content too risqué for the iTunes store vacillates more than one of those iBoob apps.

Case in point:  developer Jon Atherton says he received a letter that Apple pulled his wildly popular Wobble iBoobs app because Apple “decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store” following customer complaints.

Now we’re really confused. Many of the apps that wiggled, jiggled or writhed past Apple censors in our last iSmut app story have been pulled (Bikini Ispector, Peek-a-Babe, Crazy Eights with Hooters Girls). But if they’ve put a firm hand on iJiggles, there’s plenty of exposed flesh still available on iTunes.

iTunes is a strong service for music and apps, but it’s video offerings are far shakier, especially when it comes to television shows.
The biggest issue is the price: the average show costs $1.99 on iTunes.That seems to be more than most people want to pay for something that can watch for free on television, or wait a few months to buy on DVD for 25-50% less.

Apple’s been hinting they want to drop the average price of television shows on iTunes for awhile now, but it looks like they’ve finally convinced a network to go along with the plan. According to All Things D, CBS is planning on marking down the price of some of its show (but not all) to $0.99.

It’s a smart move, but the wording makes it clear that CBS still intends to charge full price for their more popular shows. With partners like this, Apple’s got a long way to go towards threatening the cable industry.

Now you can carry around quotes like “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall,” from Che Guevara on your iPhone. (Irony not included.)

Guevara, launched Feb. 12 for $0.99 or €.79, is the latest app in the iTunes store to capitalize on lightning rod figures. Not to be confused with iChe, another Italian-developed app released four days later, Guevara features notable quotes from the Argentine revolutionary and guerilla war tactician in English, Spanish, French and Italian.

All of these apps were approved first for the Italian iTunes store but are for sale in others, including the US store, too.

The first of its kind was iMussolini, an app featuring famous quotes and speeches of the Fascist ruler. Despite a storm of complaints, iMussolini was only yanked for a week over copyright issues.  Once ranked no. 2 in the Italian app store, developer Luigi Marino tells us his creation has been dowloaded 8,000 times so far. It is once again for sale, along with another similar app of Mussolini’s speeches.

It seems there is a kind of double standard for quote apps of controversial figures: the US iTunes store features six apps of Dalai Lama teachings and quotes, but these were all removed from China’s iTunes store leading to cries of censorship.

The Guevara app, given a +12 rating for “mild or infrequent horror/ fear /violence themes”  was developed by two 30-something Italian IT consultants who have created another five apps on the iTunes store.

As far as we know, there have been no formal complaints to Apple about the El Che quote app. (Apple has not responded to our requests for comment).

Cult of Mac talked in exclusive with one of the developers of Guevara, Marcantonio Magnarapa, about an iPad version, the approval process and iMussolini.

Cult of Mac: How did you come up with the idea?

Marcantonio Magnarapa: We came up with the idea of a Che Guevara iPhone app while talking about the man behind the revolutionary –  inspired by the Steven Soderbergh movie, actually.

However you might feel about his actions, there is no doubt that his words strike a chord in every one, independent of the era or place. His thoughts are as relevant today as they were back in his day.

UPDATE: See interview with iMussolini dev below.

Controversial iMussolini app was yanked from the Italian iTunes store a week ago, not for ongoing protests but for possible copyright violations of material from Italian state archives Istituto Luce.

The grim jawline of Il Duce has been reinstated in the iTunes store — now iMussolini, a mobile compendium of fascism, features  speeches,  a video selection (with a disclaimer), plus a section on fascist architecture and songs from his 20-year heyday.

It costs more than the previous version €1.59 (was €0.79. ) It’s also available in the US iTunes store for $1.99, in Italian only.

Cult of Mac asked developer Luigi Marino on how the app made a comeback.
Cult of Mac: So the copyright-contested video segments are still in the iMussolini app?
Luigi Marino: Yes. The videos are still there, my lawyer evaluated them in terms of copyright violation and advised me to keep them but add a disclaimer.

CoM: What does the disclaimer say?

LM: It says that the video footage is property of Istituto Luce. It also says that in no way does the app intend to praise fascism but is just a vehicle for recounting historical events.

CoM: What made you decide to put the app back in the store?

LM: I also made a few other new additions to the content in the meantime, too.

CoM: What do you think about the Holocaust suvivors’ protests of the app?

LM: I’m sorry to hear about the protests, I don’t think they understand what the app is really about. I hope they may take a closer look at the content and change their minds.

Vampire scribe extraordinaire Anne Rice just agreed to make a video-enhanced book or Vook for the iTunes store.

Her effort may provide a necessary lifeblood to the genre, even though she’s not risking much by giving video treatment to a 1984 story first published in Redbook magazine. Set in 1888,  “The Master of Rampling Gate”  is a vampire tale of two siblings and a foreboding mansion that has already been published as an audio book.

Rice’s Vook, priced at $6.99, will launch with iPod Touch and iPhone versions on March 1, a strategic move before the iPad hits the scene.

In November, Apple was kind enough to make it simpler for people checking out music through links on the web to view that album or artist’s information without actually launching iTunes.

Called iTunes Preview, the feature allowed users to click on an iTunes music link and be taken to that song, artist or album’s preview page, where you could read reviews, see the album cover, check out the user rating and listen to little song snippets. You only needed to leave your browser if you wanted to download the album.

iTunes Preview was a feature I loved: simple though it may be, it made it a lot easier to check out an artist or album when people mentioned it on the web.

Now Apple has just rolled out the same functionality for apps in the App Store, and it works the same way. Now, if you want to see an app, the only reason you need to load up iTunes is to actually download it.

I don’t want to use iTunes in any capacity as a web browser: I want to open it only when I want to suck some app or video or album down. iTunes Preview’s continuing slow rollout is a welcome improvement on the way iTunes links work.

Apple has just released iTunes 9.0.3, which looks like mostly bug fixes a big upgrade with a new look, among other things. Full details of the big, fat 100MB upgrade after the jump.

At least until Spotify lets me stream music in Germany again, I love iTunes as much as anybody, but as much music as I’ve slurped from its fiber-optical teat over the years, I still wouldn’t be caught dead buying television shows from Apple.

It’s just consumerism at work: most television shows on Apple cost $1.99 per episode, but if I wait for a DVD box set of a show, I’ll pay half that. More over, I can stream a lot of television shows for free over sites like Hulu. Apple’s prices simply aren’t competitive.

Apple seems to agree. According to The Financial Times, it is being reported that Apple is strongly pushing networks and media executives to halve the price of television shows from $1.99 to $1.

The timing of this report suggests a Tablet connection to me. The Tablet is likely to be a very media-oriented device, and there has been some theorizing that it may actually finally deliver on the promises of the Apple TV, but in a portable form factor. For that to work, though, Apple needs their video content to be a lot more appetizing… especially since the Tablet will presumably only support MP4 video files, like the iPhone or iPod. Cheaper video content and season subscriptions to shows would go a long way towards shoring up the iTunes Video Store’s current weaknesses.

At 4:53pm on Tuesday, Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince was struck by a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 M_w earthquake that essentially vaporized the entire city. Casualty estimates are still unknown, but with the earliest guesses ranging anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 dead, it is clear that only international effort is going to be able to cope with the aftermath’s sheer scope of human suffering.

To that end, Apple has figured out a smart way to leverage their existing iTunes infrastructure to easily allow users to donate money to the American Red Cross for Haitian Earthquake Relief. Just decide how much you can afford to give — denominations of $5, $10, $25, $50, $100, and $200 are supported — and click the donate button. The money will automatically be deducted from your credit card and sent on to the Red Cross, with no margin to Apple.

It’s a nice gesture on Apple’s part, but you may want to donate directly to the Red Cross, since Apple warns that since iTunes does not share personal information with external companies. From a purely practical perspective, that means the Red Cross can’t acknowledge the donation… and you can’t deduct it.

However you decided to donate, give what you can. Haiti’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.