iTunes - page 23

There’s been a lot of hot air posted in recent hours about Apple’s apparent “threat” to pull the plug on the iTunes Music Store if it doesn’t get its way.

This is, to put it politely, nonsense.

Apple would be insane to switch off the Store now. It has invested far too much of its business in products and services that integrate with the Store to just suddenly pull the plug and go home.

The quote that has caused all the fuss is this one, submitted by iTunes vice president Eddy Cue to the Copyright Royalty Board last year:

“If the [iTunes music store] was forced to absorb any increase in the … royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss – which is no alternative at all.”

Let’s say that again: submitted by Eddy Cue last year. This is an old comment on an old issue and in no way reflects today’s reality: which is that Apple has invested a fortune in developing a line of products (iPhone, iPod) whose future is inextricably tied up with the Store. Switching it off would be little short of madness.

Of course Apple doesn’t want to run an unprofitable Store, that’s obvious. But what should also be obvious to all is that it isn’t going to suddenly have a tantrum and switch the whole thing off if royalties have to go up. The far more likely consequence is that you and I will have to pay a few pennies more for each song we buy.

Chloe & The iTunes Babysitter from Jason Bedell on Vimeo.

OK, this one might divide the audience somewhat.

Here’s Jason explaining how the iTunes visualizer has saved his day, kept his daughter quiet, and enabled him to do some work. You can hear the relief in his voice as he says: “Steve Jobs, thank you.”

Is this the best concept in babysitting since, um, TV? Or is she a little young for Apple cult indoctrination?

Do share your opinions in the comments.

Here’s hoping that Apple’s feverishly-anticipated “Brick” project is the world’s first all-screen laptop — like this mockup of the OLPC version 2 by designer Yves Behar.

There’s slim chance, of course, but I for one would love a computing device like this: A hybrid iPhone-meets-Macbook-Air that would put hot netbooks like the EeePC to shame.

Apple’s “Brick” would be a hybrid laptop/tablet/ebook that dispenses with a physical keyboard and trackpad in favor of a virtual, adaptive UI that blends multitouch, gestures and its own orientation to switch between different modes:

Laptop — When the Brick is held horizontally with the two screens at an angle, the bottom screen turns into a virtual keyboard and touchpad. There’s no tactile feedback for touch typists, but never mind, corrective text handily makes up for the myriad errors. The top screen acts like a regular laptop screen, except that it also is touch sensitive, and is responsive to multitouch gestures like double-tap to zoom, pinching and scrolling.

Tablet — When the two halves are opened fully they snap together in the middle to make a tablet with a continuous touch-sensitive screen. This mode is best for surfing the web, browsing and editing photos, and displaying mind-altering music visualizers.

eBook — Like laptop mode but held vertically. Each screen transforms into an electronic page for easy reading. Displays eBooks, eMags or specially laid out websites. Readers navigate by swiping the screen to turn the pages.

Tabletop — Like tablet mode but for two people. When an onscreen button is pushed, the screens are oriented for two users sitting opposite each other. Great for collaborative tasks and especially games.

And why’s it called “Brick”? Because it smashes Windows!

More pictures after the jump.

Inspired by Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan.

AC/DC guitarist Angus Young explains it very simply in his high voltage comments on a Telegraph story about the state of the music industry:

“We don’t make singles, we make albums.”

Well that’s one view, I suppose. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall during that interview. What else did he have to say?

Apple reaffirmed its intent to control what programs may legitimately run on its iPhone this week when the company revoked ad hoc distribution authority from a developer whose application it previously barred from distribution through the iTunes AppStore.

Last week, when Podcaster received official notice from Apple that the AppStore would not be carrying its application because the company had determined it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes, the developer decided to use Apple’s ad hoc distribution method to get the program into the hands of users who were willing to make a $10 ‘donation’ for the privilege of becoming beta-testers.

Tuesday, Apple revoked Almerica’s access to creating ad hoc licenses for the podcast downloading tool, prompting howls of protest from developers and consumers, many of whom have been skeptical of Apple’s intentions and critical of its business practices involving the AppStore from the very beginning.

Follow me after the jump to learn more about what’s behind the dispute and why Apple could be standing on shaky legal ground.

I was intrigued when I read my colleague Johnny Evans’ post about 7digital and its 4 million DRM-free tracks available in 320k MP3 quality, so I went to the site to pick up a copy of the classic Harry Nilsson album, The Point, which I’ve been wanting to buy.

I found the site easy enough to navigate, with a pleasant balance between text and graphics that seemed a refreshing change from iTunes’s hevavily-graphics-oriented interface. I located The Point quickly, listened to a couple of preview tracks and thought, hey, why not? Signing up for an account was even relatively painless and straightforward, and when it came time to give my address, I put in that of a friend who lives in London, which is when the deal started heading south. See how after the jump.

Electronics retail giant Best Buy Monday announced it would acquire Napster for $121 million. The Minneapolis-based company told Cult of Mac the move wouldn’t harm its growing relationship with iTunes owner Apple.

“Our relationship with Apple is strong and will continue to be so,” said Susan Busch, Best Buy Corporate PR Director.

The acquisition of the digital music service would become “a platform for accelerating our growth in the emerging industry of digital entertainment, beyond music subscriptions,” Best Buy Executive Vice President Dave Morrish, said in a statement.

As part of the acquisition, Best Buy gains Napster’s 700,000 subscribers, its online platform and mobile technology. Napster CEO Chris Gorog and senior management would stay on. The retailer will keep Napster’s headquarters in Los Angeles, where it employs 140 workers.

Best Buy could use Napster to attract consumers still unsure of digital music.

“They might be able to find a business in bringing in late-adopters or stragglers into the online music market by virtue of their breadth of products and service,” Mike McGuire’s Gartner’s media analyst, told Cult of Mac.

McGuire said that while iTunes and Napster may have been rivals when they first arrived on the digital music scene, Napster has never been a threat to Apple. This may be why Best Buy emphasized it will still sell the Apple iPhone.

In May, Napster took a swipe at iTunes, announcing it would sell 6 million DRM-free songs, calling it “the largest major label MP3 catalog in the industry, but also the largest library of independent music available anywhere.” McGuire, however, saw the MP3 effort as “something a bit more than an afterthought, but not much more.”

Photo courtesy: Tronick

Here’s a neat hack from the team at BBC Radio Labs, a research and development team looking at new ways to broadcast and distribute radio content:

Team member Matthew Wood explains his thinking thusly:

“Here’s what I was thinking: all my music is in iTunes. iTunes, via an Airport Express, plays out through my Big Speakers. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use it to find out what this week’s Thinking Allowed is about, or to enjoy some rough dubplate pressure from 1Xtra? … Simply, the app grabs programme information from /programmes and re-presents it to iTunes in its native tongue: DAAP.”

In short, Matthew’s code grabs the BBC’s Flash-based online radio service and hooks it up with iTunes, ending the need for using horrible Real Player (and therefore browsers or Dashboard widgets that depend on it). What a neat idea.

It’s not very consumer friendly yet, but it’s pointing in a very attractive direction.

I don’t often read Windows sites, let alone link to them, and even then not when I think they’re rightly criticising Apple or Mac OS X. But in this case, I think it’s justified.

Ed Bott got a surprise when he upgraded to iTunes 8 on his PC running Windows Vista. Not only did he get iTunes 8, he also a QuickTime update – and that’s fine, because the installer told him that was going to happen, and he continued with the upgrade knowing what to expect.

Or so he thought.

But on further investigation (see the annotated gallery), it turned out that the upgrade process also installed a bunch of other things: Apple Mobile Device Support, Bonjour, and Mobile Me. And on top of those, a couple of drivers, one of which is a known cause of serious crashes.

Ed’s post isn’t a complaint about the software itself (although the crash-causing driver is a pretty annoying problem). What he’s most annoyed about is the manner in which it was installed. If Apple wanted to install all this extra stuff, it should at least have the courtesy to tell him so first.

This is precisely the sort of behavior that Microsoft, Real, and many other Windows software companies got into trouble over back in the 1990s and early 2000s. I can remember people getting hugely angry with Windows software that tried to sneak its way into your computer.

Perhaps Apple is doing it this way because it thinks Windows users are accustomed to it. But think how you’d feel if, next time you ran Software Update on your OS X Mac, it told you there was one upgrade available and then started to install six different things? Wouldn’t you be suspicious? Wouldn’t you be just a tad annoyed?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have failed to notice that iTunes 8 arrived to some fanfare earlier this week. I’ve been putting it through its paces, figuring out whether the new features are any good, and scoring them using our patented* rockometer.

More after the break…

* Not patented.

Genius certainly is a nifty little sidebar to your iTunes collection. After it’s collected every scrap of information about your library and sent it through the Apple ultra-computer you can select any song in your library and create an instant playlist from it. Oh, except for all the songs that aren’t in Apple’s iTMS database.

Since Genius bases all of its playlist making decisions off of the iTunes Music Store users’ hive-mind, it can’t make decisions about songs that aren’t in its database, or songs that no one has bought. That means no Beatles, no live recordings, no transferred vinyl and no public domain digitized cylinders.

Enter Tangerine!

Tangerine! figures out what songs go well together by actually listening to the song itself. After analyzing your digital library (about as long as Genius’s initial setup time) Tangerine! finds the beats per minute and the “beat intensity” of all of your music, after which you can generate loads of interesting playlists. Most important, you don’t just click a button and hope the computer knows how to crescendo, climax and lend some sort of feeling to the music, you can select different patterns of intensities to suit your mood.

Tangerine! also allows you to select more precise or longer playlist times than Genius. You can limit the playlist in the same ways as you would limit a Smart Playlist in iTunes – by genre, artist, etc. – and you can select a range of BPMs and beat intensities that your playlist should stay within. You can export playlists Tangerine! makes to iTunes, and if you buy Tangerine! ($25) you can export those handy BPMs to iTunes to give other playlist makers a leg up.

Tangerine!’s biggest problem: it’s a standalone application. It also requires that you leave iTunes open while it’s analyzing your music.

But those are small costs to the benefits of creating a great playlist on the fly and really understanding where it came from. After reviewing the main features and strengths of Tangerine! it becomes obvious that Genius is underpowered. Genius leaves you wondering how it made this playlist instead of giving you any type of control or understanding of how it picked it. Genius imposes the Apple hive-mind on your music more than any other product they’ve made so far.

I think it’s sad that Apple is under the impression that people want a sidebar application that does all the creative work for you, requires no real input, and generates playlists based on nothing but “what everybody else wants”. Sure you can base creative works off of the statistics in your boring grey database, but I think knowing where something came from, and understanding how to affect and change it gives it part its value.

One thing stuck out about the build-up to Let’s Rock. It wasn’t the hype, nor people expecting the absurd (such as an all-powerful unlocked 128 GB iPhone for about $5), but Apple actively encouraging the media to attend. The event, we were told, would be a ‘big deal’. As it turns out, even fairly modest expectations were barely met, and I think it’s pretty safe to say most people left distinctly underwhelmed.

iTunes was first up, with Jobs routinely talking shop (lots of songs, lost of podcasts, and lots of NBC, who came crawling back to a distinct lack of rapturous applause). The app itself is now at version 8, but with seemingly few major changes: there’s a grid view, a Genius playlist that makes me think Apple’s been getting all jealous of last.fm, and iPhoto-style scrubbing over artists, but that’s about it.

The iPod classic’s clearly loved about as much as the Mac mini. This icon of Apple’s resurgence over recent years was pretty much dismissed, and the line knifed to a single model, 120 GB. 30,000 tracks fit on it, apparently, but that’s 10,000 fewer than on the 160 GB version that’s now like the dodo.

Things were better in the realm of the nano, even if the rumor mill had revealed most of the details. The new model resembles the second-gen model, but has a raft of new features, including voice recording, an accelerometer, and the amusing ‘shake to shuffle’ feature. The rainbow colors are arresting and presumably caught rivals out, who’ve largely been following Apple into muted-color-land.

As for the iPod touch, it got the predicted price-drop, weight-loss, volume control and speaker, along with a tag-line to make English teachers wince (“The funnest iPod ever”). New games were also on show, with Real Soccer 2009 rather depressingly dumping a D-pad and buttons on the screen, cunningly making it so players obscure the screen while playing. Woo. (How I wish the Belkin rumor hadn’t turned out to be a hoax…)

So, yeah, I’m rather wishing I’d spent the past hour doing something a little more productive and exciting, like fashioning a lint ball from my office’s windowsill that really needs dusting.

I know, I know—I’m usually the first to complain about people getting all pissed with Apple events letting them down. However, this time Apple was the one telling us we were going to see something big, when all we got were skinny things we already knew about anyway.

Via our Twitter stream, we ran ongoing commentary on Apple’s Let’s Rock shenanigans. Below is a (somewhat) edited tweet-style stream-of-consciousness from the event.

iTunes store

• 8.5m+ songs, 125k+ podcasts, 30k+ TV shows, 3000+ apps
• New today: HD TV shows, and NBC has returned
• SD shows: $1.99. HD: $2.99

iTunes 8

• Grid view, as per the rumors. Can set by artist and scrub across them like a photo album in iPhoto
• Genius “Automatically makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together—with just one click”.
• Genius information sent anonymously. Click a button to get a playlist. Restrict by track number.
• Available today

iPod sales and iPod classic

• Zzzzingg! Jobs dissed everyone else’s player market share. iPod: 73.4%. Microsoft: 2.6%.
• iPod Classic: 80 GB upped to 120 GB. 160 GB discontinued.

New iPod nano

• Form factor as per rumors: skinny, tall, like the gen-2 nano, really thin.
• Push-hold center button for Genius playlist creation.
• Voice recording from attached mics.
• New UI.
• Photos/vids in landscape mode.
• Accelerometer. Rotate 90 degrees to get Cover Flow, like with the iPhone.
• Shake to shuffle.
• Battery: 24 hours for music and four hours for video.
• $199 for 16 GB, $149 for 8GB. Bright rainbow colors in addition to aluminium.

Accessories

• New accessories: headphones and armbands, a mic for voice recording, and in-ear headphones.

iPod touch revamp, iPhone and App Store

• Thinner, with integrated volume control and speaker.
• Genius playlist creation.
• Built-in Nike+iPod – just add a shoe transmitter.
• App Store: 100 million downloads in 60 days. Available in 62 countries.
• Spore Origins, Real Soccer 2009 and Need For Speed: Undercover demoed.
• iPod touch battery life: 36 hours for music, six for video.
• New prices: 8 GB: $229, 16 GB: $299, 32GB: $399.
• New firmware, free to 2.0 owners.
• “Funnest iPod ever” strapline for the new ad.
• iPhone owners to get 2.1 bug-fix—better battery life, less crashing, fewer gremlins, speedier back-ups. Free on Friday.

Steve Jobs took the stage this morning for Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event, bounding into the lights like a rock star himself. My grandmother would say he looked svelte, but most importantly, he seemed energetic and strong.

We’ll be back later in the day with a full reaction and analysis of Apple’s news, but the big news is Steve looks ready to keep on truckin’.

Speculation surrounding this morning’s ‘Let’s Rock’ Apple special event remains intense, with Digg’s Kevin Rose at the center of the vortex of leaked data, or so it seems.

Overnight we’ve picked up a few more details on what to expect, thanks to MacRumors, who tell us that not only will the iPod nano see a shape-shift, returning to the long and thin look of the first two generations, capacity will rise to 16GB.

Apple’s also expected to introduce nine different colours for the nano, adding purple, yellow and orange to the existing pink, silver, black, blue, green and Product (RED).

Less is known of the iPod touch, which is expected to see a price cut to bring it into line with the cost of an iPhone—and seems unlikely to see a capacity increase, MacRumors also claimed – though far less is known of the iPod touch than of the iPod nano upgrade, other than some suspicions that new features could be enabled in future generation devices, cameras or a microphone, for example.

To recap Rose’s claims, Tunes 8 is expected to offer a Grid View, Genius Playlist recommendations, a new Visualizer (based on the Magentosphere visualiser) and support for HD TV show downloads from iTunes, a feature currently only available to the Apple TV.

iPhone and iPod touch users are also hoping for iPhone Firmare 2.1, which it is hoped will introduce true push support for MobileMe, more stability in 3G connectivity and an end to widely-reported cases in which iPhone user’s applications and iPod features become unavailable. iPods of all stripes are anticipated to see price reductions, as Apple grapples to deal with an increasingly saturated music player market.

Analysts, soothsayers and philosophers of all stripes seem to have achieved a consensus decision in recent days that new MacBooks are unlikely to make an appearance at this event. However, Apple’s publicity people have been urging media to attend the show, which implies that all Apple’s secrets aren’t yet out in the open…that the company has also organized a European media event in London boosts such expectation.

Perhaps that one more thing could turn out to be an all-new version of the Apple TV, now equipped with a digital TV receiver, DVD player and larger hard drive? At least one report speculates on such a possibility.

Shouldn’t the Dems be on the Left and the Repubs on the Right?

Just in case you didn’t get enough of the Democratic and Republican conventions from the mainstream media during the past fortnight, Apple has kindly made the speeches from both conventions available for free on iTunes. The collections include audio files for almost every speaker as well as audio and video for the more prominent ones.

Given how often politicians are known to be for something before they are against it, these could come in handy someday.

iTunes 8 will launch next Tuesday at Apple’s “big” media event in San Francisco, according to Digg founder Kevin Rose. Rose was the first to report rumors of a September 9 Apple event back on August 23rd, which the company confirmed with media invitations issued yesterday.

Among the new features in iTunes 8 is something called Genius, which makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together, according to the “tipster” Rose cites in his blog posting. Genius also includes Genius sidebar, which recommends from the iTunes Store music you don’t already have.

Other goodies supposedly will allow you to browse  your library’s artists and albums visually with a new Grid view; download your favorite TV shows in HD quality from the iTunes Store; sync your media with iPod nano (4th generation), iPod classic (2nd generation), and iPod touch (2nd generation); and enjoy a stunning new music visualizer.

Salling Software’s MediaSync is a brand new application that synchronizes playlists, music, and podcasts in iTunes onto mobile devices from Sony, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. President of the Swedish software maker, Jonas Salling, says “There are a lot of frustrated phone owners out there who love iTunes, but can’t easily get their tracks onto their non-Apple device.” His application works with iTunes 7.6.x and 7.7.x, is compatible with many popular phone models, and requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or 10.5.x. A Windows version is also available for Windows XP SP2 and Vista with Windows Media Player 11.

The basic installation is free, though the paid app features “smart” sync, allowing you to sync faster by minimizing the amount of data transferred in incremental syncs.

With a compatible phone connected to a USB port, you simply select the playlists and podcasts you want on your device. Media Sync not only uploads the music tracks and podcast episodes, but also replicates each actual playlist on your device and–on devices that support it–transfers play count metadata for each item, reinforcing the sense of having a piece of iTunes in your pocket. Although Media Sync works with most media in iTunes, it will not transfer DRM-protected content.

China has apparently shut off access to iTunes after discovering some Olympic athletes downloaded and have been playing Songs for Tibet, an album produced by The Art of Peace Foundation to raise funds to support “peace-related projects that are dear to the Dalai Lama”, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader whom China regards as subversive.

The group made the album available as a free download just prior to the start of the Olympics in Beijing on August 8 and encouraged Olympic athletes to download and play it on their iPods as a subtle protest during the games.

Via SMH, Australia

Some iPhone application developers have taken to using Apple’s iTunes gift certificates as an effective, if cumbersome, means of getting copies of their apps in to the hands of reviewers and other key feedback agents. While Apple allows limited ad hoc distribution of apps outside the AppStore, that even more arcane method of getting apps into the ecosytem is better suited for beta testing than it is for getting feedback on a release-stage product.

John Cassanata, director of MacHeist and co-developer of a suite of new apps for the iPhone says, “I’ve heard rumors of being able to do it using coupons in the future,” but has thus far relied on sending out iTunes gift certificates to get the word out about his products. “It’s a pain to do since I have to do them one at a time,” he adds, “[but] it’s still less than the cost of putting out a press release through a national news wire. And it’s more personal so the response rate has been good so far.”

We all read PC World. It’s our gateway to millions of articles, thousands of reviews, that killer red masthead banner, and a terrific selection of opinions on various techie things. Without it, our lives would be empty, lonely and sad.

But, oh, does PC Word drive us crazy sometimes. It lacks obvious research, hobbles truth, and says things that are just plain dumb. In some cases, PC World’s writers are to blame, not PC World itself, but the latter is the conduit through which those bad articles trickle.

We’ve rounded up 2 of these annoyances, all of which PC World could fix in about five minutes. In the meantime, we’ve listed workarounds for them—because, let’s face it, much as we hate PC World sometimes, we’re stuck with it.

1. Lazy-assed reporting regarding DRM
#2 on PC World’s list of 11 Things They Hate About iTunes is ‘DRM (Boo!)’, where writer Rick Broida moans “why does the iTunes Store still employ digital rights management (DRM) for the majority of songs in its library?” and claims that “Blaming the record labels no longer holds water”, citing that “AmazonMP3 and Rhapsody are among a growing number of services selling DRM-free MP3s from all the major labels, not just EMI”.

Presumably, it escaped Broida’s notice that this is hardly Apple’s decision. In fact, Jobs wrote an open letter entitled ‘Thoughts on Music’, stating that he wanted to ditch DRM entirely (from music alone, obviously—the chances of Jobs saying the same about movies are roughly on par with Arnie appearing in a hardcore sequel to Brokeback Mountain). To be fair to Broida and PC World, this letter was only published in February 2007, and so they might not have gotten around to reading it yet.

The answer to Broida’s question “why hasn’t Apple given DRM the heave-ho once and for all?” is, EMI aside, that the majors remain sh*t-scared of iTunes and are trying to give it a good kicking by cosying up to everyone else, in the hope of reducing Apple’s share of the market (and therefore, by association, their reliance on Apple as a retail channel). The fact that to do this said record labels are helping the likes of Amazon and Wal-Mart (not exactly teeny-tiny companies that care for the labels any more than Apple) merely shows how confused, deluded and insane they are, rather than highlighting any of Apple’s shortcomings.

Workaround moment! Stop reporting total bollocks about Apple and DRM. (And for readers: buy your stuff from Amazon, if you hate DRM, or buy shiny disc-shaped music receptacles from independent music retailers. And tut extremely loudly upon reading the PC World article.)

2. Lazy-assed reporting regarding NBC shows
#8 on PC World’s list of 11 Things They Hate About iTunes is ‘NBC Shows­ — Bring Them Back!’. This item notes that new seasons of NBC shows are just around the corner, and suggests that Apple and NBC were fighting over money, leading to the NBC shows being dropped.

“Swallow your pride and get NBC back on board in time for September,” suggests Broida. “We’ve got money for ‘Office’ burning a hole in our pockets.” I’m not sure what Apple would be swallowing if acquiescing to NBC’s absurd demands, but it wouldn’t be pride. After all, it’d have to do something drastic in order to pay for all the things NBC wanted. At least NBC’s real reason for divorcing the iTunes Store wasn’t, like the record labels, an attempt to wrest total control of its content from Apple, and take its ball home in a huff, right? Oh.

Workaround moment! Stop reporting total bollocks regarding Apple and NBC. (And for readers: watch TV on an actual TV, or buy DVDs/Blu-ray discs if you want to watch content at home, rather than spending money on crappy low-resolution versions for your portable players. And tut extremely loudly upon reading the PC World article.)

Coming soon to PC World: 11 Things We Hate About Apple, with #6 no doubt being that Apple stole the Mac OS from Xerox…

More people in the US turned to Apple’s iTunes Store for their music purchases in the first half of 2008 than to any other music retailer, according to a MusicWatch consumer survey released today by NPD Group, a leading market researcher.

Apple’s digital distribution sales outpaced the three leading physical cd distributors, WalMart, Best Buy, and Target. Amazon, which launched a digital distribution service last year, moved from fifth place into fourth based on consumers’ increasing preference for downloading files over owning physical cds.

“We expect Apple will consolidate its lead in the retail music market, as CD sales continue to slow,” said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD. NPD combines digital and physical sales for those outlets who market music in both formats and tracks digital music sold by the song or album, not music purchased under subscription from services like eMusic, or subscription revenues from Rhapsody and Napster.

Apple began providing registered software developers daily download statistics this week that point to the “game changing” success of the AppStore distribution model.

Eliza Block, the part-time developer behind a popular iPhone crossword application shared a few days worth of her statistics with 9to5Mac that highlight the revenue opportunity for iPhone application developers.

Block’s 2Across app, which sells for $5.99 and has lately been listed as an Apple “Staff Favorite” on the iTunes AppStore, earned her nearly $2000 a day in the last week of July.

While there’s no way to predict whether hers or any other application can sustain that kind of momentum, the news should be enough to send many a coder scurrying to get up-to-speed with Objective C.

Windows XP and Vista users who update to iTunes 7.7 — the version required to access the App Store — receive a complimentary control panel applet for Apple’s MobileMe online sync and storage service, and some are not happy about it.

Some PC users have been surprised to notice a “MobileMe Preferences” panel in their new version of iTunes, which makes no mention of installing additional software in the Software Update notice used to download iTunes. Users who are not already MobileMe subscribers are taken to an Apple marketing site with details about the service when they click on the “Learn More” button under a “Try MobileMe” heading in the control panel.

Apple’s decision to include the MobileMe pitch with iTunes without telling users caught the attention of Stopbadware.org, an anti-malware advocacy group founded by Google Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd. and Sun Microsystems Inc., which complained in April when Apple bundled Safari 3.1 into a Software Update notice to Windows users who had not previously installed the browser on their systems. Apple subsequently agreed to separate updates for already-installed programs from offers to install new software.

Maxim Weinstein, manager of Stopbadware.org., stopped short on Monday of calling Apple’s newest move a repeat of the Safari incident. “We haven’t had an opportunity to look at it, so we don’t have a formal evaluation,” he said. “But our guidelines require and the [user] community expects that when an application installs new or different functionality that users are notified and able to consent to that.”

Via Computerworld

Apple reports over 10 million applications downloaded from the AppStore in its first weekend, according to a press release issued by the company today. There may be discord brewing between the company and developers of the applications being distributed in the AppStore, however, as blogger Bret Terpstra writes for The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Many applications from the App Store are crashing frequently, according to Terpstra, and some veteran developers are pointing the finger at Apple, claiming crash logs indicate a “growing consensus that Apple has released a highly unstable “final” version of the 2.0 firmware.”