iTunes updated yet again.
"With iTunes 7.3, you can now activate iPhone service and sync it with your music, TV shows, movies and more. Also, you can now wirelessly share and enjoy your favorite digital photos from any computer in your home with Apple TV."

It's iPhone day!
Here's a slightly funny movie from the New York Times about the new iPhonomenon (you see what I did there?)
Shit. I've become an iPhone bore. Give us some new Macs to blog about! Please?!

The wait is over. The 'third leg of the two legged stool' is in place.
That's how Steve Jobs described the iPhone venture to Apple employees. He also hinted that the new (touchy, widescreen?) iPod would also run on an embedded version of Mac OS X (like the iPhone). Over this side of the pond, it looks like Vodafone will be the exclusive carrier to offer the new phone. Great. Boring old Vodafone. I think I'll be sticking to my Nokia and O2.
By the way, the topless hunk above is the professional 'man on the street', Greg Packer.

Seeing as the iPhone is being made available tomorrow in the States (but not here) I thought I'd give you this link to a midi version of the iPhone ringtone. Somebody took it from a keynote stream so you can upload it to your own phone and pretend you have the real thing (who are you trying to kid). You may have to convert it to a file type that's compatible with your non Apple phone.

New iPhone gallery appears.
Lovely new shots of the iPhone have been galleried on the Apple site.
Don't they look nice?

Southpark reminds us smug Mac users that our trendy computers can't play games and suffer from the 'spinning beachball of death'.

Mac OS X updated to 10.4.10.
They usually don't get as far as a .10.
"The 10.4.9 Update is recommended for PowerPC and Intel-based Mac computers currently running Mac OS X Tiger version 10.4.8 and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes or compatibility updates for the following applications and technologies:
- RAW camera support
- Handling of large or malformed images that could cause crashes
- Image capture performance
- Mouse scrolling and keyboard shortcuts
- Font handling
- Playback quality, and bookmarks in DVD Player
- USB video conferencing cameras for use with iChat
- Bluetooth devices
- Browsing AFP servers
- Apple USB Modem
- Windows-created digital certificates
- Open and Print dialogs in applications that use Rosetta on Intel-based Macs
- Time zone and daylight saving for 2006 and 2007
- Security updates"

The YouTube update for The Apple TV is now downloadable.
Here's a pic from AppleInsider.

Live From London 9pm, 26th June: Natasha Bedingfield
The sister of that bloke who had a car crash...you know "I gotta get thru this"... will perform a special acoustic set at the Regent Street Apple Store on Tuesday June 26th. The set will feature tracks from her albums Unwritten and NB. Arrive early to avoid disappointment, or else download it from iTunes a couple of weeks after.

Here'a the new ad for Paul McCartney's new song on Apple iTunes. But is that Apple Records or Apple Computers?

Five days later...the Sky Broadband is switched on. Those were five days of grief from my wife the eBay addict (who else gets 75 item alerts per day?) Five days of going to bed at a resonable hour through boredom (mainly caused by Big Brother).
To be fair to Sky, their letter did say we should add an extra three working days to our switchover date due to the high demand.
After the big switch-on late last night, all seems to running smootly. It's quicker than the old broadband from Talia/Prism and, as I'm at work during the day, I haven't had a call from my wife saying something's wrong. So that's good. It'll be interesting to see if it slows down during peak hours, but I'm not expecting it to as I don't live in a built up area.
In the last five days I've called Sky's support line as few times and I'm not impressed. The first call I made got me through to an Irish Vicky Pollard who kept repeating the same line over and over again at speed "Sorry, I'm only on Tier 1 support, you'll have to wait three to five days for a Tier 3 engineer to call you back." Three to five day?! All I wanted to know was if the phone had been switched over yet. It wasn't until Thursday night when I figured out that it hadn't. I used Safair to check the settings on the Sky (Netgear) router with an IP address that I got from the internet. It seems that Sky don't want you to mess with the router settings at all as their was no proper instruction manual included. The router was all preprogrammed for a 'plug-n-play' setup. So do Sky take their customer for idiots, I wonder? I set up my own router last time and it wasn't too difficult.
Even though my broadband is up and working, I still haven't had a call from that Tier 3 engineer. At the end of the day the wait was caused by BT not changing over my broadband line in time; Probably because they were too busy switching on new BTBroadband customers. Don't you hate monopolies?

Useful tools: Fission
If you've ever tried to cut out the ten minutes or so of silence from tracks that contain hidden track, you'll know what a pain it can be.
Whenever I wanted to do this, I had to find the original CD, copy the aiff file to the desktop and open it up in Spark LE (editing the aiff file instead of the AAC in iTunes saves loss of sound quality). Then I'd cut out the extra long silence and split save the two remaining songs back as aiff files. Next a quick import into iTunes followed by converting the huge files into AACs. Then manually enter the track info into the tags and I'd be done.
Now my life has been made that little bit more easier. I read a review of Rogue Amoeba's Fission in MacUser. It's made by the same people as AudioHijack, something I use to 'steal' songs from band's MySpace pages and other streaming music sites. The difference with Fission is that it is a lossless editor, meaning you can edit the AAC file without having to re-encode it afterwards, thus losing quality. No more digging out the original CD and re-converting in iTunes. Unlike most cheap audio editors, it can scrub through tracks so you can hear where your pointer is - helpful when finding the beginning and end of a track. Once you've split your track into two songs, you can edit the tags of the hidden track (if you know what it is. They don't always have it on the CD cover). Then normalise for more oomph.
It does cost but its only $32 (currently that's £16.24) but it's worth it's weight in hidden tracks.

Broadband switcheroo

Today is the switch-over date for my home broadband. I was with Prism which bought out Talia. Their service was extremely reliable but a little expensive (almost £25/month). Now I'm subscribing to the what could be the opposite with Sky Broadband; potentially unreliable but very cheap. Reading the Sky Broadband reviews, there seems to be a deluge of disgruntled customers. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt as I already have Sky TV and Talk and adding the 'Mid' broadband is only another £5. Sky also give you a free wireless router (as pictured above). It's a very good rebranded Netgear DG834GT. That'll free up my Airport Express for wireless printing and AirTunes.
Sadly at the moment I that's all I have. Wireless printing and AirTunes. As I said, today is my switch-over day. My Prism Broadband has stopped, but because of the rush of customers to Sky Broadband (or more likely the BT engineers not pulling their socks up) I'm left without broadband. I reckon I could do without it for a few days, as I have access to the internet and email at work. I'm just a bit worried about my wife who has an Ebay discussion board addiction. She's also a very good complainer and, if pushed, would chain herself to Rupert Murdoch's gates if Sky slip-up anywhere. which is a shame for Sky, as it would be BT's fault for not switching over our broadband line in time.
I'll give it three days. If I'm not online by then, I will demand Sky + for free - which I've always wanted and (if you read those Ebay discussion boards) is free to any Sky customer threatening to leave.

Nike+ keeps getting better.
If you haven't been on the Nike+ site in the last few months, you should return. There's so much more you can do now. Map it now works better; it's easier to plot your runs on the Google Maps and search for other runner's routes in your area. Also they've brought out a few new widgets for you to display on your homepage, blog or networking site. These display eith your profile, last five runs, best run, goals or challenges. You may notice that I've added mine to the column on the right. OK, I've had a flu virus followed by a busy week!

iTunes has its own festival.
Tickets can't be bought, you have to win them at the iTunes Festival site. It all takes place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and tickets are limited to 350 per gig. It runs throughout July and features over 60 bands and artists including Amy Winehouse, Travis, Groove Armada, Stereophonics, Beverley Knight and Crowded House. If you can't get to the gigs, don't worry, they'll be made available through iTunes.

24 hours after the keynote, the UK Apple website still hasn't been given the new look of the US site (above). Tsk, tsk. Could the metallic look mirror the design of the new upcoming iMac, I wonder?

(Not so) Live from San Francisco's Moscone West.
The WWDC Apple Keynote, with a Steve Jobs imposter. I'm afraid to say that their PC Guy is better than our PC Guy.
Stream it here.

Safari 3 beta available to download.
It's not all there yet so use it at your peril.
PS. AS you can see above - I do use a PC (but only at work).

No new Apple hardware at WWDC.
But...
New games on the way from ID and EA.
Nice new Mac OS Leopard features
iChat gets PhotoBooth.
Leopard to cost $129! (Get it free with new Macs - like I'll be doing when my boat comes in).
Safari for Windows!? (the more those PC guys use their iPods and Apple apps, the more likely they are to switch)
iPhone to be open to 3rd party apps.
Where's the new iMacs?!
I'm depressed. Thank God Heroes is on tonight.
Here's a demo of Leopard's new desktop:

Stay up to date with WWDC keynote news:
MacRumors.com Keynote Live Feed.
Easily the best, fast and with pictures!

It's that time again!
Steve Jobs will take the stage at this years Apple Worldwide Developers Conference some time this evening. He'll be going through Leopard and iPhone for most of the show but what will be the 'just one more thing...' this time? Rumours of new touch-screen iPods, brushed-metal iMacs, 3G iPhones for Europe and even Google apps for .Mac have being floating around as contenders. So if you're looking to buy anything Apple today, put your money away and wait until tomorrow.

Good news for Nokia N-Series users. Nokia have released a beta version of Nokia Media Transfer - a syncronisation app for the phones. Now you can sync your N phone with iTunes and iPhoto. Download it here.

Brushed alu iMacs for WWDC rumours.
Damn, until now I was set on replacing my ageing G4 iMac to a MacBook. 9to5Mac.com have revealed that "Apple is set to unleash a new iMac design that will utilize the company's trademark "Brushed Metal" look. One inside source claimed that the new iMacs would utilize the Santa Rosa Chipset and could top out at a larger size than the current 24 inch display. Additionally, the design will resemble the current Cinema Display more than the current iMacs with the extra hang below the screen minimized.
There is no word yet on whether or not Apple will return to its color iMac designs but hypothetically, they could end up with the same sort of surface as the current iPod Nano line.
Apple is also getting rid of the 17" version, instead opting for a lower priced 20".
The new iMacs are set to be priced similar to the current lineup and will hit the shelves shortly after WWDC."
By the way, they'll look nothing like the one in the picture above.

Send your kids to Apple Summer Camp.
Spaces are available at all Apple Store locations in the UK. Families spend two and a half hours learning how to make movies, podcasts, photos, music and websites on the Mac. The recommended age is from 8 to 12 and you can sign up for a two workshops. What fun!

As predicted - New MacBook Pros.
They can take up to 4GB of Ram and use LED-backlit LCD displays. Here's the rest of the their new spec:
The 2.2 GHz, 15-inch MacBook Pro, for a suggested retail price of £1,299 (inc. VAT), includes:

• 15.4-inch widescreen LED-backlit 1440-by-900 LCD display;
• 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor;
• 2GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, expandable to 4GB;
• 120GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 5400 rpm, with Sudden Motion Sensor;
• a slot-load 8x SuperDrive® with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW) optical drive;
• NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 128MB GDDR3 memory;
• DVI-out port for external display (VGA-out adapter included, Composite/S-Video out adapter sold separately);
• built-in Dual Link support for driving Apple 30-inch Cinema HD Display;
• built-in iSight video camera;
• Gigabit Ethernet port;
• built-in AirPort Extreme® 802.11n wireless networking and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR;
• ExpressCard/34 expansion card slot;
• two USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 800 port, and one FireWire 400 port;
• one audio line in and one headphone out port, each supporting optical digital audio;
• Scrolling TrackPad and illuminated keyboard;
• the infrared Apple Remote; and
• 85 Watt Apple MagSafe Power Adapter.

The 2.4 GHz, 15-inch MacBook Pro, for a suggested retail price of £1,599 (inc. VAT), includes:


• 15.4-inch widescreen LED-backlit 1440-by-900 LCD display;
• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor;
• 2GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, expandable to 4GB;
• 160GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 5400 rpm, with Sudden Motion Sensor;
• a slot-load 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW) optical drive;
• NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB GDDR3 memory;
• DVI-out port for external display (VGA-out adapter included, Composite/S-Video out adapter sold separately);
• built-in Dual Link support for driving Apple 30-inch Cinema HD Display;
• built-in iSight video camera;
• Gigabit Ethernet port;
• built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR;
• ExpressCard/34 expansion card slot;
• two USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 800 port, and one FireWire 400 port;
• one audio line in and one headphone out port, each supporting optical digital audio;
• Scrolling TrackPad and illuminated keyboard;
• the infrared Apple Remote; and
• 85 Watt Apple MagSafe Power Adapter.


The 2.4 GHz, 17-inch MacBook Pro, for a suggested retail price of £1,799 (inc. VAT), includes:

• 17-inch widescreen 1680-by-1050 LCD display;
• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor;
• 2GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, expandable to 4GB;
• 160GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 5400 rpm, with Sudden Motion Sensor;
• a slot-load 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW) optical drive;
• NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB GDDR3 memory;
• DVI-out port for external display (VGA-out adapter included, Composite/S-Video out adapter sold separately);
• built-in Dual Link support for driving Apple 30-inch Cinema HD Display;
• built-in iSight video camera;
• Gigabit Ethernet port;
• built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR;
• ExpressCard/34 expansion card slot;
• three USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 800 port, and one FireWire 400 port;
• one audio line in and one headphone out port, each supporting optical digital audio;
• Scrolling TrackPad and illuminated keyboard;
• the infrared Apple Remote; and
• 85 Watt Apple MagSafe Power Adapter.

Additional build-to-order options for the MacBook Pro include the ability to upgrade to a 160GB (5400 rpm), 160GB (7200 rpm), 200GB (4200 rpm) or a 250GB (4200 rpm) hard drive, up to 4GB DDR2 SDRAM, Apple MagSafe Airline Adapter, Apple USB Modem, glossy widescreen display, 17-inch 1920-by-1200 high-resolution display and the AppleCare Protection Plan. Additional build-to-order options also include pre-installed copies of iWork™ ‘06, Logic Express 7, Final Cut® Express HD 3.5 and Aperture™ 1.5.

US launch for iPhone on 29th June.
Here's one of the 'commercials' showing how simple it is. But Steve Balmer (from Microsoft) won't take it seriously until they give it a keyboard. Damn fool.

Here's one of two new ads for the UK.

STOP PRESS!
New MacBook Pros to come out tomorrow (ThinkSecret say so).

DRM-free tracks tagged with buyer's name.
All iTunes Plus tracks have the name of the buyer embedded in their tags. This has caused a huge uproar across the tech-news sites. Some even say that because of this, the tracks can't be classed as DRM-free. What's all the fuss? To me it's just the same as writing your name on the inside cover of a book. Perhaps the tag should read "This track belongs to...". It could also be a cleverly preconceived way of stopping the buyer from sharing it via peer-to-peer networks. After all, to steal a track someone has to give it away in the first place.