Contrary to popular belief (in certain circles), Apple isn't perfect. Among its many hit products like the iPhone or the iPad, and popular software releases like iOS, there has been a few failures.
Ping, the company's music-focused social networking service, certainly falls into that category. It's just never really gained much user-traction. And rumor has it, it's on its way out...
As we reported earlier today, the iTunes and App Store apps now sport a much needed redesign. While it's by no means groundbreaking or revolutionary, it does add some slickness to the whole experience.
We have a bunch of screenshot below for your eyes' pleasure...
Apple has just released a new iTunes version 10.6.3 that features support for iOS 6 beta. It looks like a maintenance release aimed at only supporting the new capabilities provided by iOS 6.
It's a bit surprising that Apple decided to make iTunes 10.6.3 available to everyone as iOS 6 is in beta and normally one needs a paid developer account to download and install iOS betas...
Apple didn't have time to go into each and every new addition in iOS 6 in great detail today, so a lot of cool stuff flew under the radar. New content stores, for instance, would fall into that category.
As previously rumored, the latest iOS update features completely remodeled iTunes, iBooks and App Stores. A change, that Apple says, will give users a "new kind of shopping experience..."
Apple is said to kick off its annual Back To School promotion tomorrow in the United States and select other countries with an interesting iTunes Gift Card lure for educational customers purchasing qualifying products.
Unlike past years, this year's Back To School will reportedly include the iPad for the first time...
One of the big problems with the introduction of iCloud, was the inability to properly segregate it from iTunes accounts on a single iOS device. With iOS 5, you had one iTunes ID, and that same ID was used for iCloud.
While in many circumstances this posed no issue, (ad there are a few inconvenient work-arounds) it did cause problems for those whose purchases were tied up to a particular iTunes ID. I'm happy to report that this is no longer a problem in iOS 6, as it now allows you to log in with separate iTunes and iCloud IDs upon first setup...
Apple has finally obtained ownership over the 'aplestore.com' domain name through arbitration.
Furthermore, the iPhone maker is still fighting to win control over a bunch of other interesting domain names, including 'itunes.net' and thirteen others.
By the way, wouldn't you have liked to had registered that one?
During his opening-night talk at the D10: All Things Digital conference, Apple's chief executive Tim Cook acknowledged the need for Apple to get more social going forward. He also advised folks to "stay tuned" for Apple and Facebook, subtly hinting that deep Facebook integration could be a go-go for iOS 6.
He also addressed Ping, Apple's beleaguered social network for music that he labeled as a product he didn't "want to put a lot of energy into" because "the customer voted". So, is Apple really going to ditch Ping?
Rumors regarding the next major version of Apple's mobile operating system have really picked up over the past few days. And considering that WWDC is now less than a month away, that's really not surprising.
You see, Apple is expected to show off iOS 6 (or at least a preview of it) during its Developer Conference next month. And everyone in the tech world is trying to guess what new features it will bring...
Although Apple has created one of the strongest (likely the strongest) digital content stores in the world, it's far from perfect. The iTunes Store has a number of fundamental problems, including the lack of a proper refund system.
Perhaps no one is more aware of this than Robert Herskowitz. The iTunes user was recently billed twice for the same song — Adam Lambert's "Whataya Want from Me" — and was denied a refund by Apple. So he's suing them...
iTunes Match, Apple's $25 a year cloud locker and scan-and-match music service, is being rolled out in additional countries, according to web reports. Last time we heard, Apple expanded iTunes Match to 19 countries, with a focus on the Baltic states, Latin America and the Netherlands.
Macstories first spotted that the iTunes terms and conditions for Italy have been updated with new terms suggesting an imminent launch in the country. Other web reports confirmed a similar changes to iTunes terms and conditions for Greece, Portugal, Austria, Slovenia, Bulgaria and other markets...
PadSync from ecamm is yet another way to access the documents folders of apps on your iDevice. The interface is very similar to iTunes File Sharing, located in the device view of a synced device. The main advantage is that you don't need iTunes running to use it.
Maybe not enough apps you use have added iCloud support yet. Or perhaps you want to be able to easily drag and drop movie files into your movie app from your computer without performing a full iTunes sync. The rest of you might need an easy way to drag a document from your iPhone or iPad to your desktop. Let's take a look at how PadSync can help…