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Apple Launches Online ‘iTunes Preview’ Content

November 14th, 2009

Without any official statements, Apple quietly deployed a web-based “iTunes Preview”, which allows users to browse iTunes Store’s offerings, even if they have not installed iTunes. When Apple released iTunes 9 in September, they made it possible to share iTunes’ offerings on Facebook and Twitter, but when the link to the iTunes Store content was clicked, nothing happened unless iTunes was installed on the clicker’s device. With the new web-based iTunes Store Preview, people without iTunes can browse iTunes Store content, but they still can’t listen to song samples, nor purchase content.

Currently, only music content is available in the web-based iTunes Store preview, and since no official announcements has been, it is unclear if an extension will come to Apps or Movies.

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Posted in Products

Tags: Facebook iTunes iTunes Preview iTunes Store Twitter

Free App Review – Shazam & Shotgun Free

October 8th, 2009

Today it’s Thursday and it’s time for our weekly free app reviews. Each Thursday, AppleLunch will provide you with reviews of free apps from the App Store to separate the wheat from the chaff. Today, we finally found out who made that stupid songs that keeps playing in the radio, and gives a hint to rob a bank.

Shazam

If you have had an iPhone for quite a long time, you are probably familiar with the free application, made by Shazam Entertainment Ltd., called Shazam.

You are probably familiar with the following situation: You are sitting in your car in a traffic jam, listening to the radio and there is this song, that you have listened to a couple of times, but you have no idea who has made it, nor what it is called. Shazam provides a solution for you.

Shazam is an application with a unique technology that identifies tunes anywhere, using only the mobile phone. After you have opened the application, all you have to do is to tap the “Tag Now” button in the upper right corner, and 15 seconds later it tells you what song that you are currently listening to.

When Shazam has tagged the song, it shows you some information about the song; who has made it, what label it is from and the album of the song too. Shazam also gives you a link to iTunes Store so that you can buy the song right away, or if the music video is available on YouTube, Shazam gives you a link to it.

If you are using Twitter, you can tweet that you have used Shazam to discover a song, but you have to live with a link to other Shazam tags on Tiwtter.

If it’s available, you can also read a biography of the band that has made the discovered song and you can also see a list of discs they has made in the discography section. Finally, it’s also possible to take a photo and attach it to the tagged song, or pick a photo from your iPhone library.

Shazam is without any doubts a must-have application for your iPhone. You will sometimes get into situations where you really need to know the name of a song that you are listening to, and if you doesn’t have any connection to a wireless network, you can record the song in Shazam, and when you come home or some other place with connection to the internet, you can open Shazam and the application will now connect to its servers and find the name of the song that you have recorded.

Shazam is FREE and available on iTunes App Store, and if you have an iPhone, then download it! If you only have an iPod Touch you need a microphone to record tunes.

Get the app from iTunes App Store

5/5 STARS

Shotgun Free

This application seems fun to some people, who might be very bored in their spare time. On the iTunes App Store, there are tons of applications with the same function as Shotgun Free and hopefully one or two are also better than this.

After you have opened the application, you gets a menu screen with three opportunities; well written instructions, a list of achievements and the button that we missed in our BlackJack Free preview, the “launch shotgun” button.

How to use the application? Well, after you have launched the shotgun, you need to load it before you can shoot. You loads the shotgun by holding your iPhone or iPod Touch in vertical, and then you rapidly takes your iPhone 20 centimeters down, and if you do it correctly, you will hear a loading sound, like on real guns.

Now the gun is “half cocked,” but you’ll need to cock it completely so move it just as rapidly 20 centimeters up, and now you’re ready to fire, which you do by turning the iPhone into horizontal mode, (and now remember to aim at your target! ) and tilting it up rapidly.

If you tap the achievement button, a list of several goals will appear on your screen so that you can use the application to complete the achievement list. That, we hasn’t done because the application is too monotonous to spend even two minutes of using.

We will only give this application 2 stars because it’s very boring after short time, and you can’t choose between additional guns. The instructions though are well created and easy to understand, and the implementation of an achievements list was a good idea, but we don’t think that anyone wants to complete the whole list. If you have, then please contact us and tell us how you found the motivation

Get the app at iTunes App Store

2/5 STARS

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Posted in Apps, Reviews

Tags: App Store Blackjack Free app iPhone iPod Touch iTunes Store Shazam Shotgun Free Tagging Twitter YouTube

iTunes 9, new store, home sharing and sync improvements

September 10th, 2009

This update has been as certain as the announcement of new iPods, but the features included in the new iTunes 9, which was released yesterday at Apple’s “It’s only Rock and Roll” media event, were not at all sure. But let’s start with the features which have been rumored to arrive in the new iTunes:

First we get an entirely new look in the iTunes Store, which is far more dynamic and user friendly. In the old store, you would navigate by reloading pages many times, just to see an artist’s albums or switching to his or her songs. Now though, Apple has made this happen totally interactively, so you need to reload the pages as few times as possible.
Album ratings have also been notably more visible and featured in the store.
And now, social networking. iTunes now enables you to share your wishes or music of interest in the iTunes Store on Facebook and/or Twitter. After clicking e.g. “Share on Facebook”, you will be taken to the usual Facebook sharing page. You may be asked to enter your login information, but that’s everything there is to it. It is a one-click “Tell my friends about this” function.

And here is what we hadn’t seen coming:

When you click the arrow next to an album in the iTunes Store, artist or anything else you might want to share, you also have the option of actually adding the item to a wishlist, which have seemed to be some pretty successful features in many online stores.
Home sharing is an entirely new feature, which enables all of your computers at home to share their media files. Films, music and even playlists and audiobooks. You just need the other computers to be authorized to play the music, and it can be streamed live from just about any computer in your home.

So, that’s it! You can download iTunes 9 as of today, and stay iTuned and check back later from more summaries of yesterday’s Apple keynote.

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Posted in Products, iPod and iTunes

Tags: Album Facebook Home sharing iTunes iTunes Store Keynote Media event Music Ratings Social networking Songs Twitter Wishlist

Review: Adium

September 8th, 2009

We have mentioned it before when we made a review of iChat in Snow Leopard and it’s worth mentioning again a couple of times. Our all time favorite duck is without any doubt Donald Duck and the question of who gets in secondly is close between Daffy Duck and the Adium icon, but besides the icon, what makes Adium so good? We decided to find out.

The ultimate instant messaging client

Adium is a free instant messaging client, built for Mac OS X. It all started with an idea from a college student called Adam Iser and this idea about an instant messaging client for Mac, which in the beginning only supported AIM, grew larger every day and today there is a team of developers, writing on Adium to improve the users’ impressions of the application.

Today Adium is maybe the most popular instant messaging client for Mac and the reason it has gotten so far is because it supports almost every protocol available including MSN, ICQ,

MobileMe, Yahoo! Messenger, Bonjour, Skype, Twitter, Facebook and of course AOL Instant Messenger.

Adium supports nearly all IM protocols

With all these protocols Adium supports, it’s close to being the ultimate instant messaging client.

Plugin is a solution

Adium isn’t the only multi-protocol supporting application available, but what makes it better than its competitors is all the options you have available. If there is something you think is missing in Adium to be better than other clients, you can in all probability find it in their plugin directory, called ‘Xtras’. In this section you can find whatever you need from animated dock icons (me myself have Pixar’s For the Birds icon) to Chuck Norris Random Fact generator. If you want, it s also possible to recreate Adium to be “The Simpsons fan’s instant messaging client” by downloading first the dock icon and afterwards The Simpsons soundset. Then a “Do’h” happens every time a friend comes online and you can have yourself a laugh about that. Plugins give you the opportunity to customize Adium to become exactly the instant messaging client you want, and you can actually install a plugin that makes it possible to use Adium as a client for Skype. Adium has a built-in plugin manager which they call ‘Xtras Manager’ and it shows you all the plugins that you have downloaded and of course you can delete them too, if you’ve downloaded something that appears to be something that you didn’t want, and there’s also a shortcut to the site where you can find additional Xtras (plugins) for your Adium.

Unfortunately Adium doesn’t have its own notification system, but it supports Growl, which you can set up and get notifications when your contacts or buddies comes online. Alternatively you can get the dock icon to jump, when certain contacts appear online.

It isn’t perfect yet

Though Adium is, according to what is mentioned earlier in this review, the ultimate instant messaging client, it still has shortcomings. Every MacBook and MacBook Pro have built-in iSight cameras and Adium hasn’t managed to utilize those yet. In other words; Adium doesn’t support video nor voice chat, and that’s probably the reason why most Messenger users prefer ‘Microsoft Messenger for Mac’ to Adium.

The total impression of Adium is still positive and we’ll gladly recommend this application to every Mac user who wants to use Messenger and don’t care if he or she can video chat or not.

4/5 STARS

Click here to download Adium

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Posted in Reviews

Tags: Adium AIM Bonjour Facebook Growl iChat ICQ Instant Mess iSight Camera Mac OS X MacBook MacBook Pro Microsoft Messenger for Mac MobileMe MSN Skype Snow Leopard The Simpsons Twitter Xtras Yahoo! Messenger

New Apple TV to be announced next week?

September 2nd, 2009

As many would have guessed, Apple is preparing its shipping schedules for new launches in the Apple Store. Among the changes is however a new speculation coming up, because Apple has changed the shipping date for Apple TV to 1 to 2 weeks. So we get a new Apple TV, right? A new lineup perhaps? Which refreshments should we expect? It’s a fairly new rumors, but also a highly probably one, so it’s difficult to tell exactly what a new Apple TV might feature.

The 1 to 2 weeks would fit the keynote schedule nicely, which is to be held the 9th of september. So if a new Apple TV is to be introduced, which upgrades and changes would follow? Rumors have indicated that iTunes and Apple’s musical software in general, will being integrating social networking services, such as Facebook and Twitter. It is likely that many products would follow up on this, and who knows… surfing on Facebook on your TV doesn’t sound too bad.

We do expect the iPod models (and iTunes?) to receive refreshments as well. One of the largest updates we are almost sure of, is a brand new camera for some of them, including the iPod Touch, iPod Nano and maybe also the iPod Classic. There may be an additional feature coming up in connection with the Apple TV or social networking services as well. If so, this is probably a software update.

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Posted in Keynote, Products

Tags: Apple TV Camera Facebook iPod iPod Classic iPod Nano iPod Touch iTunes Keynote Twitter

Speculation about new iPod lineup announcements

August 27th, 2009

The next media event is believed to be held in early September, and as all of Apple’s media events, this tend to lead to many theories of what Apple will introduce and announce. AppleLunch has followed many theories, and among those which keep being actively discussed, is an almost entirely new lineup of iPod. There are many facts which tell us that there is reason to believe in a such refreshment, or at least make it probably that we will see new iPods in the September keynote, since the company’s September events usually focus on music devices and services.

Leaked photos of camera cases for iPod Touch (top) and iPod Nano (bottom)

Two of the models which are expected to receive the largest refreshments, are the iPod Nano and the iPod Touch. An expected feature to be equally present in both the iPod Nano and a new iPod Touch, is photo shooting, which means that both models may be updated with cameras. Again, this would make sense as Apple’s smaller devices are turning into multi-capable media devices, which you simply cannot live without. Being able to take pictures with your iPod, and not only the iPhone, will almost double their ways of use. Especially the iPod Touch to which you can purchase and download astoundingly much new functionality through the App Store. Another note is that several third-party companies are already taking pre-orders of iPod Touch and iPod Nano cases, featuring small camera spots. The rumors of iPod updates are, compared to the facts, most likely true, but not necessarily.

Also among other rumors gaining publicity, is a new iTunes socializing move from Apple, which means that they may be planning to integrate support for various online social services, such as Facebook and Twitter. They have already implemented Facebook functionality into iPhoto, so there is reason to believe in further expansion of these connections. It will be interesting to see what new stuff they will announce on the (anticipated date) 9th September media event.

AppleLunch will keep following these discussions to see if there are any updates on the subjects, so that we can provide even more details to help improve our expectations’ accuracy.