Apple Universe with Daniel Brusilovsky

Saturday, Apr 14, 2007

Apple Universe #7- What a deal!

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Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM) and Apple® today announced that MGM is now offering titles from its prestigious catalog of feature films for purchase and download on the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com). Beginning today, iTunes customers will be able to purchase legendary films such as “Dances With Wolves,” “Mad Max,” “The Great Train Robbery” and “Rocky,” with other titles to be added in the coming weeks. MGM has the largest modern film library in the world and has received 208 Academy Awards in its history, making it one of the biggest award winning collections of films in the world. Though the rumors have never come to pass, CNN through its Media Biz website on Wednesday raised new evidence in revisiting the prospect that Apple may soon announce a monthly subscription service for digital music downloads through iTunes. The media outlet cited Les Ottolenghi, chief executive of INTENT MediaWorks, a digital distribution system that works with peer-to-peer networks, as saying that he’s had meetings with people from Apple and believes the company will announce a subscription service for iTunes within the next six months. CNN Money's Media Biz blog reports that they have heard that Apple may be interested in joining the subscription service model for their popular iTunes store. Last week's controversial Michigan iPod proposal may have been in part been influenced by Apple's lobbying money, according to the Detroit Free Press. The paper reports that Democrat state house speaker Andy Dillon and fellow party member Matt Gillard made a trip to California at least partially funded by Apple, which included a trip to the company's Cupertino offices for an iPod and Mac technology demonstration for education. The recent buzz about security threats posed by iPods to corporations has reinforced the need for IT managers to treat these devices like any other removable media that employees with malicious intent can use to extract sensitive data. CNet's Gadget blog had previously reported that Sling Media was working to get their SlingBox working with the Apple TV. SlingBox is media box that allows users to watch and control their home TV, DVR, or home theatre setup on a Mac or PC over the internet. CNet's Gadget blog also notes that Sling Media has been offering the ability to stream content to your mobile phone and speculates that Apple's iPhone support could be in the works. kype has released a new beta of version 2.6 for the Mac which brings a cool new feature: Call Transfer. The Mac is the first Skype client that lets you transfer an active Skype call "effortlessly to other friends and family on your Skype contact list." In addition, 2.6b adds some features previously available only on the Windows clients including:

* Join public chats
* Chat typing indicator - see when others are writing a message
* Call any Skype Prime premium services provider and pay with Skype credit
* Automatic Updates – get new features and updates without having to go to Skype's website to download
* DTMF tones for automatic answering services available also during Skype-to-Skype calls

Skype 2.6b is available now for free download. Apimac today released Compress Files 1.0, an easy-to-use tool for compress, archive, encrypt files and omit Mac-specific invisible files. The utility can create Zip compressed archives; TAR archives; Gzip compressed archives; Bzip2 compressed archives; compressed and encrypted disk images. In addition, Compress Files lets you specify if you want to omit Finder specific information (such as the .DS_Store files) and Mac specific file attributes (such as a resource fork) when creating Zip archives. Lynda.com announced that it has been chosen as the exclusive producer of in-the-box video training for the new Adobe Creative Suite 3. DAZ 3D has announced the release of DAZ|Studio 1.5, a new version of its free 3D figure posing and animation software for the Mac and PC. New in this release is a U3D content exporter that enables you to ready 3D content for use in Adobe Photoshop CS3. All of this and more on Apple Universe!