Steve Jobs was surprisingly candid with All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher yesterday — he reportedly told her that both Facebook and Apple had spoken about integrating more closely with the new iTunes social network Ping, but Facebook asked for “onerous terms that we could not agree to” regarding Facebook friends connecting on Ping.
Steve Jobs just showed off some screenshots and functionality for Game Center, which will be officially releasing with iOS 4.1 next week. The official app will provide social networking features for App Store games, including friends lists, achievements, “auto matching” (the rest of the world calls that matchmaking), challenges and a host of other cross-platform features for gamers on Apple’s mobile platform.
Autodesk, proprietor of popular 2D/3D design software AutoCAD, is about to bring AutoCAD back to the Mac after a nearly two decade estrangement. AutoCAD is to engineering and architecture design what Photoshop is to photo editing, so this is a Pretty Big Deal.
Sunday night is the funnest night of the week, when you can join the TUAW staff for an hour or so of live banter about what’s happened in the Apple world in the previous week. This week, we’ll also be chatting about the mystery Apple press conference on Wednesday, which probably isn’t too much of a mystery given the past history of September press meetings.
If you aren’t a Londoner, this news probably won’t excite you that much. However, if you make the daily commute on the tube like the five million rest of us (well, 4,999,999. I work from home), a regular part of your morning is browsing though the City A.M. newspaper — a staple of daily London business news.
There’s been lots of rumors in the past about iTunes going to some sort of a cloud-based service, with the ability to store or access music remotely over the Internet, but the new word around town is that what’s actually revealed at the event next week won’t be quite so ambitious. Peter Kafka over at All Things Digital now says that instead of streaming, the new iTunes might be more social, with iTunes accounts serving as nodes on which users can share recommendations for apps or songs, or even share playlists or song information. You wouldn’t actually be able to share music, but the idea would be to lay the groundwork on a more connected iTunes system, and set up the music software as not only a location to store your personal music, but to connect with others through the media.
Back when I was a kid, I kept my most valuable possessions, my baseball and basketball card collection, in a shoe box. Apparently, so too did former Apple employee Paul Devine. Devine is accused of wire fraud and conspiracy on the basis that he collected more than $2.5 million in kickbacks from Apple’s suppliers. And during their investigation, officials found $125,000 stored away in shoe boxes at his home, as well as more than $20,000 worth of foreign currency. Prosecutors also allege that Devine may have other sources of cash.
We looked at Naturespace Holographic Audio back in May of 2009. I liked it then, and I like it more now. Naturespace is a free iPhone app that plays back carefully recorded natural environments designed for listening on headphones.
There are a few apps that are great demos for the iPhone. Pulse News is a super RSS feed reader, iMovie always drops a few jaws, and Siri is a pretty amazing way to talk to your iPhone and get intelligent search results.
iDevice: Trevdo's First Look at Angry Birds for the iPhone/iPod/iPad (AB Gameplay/Commentary) 0 comment(s) Review: Nokia 6303 Classic 0 comment(s) iPad Media Downloads 0 comment(s) Downgrade 4.0.2 Firmware to 4.0 / 4.0.1 on iPhone & iPod Touch 0 comment(s) How to Build a Kick-Ass MAME Arcade Cabinet from an Old PC 0 comment(s) 