Leander Kahney's Blog, page 2261

Rhapsody First To Bring Subscription Music To U.S. iPhones

Rhapsody has released an update to its iPhone/iPod Touch music app that does what Spotify in Europe has done for ever: you can download any song you want to your iPhone for a flat $10 monthly fee.
Rhapsody's music subscription offers virtually limitless musical selections from a library of about 9 millions songs available. And you [...:]

Rhapsody First To Bring Downloadable Playlists to US iPhones

Rhapsody has released the music app update for the iPhone/iPod Touch that does what Spotify in Europe has done for freaking ever: offer offline downloadable playlists of virtually limitless musical selections. And you don't even need to pay their reasonable $10 a month fee to try it out. Rhapsody offers a free trial of their service, and if [...:]

Daily Deals: App Store Freebies, Montage for Screenwriters, 1TB Fantom USB HD

We start off another week with a trio of deals for Apple fans. First up is the latest batch of free applications from the App for your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, including "Catch the Egg", an accelerometer-based game. Next we have Montage for the Mac, software enabling you to potentially write the next killer [...:]

Expensify: An Expense Report App that Doesn't Suck! [Review]

I love to travel. Whether it be for work or for pleasure, nothing beats exploring the country or the world. What I don't like about work travel is keeping up with expenses. It sucks out any fun I may be having and adds on to any frustrations I might be experiencing.
The only way to make [...:]

Report: Nook Outsold Kindle in March, Forcing Amazon to Change Tactics

One could be forgiven for assuming there were only two contestants in the e-reading race: Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle. However, new research appears to boost the visibility of a lesser-known entry: Barnes & Noble's Nook. Sales of the Nook comprised more than half of e-readers shipped in the U.S. in March, according to DigiTimes.
Citing [...:]

Early N8 Preview Says Nokia Still Not Ready To Go Head-To-Head With iPhone

Nokia's forthcoming N8 smartphone has been touted as the beleagured Finnish handset maker's long-coming answer to the iPhone… but judging from Mobile Review's preview of a leaked N8 handset, Nokia's dropped the ball yet again.
The N8 looks great on paper — it has a 12-megapixel camera, HDMI output and a huyge touchscreen with multitouch support, [...:]

The Apple IIe as Twitter Client

www.youtube.com/watch?v=j622EyPX6lM
Yerga Cheffe figured out how to turn his old Apple IIe into a dedicated Twitter machinee, not only displaying tweets in that gloriously pixel blurred Apple II font but blowing up the user's profile picture into a glorious 8-bit portrait. The venerable IIe is too underpowered to actually run a networking stack or Twitter [...:]

Adobe Flash And Other Third-Party Programs Will Now Be Able To Use GPU To Decode Video

Apple has introduced a new Technical Note for OS X 10.6.3 that allows third-party developers to use hardware acceleration to decode H.264 video.
Adobe's failure to deliver acceptable performance under OS X has long been blamed by the company on the lack of this functionality. Only Apple computers boasting GPUs supporting the functionality (such as [...:]

Rumor: Apple to Use Imagination to Take Shot at ARM

The Apple gadget press is all a-twitter over news of yet another semiconductor company with ties to the Cupertino, Calif. consumer electronics giant. In a bit of Hollywood-style dishing of talk of discord, Imagination Technologies Ltd. is seen as going up against ARM to develop an iPhone-like graphic console for the home.
Apple is a 10-percent [...:]

Will Inertial Scrolling Come To All Apple Laptops In Future OS X Update?

One of the secret new features of the new MacBook Pros is inertial scrolling, which causes the trackpad to function like the iPhone's touchscreen when scrolling; in other words, your screen scrolls with momentum informed by how hard and fast you swipe your fingers down or up.
TUAW has a post up about the new [...:]