According to iPodNN, a patent application that has been submitted to the US PTO suggest that the control wheels for future iPods may have touch based illumination. The article also states that the same function could be applied to touchpads on MacBooks.
While I think this would be cool to see, I’d like to see the control (specifically on an iPod) pulse (multiple colors?) to the music playing. Pressure based LCD or OLEDs? Hmm…
Earlier today Steve Jobs game his keynote address at MacWorld. There was some cool things announced, including a new MacBook called MacBook Air. While the new MacBook Air is pretty cool, there was another product that I was more interested in. The Time Capsule. This sucker is about the size of the Apple TV and is a wireless NAS system. You use it with Leopard’s Time Machine feature to create point in time backups of all your files. It’s wireless (802.11n) and comes in 500 GB and 1 TB sizes. What really amazed me though was Apple has it listed for only $299 and $499, which is reasonable compared to similar wired devices.
Remember the bit about the Time Capsule having 802.11n built in? It is it’s own access point. You can connect it up to your broadband modem and use it to share your network, or use it to extend an Apple Air-Port based network. So, you’ve got a wireless router and a NAS system all in one. Pretty dang nice.
Of course there was more that came out of MacWorld. Continue reading
Apparently a new service was announced at CES today called FlyTunes. The service will be released on January 21, 2008 and will bring internet radio the the iPhone and iPod Touch. I wonder how well internet radio will work over AT&T’s edge network.
The service will be free, but ad-supported. And apparently you’ll have to download the app from FlyTunes.fm. Hmm. Hacked iPhones then? Or will the next update allow 3rd party apps?
Source: TechCrunch
Apple has released a software update for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This update is mainly to fix an issue where “viewing a maliciously crafted TIFF image may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution”. Of course, many of you probably know what that really means.
According to TUAW this version also adds back the ability to use custom ring tones. Though they do question this “feature” and say it may be a possible mistake on Apple’s part. I hope not, the ability to use our own [legit of course] music/mp3′s as a ring tone would be nice.
Hopefully the announcement from Steve Jobs today will shut some people up. By February 2008, Apple plans to have an SDK available for developers that will allow them to create REAL applications to run on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
No idea how long it’ll actually take the developers to turn around and release an iPhone app, even in beta mode. I’m guessing it’ll be at least three months after the SDK is released.