Ads free, setting up an account takes 5 seconds if you already have an ITMS account, sharing the huge ITMS database… Ping has everything to beat any music social community because it is fully integrated with the biggest music store in the world: the iTunes Music Store.

After you setup your account, you’ll need an additional 5 seconds (10 seconds) to become familiar to the super easy user interface.
Ping.com (famous golfing accessories) doesn’t belong to Apple of course, and the only way to connect to that social community is through the iTunes browser.
Main actions you can take through Ping are: follow (you might be familiar with that if you’re already on Twitter), post (you probably have at least posted a review on the ITMS, Ping enables you to discover them all in the “my reviews” page, and like (a feature Last.fm users are familiar with too).
Some of these actions have been integrated on albums page, you can see below (post and like):

A mix of Twitter and Last.fm that is very promising and that, of course, will boost the ITMS and iTunes users (which will boost the ITMS).

If Apple integrates stats system like Last.fm’s now playing and like-o-meter Ping’s follow features would be more interesting.

With an ugly icon that reminds me of some kind of $9.99 PC music converters shareware, the new iTunes comes with a brand new GUI.

Judge by yourself (page 1 of a Google Image search):

Very nice monochrome icons, new volume slider, new status bar icons and control buttons are now on top of each others (which inducts a nice space gain: hope to see that happen again on Safari and maybe become the new OS X standard).


A few curiosities that make you ask why?, like the new (very cool) borderless bottom buttons while the upper ones still have borders:

Albums artwork popup with the same fade effect in QuickTime Player X.

The UI is very refined (but the new icon is catastrophic), and this is a probable base for Mac OS 10.7 (since the previous iTunes UI revolution was the Mac OS 10.4 brushed metal successor and the actual UI for OS 10.5).

iTunes 10 comes with many new features and improvements, including:

• Introducing Ping. Use Ping to follow your favorite artists and friends or connect with the world’s most passionate music fans. Discover the music everyone is talking about, listening to, and downloading.
• Rent HD TV episodes for just 99¢ each. Watch them on your Mac or PC, on-the-go with iPhone or iPod touch, or in your living room with the all new Apple TV.
• Play your favorites on the all new iPod touch, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, and Apple TV.
• Play music wirelessly with AirPlay on AirPlay-enabled speakers, home theater receivers, and iPod accessories.
• Explore many look-and-feel improvements throughout iTunes.
• Enjoy performance improvements which make iTunes faster and more responsive.
• Additional voice support with VoiceOver Kit for iPod.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

This is the first time I see this kind of update.
The Snow Leopard Graphics Update contains stability and performance fixes for graphics applications and games:

• Addresses frame rate issues occurring in Portal and Team Fortress 2 by Valve, on iMac (Late 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac mini (Early 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac Pro (Early 2009), MacBook (Early 2009 and Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) or MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010) models.

• Resolves an issue that could cause Aperture 3, or StarCraft II by Blizzard, to unexpectedly quit or become unresponsive.

• Resolves an image corruption issue that may occur when disconnecting and reconnecting external displays while the system is running.

Get the World Cup 2010 calendar free here.
If you like the image above, you can get it in a 1440 x 900 resolution by clicking here.

The package you can download below contains more than 120 QuickTime player components (or add-ins, plugins whatever you call them) making it capable to read almost all of the possible video formats without adding any 3rd party application (like DivX player, VLC, WMP etc…)

To install these components just:

• paste to the library/quicktime and
• paste to system/library/quicktime ( authenticate require)

To download the package just click here

Make the jump to see the full list of these add-ins:

Read the rest of this entry »

FLAC: Free Lossless Audio Codec is not a recognized format by iTunes.
To listen to a FLAC file on your Mac there are (in theory) 2 solutions: convert the file, or add a plugin to iTunes.
Since I’m not the kind of person that likes to mess a lot with my Mac, I prefer the first solution.
To me, MacFLAC is the perfect deal: free, fast and easy to use.
The possible output formats are WAVE and AIFF as you can see in the screenshot below:

Three steps to use MacFLAC: drag, drop, convert.
You can get it free from here.

And finally, Apple did something I was expecting to get for “free” as an update to the version 2 of Aperture but it isn’t.
Aperture 3 got released and comes with the features that were missing and many others.
Want to learn more? Visit Apple’s Aperture page and take a look at the 200 new features by clicking here.