Apple | Technology Blog

Control iTunes Playback With Shortcuts

November 25th, 2008

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If you like to listen to music in iTunes you might have noticed that iTunes does not provide keyboard shortcuts to control the playback when iTunes is running in the background. Other music players like Winamp or AIMP provide that feature which might be interesting for many users.

The developer of iTunes Media Keys released a public alpha version of his software. The software adds global shortcuts which can be used to control the playback in iTunes.

To be more precise it adds four shortcuts that can be used to play / pause, stop and to switch to the next and previous track. The default shortcuts are assigned to [Shift UP, DOWN, RIGHT or LEFT]. It did also recognize a Logitech media keyboard and changed the shortcuts automatically to the media keys instead.

Apple Might Be Watching You

October 18th, 2008

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What is good customer service? Customers would usually state that good customer service means fast and effective solutions for difficulties with a product of a company. What about a company that actively monitors forums and initiates the contact with the customer?

That is apparently what has happened to Nicole Gorski (via Softpedia, thanks Dante) who stated on the official Apple support forum that she got a customer service call from Apple after posting about a problem she encountered with her MacBook Pro.

She confirmed in the thread that she did not contact Apple on this behalf and that they could only got the information about the problem from the forum thread. Another user weighted in that he found this behavior scary and (privacy) invasive.

Au Revoir, Bonjour!

October 8th, 2008

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If you have installed Apple software on your computer system running Windows lately, or software from Adobe or a few other software developers, chances are that you already have a service running called Bonjour which is responsible for the process mdnsresponder.exe that appears in the Windows Task Manager.

Bonjour enables automatic discovery of network devices and services on IP networks. The service is usually not needed on most Windows installations and remains installed even if the application that installed it gets uninstalled on the system. Other means of identifying the service is the Bonjour folder in the program files folder of the Windows installation.

Bonjour can be uninstalled manually which is explained in the link above or by running Au Revoir, Bonjour.
The small application for Windows stops and uninstalls the Bonjour service and removes the winsock namespace layer provider as well.

Send MMS With The iPhone

September 16th, 2008

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The designers and developers of the Apple iPhone must somehow have missed the popularity of MMS, the Multimedia Messaging Service, which is basically a service to send multimedia messages to contacts. This is one of the criticisms that iPhone users and reviewers had when using and reviewing the iPhone. The iPhone is capable of sending SMS so why the exclusion of MMS in first place? This would make perfect sense considering that the iPhone could make use of the phone’s inbuilt camera and the Internet as a picture source.

Flutter, a free application for the iPhone, adds MMS functionality to the iPhone. The application is available at the Apple iPhone store from where it can be downloaded and installed.

There are a few fundamental differences between the usual MMS service that cell phone providers offer and Flutter. On the positive side Flutter users can use the geotagging features of the iPhone and include those information in their message. That can be nice for sending holiday pictures where the recipient can look the location up on a map to know where the sender is currently located.

New Zune Won

September 12th, 2008

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Microsoft announced it鈥檚 latest lineup of Zune products to a fairly underwhelming response, which was frankly also fairly well expected.

It鈥檚 easy to get cynical about the Zune, especially considering Microsoft鈥檚 promises about delivering an amazing iPod killing device three years back.

The original Zune was pretty ugly, far too bulky and came in an attractive poo-brown. It still sold a million units however and Microsoft stayed in the game to bring out the Zune 2. For me the problems with the original Zune where that it failed to deliver anything the iPod didn鈥檛 have and came with some hideous software which was one of the biggest issues.

The wifi connectivity was almost un-utilised when it could have been a fantastic addition to an mp3 player and instead Microsoft let Apple steal it鈥檚 thunder with the iPod touch.

Utilize iPhone As A Modem

September 12th, 2008

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Mac only. The iPhone can be used to browse the Internet, write emails and do pretty much everything that one can do on the Internet. It is great for those quick activities that require little user input but writing articles for websites takes some time due to the character input method.

Many users prefer a keyboard anytime over the way the iPhone handles text input because that is what they are used to. The software iPhoneModem utilizes the iPhone as a modem for a computer so that the computer can go online.

There are several scenarios besides having to type more than a few paragraphs like running a software that is not available on the iPhone itself. iPhoneModem works with all jail broken iPhones 2G and 3G over EDGE and UMTS and Mac OS X 10.5.0 or higher with Mac OS X 10.5.4 recommended.