News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
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You may or may not be aware that the iTunes Store offers the Free on iTunes section where you can browse the week’s (or, in some cases, month’s) free music and video offerings. You may also be aware that, thanks to the iPhone/iPod touch 3.0 software, you can now download the Store’s video content to these portable devices. Wouldn’t it be great if you could combine these two features—easily locate free content and download it to your iPhone or iPod touch?
Regrettably, the mobile version of the iTunes Store doesn’t allow this. There’s no section in the handheld Store that displays free content (and no, entering the link I posted above in Mobile Safari earns a reaction no more helpful than “Huh!?” from the iTunes app). But there’s a way.
That way is to fire up Safari on your iPhone or iPod touch and make haste for the Free iTunes Downloads website. This is a site that publishes links to the iTunes Store’s free content. Tap one of these links on your iPhone or iPod touch and the iTunes app opens and takes you to the screen where you can download the associated song or video.
But let’s make it even easier. When you get to Free iTunes Downloads with your iPhone or iPod touch, tap the Subscribe to our RSS/Atom feed
link. This gives you a handy, pared-down page with these same links.
Tap a link and you see a description of the item—a plot summary for a
TV show or artist’s bio for a song—followed by a Download For Free!
link that, when tapped, opens the iTunes app and takes you to that
item's page for downloading.
Tap the Plus button at the bottom of the Safari screen and you can save this RSS feed as a bookmark. I’ve taken the extra step of tapping Add to Home Screen so I can easily maneuver to this feed when I want to quickly scan the Store’s free offerings. I expect this will be a useful thing to have when I’m stranded in an airport waiting area and looking for fresh (and free) content.
A bug in iTunes' CD handling, which forces to insert-eject-insert each disc, remains unresolved.
Ted Landau | Sep 1, 2008
As computer bandwidth allowances are increasingly swamped by large program and operating system updates, users have to become more savvy about how they manage the update process. Those users with huge bandwidth caps and only one or two computers on their network can feel smug that they're relatively unaffected by such concerns — for the rest of us, it's time to update our update procedures.
Sean McNamara | Sep 11, 2008
While relatively simple, the Terminal commands to control 'hidden' preferences aren’t documented anywhere, so I’m often asked “just how do you find these things?” The answer, as with the Wizard of Oz (“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”) is that things that appear magical may actually be quite simple, once you know how they’re done.
Rob Griffiths | Sep 14, 2008
The new Grid view in iTunes 8 offers a new way to look at your music—and personally, I think it’s quite useful. When in Grid view, you can have your music grouped together in one of four ways—by albums, artists, genres, or composers. You choose the grouping option by clicking on the labels at the top of the iTunes Grid view window. Not much of a hint there, I realise…but wait, there’s more!
Rob Griffiths | Sep 17, 2008
This morning Apple released a new version of its iPhone SDK for developers. iPhone SDK beta 2 includes Interface Builder, a component of Apple’s development tools that lets developers create the interface for their applications. That seems to be the only major change in the latest build, according to the SDK’s read me, which continues to list some known issues. Apple says “this second beta is known to be incompatible with installation folders other than the default /Developer.” Given the importance of UI on the Mac, Interface Builder is a pretty critical tool in the development process, and some developers had chosen to hold off on their efforts until the SDK was revised. Apple unveiled the iPhone SDK at a special event earlier this month, allowing developers to begin building applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Several high-profile companies have already jumped onboard, demoing their applications at the event. Highlighting the demos was AOL with a native AIM client; other applications from Electronic Arts, Salesforce.com, and Apple were also shown.
