“iTunes U,” reports Campus Technology, “the education portal within Apple’s iTunes, has expanded its content to include educational materials from sources beyond colleges and universities,” Called “Beyond Campus,” the area provides programming from Smithsonian Global Sound, KQED, Little Kids Rock, the Museum of Modern Art, and, most recently, “American Public Media, which is making its radio programming available free for educational purposes.”
Wikipedia recognizes him as “one of the most important figures in the development of modern electric musical instruments and recording techniques.” Indeed, Les Paul, invented reverb, sound-on-sound and multi-track recording. On a mission to create “a radical new sound,” the multi-talented guitarist developed not only new ways of—and new equipment for—recording music but also new instruments. Most notably: the solid-body electric guitar that would bear his name and that legions of jazz, blues, country, and rock musicians would zealously adopt. Now Paul and his technical team have tapped the Mac, Final Cut Pro, and Soundtrack to help tell the story about how he brought his radical new sound to life.
As reported by DigiTimes, ” ‘the iPhone has become AT&T’s top selling device, commanding some 13% of AT&T’s overall handset sales, and the fourth top selling handset in the US market,’ according to Barry Gilbert, VP of the Strategy Analytics BuyerTRAX programs.” What’s more, DigiTimes also quotes Gilbert as indicating that “ ‘ the sales trajectory we are observing with the iPhone could make it the top selling device in the US over the next 1-2 quarters.’ “
At the PhotoPlus Expo in New York, the developers at Automator.us released “Publish for Approval.” Designed for photographers who’d like to offer their customers the opportunity to review and approve photographs over the Internet, the system offers one-button publishing of selected images from an Aperture library. Tightly integrated with Aperture, Publish for Approval even displays client choices automatically upon approval, collecting them in a newly created Smart Folder in the Aperture library.
At PhotoPlus Expo in New York, Industrial Color, the leader in digital photo capture and online workflow software, announced the GLOBALedit Export Plug-in for Aperture. The plug-in, available as a free download, lets photographers “securely upload image collections from Aperture version 1.5 into GLOBALedit, Industrial Color’s online digital workflow solution. Once uploaded to GLOBALedit, image collections are globally available for editing, talent approval, image distribution, contact sheet creation, image markups and retouching notes, FPO and layout creation, metadata services, fulfillment services, and long-term archiving.” GLOBALedit joins a growing list of export plug-ins available for Aperture.
“When we started to look at how to provide a quality education for our students, what became very clear was that the future is digital,” says Carl Rose, executive director of the Association of Alaska School Boards (AASB). “We needed to ensure that our kids not only had the skill-sets required by the state, but also had the digital literacy capability to use those skills. That’s when the concept of 1 to 1 learning began to make sense.” And today, the MacBook, iLife, iWork, and Apple Professional Development are helping the AASB bring its 1 to 1 learning initiative to fruition.
Music, that is. Thanks to the new iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, the editors at E! Online find it all but irresistible to indulge in the guilty pleasure of impulse music buying. “As long as you’re at a hot spot, you can click on the new Wi-Fi widget for your iPhone or iPod touch and get access to Apple’s music library at the usual 99 cents per song.”
Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.SteveP.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch.
Offering customers the largest catalog of DRM-free music in the world, Apple today expanded iTunes Plus to more than two million tracks while at the same time lowering the price of those tracks to just 99 cents. In addition to artists from EMI’s digital catalog, iTunes Plus now includes artists from Sub Pop, Nettwerk, Beggars Group, IODA, The Orchard and many others. All iTunes Plus tracks feature DRM-free music with high-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, offering audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings.
Motion 3 lets you easily import layered Photoshop graphics with blend modes and transparency intact. Following their import, you can modify each layer separately. Or, as you’ll see in this animated Motion tutorial, turn a 2D graphic into a compelling 3D element with the click of a button.
