Apple news blog

XChange UK, the source for extended technology worldwide, are pleased to announce a new pre-order promotion for Enfocus’ award-winning PitStop Professional and PitStop Server. In addition to the opportunity for users to receive a free upgrade to the next version due out later this year, XChange UK’s Summer Promotion includes PitStop Professional and PitStop Server at 25% off the regular retail price until 31st July 2009.

Audioboo, which aims to become the ‘Twitter of the spoken word’ through its audio recording and broadcasting platform, and SpinVox, the global leader in voice to content messaging, have announced the SpinVox API will be used to automatically convert speech to text across Audioboo’s applications, including iPhone podcasting and Twitter posting.

HAMSoft Engineering today released Simple WindowSets 3.1 for Mac OS X. Simple WindowSets makes it easy for you to manage groups (sets) of Finder windows. Position some Finder windows on your desktop, arrange them however you want, with any view options you want, and then use Simple WindowSets to save them as a set. Then you can restore those windows any time you want by selecting the set from the menu. It’s that easy.

With the release of the OS X Snow Leopard 10A402 beta yesterday, users have been poring over the new version looking for changes. Among the most obvious changes have been a few visual tweaks, although several other enhancements have also been discov…

Calf Trail Software today released Geotagalog 1.4, their innovative tracklog based geotagging utility for Mac OS X. Geotagalog enables precise iPhoto Places support with any digital camera. It automatically combines digital photos with location data from a GPS tracklog. Version 1.4 brings significant performance improvements and better control over which files are imported into iPhoto.

I am always adding to and editing iTunes playlists, particularly the more oft-listened ones like my punk, ambient, and programs & podcasts playlists. Since I listen to a lot of stuff on my iPhone, I naturally want these playlists always available and up-to-date on my device. I can’t tell you how many times I plugged in my iPhone to my car stereo and found, to my disappointment, that I forgot to drag-and-drop the most recent version of a playlist to the device.

Why not just set the iPhone to automatically update? Because I want the finite control that manually managing affords me. My experience with auto-updating: unintended results, creates more problems than it solves.

So I created a script that updates a specified list of playlists to all attached iPods/iPhones. It can run on a schedule (with cron), so I never have to worry that my iPhone won’t have the most recent versions of my playlists!

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Here’s a tip on saving GPS coordinates in Address Book. First, it’s lame that GPS coordinates are not a standard field type. Often a mailing address used for GPS will miss the mark by a mile, literally. For some contacts, I use Google Earth to drop a pin on the exact spot, then copy a URL which I save in Address Book.

The URL will look like this:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&q=38.343941,-75.187239%20%28Ocean%20City%20Worship%20Center%29

One quirk is that the URL pastes fine on the iPhone, but on the Mac, Address Book converts those %20 characters to spaces. To get around that, I looked at an export of a contact and noticed we can substitute %2520 for %20, and then Address Book will save it cleanly. The magic is that the URL will fire up Google Maps on the iPhone with a single click.

To make this work, I had to change Google Earth’s preferences to default to decimal de…

Softpress today announced that Freeway 5 will be featured at a pair of Los Angeles-area events followed by a presentation at the North Coast Mac User Group. First up will be a presentation for the Los Angeles chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers on Thursday, July 16th. Next up is the Digital Actor Workshop, a special event for actors looking to improve their online presence on Sunday, July 19th. The tour will conclude with a presentation to the NCMUG on Tuesday, July 21st.

California based Toy Kite Software today released iSamurai Bluetooth, the new version of their action/simulation sword fighting game for iPhone and iPod Touch. iSamurai is the first Wii-like game for the iPhone, and now using Apple’s recently released 3.0 software, it is one of the first multiplayer games that can be played anywhere over Bluetooth. In iSamurai, players attack and defend with their iPhones, slashing and blocking their way to victory against their friends.

Reuters reports that Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has served on Apple’s Board of Directors since 2006, will discuss with Apple how his role on the board may change in the wake of increasing overlap between the two companies’ markets. The report come…