Apple news blog

Announcements are continuing in full force at CES today, with a number of Apple competitors showing off new gadgets looking to set the bar for technology in 2010.

Palm Pre Plus
Palm today unveiled several new products an…

With Apple’s long-rumored tablet device reportedly set for an introduction later this month, much remains unknown about the operating system it will be using. Speculation has ranged from a touch-sensitive Mac OS X to a scaled-up iPhone OS to an all-…

Massachusetts based Invotrak today released Invotrak 2.0, a completely revamped version of its free invoice and timesheet tracking application for the iPhone. The Invotrak app connects to the Invotrak website and allows users to manage their complete billing cycle, from tracking project work to creating professional invoices, monitoring payments, and more. Professionals working remotely will especially appreciate the built-in timer to accurately record their project time.

Patently Apple reports on a newly-published patent application from Apple disclosing research on touchscreen technology involving the use of pixels with dual-function capacitive elements that are capable of both displaying images and register…

3D Magic Kft. has launched their Promo Dispenser website, a unique and free service for iPhone developers to promote their apps and games by giving away promotional codes. It serves as a unique opportunity for users to get paid apps and games for free downloading them directly from iTunes. Since the launch of the website nearly 500 developers took the opportunity to register and promote their apps by giving away more, than 5000 promotional codes in a controlled environment.

After all the lead up, Intel finally officially announced the new Core i7, i5 and i3 chips this morning. These chips were previously known by the Arrandale and Clarksdale codenames. The new chips represents the arrival of the 32nm manufactu…

In iTunes, a very useful feature is the File » Show Duplicates menu item. As expected by its name, you can use this feature to help weed out duplicates from your iTunes library. However, many people (myself included) have different versions of songs, remixes and such, which will show up as duplicates when using this feature.

The solution is to hold down the option key prior to selecting this menu item. When you do, Show Duplicates changes to Show Exact Duplicates. In this mode, iTunes shows only true duplicates, and not remixes or alternate versions.

There are a couple of options for “normalizing” MP3 volume in iTunes in OS X. The first, of course, is iTunes’ own Sound Check. If you use this feature and like it, then you may not need this hint. I disabled it because, with iTunes 9, I had a lot of problems importing large MP3 files — it would often hang when determing the MP3′s volume. Also, I was never able to tell the difference one way or the other — playlists with songs from different albums still sounded uneven when Sound Check was enabled. If you love Sound Check and don’t have any problems with it, this tip is not for you.

Another solution is iVolume, which I’ve never tried. I read good things about it…but it costs money. Another is what I am going to focus on here: MacMP3Gain, which is a port of the open source command-line program mp3gain…

I support quite a few people with external displays connected to MacBook Pros. What happens is that they maximize their iTunes window for their 24″ monitor at work. Then, when they go home, the iTunes window is larger than the screen on their laptop, so lots of stuff is inaccessible.

Normally, clicking the green button would resolve this problem. However, Apple has changed the behavior of the green button in iTunes. The solution is simple but not obvious: Hold down the Option key while clicking the green button. This will make iTunes size its window appropriately to the screen that it is running on.

GigaOM briefly noted late yesterday that Apple has added 30-second song samples to its browser-based iTunes Preview pages that quietly appeared several months ago. The report notes that Apple is serving the previews, which are encoded in 44.1 KHz AA…