Hasta La Gadget!

This week Apple has made it clear that they’re continuing to bust up the record books with a massive 25 billion songs sold. This record takes on the digital sales record with the iTunes Store having reached a 15,000 song downloads per minute mark on average – crazy stuff! The 25 billionth song sold goes to none other than Chase Buch with the song “Monkey Drums” (Goksel Vancin Remix), and rewards are in store!

This 25 billionth song not only gets the distinction of being that mark-maker, but also has the artist winning a beastly €10,000 iTunes Gift Card. One wonders if they’ll simply purchase thousands of copies of their own music or if they’ll pick up every single song recorded in the last several years. One thing is for certain – even with that amount of iTunes cash, Chase Buch won’t be able to purchase everything the iTunes Store has to offer.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services spoke up this week about the masterful mark. Noting the 15,000 songs per minute average sales point as well, Cue spoke up on how “the iTunes Store connects music fans with their favorite artists … on a scale we never imagined possible.” It was also made clear once again that the iTunes Store is “the world’s most popular music store” complete with 119 countries on its roster and 26 million songs available for download.

In their most recent release on the iTunes Store, Apple reminded the world that they push songs with “iTunes Plus”. This is Apple’s own brand format for songs which offers DRM-free action with 256 kbps AAC encoding for what Apple describes as “audio virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings.” It’s high-powered!

iTunes breaks 25 billion songs sold – a new record! is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

As glad as we are that digital bookstores let authors skip the usual gatekeepers, that doesn’t help much if they can’t get noticed. Apple is giving those self-publishing writers more of a chance to shine with the launch of a permanent Breakout Books section in the US iBookstore. The section highlights hot-selling and well-reviewed independent books, many of them from distributors like Smashwords. Don’t see the placement as a purely altruistic gesture, though: many of the books sell for significantly less than their peers from major publishers, which might help Apple snag a few more impulse purchases than it would otherwise. We doubt there will be many complaints when the category could pad both sides’ wallets.

Filed under: Tablets, Internet, Apple

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Via: New York Times

Source: iTunes, Smashwords

Files discovered by 9to5Mac in the Music app on newly jailbroken iPads suggest that Apple’s long-rumored radio service might turn out to be more than a rumor after all. More »

Just yesterday the 2013 Super Bowl revealed the very first glimpse most of the world had at Apple’s URL-shortening “AppStore.com” in the Star Trek Into Darkness teaser – and lucky you, you’re already signed up! The AppStore.com structure is not one where there will be a massive “land grab” as often is the case with these sorts of things, instead Apple has opted for a more automatic sort of push, with URLs like http://appstore.com/slashgear being active automatically. That particular address will bring you straight to the iTunes App Store listing of the SlashGear app – easy as pie!

This structure also works for the Mac App Store. If you head to http://appstore.com/mac/osxmountainlion/, you’ll be taken to the Mac App Store’s listing of OS X Mountain Lion, also launching the Mac App Store as the iTunes App Store links launch the iTunes app. This shortened link structure includes both names of apps and names of companies. You’ll be able to link to link in three different ways to two different kinds of final locations as follows:

http://appstore.com/companyname/

http://appstore.com/companyname/appname/

http://appstore.com/appname/

As the iOS Developer Library lets us know, each of these also works with the “mac” inserted to head to the Mac App Store instead of the iTunes App Store. The Mac App Store, for those of you that don’t know, is made for desktop apps rather than mobile apps – while your iPhone apps come from the iTunes App Store, your MacBook apps come from the Mac App Store.

http://appstore.com/mac/companyname/

http://appstore.com/mac/companyname/appname/

http://appstore.com/mac/appname/

The way you’ll get the correct app or company name for this structure is to remove all whitespace, make sure all letters are lower-case, and make sure all copyright, trademark, and registered mark symbols are taken out. You’ll be replacing the ampersand with the word “and”, and all of the following punctuation must be removed: “!¡”#$%’()*+,\-./:;< =>¿?@[\]^_`{|}~”. You’ll need to replace all accented and “decorated” character with their most basic form (elemental character) while all other characters are left as is. So make your title as basic as possible and it should, by all means, link easily.

Above: Star Trek Into Darkness trailer displays first-ever appearance of an AppStore.com/ vanity url.

If you have trouble finding the correct structure for your app or company on either app store, be sure to let Apple know at http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter. There you’ll want to tell them the full current or desired URL you’re hoping to work with, the countries your app or company works in, and the iTunes-generated long URL you’ve been working with up until now (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app…). You can get this longer URL by right-clicking or control-clicking the little triangle next to the app’s price in your respective app store and selecting the “Copy Link” option.

Sound all good to you? Let us know if you’re pumped up about this simple yet powerful measure Apple is taking to keep links to their app stores clean and quick!

SlashGear 101: How do I get an Apple AppStore.com vanity url? is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Microblogging service and teen-favorite Tumblr has quietly scaled up its iOS app age warning, giving the latest version a 17+ recommendation in what appears to be a preemptive defense against Apple’s latest porn witch hunt. Tumblr for iOS was updated overnight to version 3.2.4 [iTunes link], but in addition to “small bug fixes” the refreshed app also demanded users confirm they are 17 or over.

The nature of the Tumblr service – following multiple other users, who either post or reblog images, text, video, audio, and links – means that the sort of content you see depends largely on the sort of people you follow. However, there’s plenty of adult content to be found, something which may have prompted Tumblr to take a more cautious approach to its app rating.

Apple has had a crack-down on erotica-filled apps in recent weeks, first yanking apps by 500px from the App Store after they were found to contain x-rated material, and then triggering a flurry of activity over at Twitter-run Vine which inadvertently made a sexual image an “editor’s pick.” Twitter blamed human error for the mistake, though the Vine app [iTunes link] is still rated at 12+ in the App Store.

Tumblr is yet to comment publicly on the decision to reclassify the app’s age rating, but it’s worth noting that the Android counterpart to the iOS software is still considered “low maturity” in Google’s Play store. Whether Tumblr’s move will be sufficient to avoid Apple’s ire this time around remains to be seen.

[via CNET]

Tumblr makes iPhone app 17+ over porn potential is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.