Hasta La Gadget!

The iPad’s music player hasn’t changed much since its debut, and unlike its desktop counterpart, it also lacks a built-in music visualizer for your mesmerization. Luckily, for the folks who are seeking ways to spice up their iPad music experience, you now have a new option: Planetary, by Bloom Studio. As you can tell by the name and the screenshot above, what we have here is a visually compelling app for exploring your tablet’s music library. It’s very straightforward: each artist or band is shown as a star, surrounded by albums in the form of orbiting planets, and then you have individual tracks displayed as moons orbiting each album.

During playback, each track leaves behind a trail on its orbit to indicate its play time, though you can hide the orbit lines (and labels) if you them too distracting. To choose other albums or artists, the good old pinch-to-zoom or the simple tapping on other 3D objects will move you between the moons and constellations, or you can just tap on the bottom-center button to jump straight to the letter selector for artists. Obviously, the former’s more fun within the first few hours, but after awhile we found ourselves preferring the quicker option to skip the mellow animation. Head past the break for our full impression and demo video.

Continue reading App review: Planetary for iPad

App review: Planetary for iPad originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 May 2011 15:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Spotify will now sync local music to your iPhone over Wi-Fi, embarrassing Apple in its own home

Music streaming service Spotify has updated both its desktop and mobile software to pretty much let you ditch iTunes entirely. The new desktop client will now detect any iPod you have plugged into your computer and let you sync your local tracks with it. This works with not just the iPhone and iPod Touch, but also the iPods Nano, Classic and Shuffle.

This doesn’t let you stream music from the internet to these devices, obviously. Instead, you are using Spotify to replace iTunes as music syncing software. And as Spotify will already import and play local files, it should work seamlessly.

You will also be able to sync tracks that you have bought in Spotify. Music sales is a little known feature of the service, and one the company is pushing with this update with the ability to purchase an entire playlist with one click. Users of the free service, who previously couldn’t use the iOS versions of Spotify (this is an option only for €10-per-month premium subscribers), can now use iPhone Spotify — but only to sync local and purchased music.

IOS and Android users, whether free or premium, also get a rather nifty new feature: Wireless syncing. With the soon-to-be-released update, you can wirelessly sync music from your computer to your phone (or iPod Touch). This is something iTunes should have done years ago. Previously, Spotify tried to let its iOS app play music from the iPod library on the iPhone, but the addition of multitasking in iOS 4 broke this and it had to be pulled.

These updates are rolling out in Spotify-friendly countries over the next few days. In other news, the iPad version of Spotify was recently sighted being used by Bigfoot and/or the Loch Ness Monster.

Spotify says hello to the iPod [Spotify blog]

See Also:

• Spotify Radio Puts Playlists On Physical Disks
• Spotify Further Limits Free Service: Hint of U.S. Launch (Again …
• Spotify
• U.S. Exclusive: Hands-On with the Spotify iPhone App
• Six Million Songs in Your Pocket: Apple Approves Spotify for …

If you’re the kind of person who’s always listening to music and wouldn’t be caught dead headphone-less, pause that song for a quick second and check out Seamless. This lightweight app links your iPhone‘s Music player to iTunes on your Mac in a pretty clever — not to mention Cupertino-esque — fashion. The whole crux of it is the “transition,” which simultaneously fades out a song on one end while bringing it to full blast on the other. All it takes to get started is a quick $1.99 download for your i-device and free Mac-centric companion app. Does it work as advertised, or is it really just a gimmick? Head past the break for a quick rundown of just how seamless this utility really is.

Continue reading App review: Seamless for iOS and Mac (video)

App review: Seamless for iOS and Mac (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Apr 2011 13:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

The iPhone has been out for over a month now, and on Tuesday we saw Apple release the first security update for it. I’m sure a team of people over at Apple had been working around the clock to push out that update because they were working under pressure. Just a week ago we wrote about a group of researchers at Independent Security Evaluators who found a way to make an iPhone vulnerable to hackers.  They of course reported the exploit to Apple, but gave them until August 2nd to fix it before they discussed it at the Black Hat conference (computer security) taking place on Thursday. Phew, Apple made it with a little time to spare!

iPhone owners will receive the update via iTunes. Computer World explains that “iPhone users can wait out the update interval — iTunes automatically checks Apple’s update servers once a week — or retrieve the patches manually by selecting “Check for Update” under the iTunes Help Menu and then docking the iPhone to the PC or Mac.”

Also in the news, buzz around the web is that a new 20” and 24” iMac computer will debut next week on Tuesday at a press event held at Apple headquarters. AppleInsider reports that a slimmed down keyboard will debut as well as demo’s of iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08. Apparently Apple is refocusing back to the Mac computers? They seem to have been pushed out of the spotlight ever since the iPhone came around.

Thanks for the tip Cory!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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According to entertainment website The Wrap, Google’s YouTube has finally locked up all the studio deals to get itself fully into the online movie rental game. The report indicates it could launch as soon as this week with movies from majors including Sony, Warner and Universal, as well as smaller entities like Lionsgate, Kino Lorber and other independents. This doesn’t appear to be a challenge to (now bigger than Comcast, but still smaller than HBO) Netflix, with the unnamed studio exec quoted in the article saying how happy they are to see a new entrant renting (and eventually selling) movies that’s not using a subscription model. Apple currently leads the online VOD market after jumping in with iTunes back in 2008, so obviously that’s a main target but without the important info (pricing, picture quality and content) it’s hard to tell how much of a challenger this is. VOD rumors have swirled around YouTube for quite some time and it rolled out $3.99 rentals of indie movies a little over a year ago, here’s hoping they go the whole way and offer nothing less than 3D and 4K streaming to start.

Update: The store currently shows a slew of Weinstein produced movies (Scary Movie 4, Death Proof) and a few Lionsgate flicks (Made, Reservoir Dogs) available for $2.00 or so but most have been up since 2009 so keep an eye on this page for any new flicks. [Thanks, Rocco G.]

YouTube ready to start renting video on-demand movies from major studios? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Apr 2011 22:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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