Ipod

Apple launches ’12 Days Of Gifts’ app for the 2013 Holiday season

11 December 2013 1:16 AM
Hello!

Apple has launched its annual 12 Days of Gifts app, offering a new free song, app, book or movie every day from Dec. 26 to Jan. 6.

European fans have grown accustomed to Apple’s holiday promotion called 12 Days Of Gifts (previously 12 Days of Christmas) because they can count on a free download every day in a period following Christmas and until early-January. It’s not just apps, Apple usually gives away songs, books and music videos as well.

A dedicated app is crucial to the promotion and today the company has updated the iOS App for the iPhone, iPod and iPad with gifts for the 2013 Christmas holiday season. Download it now to get your free gift starting with December 26, the day after Christmas. Only available in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia and other territories (requires iOS7)

Also new this year, the US has finally been invited to Apple’s Christmas party. Rather oddly, Apple had previously excluded its own home country in favour of the UK, Europe, Japan and Canada.

App’s Description pulled from the Apple App Store:
“From December 26 to January 6, you can download a gift each day—songs, apps, books, movies, and more—with the 12 Days of Gifts app. Each day’s gift will only be available for 24 hours, so download the free app to make sure you don’t miss out. Note: Not all content is available in all countries.”

12 Days of Gifts can be downloaded now for free from the App Store on iPhone and iPad, though it won’t offer its first gift for another 15 days. If you’re worried that you’ll forget all about the app’s existence in this period, don’t worry – you can set it to notify you when new deals become available.

Apple notes that not all content will be available in all countries, but you can bet there’ll be a fine selection wherever the app is available.

You can download the app from the UK App Store right here for free Direct Link]. (CA / US)

The app requests permission to send push notifications so it’d be wise to hit the OK button because otherwise you won’t be alerted of daily freebies.

iTunes 10.5 – Now available for download

11 October 2011 7:01 PM

Summary: Full of iCloud goodness.

Ahead of tomorrow’s release of iOS 5 and iCloud, Apple has released an update for iTunes.

iTunes in the Cloud
iTunes now stores your music and TV purchases in iCloud and makes them available on your devices anywhere, any time, at no additional cost.

Automatic Downloads
Purchase music from any device or computer and automatically download a copy to your Mac and iOS devices.

Download Previous Purchases
Download your past music, TV, app, and book purchases again, at no additional cost. (Previous purchases may be unavailable if they are no longer on the iTunes Store)

Sync More
Sync with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 5.

Wi-Fi Syncing
Automatically sync your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iTunes any time they’re both on the same Wi-Fi network.

iTunes 10.5 brings with it compatibility with iOS 5 and iCloud, and adds support for the iTunes Match part of the iCloud service.

iTunes Match is a $24.99/year subscription service that allows users to have their entire music library synced with Apple’s database of over 20 million tracks, making those songs available for use on any iCloud-enabled device. If a particular track isn’t available on iTunes, don’t worry, it can be uploaded so it too is available to all your devices.

If you’re going to be upgrading to iOS 5 tomorrow then you will need this update, so get it now rather than having to fight it out tomorrow.

Updated (07:01PM) with information on Windows-specific elements of iTunes 10.5
ITunes 10.5 requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later. On the Windows side, iTunes patches a slew of vulnerabilities, including several that could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code. iTunes 10.5 also marks the first time an iTunes installation on Windows doesn’t include (or require) QuickTime.

MobileMe runs till June 2012 – no refunds?

7 June 2011 1:35 AM

If you went to MobileMe's page on Apple's website Monday 6th June 2011, this is the message you saw.

It’s great news for many that Apple is offering free email, contacts and calendars, but it irks those people who have recently paid the $99 annual fee for the MobileMe service. Here’s what they need to know, and what Apple hasn’t yet explained.

MobileMe isn’t shutting down. It may be “dead” but Apple is giving everyone who paid for the service another 12 (and a half) months. The company stated that the service will shut down on June 30, 2012.

MobileMe may run for another year, but as of now, there are no new subscribers. Apple is refunding anyone who bought the subscription box with a code, provided they have not yet used the code. If you have the code, or recently paid up, you will simply have the MobileMe service until it shuts down. (If you have a family pack, you can still create family member accounts.)

Hello, iCloud!

The much-talked about iCloud service from Apple was officially detailed today by Steve Jobs himself at the Apple WWDC keynote in San Francisco. Apple will now let you store your files on their servers, but the real application for Apple fans here will be the syncing possibilities iCloud opens up, and that’s what Jobs focused on the most in his speech today.

iCloud is free of charge for everyone – iOS device users, Mac users and PC users alike. All devices registered to you will be able to communicate with iCloud, and all applications on your devices will be fully integrated with it. The service will automatically push new data to all of your other devices. Buy an iBook, and it will be automatically downloaded to your other devices. Take a picture, same thing happens. Store a contact on your iPhone, the iCloud pushes it immediately to your iPad.

Almost everything about the iCloud is automatic. Once a day, your data will be backed up to the cloud, wirelessly. This means all of your data – if you buy a new phone, you can enter your Apple ID, and everything saved to your old phone will be automatically downloaded to your new phone.

iCloud has a few little advantages depending on which app you use it with. When reading an iBook, your progress will be automatically pushed to all of your devices, so you can pick up immediately where you left off on your book when you switch between your iPhone, Mac, and iPad. Photo stream will upload your camera roll to the cloud and push to all other devices. This works with PCs, too, using the pictures folder. iOS devices will then store the 1000 most recent photos, due to storage space considerations, while Macs and PCs will store all photos from all devices.

This isn’t a permanent storage solution, though. Files are stored on iCloud for up to 30 days, meaning this is more of a wireless syncing platform with rolling cloud storage. It’s also not a streaming service – files and apps are downloaded to your devices, so no form of media can actually be streamed from the cloud. There will be 5 GB of free storage available to everyone in iCloud, but purchased items like books and music do not count toward that limit.

iCloud seems to be more of a wireless syncing platform than a storage solution, and is certainly not the streaming media center many were hoping for. But, it is fully integrated with all apps, and to say it’s easy to use would be a little misleading. You don’t really use iCloud at all. You set it up on your devices, and it does the rest in the background, pushing new and updated files and apps to all of your devices in (literally) seconds. It is amazingly fast. iCloud will work over Wi-Fi connections, and will completely replace MobileMe, which will cease to exist after iCloud is fully implemented, which will be sometime this fall, alongside iOS 5.

I’m not going to pretend I’m not looking forward to this, but I will miss the MobileMe gallery, if there’s no suitable replacement. And as for the people who paid $99 for a premium service that won’t be premium in three months, I guess Apple is happy to charge you the early adopter tax. Like you’re surprised!

More on this at:
Apple Announces iCloud at WWDC – Goodbye MobileMe – ChipChick
MobileMe runs till June 2012 – GadgetBox