Unlike the recent WWDC which left me somewhat underwhelmed, I must say I’m pretty excited by Steve’s recent announcements. In particular:

iPod Gapless Playback

This might be what finally persuades me to buy an iPod. Even my old linux player could do gapless playback – it always amazes me that iTunes or iPod can’t do this. If it can do it in iTunes as well now, then I’ll be very happy 🙂

Cheaper iPod

Never a bad thing! Time to start saving my pennies… 🙂

Tiny iPod Shuffle

Not that I’d probably buy a Shuffle, but look at it – it’s sooo cute!

640×480 TV Shows on iTunes

I almost bought a season of “Lost” on iTunes the other month as it’s cheaper than the DVDs, but the 320×240 res put me off. No excuse now! 🙂

Movies on iTunes

If they pull this one off and get a lot more movies on-board, and also get pay-per-view sorted (and bring it to iTunes Australia!), then I’m sold.

We don’t have a TV so we watch all our DVDs on the iMac in the living room. Currently, living in Australia, and thanks to the iMac’s non-region-free DVD drive, I can only watch my UK Region 2 DVDs on the iMac, which means I can’t buy or rent Aussie Region 4 discs (which sucks!). As nearly all our DVDs are Region 2 then we just buy new DVDs off Amazon.co.uk. However this is expensive and also means we can’t rent DVDs. If we can buy cheap movies, or rent them, off iTunes then that will conveniently bypass this stupid region crap once and for all! Yay!

Things I personally wasn’t so taken with:

Downloading existing album cover art via iTunes

I don’t particularly want Apple knowing about my entire music collection for marketing purposes, so I won’t be sending all my track listings to get the cover art, thank you very much. Besides I’ve already grabbed or scanned the cover art for most of my collection.

CoverFlow

Meh, I already use it. Still, it’s nice to have it integrated into iTunes.

iTV

It’s a great idea and essential for the whole Apple end-to-end experience, but of course useless for me as we don’t have a TV and watch stuff on the Mac anyway. 🙂

It’s good to see that Apple are still innovating – makes me cheered to have bought into their platform at any rate!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 10:28 am and is filed under Cult of Mac, Hardware, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.