The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Last week's talkcast included some great WWDC preview discussion with developers Kai Cherry and Todd Ditchendorf along with an expanded panel. Apologies for the scratchy audio (we had to use the Talkshoe low-bandwidth recording instead of the local Skype copy). Download the show from Talkshoe, play it from the Flash player in the continuation of this post, if you like, or pick it up on iTunes.

Join us again later tonight, Sunday June 8 at 10 pm ET for more WWDC conversation -- let us know what you want to hear about and which developers you want us to interview, and our man on the ground in San Francisco will try to track them down. Time and personnel permitting, we'll be back on the air Monday night with another show; keep an eye on the TalkShoe page and our Twitter feed for scheduling.

Read more →

iWeb 2 (the iLife '08 version, that is) comes with an assortment of 26 different themes, but if you're tired of trying to mod the Comic Book theme for your new blog, you may want to look at ten new iWeb themes from Jumsoft.

There's a good assortment of styles in the Jumsoft collection. I personally find the Teddy theme to be a bit twee and Flowered World is too feminine for my taste, but YMMV. My personal faves from the new collection are the sparse and paper-like Simple Info, and the pastel and plastic Business. An installer app is included to make sure that your new themes end up in the proper place on your Mac.

Jumsoft sells each theme for $9.99 or you can buy the entire pack of ten themes at a 30% discount for $69.99. If you're an iWeb fan and want some additional design options, take a look at the new themes.

The idea of being able to select text and have it automatically converted into an audiobook using text-to-speech isn't a new one, but it is a good one. I mean, who doesn't love the idea of being able to take longer text on the road with you and listen to it in the car or on the bus?

Well, if you loved the idea as much as I did, but didn't think you'd be using it enough to justify coughing up some dough for it, you're in luck. Over at Mac OS X Hints, user miketyson has created a script that will add a service to your Mac's Services menu. The new service, which is appropriately called Speak to iTunes Audiobook, allows you to select a body of text and automatically have it converted into an audiobook, then have it imported straight into iTunes.

In testing the script works as advertised. My only quibble is that the clipped audiobooks don't get any sort of meaningful name given to them. They are simply named Speech 1, Speech 2, etc. If the script was smart enough to look at the title of the document the text was being clipped from and generate a title from that, this would be a killer utility. But that's really only a minor complaint considering the heavy lifting this little script actually accomplishes. And heck, if you find yourself using it, you might consider going back and giving GhostReader a second look.

Welcome to the latest installment of TUAW's best of the week, where we gather up our favorite posts for your easy clicking enjoyment. With WWDC just around the corner, the TUAW team has put together our WWDC '08 predictions for your reading enjoyment.

.Mac mail down, speculations abound
Many .Mac users were angry after their .Mac service went down; not only were existing users angry, but hopeful users were looking at this as Apple preparing for the MobileMe launch on Monday.

A low cost guide to making music with your Mac, part two
Joshua continues his second post on how to make music on your Mac without spending much money. If you want to learn about the hardware portion of making music on your Mac, then why not take a look at his first post.

Students: Get an iPod touch free with qualifying Mac purchase
Apple started their new "Back to School" promotion for 2008. This is Apple's most expensive give-away to new Mac purchasers, being as the iPod touch is $299. However, this should make Mac using college students everywhere rejoice.

.Mac and Me rumors: TUAW inside look at Apple's next-gen service
We here at TUAW received some secret information about Apple's .Mac and MobileMe service. According to our sources, MobileMe could be launched as-soon-as Monday at WWDC. Read the post to learn all about the rumor floating around the web.

Rumor: Mac OS X 10.6 to debut at WWDC 08?
In addition to all of the other Apple rumors circulating the interwebs, TUAW also received information that Apple would seed developers with Mac OS X 10.6. Ars Technica and other sites later backed up our story, even clearing up the cat name speculation by giving us the name "Snow Leopard."

iTunes UK gets rentals
UK iTunes/Apple TV users were blessed with the awesomeness of iTunes rentals this week. Soon after Apple announced rentals to UK users, Canadian users also got to join in on the fun.

iTunes: Free Tuesday
Get some free tunes.

In the Venn diagram of users, the intersection of "Mac" and "Twitter" appears to be quite large. Why this is, I'm not sure, but it's true that many Mac users rely on the short-message broadcasting service for their day-to-day lives.

There's some concern in both communities that the flood of new tweets about announcements at tomorrow's WWDC will break the back of the Twitter infrastructure. Their uptime has been mostly in the 90s this month, with some features still disabled for performance reasons.

Do you think it will hold up? What will do you if Twitter grinds itself into metal shavings?

A poll and results, plus more updates (!!) all after the jump.

Read more →

If you've held off so far, this week's new iPhone announcements may sway you to re-consider moving your phone service to iPhone. So what will this decision cost you? The phone cost is the least significant factor. Whether the 8GB iPhone sells for $200 or $400 subsidized or $400 or $800 unsubsidized only minimally affects your other out of pocket costs over two years.

Read on for the facts and figures that will help you make a decision.

Read more →

The best-in-class notification framework for Mac OS X, Growl, just got updated to version 1.1.3. One of the most missed features of Growl was GrowlMail, which allows Growl to issue incoming notifications from Mail.app -- Apple disabled this feature in the Mac OS X 10.5.2 release. However, the Growl team has re-written GrowlMail to work with Mail.app and 10.5.3.

Some of the other updates include:

• GrowlSafari now works with Safari 3.0 and later
  
• GrowlTunes doesn't show ratings from iTunes unless the song has a rating above 0
• GrowlTunes is now localized in German
• Memory leaks fixed in WebKit display
• You are now able to see notifications on every space in Spaces in Leopard

You can see the full list of updates / additions on the Growl version history page. You can also download this update by going to the Growl website and clicking "Download." Growl is, of course, free and open-source.

Thanks, Peter!

It looks like Samsung and Sprint are going after some of the iPhone market share as they show off their video recording capability on the Samsung Instinct. As Apple's competitors are slowly catching up, is it time for Apple to release video recording capabilities for the iPhone? I'm sure that most iPhone users would like to see video recording on the next iteration of the device.

Late last night, several rumor websites, including CrunchGear, reported that they had received copies of "leaked" iPhone advertisements. These ads depict matte black and Product (Red) iPhones. Most of the sites that were sent these images are calling them fakes, including our own Engadget.

There are two major flaws that stick out in these images, the first of which is the lack of a sleep/wake button on the red iPhone in the image above. The second of which: where the iChat details are shown, the requirements state "Windows Xp." However, Apple always states "XP" as just that; not upper case, then lower case letters.

We do have to agree with Engadget when it comes to the video chat images. Ryan Block states, "No Apple design would be laid out the way this guy's got his page laid out here." We have to agree -- Apple designs are normally clean and minimalist; not jumbled as these images are.

[via CrunchGear]

iToner by Ambrosia Software lets iPhone owners put an unlimited number of custom ringtones onto their phones with no hacks and no per-ringtone fees. We've written about iToner several times, and interviewed Ambrosia's president Andrew Welch about the future of the product.

This week, iToner 1.0.7 was made available. Changes include:

• Fixes with iTunes compatibility. iToner should no longer prevent iTunes from removing iTMS ringtones.
• Fixed crash when syncing with iPod touch from iTunes
• Various fixes and enhancements

iToner allows for drag-and-drop ringtone sync, support for MP3, AAC, WAVE, and AIFF files and the ability to assign specific ringtones to certain contacts.

This is a free upgrade to registered users. iToner costs $15US, requires Mac OS X 10.4.10 or later, and is a Universal Binary application.