So, as you probably know by now, Apple had it’s now routine Fall music event for 2010 yesterday, September 1st. These events for those new to the Apple announcement bandwagon, revolve around Apple’s iPod line and iTunes. This year, as expected, we got refreshed iPod shuffle, nano and touch lines as well as iTunes 10. Apple normally has a ‘one more thing’ announcement that it keeps until the end of the keynote and this year was no exception. Mr. Jobs ended the keynote with a revamped ’2nd generation’ Apple TV, which yes, maintains the Apple TV name and doesn’t encroach on ITV’s branding as was rumoured.

So on the face of it we’ve got some new gear to check out that’s relatively evolutionary, not revolutionary. We’ll quickly run through the ins and outs of each product so you don’t have to wade through pages and pages of prose:

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Update: Direct link to the stream

Yep, you read that right. For the first time in a long while, Apple will livestream it’s music event, today – 1st of September – at 10AM PDT. That’s 5PM GMT for those that want to work it out for their own time zone.

Great I hear you say – where can I get it. Simple, just point your browser at Apple.com and you’ll be acoustic-rocking. One small snag however, there’s a strict door policy to this here club. You have to be running a Mac with OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and be running Safari or holding an iOS3+ device in your palms. Yes that’s right, PC users, sorry you’re out; PPC Mac users, yep, sorry you’re out too and anyone not updated to at least iOS 3.0 on their iPhone, iPod touch or iPad (where have you been?!) you’re out of luck too.

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Splashtop Remote is a new iPad app plus PC server program combo package that provides remote control of your Windows PC using your iPad. It’s from the guys at DeviceVM who brought us the instant-on OS, Splashtop, but similarities end with the name. There are several applications that allow you to VNC into your computer across a network from an iOS device, my favourite thus far being TeamViewer, which has iOS apps for both iPhone and iPad, plus a plethora of desktop utilities. What DeviceVM say makes Slashtop Remote different is that you can ‘watch video, listen to music, and even play games remotely’. The major difference we can see is that Splashtop Remote automatically pipes the sound from your computer to your iPad, as long as you’re using Windows 7 or Vista.

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For those unfamiliar with the Fallout universe and the previous re-invigoration of the series for the modern gaming era, Fallout 3, the general idea is there’s been a nuclear war where pretty much most of Earth has been wiped out. Survivors locked themselves in underground self-sufficient ‘vaults’, only emerging once the dust had settled. It’s a third person, sandbox shooter-come-RPG, where you explore the wasteland expanse, taking missions, killing vermin, mutants and raiders and generally having a rawkus good time trying to survive.

New Vegas, as the name suggests is based around a slightly less annihilated Las Vegas in the Mojave wasteland, where any man with enough weaponry and guile can carve out an existence for himself. But enough guff, you get the picture, a post nuclear wasteland RPG-shooter. Fallout games have always had great stories and well realised characters, but Bethesda have outdone themselves this time with a truly fantastic vocal cast.

Highlights include: Matthew Perry of Friends fame; Ron Perlman from Hellboy returning from his outing in Fallout 3 as the narrator; Wayne Newton – ‘Mr. Las Vegas’; William Sadler (Shawshank Redemption); Zack Levi aka Chuck; Felicia Day; Michael Dorn aka Worf from Star Trek; Kris Kristofferson, best known as Whistler from Blade Trinity; Danny Trejo; John Doman; and last but by no means least Rene Auberjonois better known as Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Paul Lewiston from Boston Legal.

Looking at the list you’ve got some pretty experienced voice artists as well as some decent actors. I for one, am looking forward to some quality character vocalizations, a repeat of the amazing music and DJ over the ‘wireless’, and expansive story New Vegas is likely to offer. I just hope it builds on the success of Fallout 3 and offers a little more variation, not falling back into sequel oblivion.

[Source]

We’ve heard rumours for months about the posibility of Apple taking iTunes into the cloud. They bought and subsequently shut down LaLa, a cloud based music streaming service, but as yet we haven’t seen any hard evidence Apple is going to launch a LaLa iTunes replacement.

Everyone’s favourite fruit flavoured company did, however, sneak in a bit of iDisk based cloud storage music streaming, by updating its iPhone and iPad iDisk app to enable music streaming from the MobileMe iDisk service. For those of you who have shunned Apple’s ill-fated sync and cloud solution, MobileMe comes with 20GB of online storage called iDisk. The iDisk can be mounted as a network drive in OSX and or Windows and there’s no restriction on what you can or can’t store on your iDisk; however files that the iDisk app on iOS doesn’t recognise can’t be accessed on your iDevice.

Apple updated its iOS iDisk app on the 6th of July with the following change list:

What’s New In Version 1.2

- Designed for both iPhone and iPad
- Multitasking support for iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS (iOS 4 required).
* Quickly switch to another app and back to iDisk
* Play audio from your iDisk while using another app
- When app is opened, the last file or directory viewed is displayed
- Option to open iDisk documents in compatible apps such as iBooks
- When sharing a file, an email can be sent from any configured email account
- The URL for a shared file can be copied and pasted
- Various stability improvements

Fine, small improvements across the board, with a bit of audio playing to boot. However, it wasn’t until Michael Robertson, CEO of MP3tunes, revealed in a blog post that the iDisk app could play songs from your iDisk in the background on iOS4 that what Apple had actually done with the update was shown. By streaming tunes from the iDisk in this way, Apple has circumnavigated the recording industry, essentially allowing you to stream any songs you might have in your library. It’s nothing novel, you can do the same using your computer as a media server, even across the web. But as it’s actually a company doing so, without any compensation to the recording industry, you might find Apple takes a bit of heat for this.

Is Apple testing the waters in preparation for iTunes.com? It wouldn’t take much for Apple to integrate music streaming into the iPod app in the same way it has with the iDisk app. Perhaps Apple will roll iTunes and MobileMe in together, iTunes Plus for instance or MobileMe Tunes. Whatever happens in the near future, if you happen to have a MobileMe account now, you can dump all or a large proportion of your music library onto your iDisk and stream said library to your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad over 3G or Wifi, all for the grand old price of gratis.

[Computer World]