I gave in this week & installed iTunes, purely so I could purchase Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.  Of course as all Whedon fans who don’t live in the US now know, when you try & buy it you get this

Not. Happy Jan.

So now I’ve installed iTunes for no good reason at all!

I’m really not a fan of Apple’s client software, they tend to be bloated & they have a nasty habit of installing stuff that you weren’t expecting.  Unfortunately iTunes is no exception to this rule.  After installing it I went to my Windows Control Panel & I see this little icon there

MobileMe is Apple’s new sync application for the iPhone & iPod.  Now I don’t own an iPhone or an iPod (not through lack of *wanting* one) so I’ve got no use for this software.  I didn’t do the custom application when I installed iTunes like I normally do with new software because I was in a hurry, so there may have been an option to not install it there.  Either way, I never said to install this & I’ve got no use for it.

Removing it

Removing it is actually fairly simple.  Go to the Control Panel & click on Add/Remove programs (or whatever the Vista equivalent is).  You should see an entry for Apple Mobile Device Support. Click the remove button on that.  It may complain if you have Outlook open, but you can ignore that.

Once that’s finished (it took a surprisingly long time on my computer) refresh the control panel & the application will be gone.

From the SMH:

Apple iTunes users in Australia can now buy television shows - some of which have long been offered for free elsewhere - for the first time at $2.99 each.

After a protracted tussle with local networks and the studios for rights to distribute episodes to Australians via the internet, Apple has secured deals with the ABC and Nine networks in Australia, as well as Disney, ABC and MTV in the US.

Local shows on offer include Summer Heights High, McLeod’s Daughters, Canal Road and Sea Patrol, while US favourites are also available including Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, The Hills, South Park, Pimp My Ride and Scrubs.

Single episodes cost $2.99 but unlike overseas there are no discounts for buying full seasons. In the US, where TV shows have been available through iTunes since 2005, individual episodes cost $US1.99.

‘bout time.  Hopefully this is the beginning of some better online entertainment content for Australia

From the Mozilla Developer Centre:

Whenever we’re asked “when is Firefox going to be released” we endeavour to answer to the best of our abilities, but the truth of the matter is that we’ll only ever ship “when it’s ready”. We have a lot of indicators that help us understand when the product is ready for release: feedback from our pre-release milestones, excitement in the community and the press, availability of compatible Add-Ons, and a large active beta community helping us ensure that the release is compatible with all the various sites on the Internet.

After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 - the best web browser, period.

Plus the 3rd Release Candidate is out today.  Unless you’re on a Mac you don’t need it though, as it contains only a single change to fix a Mac-only bug that was causing the system to hang or crash at startup or shutdown.

One of my mates got a new mac & the other day I was having a play around with it. It is sweet.  The UI is out & out gorgeous, no question. It’s intuitive too, I really haven’t used a mac since I was in high school, but it all just worked.  The photo application using the built-in web cam was a lot of fun & the Time Capsule app is really nice (plus its interface, like everything else, is just plain fun).

The new iPhone looks to be much of the same, beautiful design, easy to use software and, soon to be available, lots of third party apps to install.  The ability to sync with Exchange looks to be a really good feature, this puts it in direct competition with the Blackberry.   The new iPhone will finally get 3G networking support too.  A lot of people wondered why this wasn’t in the original iPhone, but none the less it will have it now.  It’ doesn’t have video recording or video calling facilities, and while some may wonder why, I don’t see this as a problem.  Video calling was the original major selling point of the 3G network, but it really hasn’t taken off.  I’ve got a 3G phone & I’ve only ever made a single video call - when I first got it to test it out - but it’s just not feasible to use normally.

This brings me to my point.  The new iPhone will run on the 3G network, but it won’t have MMS or video facilities.  Have a look at the features page, it ain’t there.  It will take photos, and you can email them or sync them with the new MobileMe service, but you can’t directly send them to other mobile phones with MMS.  It’s certainly not a big deal, but this is such a simple feature I’m really not sure why it would be left out.  It seems like Apple doesn’t want it’s users to know that there are other 3G phones out there, it’s the walled garden all over again.

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