Bites from the Apple: Last-Minute Shopping (and Savings)

A fairly slow news week on the Apple front, what with holiday falderal moving into overdrive, so let's get right to the Apple-y goodness (and get back to gift shopping before it gets too late)...

• If you're considering a GPS app for your iPhone, now's a great time for purchasing as the competition has been driving down the price in time for holiday giving. Currently, the TomTom iPhone app is $50, while the Navigon app is down to $60 and Magellan has lowered its price to $80. To sort through all the GPS possibilities for your iPhone, check out this Macworld review of nine of the big navigation apps (written by my pal/colleague Glenn Fleishman), which surprisingly puts the subscription-based AT&T Navigator at the top of the heap.

• The Apple Blog reminds us that the latest crop of MacBook/MacBook Pro models are also a great companion to your HDTV these days, with a little help from a DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter and an HDMI cable (perhaps an affordable option with Amazon Frustration Free Packaging).

• And speaking of seasonal savings, the entire catalog of Take Control e-books is on sale for 50 percent off--including the e-book version of publisher Adam Engst's iPhoto 09 Visual QuickStart Guide (a great resource for Mac newbies). If you're new to Take Control books, check out some of the highlights at TidBITS.

• Looking to try out some new software? Check out Lifehacker's list of most popular free Mac downloads for 2009 (including the not-exactly-free, but very affordable Snow Leopard OS X update).

• TUAW points to a new file sharing site--Droplr--which resides in your Mac's menu bar for quick access and provides up to 1 GB of storage space. The site seems to do well for smaller files, but it choked a couple of times on my attempt to upload a 100 MB file.

• With the release of the beta versions of Google's Chrome Web browser, Apple's Safari browser has been knocked down to 4th place in worldwide market share behind the new kid on the block (via MacRumors).

• Some worrying news about VLC, the Swiss Army knife of media players (and one of my most used pieces of software)--development has been stalled on the Mac 64-bit update as Mac developers are involved in this volunteer open-source project have dwindled to nil. If you know C, Cocoa and Xcode and are interested, be sure to hit them up on their Developers page (via multiple sources, including MacNN).

• Verizon continues to tweak AT&T by saying that it's ready to handle the data demands of iPhone users once Apple's exclusivity with AT&T is over in the coming year (via Boy Genius Report). But if this is the kind of service that iPhone users can expect from Verizon, maybe it's best to stick with the devil you know.

• Continuing in the rumor vein, it looks like we would be seeing 64 GB iPhones and 128 GB iPod touches with Toshiba launching new 64 GB NAND flash memory chips in early 2010 (the iPod touch, which isn't saddled with some of the additional hardware of the iPhone, can pack two of the memory chips).

• And finally... Apple received several accolades from AdWeekMedia this week in its review of the past decade's advertising, including ad campaign of the decade for its Get a Mac series (as well as brand of the decade and product of the decade for the iPod). The Get a Mac campaign has been running since 2006, and here's a reminder of a couple of the ads from that first year:

--Agen G.N. Schmitz

Comments

[Nasir Gul on December 19, 2009 at 07:19 AM]

Thank Agen for the nice blog:) I will surely buy it for my mobile...thanks..... :)

By http://connectonlineshop.com/

[r4i software on December 30, 2009 at 09:18 PM]

I was stressed out and not thinking very fondly of the Christmas season right then. It was dark, cold, and wet in the parking lot as I was Now, you can leave the shopping and the driving to Deb Marsden, who began her service

[Fredik on January 11, 2010 at 11:58 AM]

very good and nice...keep it up..very cool blog and got alot of good information.....

[Study in Sweden on January 14, 2010 at 02:28 PM]

Apple love it...especially their laptops and ipod...kooooooool