Christopher Mackay's Blog

Apple recently announced a series of updates. The most widely-anticipated was the Motorola/Apple/Cingular iTunes phone. To call it hideous is an injustice to all self-respecting things hideous. Still, it’s a toe-hold in a new market, and it stakes out some small territory. More will follow. Enough about that.

QuickTime 7.0.2 was released, marking the first full release of QuickTime 7 for Windows, and the quashing of some QuickTime Player Pro bugs that were of particular interest to QuickTime VR authors like myself. Kudos to the QuickTime team.

iTunes 5 is also fun. John Gruber has a hilarious take on the app’s appearance, in which he correctly identifies himself as an Apple interface zealot. He’s not wrong, but he is amusing. Visit his site. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The new iPod nano looks brilliant. The black version is the one to get. The lanyard headphones option is very cool. It’s almost enough to make me wish I didn’t have a 20 GB click-wheel iPod. Almost.

Oh, and you can now buy all of Madonna’s music — on a song-by-song basis, no less — via iTunes. I’d make some snide remark about how no self-respecting Pink Floyd fan would ever listen to Madonna if it weren’t for the fact that I bought two of her tunes…

But where’s the iPod video? Either there’s going to be another announcement soon, or Robert Cringely’s predictions vis-a-vis an iTunes video store aren’t quite on the mark.