360 DEGREES Weblog

Well it’s official boys and girls — Apple’s Mac App Store is live as of this morning, and available to use and abuse via a Snow Leopard update (version 10.6.6 to be exact). The OS X application market takes the company’s wildly successful iOS App Store to its logical conclusion, bringing an orderly, structured app buying experience to desktops and laptops across the globe. The Store will launch with over 1,000 titles, including Apple standards like the iLife suite broken out into separate parts (iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand) selling for $14.99 each, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers for $19.99 apiece, and the bank-breaking Aperture for $79.99. Of course there’ll also be third-party apps present at launch, including Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Pixelmator, Cheetah 3D, and Flight Control HD (yes, a port of the iPad version).

The software itself will be a separate application that functions much like the App Store, providing update notifications and a universal installation process. That process, mind you, will be part of the requirements for getting your application into the store, along with Apple’s famous content policies — so we’re sure we’ll see some irate devs with painful rejection stories. Or maybe not. We know that the company is planning on getting lots of familiar developers into the Store, but we also know that some of what Apple is looking for may not gel with, say… Adobe’s installation procedures (or worse). Regardless, right now the number of apps available is small, but you can expect it to grow fast now that every Mac user will get a crack at this software.

The premise of Microsoft’s newly-released music making application is simple – you just sing into your PC’s microphone and Songsmith analyzes your song’s notes to create a background track.  If you’d like to see all the ways you can use this power for evil, watch the video after the jump.

I’m going to warn you before you even get a chance to click the play button – in my eyes, this ad is already an early contender for “Worst Ad of the Year” in 2009.  What you’re about to watch is so gosh-darn wholesome it’s borderline criminal.  It may make you very uncomfortable.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

SRS Labs has released a couple of products today – the iWOW Adapter for the iPod and the iWOW Premium Software for iTunes on Mac and PC. Both offerings rely on patented SRS audio technologies that result in improved audio quality to increase your enjoyment of your digital music collection that are stored on both your iPod and iTunes library. The iWOW Adapter for the iPod will hook up to the iPod’s dock connector and requires a simple push of the button to work, being comaptible with all iPods thanks to its 30 pin connector. As for the iWOW Premium for iTunes plugin, it offers an “intuitive, high end user interface” that “provides the ability to personalize acoustic preferences with an array of music and video presets, like rock, classical, jazz, blues, country and more” You will be able to pick up the iWOW Adapter and iWOW Premium for iTunes for $79.99 and $49.99, respectively, while both are available as a bundle for $99.99.