It’s been a busy week so far for Apple software updates.
Yesterday, June 20th, an update was released for the AppleTV which added YouTube video capability. The YouTube feature was added seamlessly to the AppleTV feature set. It installed on my unit with no problems and after a couple of hours playing around with it and watching a fair number of videos I can honestly say that it works very well. The YouTube video’s are being re-encoded to H.264 and the quality is *much* better on the AppleTV then most of the originals. This is a nice enhancement for the AppleTV. I would expect to see additional enhancements for the AppleTV in the futureos.
As a mention, it seems the Apple iPhone will have similar YouTube features for video display.
Apple also released OS X 10.4.10 yesterday. According to Apple update documentation, 10.4.10 includes general operating system fixes as well as specific fixes or compatibility updates for the following applications and technologies:
– RAW camera support
– Mounting and unmounting external USB devices
– Enhancements to Bluetooth
– Support for 3rd party software applications
– Security updates
It also seems that a new OS X framework, Yahoo! Sync, is being install with this latest version of OS X. While this may seem strange, one possibility for this new framework was stated as:
If you will think back to MacWorld 2007 and the announcement of the iPhone, you’ll remember that Steve Jobs brought three special guests on stage. Stuffed between Eric Schmidt and Stan Sigman (of Google and Cingular, respectively) was Jerry Yang from Yahoo! who used his time to talk about the free Yahoo! IMAP “push” email that will be bundled with every iPhone.
With an email account comes a contact list, and in this day and age of do-everything service providers, a calendar usually comes with it. It makes sense then that Apple would make it possible to edit and sync these things from your desktopâ thus the new framework. Sure, I can do all that from my iPhone, but do I really want to enter and tweak 300 address book entries on such a small device?
Obviously, this is just idle postulation, but I’d be surprised if something like this didn’t get announced before the release of the iPhone later this month.
I’ve installed the 10.4.10 update on four Mac’s, both intel and PowerPC machines, with no problems thus far.
Apple continues to bring together the different elements needed to enhance it’s digital media enterprise. I’m starting to want an iPhone…but will resist the temptation.
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