‘Tis the season shop until your brains melt (or skip it all entirely, depending on your interpretation of the term holiday). In that spirit, for the next few weeks we’ll be rounding up a dozen daily deals courtesy our friends at DealNews.com. Each afternoon tune in to TUAW for this handy summary. Keep in mind that while our posts will live on, the deals won’t. Each is lovingly generated by the deal-bot every day, so get ‘em while they’re hot. Enjoy!
iTunes Music Store: [iPhone / iPod Apps] App Store Freebies: Super Santa, Roller Uberball, Enso-Dot, BuddyFeed, more
What a crazy 10 years, right guys? It’s really flown past; the highs, the lows, the stuff in the middle that didn’t seem very impressive one way or another. For our final Engadget Show of the decade, we asked site founder Peter Rojas to join us for a look back at our picks for the most important and / or interesting gadget developments since 2000. A hardcore crowd came out just after a gigantic snowstorm to witness the proceedings, and now you get your chance to see how it all went down. This is a long one folks, so grab some popcorn and settle in for the show!
Note: The HD download below is on its way, so hold tight. The iPhone / iPod version and RSS versions are all fine.
As we reported last week, Apple is again rolling out their ‘12 Days of Christmas’ promo for almost all of Europe. From December 26 to January 6 anyone with a iTunes account in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and Ireland can download a free song, music video, app, television show, or film from ’some of the biggest star performers’ on iTunes.
To help you remember to download the daily giveaway, Apple has created a ‘12 Days of Christmas’ iPhone app [UK iTunes link]. It uses push notifications to alert you when the new download is available and also allows you to connect to Facebook and recommend the download to your friends. So if you live in Europe, get downloading! The promo starts December 26th, but the app is available now!
Vienna, Austria-based tunesBag is opening up the public beta version of its social music service today, after allowing access by invitation only for the past year or so.
The launch has been a long time coming, considering the fact that the startup has already produced a fully functional web client, and Adobe-AIR powered desktop client and applications for iPhone, Facebook and Boxee since its founding in late 2008.
Our friends over at Adafruit Industries made their way over to NYU’s ITP winter show 2009 recently, and they’ve blessed us with some highlights. ITP shows are always interesting and worth a walk through, and this is one show we regret missing this time around. The fridgebuzz MK1 protoype alone is enough to snag our hearts — a MIDI controller with 32 LED button switches and six copper switches, all in a super attractive package. The Super Duper cubes go beyond their ridiculous name, and operate as an interface to control video and music, with each cube boasting a gyroscope, accelerometor, battery, and wireless communication, so that the cubes can be turned (no wires!). There is plenty more to see, so hit the source link to check out photos and a video of the full highlights.
Much of the web is based around clickstreams. The latest version of Whrrl, a location-based application by Pelago, wants to take that concept into the real world, with “footstreams.”
Up until this point, since the launch of version 2 of its iPhone app earlier this year, Whrrl’s focus has been on storytelling. That is, allowing users to tag places they’re at with stories and pictures. But the latest version shifts the focus towards creating a digital record of all the places you go in the real world, Pelago CEO Jeff Holden tells us. “It’s about places, not location,” he says.
‘Tis the season shop until your brains melt (or skip it all entirely, depending on your interpretation of the term holiday). In that spirit, for the next few weeks we’ll be rounding up a dozen daily deals courtesy our friends at DealNews.com. Each afternoon tune in to TUAW for this handy summary. Keep in mind that while our posts will live on, the deals won’t. Each is lovingly generated by the deal-bot every day, so get ‘em while they’re hot. Enjoy!
iTunes Music Store: [iPhone / iPod Apps] Wild West Pinball for iPhone / iPod touch downloads for free, more
The cable companies suck. All of them. Some suck less than others. But they all suck. We need someone to whip them into shape. And that someone may be Apple.
Apple may be on the verge of gaining two key television network agreements, according to The Wall Street Journal. Specifically, CBS and Walt Disney (which runs ABC) are said to be considering a proposal by Apple to offer a subscription-based TV service over the Internet. Presumably, this would work through iTunes like all of Apple-based content, but also presumably it would work over Apple’s Apple TV device (though maybe a new version of it) to bring this content into the living room, where people are used to consuming it. Simply put: This could be huge.
Some wood, some knobs, and a ball bearing: the traditional labyrinth game has spawned several digital descendants (including some of the simian sort); considering the iPhone’s accelerometer is very adept at simulating a tilting table or a swaying bridge, it’s no surprise that this genre is quite popular on the App Store. The latest entry in the fun parade, from the developers of the Pano photo app (Debacle Software), is Little Metal Ball [$1.99, iTunes link], available tonight in the App Store. We’ve got an exclusive gameplay trailer above, so you can see that you’ll be piloting your steel BB around and through a wide assortment of obstacles, landscapes and challenges as you try to collect prize stars and finish each level (40 in total) in the minimum amount of time.
While the original Super Monkey Ball was so challenging as to be frustrating for an average twitch gamer like myself (version 2 is a big improvement, according to TJ), I found that the difficulty level on LMB was just about right for me — it takes a little while to get used to the ball jump controls, which are critical for navigating the early levels, but I got the hang of it quickly. The variety of environments keeps it interesting as you progress through the game, and the background music (which calls to mind the Harry Potter film theme) is soothing enough to keep you from throwing your iPhone through the window if you hit a frustrating spot on the course. If I could add one feature, it would be a calibration option so that players could adjust the zero point and not spend the entire game hunched over like a victim of mild food poisoning.
In the two weeks since it acquired imeem in a firesale, MySpace has been met with waves of frustration from outraged users who blame the company for shutting down the troubled music service. MySpace didn’t really have anything to do with imeem’s sudden shutdown (it would have closed shop anyway), but most users don’t care — they just want their imeem playlists and free streaming music back. Today, MySpace is reaching out to these disgruntled imeem users to let them know that their playlists will soon be restored, brought back to life with free streams from MySpace Music.
We’ve known this was happening for a while now (MySpace even tells users who visit imeem.com that their playlists are being migrated), but it now looks like the site is taking a more proactive approach to keeping its users informed. This is probably what it should have done from the start, instead of suddenly pulling the plug on its API and redirecting all imeem traffic to MySpace without any prior warning. But at least your imeem playlists will live on, which is better than nothing.