When Apple TV was launched four years ago, it bombed — but this autumn, with YouView, the British Internet TV box just round the corner — Apple has one more shot. The new Apple TV is tiny — not much bigger than iPhone — and costs just 99 pounds. Its exterior temperature is also far less alarming. The hard drive has been stripped out. To use, it's as simple as a set-top box, with Internet radio, films and your home PC video libraries popping up from a single menu. You just rent, picking from an excellent library of films for 3.49 pounds a go, reports the Daily Mail. You can also watch YouTube, although typing via a remote is an unbearable fiddle that leaves co-viewers fidgeting. Whatever you're watching, though, is colourful and clear — although it's 720p, not Full HD. Rival film rental services offered by games consoles largely offer ‘male interest' films — i.e., packed with aliens and explosions. Apple TV is refreshingly unisex. And it's far better controlling it using an iPhone app than the finicky metal remote.
3D soundscape
Now, 3D soundscape to updates your Facebook, Twitter. AudioFeeds, software that provides 3D soundscape, could soon be alerting you, via your headphones, to updates on your social network and news feeds. The software announces Facebook updates such as friend requests with watery sounds like drips, bubbles and splashes. Bird calls are reserved for Twitter, while musical sounds such as a didgeridoo or wind chime alert you to news stories. It achieves the 3D effect by adjusting the phase, or timing, of the sounds delivered to your left and right earphones. “The idea is to tell you what is going on in your social networks in a non-intrusive manner,” said co-developer Stephen Brewster of the University of Glasgow, U.K. “Rather than having to look at your phone all the time we have created a 3D sonification of social network and news feed alerts,” he said. AudioFeeds could be built into a cellphone app, according to Brewster. The technology will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Multimedia conference in Florence, Italy, next week.
Walkman, now history
It's official. Sony Walkman is now history. The multinational conglomerate has stopped the manufacturing and distribution of the cassette Walkman after retiring the floppy disk in March. Now considered to be another obsolete technology, the cassette Walkman was the first low-cost, portable music player. The final batch was shipped to Japanese retailers in April, according to IT Media. The first generation Walkman (that was called the Soundabout in the U.S, and the Stowaway in the U.K.) was released on July 1, 1979 in Japan. Although successful, it sold only 3000 units in its first month.
Sony managed to sell some 200 million iterations of the cassette Walkman over the product line's 30-year career. The decline of the cassette Walkman is attributed primarily to the explosive popularity of CD players in the 90s
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