Briefly: Apple's Ive receives award, new iPhone apps

In brief: Ive receives design award, 15-day weather forecast, emoticon texting for iPhone, iMac turns into giant iPod , Mad Men to launch on iTunes and more .... Apple's Jonathan Ive received yet another award for his outstanding product design work at Apple. The design guru--whose official title is vice president of industrial design at Apple--has won numerous awards over the years for his work on the iMac, iBook, and iPod. On Wednesday, the National Design Awards were presented at the White House yesterday to 10 top designers and architects, including iPod designer Ive and Adobe, which developed the industry-standard Photoshop graphics application. Sponsored by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, a New York arm of the Smithsonian Institution, the awards US First Lady Laura Bush said that the "union of form and function has changed the way we peel potatoes and brush our teeth. Your design has made it more fun to go back in time and play oldies on our iPods and to really go back in time by doctoring our photos on Photoshop," according to the Washington Post. It was announced that Ive had won the award in May.

15-day weather forecast, emoticon texting for iPhone.

AccuWeather.com has launched a widget for the iPhone that is also usable on the Mac OS X dashboard. AccuWeather claims that the widget is superior to the iPhone’s pre-loaded weather information in that it provides 15-day forecasts, detailed radar and satellite maps, three pre-saved locations, and access to weather information for over three million locations worldwide. It also provides severe weather alerts for all U.S. locations.

Meanwhile, iGiki has released Textalution, a Web-based texting program for the iPhone that offers the ability to use emoticons.

iMac turns into giant iPod

William Lyndsey Cochran has converted an old iMac into a giant iPod, complete with the legacy iPod's Chicago font and monochrome look. The onscreen buttons and scroll bar even work, and it can be operated via my wireless mouse and keyboard. William describes it has "Part Yahoo! Widget, part Apple excellence, part fanboy geekiness." Code exists that allows other widgets to control the track position, adjust the volume, enable the shuffle option (the iMod only lets you know if it has been activated in iTunes), even retrieve and display the CD cover art.


Mad Men to launch on iTunes

Mad Men, a new AMC show from some of the creators of The Sopranos will be available on the iTunes Store beginning July 20th. All thirteen episodes, from AMC in association with Lionsgate, will be available for purchase and download the day after they air for $1.99 per episode or as a Season Pass for $24.99. The launch dovetails with the network premiere of the series, tonight, Thursday, July 19th at 10PM EST. A special 'making of' Mad Men documentary is available now as a free download on iTunes, and 12 Apple retail stores in cities that include New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, are featuring the documentary in their Apple Theater areas.


iPhone Gains TVersity Support

TVersity has announced that its latest software release supports the Apple iPhone. TVersity is a solution to allow playback of any media on all the major game consoles (Xbox 360, Sony PS3, Nintendo Wii, and Sony PSP) as well as networked TVs, DVDs, STBs, digital media adapters/receivers, PDAs, mobiles phones, and other mobile devices. TVersity is available now for free download.


app4mac acquires Magrathea, OnScreen Particle Physics price cut

app4mac.com announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire
the Magrathea source code. Magrathea is a geotagging solution for Mac. It allows you to easily tag your photos and home videos
with the location where they were taken... OnScreen Particle
Physics' (software for exploring the quantum world of subatomic physics) price has been reduced 50% to $70... MAG Softwrx, celebrating its 10-year anniversary, is recuding its time tracking software's price to $43 for this month.

Filed under: Apple