The battle for the mobile landscape is about to heat up: Microsoft is expected to barge right into direct competition with Apple and Google with the release of Windows Phone 7. Invitations sent out indicate that Microsoft will hold a launch event on October 11. The event will give attendees an insider look at Windows Phone 7 and provide a hands-on demonstration of the new devices that will go head to head with Apple’s iPhone.

Early videos of Microsoft’s new mobile OS seem intriguing and reveal a gesture and touch based interface with a rather unique look. With that aside, could they have picked a better name? iOS and Android at least sound modern and hip, but Windows Phone 7? Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue with much enthusiasm.

Earlier in the year it was revealed that Microsoft was paying mobile app developers to create for Windows Phone 7, which is just part of what is expected to be a massive push to grow Windows Phone 7 into a viable alternative to iOS and Android OS.

AppleInsider comically notes that the stakes are high for the Windows Phone 7 because loss of the companies mobile market share “had affected Steve Ballmer’s end of year performance bonus.” All jokes aside, it is indeed a high stakes game; more and more personal computing is being moved away from the desktop and into mobile devices, if Microsoft fails here it could spell bigger trouble for the companies long term prospects in an increasingly mobile world.

Buying an iPad just got easier, and in many cases cheaper. Amazon is now offering the iPad for sale directly through their website, and includes free shipping in the purchase. It’s also worth noting that if you purchase through Amazon, they do not add many local and sales taxes.*

Amazon currently offers the 32GB and 64GB Wi-Fi models, priced at $599 and $699 with free shipping. It is expected for the other iPad versions to be available soon.

The iPad was previously only available through resellers on the Amazon website, which often marked up the price beyond the MSRP. The expansion of the iPad onto the Amazon storefront is part of Apple’s continued retail expansion of the device, which also includes Best Buy and Target. Fresh rumors suggest that the iPad may even be available at Walmart stores soon, possibly in time for the upcoming holiday sales season.

*Note: in some states you are required to manually report online purchases for taxation. Be sure to know your local tax laws regarding online purchases.

Mac users can quickly get the bitrate of any MP3, m4a, or other audio file from the command line of Mac OS X.

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This is a really great terminal command that compresses every file within a directory, turning them into a zip archive. We’ll offer two variants of it; one that removes the original source file and leaves only the compressed files, and another command that leaves the uncompressed source files intact. This has been tested and works in Mac OS X and Linux.

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If you want to mass upload a ton of pictures to Facebook from your Mac, using the Facebook built-in photo uploader tool can be annoying. Another solution is to use Mac OS X’s highly customizable Services feature and download the Facebook Services automation scripts, which then allow you to select any number of pictures from your Mac desktop and upload them directly to Facebook via the Finder’s Services menu.

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The big mystery of when iLife ’11 will be released just may have been solved. An iLife ’11 book has been discovered on the UK Amazon store that lists its ship date as November of this year, which would be a fitting time to release the iLife ’11 software package as well since selling a book about software that doesn’t exist makes little sense.

The book is actually written in German, but the translation from 9to5mac reads as follows: “iPhoto, iMovie and more with apps for Mac, iPhone 4, iPod and iPad.”

An additional item on the Amazon UK store shows an iMovie ’11 guide that lists iDVD as part of the new iMovie app, this is interesting because iDVD has been assumed to have been abandoned by Apple.

The release date of iLife ’11 has been speculated at several times this year, with most of the claims surrounding earlier this summer. It even briefly appeared on the Amazon bestselling Mac software list before disappearing from the Amazon US site. A November release date makes sense if the new software is to be included in the holiday shopping season.

The desktop software package currently rests at iLife ’09, which was released in January of 2009, and has not been updated since. Rather amusingly, if you do an Amazon search for iLife ’11 your top result will currently be iLife 1.1, which was released in 2003.

The iTunes 10 player defaults to include the album art inside the playlist, the size of this album art is adjustable. All you need to do is click on the “Album by Artist” list header to pull down a menu where you can adjust the size to either Small, Medium, or Large.

The album art view is nice, but I think the best part about iTunes 10 is the new album art mini-player which lets you use album art as a desktop HUD to control and play songs.

How’d you like to run Newton OS on your iPad, iPhone, or Mac? You can with an emulator, and it actually runs on your iPhone, iPod touch, and Mac OS X too.

This is all done through an open source project called Open Einstein which now has a working iOS port.

It’s not exactly an easy achievement, but if you’re dedicated and can find yourself a Newton ROM image, you can pull it off and run Newton OS on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

Apparently the emulator runs at about half the speed of a real Newton, and is a bit buggy, but just the fact that you can do this is pretty interesting. You can check out a video of the Newton OS emulator running on an iPad over at Flickr, which is also where the above picture is from.

The video below helps to get this setup on your iPhone too!

How cool is this?

This has to be the most repulsive gadget accessory I’ve ever seen. Straight out of Japan, it’s an iPhone charger made to resemble an umbilical cord that twitches, pulsates, and squeals as it charges your iPhone. I don’t know if it’s for sale (would anyone want to buy it?), but it’s the creation of a Mio Iizawa, a Japanese artist who has some other rather… interesting and creepy… art pieces.

Now here’s an awesome Mac setup: a MacBook Pro, a beautiful iMac, and an external vertically aligned Dell display, plus a bit of voice recording equipment. Ok I admit I don’t know if that’s really a voice recording studio, maybe it’s for podcasts or radio or just making funny noises and emailing them to people. Anyway, a great looking Mac setup. I’m really digging the vertically aligned monitors lately… maybe I’ll get one!

[ via Flickr ]

If you’re looking for a discrete and barebones keylogger for Mac OS X, logkext will likely fit the bill. For the unfamiliar, a key logger does what it sounds like; it quite literally records every single key press and key stroke on a computer, and stores that typing data within an encrypted log file so that another user, perhaps you or someone else, can review all key presses and typed keys, characters, and sequences – basically anything entered into the keyboard will be recorded using a key logger app.

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More good news on the new Apple TV front, the new device actually does play 1080p content that is streamed to it, but it downscales the video quality to 720p. This means that your existing 1080p content is being decoded and will still work on the new Apple TV, although for now it is being downsampled to the lower 720p resolution for playback.

I suspect the new Apple TV hardware specs are strong enough to support 1080p output, but we may have to wait for the jailbreak to arrive before finding out for sure.

The 1080p to 720p downsampling has been confirmed by several users on MacRumors and Handbrake forums. We’ll keep you posted on any new developments.

Have you ever closed a window that you really wish you didn’t in Safari? It’s pretty common to accidentally close an important tab or browser window, and sometimes the Safari app will even crash too. But don’t freak out, you can re-open your last browser sessions in Safari regardless of why they were closed. Session restore is multi-featured on the Mac Safari app, and there are actually two ways to quickly restore your last browsing session, including all of its closed windows, tabs, and URL’s in Safari.

One of the features is automatic – just relaunch a crashed Safari app and modern versions of OS X will attempt to restore your prior browsing windows.

But, what if you closed a window on accident? Or what if you lost a browsing session for some reason, but the app didn’t crash? Or if Safari crashes, but the auto-restore function did not re-open your browser windows? Don’t sweat, because by doing the following simple trick once Safari has re-opened you’ll get your prior browser windows back in a jiffy in Mac OS X.

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If you’re new to using the command line and trying to learn the Terminal, setting a cheat sheet of command syntax for commonly used tricks as your background picture can be a pretty helpful way to help remember commands.

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This has to be the worst imaginable iPad car mount solution I have ever seen, which is exactly why it’s so funny. Mounting an iPad to your arm, seriously, can you come up with a worse idea?

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Apple told everyone that the new Apple TV had an A4 chip, HDMI out with 720p support, WiFI, etc, but what everyone wanted to know was what the actual device hardware specs were… how much RAM does it have, how much local storage, does it run iOS?

Now we know, here are the Apple TV 2010 hardware specs:

• A4 Processor – identical to the CPU in the iPad and iPod Touch 4G
• 256MB RAM – again the same as the iPad and 4th gen iPod touch
• 8GB Flash Storage – similar to NAND module found in the iPad and iPod touch
• Runs iOS – the Apple TV is running a modified version of iOS 4.1
• 802.11n Wi-Fi + Ethernet
• HDMI output
• Optical audio
• Mini-USB port – potential for external storage options, syncing to your Mac, and more
• Infrared receiver for remote control

The new Apple TV is also really small, coming in slightly less than 4″x4″ and less than an inch high. You can see specifics about the dimensions and video and audio formats on Apple’s official specs page.

The new Apple TV is looking better and better for $99. The RAM and flash storage capacity were discovered by iFixIt during their teardown of the device, and indicate that the device is just as powerful as an iPad and iPod touch 4G, although slightly weaker than the iPhone 4 due to a slightly different A4 chip and half the RAM (iPhone 4 has 512MB RAM).

Since the new Apple TV runs iOS it means a Apple TV Jailbreak is just around the corner… 8GB of storage is enough room to store a fair amount of apps and still cache video and media through the AirPlay streaming service.

I am very excited to see where the Apple TV takes us!

You can easily hide or show the “Macintosh HD” main hard drive from the desktop of Mac OS X, along with any other internal volumes and removable drives by adjusting some Finder options.

If you like to keep your disk drives available on the desktop for easy access like this, here’s what you can do to be sure they’re always visible on the Mac desktop:

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If you come across a song playing in iTunes that is not playing at an appropriate level, perhaps it’s playing back way too loud, or maybe it’s far too quiet and it doesn’t play loud enough for your preference, you can individually increase the volume level of any specific song in your iTunes Library. Likewise, if a song plays too loud, you can lower the volume using the same controls, which are presented as an easy to use slider.

This song-based volume adjustment ability works in all versions of iTunes on Mac and Windows, and the song volume adjustments is handled through iTunes settings on a per-song basis. This is a really easy setting adjustment to make, here’s what you’ll want to do:

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