Just a short one today to note that our favorite fruit flavoured computer company has released an update to its music player.
iTunes 4.8 came out today and its main new features: sync of some info with the iPod (I’m sure iSync used to do that) and wait for it…..Movie Playback!!!!
Well, I have installed the software and the video playback interface is not all that. There doesn’t seem to be any UI when its playing back in full screen mode. You really need something other than breaking out back into iTunes. Either a panel like the DVD player or the transparent interface you get in iPhoto or Tiger’s mail.app
This is a water test. Apple has previously put out technology tasters like this and most of the work was already there with Quicktime anyway.
As we already have Quicktime’s Player application I can’t see that they would have brought the feature in just to play the occational movie, I think this is a stepping stone to the ultimate goal of delivered feature films I have written about before in “Jigsaw” and I am pretty convinced that it is going to happen this year (“the year of HD”).
Interesting times to come I’m sure.