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ADA reveals eight-zone Suite 8200 receiver
Got a whole lot of rooms? Does each one need its fill of audio? If so, you should give Audio Design Associates Suite 8200 multi-room receiver a gander. Upping the ante on its own Suite 8100, this device is an 8-source, 8-zone (16-channel) single chassis pre-amp / amplifier that utilizes a class A/B amp outputting some 25-watts per channel. Additionally, you can get it customized with two tuners of your choice, including XM, Sirius or HD Radio. The 2U design should make those with racks quite happy, and you'll also find line-level audio outputs for each zone alongside line-level subwoofer outs for zones 1 and 2. Sure, the Suite 8200 will run you a cool $4,999, but if you're really looking to pipe music to eight separate zones, coming up with five large shouldn't be a problem.[Via Widescreen Review]
Apple Design Awards 2007
Apple has announced the winners of the 2007 Apple Design Awards, and as always, the winners are a selection of the very best of OS X applications. While a good deal of the winning developers tonight received their second or even third award, it's nice to see a bunch of smaller and lesser known first time winners mixed in. Results after the jump.
Trailer for Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition
Ever wondered exactly how you're going to make those Plagas stop biting into your skull in the new Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition? Wonder no more, dear friends, as a rather buried link in the official Japanese website reveals a lovely trailer just rife with waggle. Looks like pretty standard stuff: shake remote, move remote in circle, stab parasitic zombie villager in the kidney with remote, you know.If nothing else, this trailer just kind of rekindled our fiery lust for Resident Evil 4 ... damn was that game good. You remember that time when you took on two Gigantes and dropped one into a giant pit of lava by ziplining across the room like a badass? Yeah. We do too.[via GoNintendo]
Freeverse releases Periscope
A slew of new apps have been released as of late (no doubt due to the Apple Design Awards deadline) and Freeverse didn't want to be left out of the party. Periscope is a webcam utility that adds a bunch of cool features to your Mac's webcam (builtin or otherwise). You can set it to take a pic based on motion, noise, a timer, Applescript, or by pressing the Apple Remote. Once you have a pic, or a series of pics, you can upload them to Flickr, an FTP site, or export them (you can even create a time lapse movie).Periscope is available now for $29.95.
Widget Watch: iStat Pro 4, iStat nano 2
The crew over at iSlayer have been busy releasing major updates to their killer system monitoring widgets, and not a moment too late for this year's Apple Design Awards (entry deadline is April 23rd). Earlier this month we missed a major upgrade and UI overhaul to iStat nano, bringing the compact system monitoring widget to v2 and adding a ton of new features.With the release of what almost looks like an all-new version of iStat pro v4, however, iSlayer has brought a consistent, uniform UI to both widgets. While I agree that you should probably sit down and take a deep breath before reading through the extensive list of changes, the big-hitters include: support for the battery meters in bluetooth keyboards and mice, instant update for things like network changes and disk mounting, a choice between memory and CPU usage in the process panel, as well as drag and drop re-ordering of sections inside the widget, allowing you to customize the layout to your heart's content.That isn't all though - go check out the huge list of changes for either of these widgets and consider showing iSlayer some donation love for all the stellar work they've done on two of the inarguable kings of system monitoring widgets for Mac OS X.
Apple Design Awards 2007 now accepting entries
It's that time of year again kids - the time when Mac OS X developers can submit their application to Apple for a chance to win a coveted Apple Design Award. The categories up for judging this year have actually lowered from eight to seven since 2006, shaving off Best Automator Workflow to leave us with: Best Mac OS X Leopard Application Best Mac OS X User Experience Best Mac OS X Developer Tool Best Mac OS X Game Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution Best Mac OS X Dashboard Widget Best Student Application We know what you're saying: "Best Leopard app? But it isn't even out yet!" Don't worry, we're scratching our heads too. Even though more and more developers are already announcing Leopard-only apps, we're itching just as bad as you are to see all the wiz-bang new stuff developers' apps can do with the fancy new technologies - some of them still a secret - of Mac OS X Leopard. Fortunately, since the awards are announced at WWDC, which is where everyone thinks Leopard is going to debut anyway, we'll already have a list of rockin' apps that were chosen by the dev community themselves to hit the ground running with.
ADA's iHome Multi-Center: a Windows MCE which plays iTunes's DRM'd music
The iHome Multi-Center on display at CEDIA has been around for awhile but somehow managed to slip below our radar. Still, when a Windows Media Center Edition device touts the ability to playback Apple's DRM-protected AAC files, well, it makes sense to double-back and take notice. The device is said to exploit iTunes and the Quicktime APIs to create a two-zone (analog and digital audio) music server in addition to its MCE capabilities. The magic created by using Quicktime as the output driver makes the iHome the only server product we know of that will playback your FairPlay tracks purchased off the iTunes store. The slab even busts-out an IP control server which generates both full-sized and mini flash-based HTML pages for two-way control over the system from any networked device sportin' a web browser with Flash support. Sweet. The iHome MCE features a couple of 400GB disks (750GB disks coming early next year) and an HDTV video card for a luxurious, $8,000 addition to your home audio rack. You do have one don't you?[Via TalkAbout:CEDIA]
2006 Apple Design Awards entry deadline approaching
I just received another email from ADC reminding developers that the submission deadline for Apple's 2006 Design Awards is coming up - June 16th to be exact. While I'm willing to bet that most of you TUAWers aren't developers, I thought I would pass on the reminder to you just in case your favorite 3rd party app's developer could use that extra motivation to submit their product.
