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I’m really going to have to dive into one new feature in iTunes 8: last night, I discovered that it has per-podcast settings. I’m pretty sure the settings were only available globally before, and I didn’t see anyone else talking about this change yet.

These settings can override the defaults for:

• how many episodes to download
• how long to keep episodes.

This is tremendous, although unfortunately it will lessen the opportunity for third party tools like Cast Away. (However, I’ve found Cast Away extremely complex.)

Does anyone else think that Apple has some ulterior motive for promoting Viva la Vida, the track on the new iTunes ad featuring Coldplay? That maybe its lyrics are indicative of something going on at Apple?

“When I ruled the world,” indeed.

No matter. I find it a fantastic visual treat and now the haunting music is stuck in my head. I would not be surprised if it were featured at WWDC 2008 in a few weeks.

The Apple TV, for all intents and purposes, sounds as if it is an iPod that you put on your home network and connect to your TV. It shows up in the “Devices” list in iTunes.

The Apple TV is based on Mac OS X; that’s how people have done some hacking on it.

So why don’t the iPhone and iPod Touch — software for which is also derived from Mac OS X — have network-based synchronization? Are they merely one flashy keynote address away from having it? And why not have introduced it before the new Zunes came along with that feature?

(Of course, you could ask the same question about other technologies, including Bluetooth A2DP.)

Let’s summarize the week in Apple news so far:

• Declared October 26, 2007, as the ship date for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and updated all sorts of marketing material about it — including a list of its 300+ new features (an almost unheard-of summary, and the closest I’ve seen to the old TechNotes covering each new Mac OS release).
• Increased the catalog of DRM-free music on the iTunes Store to 2 million tracks, and dropped the price to 99¢ from $1.29.
• Announced an SDK for developing native software for the iPhone and iPod touch, due in February 2008.

Apple’s iPod Camera Connector: Supported Devices support article has an interesting tidbit about how to find out what USB protocol Mac OS X is using with your camera or card reader or similar device. The protocols they list for the iPod Camera Connector are PTP, Type 4, and Mass Storage; these correspond to protocols Mac OS X itself supports.

While the device is connected (and in my experience, has a card inserted or other storage available), open Image Capture. Click “Options” and then choose the “Information” tab. In Tiger, the “Device Module” line will tell you which protocol module is being used with the camera or card reader. It seems as if this is a useful tidbit of information, especially if troubleshooting is required.

By the way, I had to make sure that iPhoto wasn’t launched when I checked my SanDisk reader — otherwise, iPhoto tended to exert control over my card reader and it disappeared from Image Capture’s list. I assume the same could be true of Aperture or other applications which use the Image Capture framework.

I’m not a coffee lover at all, but I think the new link between iTunes and Starbucks is exceedingly interesting from a technical viewpoint.

I have to wonder if they are accomplishing the connection between song playing over the PA in the store to the iTunes Wi-Fi Store via Bonjour’s DNS-SD. After all, Bonjour is a service discovery protocol that Apple has been known to champion.

If you turn on Personal Web Sharing in Mac OS X, it publishes the URL for your server via Bonjour, and you can see the results in Safari (Bookmarks button > Collections > Bonjour). Recall that every item in the normal Mac/Windows version of the iTunes Store has a URL, and suddenly it doesn’t seem farfetched to publish that URL over a local network. Bonjour’s DNS-SD provides just such a mechanism.

What if they have a resource in each properly-equipped Starbucks that updates a Bonjour-published iTunes Store URL when the track changes?

If they wanted to provide history, rather than just the current track, I suppose there could be some intersection with RSS. (I wish Yes.com provided RSS feeds for stations for this reason.) An RSS feed URL is just as valid as any other, and I believe the iTunes software itself understands RSS (for its podcasting feature). There’s also nothing stopping them from publishing more than one URL, so they could conceivably publish both the current song as a direct link and an RSS feed (with individual song links) for history. Even without history of recent songs played, the use of Bonjour seems entirely plausible to me because:

1. it would only become available in the physical vicinity of the Starbucks’ Wi-Fi access point
2. it could link you directly to the track that is playing
3. it can be refreshed dynamically, without requiring a “Refresh” button in the user interface
4. it could probably work on laptops running an updated version of iTunes, as well, in a way similar to (but not exactly like) how you can already share your iTunes library.

Update: I fixed an error with the URL of this story, so the permalink actually works.

I am amused that The Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” — formerly a theme song of Microsoft Windows 95 — is one of the tracks that is now sold DRM-free and at a higher 256-kbps encoding rate via iTunes Plus.

The Global Geek Podcast has it in writing from Cupertino: “Apple Does Not Licence the Term ‘Podcast.’” So says a scanned letter they received from the Apple Trademark Department. Now, can we all end the insanity around “netcast” and other alternative terms? Or, we could continue to dilute our language into uselessness. Whatever.

[Via iLounge.]