Apple has officially announced that its annual iPod music event will take place on September 9th. Then again, who DOESN’T have something happening on 9-9-09, right? Be it celebrating the birth (or 10th anniversary) of the Dreamcast, a movie release, Rockband’s Beatles edition, or checking out new Apple gear – you’ve got something to do on September 9th.

The keynote will be presented at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco at 10 am PDT.

The invite includes a graphic stating “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it,” which references a classic Rolling Stones lyric.

The event is rumored to bring a refresh to the entire iPod lineup. iTunes could also see an update to version 9 which is said to include new social features.

According to recent reports, It’s unlikely that a Apple will announce a new tablet device at this event.

[via AppleInsider]

MacLife has compiled a list of 100 Snow Leopard Tips, Tricks, and Features for those looking to discover more about the new OS.

We’ll include a couple features below but you should hit the link to check out the entire article on their site.

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Import from a scanner directly into Preview

Screenshot names are time stamped

Sync Address Book with Google and Yahoo

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A research note by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster suggests that Apple will make some changes in the upcoming year, according to an AppleInsider report.

One predication is that Apple will end its exclusive agreement with AT&T and add other US iPhone carriers.

“For various reasons the company moved from an exclusive relationship with French wireless carrier Orange to a multi-carrier model,” Munster said. “In France, the company now enjoys dramatically higher market share (in the 40 percent range vs. about 15 percent in ROW) than in countries with exclusive carrier agreements (such as AT&T in the U.S. where the iPhone has market share in the mid-teens). We believe Apple is seeing the increased unit sell-through more than offset the slightly (~10 percent) deteriorated economics per unit involved in non-exclusive agreements.”

AT&T is said to be working hard to keep its exclusivity through 2011; however, Munster believes Apple will announce new carriers in the summer of 2010 along with a new iPhone model.

Munster also suggests that Apple is unhappy with the current TV and Movie offerings in iTunes. “We believe Apple is unhappy with the current status of video on the iTunes Store and is working to change it,” Munster said. “These changes, however, will take time, in the form of lengthy negotiations, in order to bring the rights for TV and movies up to speed in a digital world.”

His analysis indicates that Apple will soon offer a subscription model for TV Shows that would replace the need for a cable tv subscription.

“While timing on the launch of such a new product is very uncertain given the negotiations that would need to take place, Apple may work to launch it simultaneously with a new version of Apple TV, or an undated Apple TV software within the next year,” he said. “Moreover, we believe Apple has wisely avoided a subscription music model, as music listeners prefer to listen to their own music, and listen to it frequently. Movie watchers, on the other hand, prefer to rent, and typically only want to see a movie once or twice. Likewise, TV viewers are not accustomed to purchasing TV shows on an a-la-carte basis, and a subscription TV service would likely be more appealing.”

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Rockstar Games has announced that the critically acclaimed Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars from Rockstar Leeds, the winners of the 2009 Develop Award for Best Handheld Game Studio, will be making its way to the iPhone and iPod touch this fall.

“Chinatown Wars is a perfect match for the iPhone and iPod touch,” said Sam Houser, Founder of Rockstar Games. “We are very excited to bring this incredibly ambitious version of Liberty City, with this level of detail and immersive gameplay on Apple’s new gaming platforms.”

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is currently available for the Nintendo DS and is also coming this fall for the PlayStation Portable system. The game follows the story of Huang Lee, a young Triad who travels to Liberty City after the mysterious death of his father. Players will navigate their way through the streets as they uncover the truth behind an epic tale of crime and corruption within the Triad crime syndicate, delivering the unprecedented amount of depth that has become a true trademark of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

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Snow Leopard has changed the method used to represent how much hard drive capacity is available on your system.

Storage drive manufacturers measure storage drive capacity using the decimal system (base 10), so 1 gigabyte (GB) is calculated as exactly 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Leopard’s operating system used the binary system (base 2) of measurement. In binary, 1 GB is calculated as 1,073,741,824 bytes. This difference explains why your 4 GB storage drive appeared as 3.7 GB, even though the storage drive still has 4 billion bytes, as reported.

In Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard, storage capacity is displayed as per product specifications (base 10). A 200 GB drive show 200 GB capacity (for example, if you select the hard drive’s icon and choose Get Info from the Finder’s File menu, then look at the Capacity line). This means that, for example, if you upgrade from an earlier version of Mac OS X, your drive may show more capacity than in the earlier Mac OS X version.

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After being held up and robbed, a MobileMe user managed to lead police to the location of the robbers using Find My iPhone, reports the Pittsburgh Post.

The unidentified victim was approached by two individuals at about 1am. One of them showed him what appeared to be a gun and they demanded his wallet and his credit card PIN numbers.

After handing over his iPhone and wallet the thieves let him run off at which point he was able to call the police. The man later used Find My iPhone to track the location of his iPhone to a Wal-Mart in North Versailles. He was able to help the police follow the individuals from the Wal-Mart to a gas station where they were finally apprehended.

Police said they recovered a black pellet gun, as well as stolen identification, credit cards and cash. They will charge Bryant Rather, 22, of West Mifflin, Brent Ray Potter, 22, of Swissvale, and Myron Knox, Jr., 22, of Homewood, with two counts each of access device fraud, conspiracy, receiving stolen property and possessing instruments of crime. Mr. Rather and Mr. Potter will also be charged with robbery.

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The iPhone Dev-Team has confirmed that all its tools work well with Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

Snow Leopard, the OS released for Mac on Friday, poses no new wrinkles for the redsn0w jailbreak or ultrsn0w unlock.

You find a tutorial on how to jailbreak or unlock your iPhone (whichever it may be) using this guide.

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Gizmodo has received a tip from a source “that has always been 100% reliable” informing them that Apple is working on a 10-inch tablet, and 13″ and 15″ model as well.

This source claims that the two touchscreen prototypes—made of aluminum, but on the shape of big iPhones—were in a factory in Shenzuen, China. One of them “was running Mac OS X 10.5.” When I asked, the source didn’t know if these were built for demonstration purposes, or if they were preproduction units. The company has a tight relation with Apple but “it’s not FoxConn.”

Until now speculation has been that Apple will put a modified version of the iPhone OS on the tablet device. This may be the first evidence that the tablet could run the more powerful Mac OS X.

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Primate Labs has released benchmarks comparing the performance of Snow Leopard to Leopard.

To find out just how much faster existing applications run under Snow Leopard, I ran Geekbench on my MacBook Pro under Leopard and Snow Leopard. Geekbench doesn’t take advantage of Grand Central Dispatch or OpenCL so it’s a good way to determine how much of a performance boost existing applications will receive under Snow Leopard.

The system used was a MacBook Pro (Late 2008), Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.40GHz, 2.00 GB 1067 MHz DDR3.

The results indicate a speed improvement of between 2% and 3%. Qualitatively the new OS also feels faster and smoother due to increased responsiveness.

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Okay, so here I am going through yet another glorious Thursday trying to make work go by as fast as possible for the hope that Friday is what it’s suppose to be all about. That way when Friday night comes around I can hop in the fly-est car out of the group and we can go driving around like we’ve got places to be, people to see, and basically make our selves seem more important. Obviously with the last sentence you can tell that I don’t have the fly-est ride.. so what do I do? I go online and start coveting. No doubt you can covet a new Mercedes, Bentley, Skyline GTR, Kitt, the Gadget-mobile or heck even Elanor herself. Then I stumbledupon these amazing concepts!! Obviously it’s not going to be a piece where I tell you the specs and all that, since I myself are only looking at the “skin deep” beauty of these amazingly sexy cars..  and since there’s no end to these amazing cars, here’s my top 5 :)

5. Lamborghini X

Okay, you know it’s a fantastic list when the first car on it is something that’s in the fantasy class for the general public. I’m not even sure if it’s called X, but man, look at it, I know they upgraded bumblebee from a VW bug to a Camero, but seriously if I was bumblebee I’d kick the Camero over and fight my way to this baby.

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