At the very least Apple would seem to know where their bread is buttered, especially considering that Apple made roughly 4 billion in revenue to date through the app store. I, for one, find it heartening that such a successful company would look into the throws of gaming to make their products stronger. On the other hand, I wish Apple would leave some of the talent alone. You watch, after Kingdoms of Amalur becomes a massive hit Curt Schilling will become Apple’s new VP of Awesome.

For the $0.99 you spend, worth it. And it’s universal, enjoy!

In order to be considered for the beta, all you have to do is download the app and log into their steam account.

As time goes on more people are expected entrance into the beta program.

While 802.11ac is not an official standard as of yet, Apple has been known to be ahead of the curve when it comes to wireless technology, and consequently, they have been among the first adopters of a new consumer-grade technology in the past.

And it’s a fair bet that this will pay off again.

In a relatively modest event, Apple held a press conference at the Guggenheim in New York City with the next generation of educational applications. With that, people came away with three exciting new announcements:

• iBooks 2 - Multimedia textbooks are now available in iBooks, complete with photos, videos, and interactive diagrams. Users can search terms within the textbook, highlight them, and make notes on any page they like. Each of the textbooks are available at a price point of $14.99 or less, far less than their physical counterpart. However, each of these textbooks are only available in the United States at the moment, and take up between 855MB and 2.77GB. Hopefully with the inevitable iPad 3, we’ll have a bit more storage space to put these books in.
• iBooks Author – Now people can create these very cool books for the iPad on their Mac OS systems for free. Authors can embed animations, videos, pictures, 3D objects, and even embed custom HTML in their books. It also allows you to import chapters from Microsoft Word or Pages. One important note, please carefully read the EULA for this application before you submit any completed work to Apple. While I can’t confirm anything, but I heard some rumors of it’s far-reaching implications for the authors submitting material. I’ll add more on this when there is something to say.
• iTunes U – Not to be confused with Wii U. A service that was primarily used to deliver lectures is now getting it’s own application. Any educator, whether it be a University professor or an elementary school teacher, can distribute courses online to be consumed by anyone, and for free. This particular app is definitely exciting for anyone looking to further their learning experiences. Introduction to Robots from Stanford University, Multicore Programming Primer from MIT, School of Architecture from Notre Dame, and much more. I’m seriously considering looking up some stuff on Photoshop CS5.

Even by patent standards, this is fairly abstract language. Essentially, the claim is that they can sort and display information based on meta-data from the television show, whether that be by actor, show title, date recorded, etc.

Here is a direct quote of the patent claim:

A computer-implemented method, comprising: receiving episodic content including one or more episodes of television programs and storing the episodic content in a data store; receiving metadata associated with the episodic content and storing the received meta data in the data store; displaying on a display device a menu arranged in an interface environment, the menu comprising a list of menu items associated with the episodic content; displaying on the display device a sort interface arranged in the interface environment, the sort interface defining a plurality of sort options and being configured to receive a selection of a sort option and to sort the list of menu items based upon the selection; in response to receiving a selection of a sort option: determining whether the received metadata stored in the data store includes metadata that facilitates sorting the menu items in accordance with the sort option: in response to determining that the received metadata does include metadata that facilitates sorting the menu items in accordance with the sort option, sorting the menu items based on the received metadata in accordance with the sort option; and in response to determining that the received metadata does not include metadata that facilitates sorting the menu items in accordance with the sort option: extracting from the received metadata that is associated with additional metadata that facilitates sorting the menu items in accordance with the sort option; providing the extracted metadata to a content provider and receiving the additional metadata from the content provider in response; and sorting the menu items based on the additional metadata in accordance with the sort option; and displaying on the display device the sorted menu items.

Whether or not Apple ends up going with HzO is anyone’s guess, but you can bet that they are going to find some sort of water resistant solution for their products very soon.