iTunes

One person for sure who will be delighted by one of iOS 7's new features is one Senator John McCain. Famously, during the Senate hearing attended by Tim Cook, McCain asked why he has to update things all the time. Fast forward to WWDC, and what should Apple announce as part of iOS 7? Auto-updating apps. So, taking to Twitter, the Senator has congratulated Apple on a job well done:

The App Store will celebrate its fifth birthday this year and Tim Cook has just announced some pretty amazing numbers from WWDC 2013. Not only did Apple recently surpass 50 billion app downloads, they've also paid developers a staggering $10 billion, with $5 billion of that being this year alone.

Breaking up iTunes is Peter Cohen's number one want for OS X 10.9. He's probably not alone on that front, I myself went as far as saying I'd love to see the Podcasts app broken away from iTunes and released as a stand alone as on iOS. On their iOS devices, Apple has made the iTunes experience so much better than on the desktop, and it's been this way for a long time. And, with iCloud at their disposal, Apple could easily strip apart the "bloated, unwieldy mess" that is the current iTunes desktop experience.

The rumors of an Apple iRadio music streaming service just won't go away. With WWDC just around the corner, many think that we may see something announced in San Francisco—in the very same room Google recently announced All Access. Apple could knock it out of the park if they entered this space, and I'm sure a lot of us would love to see just such an Apple branded service. But a couple of questions still present themselves. Does Apple really need to do music streaming, and what form could it take if they do?

Periodically, albums become available for live streaming on iTunes prior to their official release date. The hope is that not only do consumers get a chance to hear the album before buying it, but also that by offering a free and legal way to listen to the album before it’s available, there will be less motivation for eager fans to pirate leaked albums. With unreleased albums from Daft Punk and The National currently streaming on iTunes, 9to5Mac has discovered that the streams are being left completely unprotected, offering an easy way for pirates to get high-quality cuts of the albums before they’re officially released.

Apple recently released iTunes 11.0.3 with a number of cosmetic improvements including an updated MiniPlayer and songs view. However, this release is more than just a pretty face, bringing a number of security patches which address a wide range of vulnerabilities. Even users not interested in the visual treatments will want to grab this update.

There's a new iTunes update in town, and at the top of the list of new goodies is a new look MiniPlayer. The tiny little iTunes window has had a makeover that now includes a progress bar for the track currently playing, alongside your album artwork too. It may well be tiny, but it does look a lot nicer now, so good job on that front, Apple.

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Apple has released a statement concerning their recent 50 billion app downloads, and in it, they completely bury the lede. From Apple PR

50 billion unique downloads excluding re-downloads and updates.

In just under two weeks since first announcing they were approaching the milestone, the Apple App Store has officially ticked over its 50 billionth download. Coincidentally the milestone was reached during the first few hours of Google I/O, where Google themselves were shouting about their own download numbers. In reaching 50 billion, that now means one lucky iOS user is set to receive a $10,000 App Store gift card, with 50 billion and one through to 50 each receiving $500 vouchers.

Amazon's Cloud Player has been around for a while now, but the only way to access it in a desktop environment has been via the web browser. Now though, Amazon has announced a full desktop client for Cloud Player, and takes the fight to iTunes in doing so.