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Apple has announced that it will hold it 2012 developer conference in San Francisco on June 11th through 15th. You must be a member of an Apple developer program to attend. Apple generally uses the WWDC to make big announcements about new products. Last year they announced iCloud and OSX Lion. The year prior it was the iPhone 4.

Update: All the tickets have sold out in a couple of hours. Last year the tickets sold out in 12 hours and it took 8 days the year before. It looks like Apple will need a bigger venue next year.

Apple will be posting videos of the sessions shortly after the conference. These videos will be free.

More than a decade since the release of SimCity 4, EA has announced that SimCity 5 will be released sometime in 2013. The game will feature a revolutionary logic engine called Glass Box. Glass box is what will differentiate the new installment from the previous. In all versions of SimCity up until now they have started with the larger picture on things like the economy, pollution and so forth then had that trigger animations accordingly. If there was a bigger population then there would be more pollution or traffic congestion. Now every sim will play his part in these. A sim will have a house and a job. He will need to get to that job and that process will be entirely animated. Each industrial zone business will not open and start producing until workers have made the commute from the residential zone to start work. Then each factory will start to produce goods that will need to be shipped to commercial zones. All of this will directly effect the economy, pollution, traffic congestion and many other factors I’m your city.

Watch these two videos on the glass box engine and it’s logic. Note these are logic videos and not graphical representations of the finished product.
Glass box video 1
Glass box video 2

Also take a look at this announcement trailer. Sadly it does not give a lot of information or have any video or screens of actual gameplay. It will build your excitement.
SimCity 5 Announcement Trailer

We know we are excited. So far everything looks a lot better than the joke that was SimCity Societies. Check out more info at SimCity.com

If you have been getting a similar error to the ‘Unable to Purchase – (Application Name) and (number) other items could not be purchased at this time. Please try again later’ then you will know how annoying it is. Your error will vary, the app will change and the number of ‘other’ apps will be different, but your annoyance level will probably be about the same.

I have a fix for you that requires a little bit of work but it’s fairly easy to accomplish and doesn’t require a jailbreak. Just follow these steps…

1. Download iExplorer (formerly iPhone Explorer) on your Mac or PC for Free via http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer

2. Install and open iExplorer before you plug in your iPhone or iPad

3. Plug in your iDevice and run iExplorer

4. On the left expand Media and Downloads

5. Scroll way down inside the Downloads folder to the only file ending in ‘sqlitedb’

6. Rename that file to ‘sqllitedb.old’

7. Close iExplorer and unplug your iDevice

8. Close and reopen the app store and the problem should be solved (you need to hard close by double clicking the home button and holding the app store in the multitask menu then hitting the X)

This causes the database to be re-created without the stuck entries that are causing the problem.

We hold no responsibility if this causes any harm to your device but if you follow these instructions you should have no issues.

Update 1: Or you can use DiskAid or other iPhone file system viewer.

Quick Info
Name: Planetary
Description: A universe created from the artists, albums and songs of your music collection.
Cost: Free
Device: iPad Only
Rating: 4.5/5

Planetary is a visually stunning app that takes your entire iPad music collection and creates a universe. It starts off from the highest level where each artist is their own Solar System. You can zoom in to each solar system and see individual albums. The planets are all rotating around their nucleuses and you can fix the camera and enjoy the show or start the camera spinning and enjoy the ride.

While the app gets boring after actively interacting with it for a while it is perfect to have on display while listening to music. Especially when using Air Play Mirroring to your TV and stereo speakers.

The app is free so you should move along now and download it already!

ITunes Link

I am a sucker…I mean…. Paying customer. I pay for my music, TV and Movies because it’s the right thing to do. I download the latest episode of My favorite show with excitement ready to watch. Wait the hour for it to download, even though I have 100mbps Internet. Turn on my Apple TV and scroll down to the show and hit Play….. “authorization required”. I reboot the Apple TV, iTunes and Mac Mini. I de-authorize and re-authorize the computer. Nothing. Something appears to be wrong with the DRM (digital rights management). Also known as copy protection, its designed to keep me the legal purchaser from sharing the files. I am being punished for legally purchasing my content. If I had of illegally downloaded it I would be watching it. Now I’m out $34.99 for the season and writing this post rather than watching the episode.

Quick Info
Name: Band of the Day
Description: Daily information and songs
Cost: Free
Device: Universal App
Rating: 4.5/5

Band of the Day is one of the best apps available for the iPad. They offer a daily write up of artists or bands which includes, reviews, bio’s, high resolution photos and full streams of their hit songs.

The app opens with a calendar view of the current month. The background of the calendar is a high resolution photo of the current days artist or band. From here you can read up on the band, see what people are tweeting about them and start playing the full streams up to 5 times per song. From the app you can buy the songs in iTunes. If you miss today’s band page you can click back through the entire history of bands, spending hours listening to and reading up on new bands.

The app allows you to browse and move from band to band or even move to another app while continuing to listen to the currently streaming songs.

Everyone here at app:related is discovering wonderful new bands and using this app on a daily basis. This is one of the must have apps for the iPad.

iTunes Page for Band of the Day

Michael Margolis, a former Apple TV software engineer, tweeted that Steve Jobs personally rejected the new Apple TV design. It was originally proposed for the first Apple TV. However that was before the iPhone was hugely popular and before the iPad even existed. It makes perfect sense now to bring the interface more in line with the rest of their products.

A while ago Apple asked developers to stop tracking users by their by their unique device ID (UDID) number. It appears that Apple has started enforcing this policy by rejecting new apps that use the UDID for analytic data accross apps.

The UDID is a number that identifies the device and cannot be changed by the user. It will stay the same even if the device changes hands so it’s not a very accurate tracking method. Developers need to figure out a new way like having users login to thir app.

Developers who ignored these rules are scrambling to get their app fixed to get approval.

Major League Baseball is giving away MLB At Bat 2012 free of charge on February 29th, 2012 for both the iPad and iPhone app. However you will need to purchase a yearly subscription to MLB.tv for $119 if you are a returning customer and $125 if you are a new customer. That is a savings of 29.98 if you normally get MLB.tv and both iPad and iPhone app.

MLB.tv subsciption allows you to watch live out of market mlb games on a wide variety of devices including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and PS3.  It is a great value for people who love a team outside of their coverage area.  Not so great if you are a Blue Jays fan and live in Canada, 100% of jays games are blacked out Nationwide.