Software : Mac App Store hits 100 million app downloads

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• Mac App Store hits 100 million app downloads
• Tutorial: How to convert video for your iPhone or iPod
• Microsoft Sliverlight 5.0 is released

Mac App Store hits 100 million app downloads Posted: Who puts the App in Apple? Well, Apple. But with good reason – not only has the fruit-flavoured tech company announced that it has 500,000 apps in its mobile App Store but it has also hit 100 million downloads from its Mac App Store. That's a lot of apps, considering that the Mac App Store has only been live since January 2011. Phil Schiller, Apple's senior VP of marketing, was on hand to offer his two typically sensationalised cents: "In just three years the App Store changed how people get mobile apps, and now the Mac App Store is changing the traditional PC software industry. "With more than 100 million downloads in less than a year, the Mac App Store is the largest and fastest growing PC software store in the world." App avalanche Apple's release also casually reiterated the fact that the iOS App Store has seen over 18 billion apps downloaded, at a rate of around 1 billion a month, which suggests that pace hasn't changed much since early October when it first mentioned that fact at the iPhone 4S launch. But surely it should be up to over 19 billion now? We love a good app round up almost as much as we love app stats, so feast your eyes on our top ten free apps for iPhone in the video below: brightcove : 968441173001

Tutorial: How to convert video for your iPhone or iPod Posted: How to convert video for iPod, or iPhone There are plenty of comprehensive and capable media conversion applications on the Mac, such as Roxio Toast/Popcorn, Handbrake and Elgato Turbo.264 HD. But if all you want is a straightforward means of converting your music and video to an iTunes-friendly format, ready for streaming to an Apple TV or playing on your iOS device, look no further than Kiwi Fruitware's Media Converter. A free download, Media Converter is surprisingly powerful and versatile under the hood. Using a simple drag-and-drop interface, you can convert your media files into a variety of formats. It also comes with a list of presets. Standard settings exist for iPod, iPhone, DivX, DVD Video in PAL or NTSC formats, MP3 audio and WebM, an audio/video file format built for use on the web and compatible with HTML5 video. Media Converter is based on Burn, Kiwi Fruitware's disc-burning utility. Its user community has created numerous custom presets that can be downloaded from here, and you can even create your own. 1. Select output format On opening the application for the first time, you're invited to update the presets to take account of its new subtitle support. Do so – it doesn't take long. You're now ready to convert your media. Using the pull-down menu labelled Convert To, select which format you wish to save it as. By default, DivX, DVD-Video (NTSC), DVD-Video (PAL), iPod/iPhone (H.264), MP3 and WebM are available. 2. Drag and drop After selecting your output format, simply drag and drop the media file onto the Media Converter window; it's as simple as that. Conversion starts automatically, and by default, converted files are saved in your Movies folder. Here we're converting a sample video for playback on an iPod or iPhone, or streaming to an Apple TV. 3. Conversion in progress While the conversion is being carried out, a progress bar shows how far the encoding has got, with a percentage displayed too. You can cancel the conversion if you wish. Completed conversions retain the original's filename, but with an extension that reflects the file format you've converted it to. In this case, it's M4V. 4. Batch conversions You can drop a bundle of files or even entire folders into the Media Converter window, and re-encode them as a batch. Here we're converting a folder full of OGG files into MP3 files. Unlike the Ogg Vorbis audio format, MP3s can be played using iTunes, copied to iOS devices and streamed to an Apple TV using your wireless network. 5. Preferences The app can be customised using its Preferences window (found under the Media Converter menu bar). You can set up a new target folder (Movies by default), or have it ask where to save. This is useful when batch-converting a folder, as the folder itself isn't retained; completed files are saved loose in the target folder. 6. Changing presets Under the Presets tab, you can reorder or customise your preset encoding settings. Modified presets can be saved, though doing so overrides the original. If you need both, just change the name of the custom preset before you save it, then download and reinstall the original preset using the method described in Step 7. 7. Adding presets The Get More Presets button takes you to the Media Converter website, from where you can download the default presets and also custom-built settings created by other users. Click on a preset's icon to download it, then double-click on the downloaded file to install. You can even email your own custom presets to the developers.

Microsoft Sliverlight 5.0 is released Posted: Microsoft has updated its Silverlight platform to version 5.0 – bringing key new features that should boost its popularity. Silverlight 5.0 brings the eagerly awaited hardware decode of H.264 media – which is a key new addition for the rich application framework –alongside other new efatures. "New features in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives," explained the Silverlight team in a blog. Trusted Also changing is the 'trusted application model' which is extended to the browser for the first time – allowing people to stay within the browser but perform complex tasks (such as "multiple window support, full trust support in browser including COM and file system access, in browser HTML hosting within Silverlight, and P/Invoke support for existing native code to be run directly from Silverlight" explains Microsoft). Although Silverlight has impressed with its feature set and potential – it has never made the crossover into a high-profile Microsoft product, despite the growth of apps and the growing importance and familiarity of the browser to the public when doing more complex tasks. With the tech world's attention firmly fixed on HTML 5, will Silverlight 5.0 give it a fighting chance of some much-needed attention? Only time will tell.

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