The day has come! Apple launches iTunes Store in Singapore alongside with Hong Kong, Taiwan, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. iTunes Match will be available as well for S$31.98 per year! The iTunes store is live on my Mac, but it seems it has not yet been made available on my iTunes app on my iPhone.
Music pricing starts from S$1.28 for a single track and typical price for an album is S$9.98.
Finally! Prices in both the iOS App Store and Mac App Store in Singapore are now displayed in Singapore Dollars (S$ or S$) instead of United Stats Dollars (US$). This means that the price of an app will not fluctuate because of the horrible currency exchange rate between Singapore and United States given by banks.
Last month, when I bought a US$0.99 app, my credit card bill will reflect S$1.30, but now the app just cost S$1.28. Apple uses very reasonable exchange rates, according to Google the exchange rate today (13:45 on Friday, 22nd June 2012) is:
Earlier this morning, Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8 at the Windows Phone Developer Summit. Before I start, existing Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) users will not be able to upgrade to Windows Phone 8 due to hardware differences and hence they will be getting a minor update dub Windows Phone 7.8 in a few weeks time that bring some changes to the start screen for existing users.
My summary of Windows Phone 8 from the summit:
Hardware
Did you know that if you are a student, educator, academic or non-academic staff from Ministry of Education in Singapore, you can purchase original Microsoft and Adobe products from mine.com.sg at a discounted price. Software such as Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 and Adobe Creative Suite 6 Design and Web Premium.
My brother is currently studying in National University of Singapore (NUS) and he bought the Adobe Creative Suite 6 Design and Web Premium for only S$139 (normal price is S$2,868).
Windows 8 Release Preview has been released!
This is our final pre-release, and includes Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10, new Windows 8 apps for connecting to Hotmail, SkyDrive, and Messenger (and many more), and hundreds of new and updated apps in the Windows Store. Since our first preview release last September, millions of people now use the pre-release product on a daily basis and millions more have been taking it through its paces, totaling hundreds of millions of hours of testing. We genuinely appreciate the effort that so many have put into pre-release testing, and of course, we appreciate the feedback too. Direct feedback and feedback through usage contributed to hundreds of visible changes in the product and tens of thousands of under-the-hood changes.
I have been using Panic‘s Coda 1 for almost 30 months since I started work at mig33. I have been waiting ages for Coda 2 and today my wish came true!
Coda 2 will be available from 24th May 2012 onwards from the Mac App Store as well as their own online store. The pricing scheme is a little tricky. For the first 24 hours, Coda 2 will be on sale at 50% which is US$49, after that it will be back to US$75 and after certain time frame it will be back to the original price which is US$99.
It seems that SingTel has launched its own version of cloud syncing and storage which is called SingTel Store & Share. Think of it as SingTel’s version of Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive or even Dropbox.
Right now SingTel’s Store & Share only supports PC, iOS and Android platform. No support for Mac yet.
Was invited to a blogger event for the launch of ESET Endpoint Solutions at Screening Room. ESET Endpoint Solutions is essentially a rebrand of ESET NOD32 Business Edition. ESET has always been focusing on the consumer markets and now they are going into the enterprise markets.
ESET NOD32 Antivirus & ESET Smart Security will still be there and are targetted at consumers. For the business/enterprise version, it will now be known as ESET Endpoint Antivirus and ESET Endpoint Security respectively.
Google Drive is finally here after years of waiting! Just in time to jump to cloud syncing/storage bandwagon. Microsoft has released their new SkyDrive 2 days ago.
Dropbox now faces some serious competition. I am a paying Dropbox user (Dropbox Pro 50 (50GB plan) – US$99/year) for almost 2 years now and I have used up about 95% of my storage space and I didn’t want to go to the Pro 100 (100GB plan) because at US$199/year it is pretty expensive. I hope this competition will drive down the prices for Dropbox, if not I would have to switch to Google Drive or Microsoft SkyDrive.
Attended Adobe Creative Suite 6 launch yesterday at The Luxe Art Museum. Adobe has joined in the “more focus” bandwagon by only having 4 suites instead of 5 (for CS5) and 6 (for CS4). Creative Suite 6 will consists of 4 suites ranging from 14 different products.
If I have to pick my favourite thing in CS6, it got to be the Mercury Engine. It speeds everything up so much faster. Whenever you press “Save”, it does a background save, allowing you to continuing working on your PSD file.
