Apple may be winding down their calendar year, but Cupertino continues to roll out retail stores across the planet, with new locations opening in Hong Kong and several other international cities this weekend. Sure, your weekend plans are probably less ambitious than that, but why not take a gander at a few other things happening in the tech world before you call it a week?
As noted by MacRumors earlier this week, Apple is taking the wraps off what it calls "an opening you simply can't miss" this Saturday, December 15 in Hong Kong. This huge new Apple retail location features 30-foot tall glass windows, located in the Causeway Bay area of Hysan Place at 500 Hennessy Road. The grand opening starts at 9am local time, and it's not the only international retail debut this weekend -- Apple will also be opening new locations in Sweden, China and Melbourne, Australia on the same day.
For music lovers who shun iTunes Match there's always Amazon Cloud Player, the e-tailer's own cloud storage locker which allows MP3 customers to access their music library from almost anywhere. On Thursday, that "almost anywhere" expanded just a bit more, with apps appearing on both Roku and Samsung Smart TV devices so you can enjoy your songs, albums and playlists right from the comfort of your own couch. It's a simple matter of a quick registration code and you'll be on your way to the musical delights of whatever tunes you're into.
Fat Cat Software has announced the release of iPhoto Library Manager 4.0, a major new version of its extremely handy Mac utility for working with multiple iPhoto libraries and even copying and merging content between them. The latest version brings an all-new interface to iPLM, introducing a photo browser that allows users to actually see the contents of their libraries without having to first open iPhoto itself. A new duplicate detection feature makes short work of finding images that appear more than once in your libraries, even displaying duplicates side-by-side so you can make a decision before doing anything with them. The app can be purchased directly from the Fat Cat website for $29.95, and iPLM 3 users will be able to upgrade right from within the app for only $14.95.
The storage gurus at Drobo are capping off 2012 with one more new product on the heels of its new Thunderbolt-powered Drobo 5D and Drobo mini. The latest is the Drobo 5N, essentially a less expensive, networked version of the Drobo 5D featuring only a single Gigabit Ethernet and the ability to house up to 20TB of storage when using 4GB hard drives, for 16TB of protected storage. Like the newer Drobos, the Drobo 5N also uses an mSATA solid state drive for increased read/write performance through the Accelerator Bay underneath the five-bay unit. The Drobo 5N supports AFP, CIFS and SMB connectivity and is now shipping for only $599 without drives.
Though there are many PDF apps available from the App Store, one of our favorites is Readdle's PDF Expert, which continues to live up to its name. This week, the company has updated the $9.99 iPad version, adding Google Drive sync, integration with Readdle's PDF Converter app as well as Sharefile and German localization. PDF Expert for iPad is also faster than ever at viewing documents, with auto save and the ability to protect PDF files from corruption, which is always a good thing. PDF Expert 4.4 for iPad is now available and as always, is a free update for existing users.
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