Apple rolled out an update to iTunes tonight. A mere 36MB download will land you this hot feature: Coverflow in fullscreen! I was digging around the new interface, looking for changes when I notices a little ‘expand’ button next to my albums in Coverflow view. Hitting this button will let you flip through your albums similar to demonstrations we’ve all seen of Apple TV or the iPhone. You get full control of play, pause, skip and volume from this mode so as a listener it’s easy to swith to fullscreen Coverflow and have a digital jukebox at your command.

Speaking of Apple TV, there is also an Apple TV tab now listed in the preferences and Apple TV Help under the Help menu. It seems like the interface between iTunes and Apple TV will be similar to iTunes and AirTunes. You can select the option to ‘Look for Apple TVs’ in the Preferences menu as well as ‘Remove’ connected units.

I also noticed while browsing around that when you Get Info on any given track in your library, you can now fill in ‘Sorting’ metadata. I’m not really sure purpose this data will serve, but when you are browsing the list view, contextual menus now include an ‘Apply Sort Field’ function. Intriguing…

Here’s a strangely addictive animated music video that is making the rounds on the interwebs this morning. It’s a little story about love in the early 2000s, when the landscape was dominated by AOL and IRC. Enjoy trying to get this little jingle out of your head for the rest of the day! <3

I have a weakness for Mahjong. I’ll admit it. You can have Sudoku, I’ll take the tiles. Considering this, I decided to download the new Mahjong game from the iTunes Store for my 5G iPod. Games on the iPod? Can this really work? Well, at least in the case of Mahjong, yes, yes it can.

The games download quickly (much quicker than films) and get their own spot in the source list on the left side of the iTunes application. Games aren’t listed the same way as music and videos. They get their own backdrop and include a summary of instructions and tips. It’s a nice way to organize and looks really good.

Mahjong plays well and makes good use of the scroll wheel. The graphics look good and the play styles are interesting, there is even a “pass n’ play” mode for 2-player action. The best part of all is that you can actually listen to your own music as you play the game. The music that comes with Mahjong is good, but giving the player the ability to customize the soundtrack was a great move. I just played a round while listening to the Easy Star All Stars’ Radiodread and it worked great. No slowdown or problems with the audio that I could detect.

Because of the iPod’s design, I imagine that there will be a limit to the iTunes games catalog. There just aren’t that many titles that I can see making the conversion to a scroll wheel and one button. That said, some of the games that are already on offer including Tetris and Bejeweled should be quite popular!

Apple hit the tech world with a raft of announcements at their “Showtime” event on Tuesday. Now that Ryan and I have had a chance to talk about some of the new products and services, here is our take on Tuesday’s announcements.

The much ballyhooed “widescreen video iPod” was not to be at this event. Instead we got refreshed full-size iPods (now widely being referred to as 5.5G) with:

• 60% brighter screens
• Larger hard drives (30GB and 80GB)
• Longer battery life (3.5 hours and 6.5 hours of video playback respectively)
• Lower prices ($249 and $349)
• New headphones
• Gapless Playback
• Instant Searching
• Letter overlay when scrolling
• New Games

At first glance, these updates are a bit underwhelming, but taken all together they make for some pretty nice enhancements, especially given the $50 price reduction. The pieces of this puzzle that I am most excited about are the gapless playback and searching improvements. Ever since making the transition to digital music I’ve been really bummed out about the small gaps between songs that originally flowed into each other. If you have an album on CD where say, track 3 and 4 blend right into one another, the new iPods will play these songs without a gap between them as originally intended by the artist. Nice!

The ability to search for songs on the iPod using text and the letter overlay while scrolling are also welcome additions. Using the touch wheel to zip around 30-80GB of songs was getting a bit tiresome. These new features allow you to search for songs or albums by using the wheel to select letters instead of just scrubbing back and forth through the entire list until you find the track you are looking for.

Way, way more thoughts after the jump!

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