Unless you're a fan of their website, you probably don't need the Giant Bomb iPhone app. It's a pretty limited use piece of software. While it does offer easy access to everything on their site, including videos, reviews, previews, and so on, it actually costs $1.99, and we can't really justify a purchase like that. Isn't browsing sites what Safari is for?

But we are thankful that they made the app, because, at the very least, it encouraged them to make the commercial above. It features a few spot-on parodies (the first one overstays its welcome, but stick with it), and even has some nice iPhone-related humor. I don't know about you folks, but I winced when Apple's device went in the drink during the ShamWow parody. The app itself might not be worth the price, but the commercial is definitely worth every penny.

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." - William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

If we applied Shakespeare's logic to today's digital age, then it would also mean that watching mis-tagged or untagged videos on your Apple device (be it a Mac, iPhone, iPod or Apple TV) would be just as enjoyable. Okay, you got me, they'd probably be just as good. But this doesn't mean you're excused from tagging your videos appropriately.

First, a bit of background. The vast majority of videos purchased from the iTunes store, as well as "digital copy" (iPod/iPhone pre-formatted videos that are sometimes included on DVDs and Blu-Ray discs), will come pre-tagged. So, the situation for those in this camp (myself included) is peachy, especially when using an Apple TV. Your videos show up on the screen screen with proper titles, season and episode numbers, actors, and descriptions. Just the way Steve likes 'em.

But what if you already own the DVD and want a version for your iTunes library? For those of you with the time and patience to rip an MPEG-4 version (and believe me, this takes some patience, especially if you use H.264 encoding) of your favorite videos, a HandBrake-MetaX martini make tagging your videos a bit more of a pleasurable experience - as if it wasn't fun enough already.

Apple has posted two new videos on its main page. An iPhone Guided Tour introduces the iPhone 3G S model with all its new features. You'll see how to shoot a video and edit it on your iPhone, make calls and play songs using voice commands, get a preview of the 3.0 Spotlight feature in action, and of course check out that cool new compass.

You can also view the iPhone advertisement that was shown to the keynote participants today. Point your browser to the Ads Gallery page. The spy-influenced ad is presented on the front page of the gallery.

It's no secret that the American economy is suffering, and many of us are experiencing the cold-water shock of abrupt career shifts and planned or unexpected part-timer-ification. Want to spark up your value to an employer, or gain some new skills to improve your freelance mojo? Adobe's free video tutorials may be right up your alley.

The library of CS3-centric tutorials is extensive, and covers most of the content that was delivered on DVD with the products. The CS4 section is a little thinner, and most of the demos are performed with the Windows versions of the apps, but the videos are still valuable for new feature info. Adobe's full training site covers paid and e-learning options for all the company's technologies, and of course there are many respected third parties offering training on the CS4 suite.

If you've got a favorite training resource, free or fee, let us know below.

Have you ever been listening your iTunes library and wondered why a song played more than one time? Duplicate songs in your library can be very annoying, and waste precious space on your hard drive. In this TUAW Tip, I'm going to show you how to get rid of duplicates using a built-in feature in iTunes.

In iTunes, click the "Music" category under the Library section from the selector on the left. You should now see all of the music items that are in your iTunes library. Now click File > Show Duplicates. Any duplicate songs that are in your library will show up, and you will be able to delete the ones that you don't want any longer. To hide the duplicate song list, click the "Show All" button at the bottom of the window (or click File > Show All). You can use this same method for Music, Videos, and TV Shows. It will also work in any playlist.

Using the built-in iTunes feature is nice, but it can be very time consuming -- especially if you have thousands of songs, videos, or TV shows. In this case, you can use an application like iDupe (which costs $8US). iDupe gives you a ton of options for deleting duplicate songs in iTunes.

Do you know another way to delete duplicate iTunes songs? Know of another application to delete duplicates? Tell us in the comments!


Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 and TUAW Tips sections!

Over at Apple, several of the iPhone example videos have undergone an upgrade. During the past week or two, many of the videos went from a 2-D (straight on) look to a 3-D (iPhone tilted away) look. Today, the Internet videos went a bit further. Here are some of the changes between the old and the new videos:

YouTube Widget. The standard set of widgets now includes a YouTube widget on the second row. Apple offers a new YouTube video QuickTour as well.

YouTube Interaction. You seem to be able to select from "Featured", "Music Videos", "Bookmarks", "Search" and more as the main YouTube playlists. YouTube playback takes place automatically in landscape orientation. (Thanks Trey)

Updated data. It's no longer 26 degrees in Aspen in December. The videos now show that it's late May and a balmy 63 degrees in San Francisco. The stock prices have also changed and reflect May 2007 rather than December 2006.

New Yahoo! logos. The stocks and weather reports sport a distinctive Y! logo missing from earlier videos.

Safari has a new "page" browse view. The end of the Safari quick tour shows a new way to browse through pages

New Maps intro. You can now see the default Maps page before a location is entered.

Email indicates "sent from my iPhone". The new tag appears to be added automatically to the text of your message as a default.

Thanks Zack Kitzmiller

Now that YouTube has arrived on the Apple TV, an image gallery of all the new features seems only fitting. Apple has done quite a nice job with the debut of this custom YouTube UI, and it is surprisingly feature-packed. In terms of video quality, I can comfortably say that most videos that started out in a decent quality to begin with (TV show clips, CG videos from design students, etc.) look *worlds* better in YouTube on the Apple TV (re-encoded to H.264 from the original, mind you; Apple thankfully doesn't put up with the dreadful quality of Flash video) than YouTube online. If you can't get to an Apple TV to take a ride for yourself, check out our YouTube on Apple TV image gallery to get a decent idea of what's in store for this clever new Apple TV feature.

Geeze, those MacZOT guys either have strangely coincidental timing, or I need to consider changing the locks on my house. This is either the second or third time that I discovered and thoroughly enjoyed an app, only to find it go on sale at MacZOT the next day (i.e. - I'm buying a license as I type this). The app in question is yFlicks, which we wrote about back in January (and I probably missed because of all the Macworld craziness). yFlicks is more or less a really cool 'iPhoto for your movies,' allowing you to organize and rate your movie files, as well as update the metadata associated with them. This is a great thing if, like me, you're switching from iPhoto to Aperture, because one drawback of the latter is that it doesn't import or organize movies shot with a digital camera.

But yFlicks does some great stuff I've never seen in a full-on movie organizer before: it offers live video previews when you mouse over the thumbnail (so you don't have to open each movie just to get a look at it), complete support for the Apple Remote, a bookmarklet for downloading movies from popular communities like YouTube, Daily Motion and College Humor, and even a great temporary folder system that doesn't simply copy every movie into your movies folder when playing it, allowing you to pick and chose which movies you actually keep and catalog.

The great thing about yFlicks is that the cleverness doesn't stop there; its developer, Peter Maurer - who Mat Lu pointed out in January has developed a ton of other great Mac apps, has sprinkled all sorts of handy magic throughout yFlicks, from a simple rotate button for movies that were shot with the camera rotated to Smart Folders for organizing your flicks and even one-click access to viewing your movie file in its location in the Finder. In fact, I'm so happy with yFlicks, I'm still buying it straight from Mr. Maurer. If you want to save some cash though, yFlicks is on a 40% sale today at MacZOT: its U.S. price is typically $20, but today-only it's just $11.95. That's a killer deal on one of the best darn movie organizing apps I've ever seen.

Of course, before you decide, you can grab a demo from Many Tricks, Peter Maurer's software company, and take it for a spin before throwing down your cash.

Of all the products Apple has been rolling out in the past few years, the Apple TV is easily one of the most debated. While I haven't seen any specific figures from Apple on how well or poorly the device is selling, Apple's first foray into the living room seems to be getting off to at least a decent start. Jobs made another uncharacteristic move in revealing upcoming plans to support YouTube next month. But could the Apple TV be a dud? CNN Money's Brent Schlender sure thinks so. In fact, Mr. Schlender goes so far as to take a jab at the Apple TV's development: "Apple TV is so Zune-like, you'd think Jobs was so busy with the iPhone that he outsourced the Apple TV project to the folks up in Redmond." He then follows with a list of the largest complaints against the device, which includes:

• No DVD drive
• The perceived requirement of an HDTV (though we know that to be not-quite-true) even though you can't buy full HD content from the iTunes Store
• The fact that you can't shop the iTS right from the Apple TV despite its internet connection
• The annoying conundrum with only being able to use images from one computer's photo library, even though most people's pictures are probably the one batch of HD-ready media that isn't rights-managed in any way and completely sharable over a network and amongst friends or even strangers

Schlender is quick to point out, however, that the one other device everyone expected to be able to shop online via its wireless connection - Microsoft's Zune - can't do that either.

Apple must be happy with having the WWDC06 video sessions available via iTunes for ADC members, as another set of videos has just been rolled out for developers. This latest collection includes:

• Graphics & Media State of the Union
• Welcome to Xcode
• Taking Advantage of Leopard Features in Cocoa
• Mac OS X State of the Union
• IT State of the Union

But don't get too comfy with last year's programming; lest ye been living under a rock for the last year or so, we probably don't need to remind you WWDC07 is fast approaching, and more and more signs are pointing towards a debut of both the iPhone and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard - especially since Apple said the big cat is still on schedule.

Variety reports that independent video producers can now sell through iTunes. The first indy video production, a 40-minute snowboarding feature, represents the first iTunes content outside the studio system. This opens doors for small business videographers to market their content and I suspect that video tutorials may be a big growth area for content. Let me point out that the video that debuted (it's called "That") is by no means an amateur production. It creates a new venue for distribution previously unavailable through video podcasting.

Need to replace your video iPod's LCD screen or faceplate? Looking to upgrade its hard drive or battery? A new website, ipodhowtovideo.com offers a number of free iPod how-to videos. These are clearly home-brew videos, but they provide well-paced step-by-step instructions and there's a refreshing lack of site-promotion in the videos. It's nice to be able to watch along with the narrative to see how the job actually gets done.

I doubt I'm going to do any of these projects any time soon, but the videos made me want to go out and find a bunch of busted 5G iPods, just so I could try.

Musings From Mars has posted some revealing videos of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's upcoming 'Quick Look' feature, which allows the OS to preview many different types of media, including audio and video, with unprecedented ease and power. MFM has created a YouTube playlist of three videos, all demonstrating different abilities of this new feature.

Note that in the first movie, the Finder has an unmistakably different look to it, and this blogger would go so far as to wonder if it could be an early sign of an update to everyone's favorite file manager to hate. The second video demonstrates something peculiar that isn't quite apparent from simply watching it: once one video was playing in the preview pane, MFM began clicking on different videos in the Finder, which caused the preview pane to instantly start playing each new video, but picking up at the same point in the timeline - not beginning each video from square one. The third video is a basic demonstration of the preview pane's ability to preview movies even at full screen - unshackling Mac OS X users from the cramped chains of the Finder's tiny preview when in Column view.

Now we don't have any way of verifying these videos, but if they are real, they're some appetizing examples of what is hopefully a shiny new Finder in Leopard.

Thanks Kurt

Update: Leland, the author of the movies from Musings From Mars, stopped by to let us know that the interesting look of the Finder in the first video is in fact the work of Uno, and not evidence of a fancy new Leopard Finder.

As if you can't waste enough time at YouTube, Sport Monkey Design has doomed the productivity levels of Tiger users everywhere by bringing YouTube to the Dashboard. The YouTube Widget isn't so much of a viewer for videos, but it lets you view a list of new videos and filter them by tags, user and even most viewed, most discussed, etc. The only way this widget could be more of a threat is if they integrated an actual video player so you never need to leave Dashboard.

The evidence continues to mount. Several eagle-eyed readers have spotted the images and links depicted at right on the Quicktime page of Apple's website for Germany. Of course, the links aren't working for me right now (clicking them just brings up the "It's Showtime" message), but they do begin with the familiar "phobos.apple.com..." address. Some of you have argued that these are for soundtracks, but the title of the column is "iTunes Videos." I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

If you're in a country that has not yet had television and/or videos in iTunes and you find such a link on your respective country's Apple site, please let us know!

Thanks to everyone who sent this in