So, Apple has confirmed that there will indeed be an event next Wednesday, September 9th. The image on the invitations indicates iPods, or at least "music", will be the focus of the shindig.

Will we see new iPods with cameras? How about iTunes 9 with some whiz-bang new social networking features? And what about that bright yellow underwater elephant in the room?

While the date is almost too tasty to pass up, I can't imagine (pun intended) that The Beatles will even be mentioned during the event. Why? The slogan the iPod silhouette girl is rockin' to is "It's only rock and roll, but I like it." Now, I'm a little younger than the relevant time period, but I've heard that neither The Rolling Stones nor The Fab Four would be thrilled with the mix up.

So, what do you think? What kind of magic are we likely to see next week?

It's an increasingly crowded category on the App Store: Social Networking. Like several other apps in this category, Zensify (iTunes link) doesn't just tap into one social networking service. The app is an aggregator, taking multiple sites and rolling them up into one app that will, in theory, make your social networking somehow easier. That's the promise of all these aggregator apps. So how does Zensify do?

First, Zensify supports Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, 12seconds and Photobucket. Unfortunately, I had only moderate success with signing in to some of these. Flickr takes you to the requisite Flickr-based verification pages, but after going through the process I received a warning dialog that an error had occurred, with only OK as my option to continue -- right before the app froze up completely. Then I tried Digg, but there was only a username field, not a password field. I was able to get Delicious to work, and YouTube (after quitting the app, as there was a bug preventing me from typing in the text area). I didn't try Photobucket or 12seconds, as I'm not big on those.

I should note that I wound up deleting Zensify, then re-installing it, and something interesting happened -- once I had re-logged into Facebook Connect, my previous logins "stuck." I only needed to type in my username on digg and it said everything was logged in. That was a pretty neat trick, and a re-install appears to take care of some of the initial bugs. I'm assured by the folks at Zensify that several other bugs are being crushed for the next release.

While Zensify is pretty in parts, there are functionality issues. These are because, in an effort to do everything, the app winds up a confusing mess at times. Many apps suffer from this, especially social networking apps. Keep reading for my full review.

When the video recording capabilities of the iPhone 3GS were announced, I really looked forward to using the direct YouTube uploads to share things that no one else cared about, like my dog or my nephew. It seems like many other 3GS owners had similar ideas.

The YouTube blog is reporting that since the 3GS was released last friday, uploads have increased from mobile devices by 400% per day. They even list some of the many videos that have been uploaded since the 3GS release that range from boring to annoying.

I know that these mobile uploads of videos have a pretty limited audience, and most people watching them will wonder why they were ever uploaded in the first place. However, it does make sharing special (or mundane) moments with family and friends much easier, and I for one am happy to have the option.

[via MacRumors]

According to my completely unscientific research, about 90% of the TUAW mailbag is comprised of iPhone app announcements. In our continuing effort to not deluge you with iPhone app reviews, I present another "fistful of apps": 6 iPhone app reviews in one post. If you don't have an iPhone, you only have to skip one post. For the rest, this is some serious bang for your blog-reading buck.

I don't play games much, aside from the occasional word challenge, so the apps I've chosen to review are definitely of a more utilitarian ilk. I'd classify them as productivity apps, including a Campfire client, a 3D mind mapping app, a movie cataloger, a task-management solution, a multi-status updater and a nifty tool for developing iPhone interfaces. Read on for the nitty gritty.

If you're a Twitter fan and a Mac user, you'll appreciate a new tool from RADSense Software -- Tweetube for Mac OS X.

Tweetube is a free application that uses your iSight camera to record a 25 second video which is then uploaded automatically to Tweetube. A tweet with an embedded link to the video is sent out, and the world can then see your smiling face.



It's also easy to share YouTube videos with your Twitterpals by logging onto the Tweetube site, and then either entering a YouTube URL or doing a quick search. After you add your tweet, a link is sent off to your Tweeples.

Tweetube received a few seconds of fame earlier this week when comedian Dane Cook recorded a 25-second blast in his usual high-speed rant mode. If you use Twitter, give Tweetube a try!

In the online social networking space you've got your big guns: MySpace, to a lesser extent Twitter and for business users, LinkedIn. Facebook is also extremely popular and now, Facebook's client for iPhone and iPod touch has been updated to version 2.1.

Among the changes for this update include fewer crashes (that's an important one), corrected timestamps for all time zones, improved sync time and faster loading of the inbox. It's also worth noting that Facebook for iPhone and iPod touch requires iPhone 2.2 firmware.

Other iPhone and iPod touch apps updated recently include Pandora, Things, Darkslide, Lists and the trifecta of iSteam, iFog and icanhascheezburger. So, fire up iTunes or the Applications app on your iPhone / iPod touch and go get 'em!

Be sure to let us know how they work in the comments.

If you're looking for the 'next thing' with which to boost your Facebook ninja status, Subsume just might be it. Right now it's an alpha so it's a little rough around the edges, but it primarily displays updates from your Facebook friends with Growl, a TUAW favorite that allows applications to display useful popup alerts when something happens (your song changes in iTunes, new email arrives, a buddy goes offline, etc.). Setting up Subsume is easy, just like with any other app that hooks into Facebook; you're taken to a Facebook login that prompts you for your credentials (if you aren't logged in already), then Facebook asks you to authorize Subsume to display your info. At an interval that Subsume's site doesn't describe yet (remember: it's an alpha folks), the app will check your Facebook account for any status updates from your friends, then display them in Growl's handy, unobtrusive update alerts. For the Facebook obsessed, this could turn out to be a great app that keeps you on top of what's going on without having to keep some kind of a window always open and taking up space.

Subsume is provided as free for now at subsume.info. I should note that the developer, Jacob Jay, developers one of my favorite picture sharing utilities: PictureSync, which we've mentioned on TUAW a few times before.

Attention all ye users of Adium, Skype, iChat, Twitter, Facebook and Jaiku - Brett Terpstra has struck again with MoodSwing, his excellent utility for updating your status across all these apps and services. Why do I call it a utility instead of just a Quicksilver action, you ask? Because Brett is now providing both the original action and a new full-blown menubar app - at the request of TUAW readers - called MoodBlast. Both now live on the same download page at Brett's Circle Six Design blog, and they both allow you to update your status across all the aforementioned services at once. While MoodSwing is an action you set-and-forget to work with Quicksilver (though you can reconfigure later), an advantage of the MoodBlast menubar app is that you're presented with the UI you see above every time you activate it, with any services you used previously already selected for updating. The other advantage of the MoodBlast app, of course, is that you don't need Quicksilver in order to minimize the effort spent for online socialization.

As with his other excellent projects, Brett Terpstra provides MoodSwing and MoodBlast as donationware.

Our good friends over at DLS just posted some news about a service called iRovr, which purports to be a "unique social experience" made exclusively for the iPhone. Basically, you sign up, and are given a set of email addresses to which you can send content directly from your iPhone (including blogs, photos, videos, and even comments), which is then archived on their pages. It's definitely an interesting concept, and even if you aren't ready to join yet another social networking service (especially since Twitter is already on the iPhone, and Pownce is sure to follow), I actually entertained myself for way longer than I planned to just browsing through the content that's been uploaded.

You have to give iRovr credit for using email hackery, a squeezed design, and probably a heck of a backend just for getting this all working smoothly together as an app that is completely accessed only by the iPhone. I'm sure an app like this is just what Jobsy had in mind when he spoke of the "very sweet solution."

Spyder is an interesting concept: an app that leverages the APIs of allows you interact with and manage social networks from within the power of the Mac OS X environment. If you're a chronic social networker, Spyder might (eventually) allow you to speed up your obsessive profile checks so you have a better chance at getting outside for once. The reason I say 'eventually,' however, is because Spyder isn't without its shortcomings.

First and foremost is the fact that the language at Spyder's site makes it sound like it will (eventually) work with more than one network, but for now, it only shakes hands with MySpace. While it allows users to manage more than one account (for example: if you run a band or an org in addition to a personal account), it doesn't let you do much more than browse friends and their friends, send messages and leave comments. No blogging, no iPhoto integration for picture posting, no vlogging, etc. While these missing features (hopefully) might arrive in a future version, there is still the glaring problem of price: Spyder is $40. Now I'm not really a fan of MySpace (though yes, I succumbed to peer pressure and opened an account in the hopes of silencing my friends), but $40 sounds way, way too high of a price for the minimal convenience it offers above going directly to the site itself. I could see $10, maybe $15, but $20 and above for Spyder - in its current state of minimal, MySpace-only features - is just too much to ask. I think the developer would get a lot more attention if he/she offered the app at a discounted price during its present feature-maturing state, while simultaneously promoting what features are coming, and how the price will increase through development (commercialism 101: people love a sale, and they love to know what they can get for their money in the near future). I've seen other developers have success with this open promotion and development method, and Spyder could really capitalize on this due to the relative cornering of its particular market; I've never seen another (potentially) full-fledged social networking app like this.

Long story short: Spyder is a great idea and it has a lot of potential, but I can easily see its price knocking it off many potential customers' wishlists. It will be interesting to see how Spyder evolves in the future.

[Update: readers have noted in the comments that MySpace, for some mind-boggling reason, doesn't have an API, while others like Facebook, Flickr and Upcoming do, making it much easier for 3rd parties to make apps like this. My gut reaction as to why Spyder stuck with MySpace for its launch is probably because of its massive popularity.]