Apple has it big media conference this week. This conference highlights the innovations in Apple’s music business which is focused on the combination of iTunes and the iPod lines. As usual, there is always something to talk about from this conference. Relative to previous conferences, the announced updates were modest. The Nano line of iPods were updated with a new look, sleeker & thinner with a larger screen for showing video. More colours too. I have never really understand the attraction of seeing video on a screen the size of four postage stamps. On the other hand, the iPod Touch, which as adopted the new look of the iPhone is a much better way video viewer with its larger screen.

As it has in the past, buyers will get the iPods for a lower price and/or larger storage ability.

Of course, anytime there is an update in the iPod line, iTunes gets an update too to handle the new technology. Much of it is under the covers and if you do not have an iPod now, it is sort of irrelevant except for two things. There is a new way of viewing your music which is by album through a mechanism similar to cover flow. Looks better than the old list view of albums and if you are a listener of music by the album collection, this may work out well.

The second thing is the new Genius suggestions. part marketing ploy and part organiser, the Genius API will scan your music collection to suggest like music for a particular song based on genre and other factors. In some ways, it is like a smart Shuffle function.

Also, Genius will suggest songs from the iTunes Store library that could complement your selection based on how other iTunes users bought in concert for the same song. For example, if I am playing Bruce Springsteen song, it will suggest buying the album the song came from, similar Springsteen tracks from other albums and then songs that other people bought or playing with the song you have. Much of the benefit of the new feature depends on other iTunes user uploading IDs of their song collection to Apple’s iTunes Store and allow the service to do the cross-referencing.

On both counts, Genius seems to be a good feature to have and appears to be implemented well. Of course, I could do without the blatant marketing pitch on buying more songs but I will endure it.

Playing with Apple’s Aperture program for photography editing. First impressions are that it looks to be a solid application that provides most of the functionality that Adobe’s Lightroom provides. The interface is similar enough to Lightroom that it did not take too long to come up to speed on it. Probably will need some more practice on it before making a firm decision on whether to go with that program or Lightroom.

Speaking of photography, Flickr is revamping its site in a big way. Users will be getting a new home page which you can get now ahead of the official release which I did. It looks better organised in some respects. Groups you belong to are more visible now as is the stats page of all of the views of your photos. One thing I do not like though is the comments listing. Before comments for your photos and comments you left on other photos were kept in two distinct lists. Now they are combined in one listing. this makes it a bit more difficult to see what is happening in terms of activity on your photostream especially after a recent posting. Let’s see if that changes in the official release.