In my tests, performed on multiple Windows PCs and Macs, iTunes 9 worked as advertised, and I found it to be less cluttered, more intelligent and easier to use than the prior version. It synced music and videos properly for me using both an iPod Nano and an iPhone. It’s available as a free download at apple.com/itunes.

To me, the two biggest new features in iTunes 9 are something called Home Sharing and a new, easier way to organize the apps on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

For years, iTunes users have been able to wirelessly stream music from nearby computers running iTunes whose owners chose to share their music. But Home Sharing takes this one step further, allowing users to actually copy the song files from one computer to another.

Right inside iTunes, you can simply peer into the shared library on another computer set up to allow this, and then select the song you want and drag it into your own library. It doesn’t delete the original from the other computer.

In my tests, this worked perfectly with music, as well as TV shows, movies and audiobooks, and it worked between any combination of my PCs and Macs. You can even configure Home Sharing to automatically transfer to your library new media purchased on another shared computer.

But Home Sharing has limitations. It only works with a maximum of five computers. These computers must be on the same local network, not connected over the Internet. And they must be the same computers authorized to play copy-protected media you buy from Apple.

With 75,000 apps available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, it has been easy to download so many that your device becomes cluttered, with numerous icons scattered among numerous screens in a manner that isn’t optimal. There’s a way to move them around, or delete them, right on the device, but it’s clumsy, partly because you can’t see all the screens at once, and partly because it’s difficult to move an icon from a location on one screen to another location several screens away.

Now, in the new iTunes 9, when you plug in your device, the software displays an exact visual representation of your iPhone or Touch screens right on your computer, and allows you to rearrange them with your mouse. When you disconnect, the new arrangement is retained on the phone. It worked fine for me.

In iTunes 9, you also can create up to 12 automated “Genius Mixes” from your personal music library — essentially personal radio stations consisting of songs iTunes considers to be related, that play on and on. I enjoyed this feature, and found it generally made good choices.

There are also a number of small visual improvements throughout the program. In the jukebox, for instance, you can now locate all songs by a particular artist using a Column Browser — an optional left-hand column that lists the artists.

In the store, categories like music, movies and TV shows are now arrayed across the top, with drop-down menus for genres. The store also is generally better organized, with richer graphics, more white space and easier navigation.

A small touch of social networking, not exactly Apple’s historic strength, has been added to iTunes. From inside the store, you can post a link to a favorite title to either Facebook or Twitter, though this of course serves Apple by encouraging others to buy the title.

You can now buy special albums, called “iTunes LPs,” that attempt to replicate the experience of old vinyl albums by including lots of extra material. For instance, for one such title by the Doors, iTunes delivered to me liner notes, digital scans of old posters and set lists, plus photos and video interviews. Another, called Mayhem, by the singer/actor Tyrese Gibson, includes just one song, but also a vivid digital comic book with voiced dialogue.

However, these iTunes LPs take up a lot of space on your hard disk — about half a gigabyte each for the ones I tried.

Overall, iTunes 9 is a nice improvement on a much-used program.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com.

Google have had a FREE little feature called Google Apps for a while now, but still not that many people know about it. The big benefit is that it gives you all the features of Gmail, but with your own domain name! You can sync email to your phone, you can setup POP and email forwarding and even out of office replies. You can have up to 50 email accounts in total, and setup mailing lists and groups. Oh Google…..

But wait, there’s more… It will also give you Google Documents and Google Calendar linked to your domain name. Google Docs gives you a sort of virtual online Office suite, with Google’s version of Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint and Word. Google Calendar is an online calendar which will sync with your iPhone too.

All the features above can be accessed through:
mail.yourdomain.com
docs.yourdomain.com
cal.yourdomain.com

So How’s it Done?

Once you have your domain name, then navigate yourself here: http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new

It will ask you to enter your domain name and confirm you are the owner. You must have the control panel for your domain name at the ready as you will need to edit some DNS settings to get it all working. I’m not going to go into the specifics of this too much as the set of instructions Google provide are far better than I could write. (leave a comment if you do get stuck)

The whole process from start to finish should have you up and running within 3-4 hours depending on propagation time.

We love free stuff. Enjoy

For some of us who are “enriched” with tech savvy family members, the time will come where you get the friend request from your mum or gossipy aunt. There are oh so many things I’d be written out of the will for should they stumble upon photographic evidence.

So how do you prevent the infamous tagged photo or video from showing up in all of your friends news feeds? It

RSS
It stands for Real Simple Syndication and it is just that. It lets you gather only the information you want and nothing else. You subscribe to a web site’s feed and you get notified when there is new content. You can tell a website has a RSS feed by the square orange icon (like the picture at the top of this article). If you want to test it out, have a look for the RSS icon on this website or click here.

Twitter
Interesting how this came about, and I was a sceptic at first. It’s microblogging. You have 140 characters to write about whatever you want. You follow people who you want to receive information from and people follow you, usually because they like what you have to say. It’s easy to weed out information you don’t want by just un-following. To find specific information, try the Twitter keyword search.

WordPress
It’s predominantly a platform in which you write blogs but it’s much more than that. If you want to be heard you have to shout and wordpress lets you do that by being optimised for search engines out of the box. If you have a business, band or project you want to share on the web, then wordpress is your ticket. Check it out here.

Ping.fm
A great website that allows you to update most if not all of your social networks in one hit. You can link it to your phone, send pictures and even videos shortly. Check it out here.