Facebook Timeline

Facebook Timeline is a radical new profile page design that Facebook will launch around the end of September 2011. It was announced by Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook's F8 conference following an introduction from SNL's Andy Samberg. (See pictures of Facebook Timeline here.)

Facebook Timeline changes the default profile from a list of your most recent updates to a complete summary of your entire life since birth. It includes photos, videos, status updates and locations you have visited. The new Facebook profile is divided into two main columns, with a line down the middle representing the passage of time. Users are encouraged to add life events which were not captured by Facebook, particularly those that occurred before the person joined Facebook.

Timeline uses an algorithm to assess the most important moments of your life, which can then be edited to your satisfaction. Unwanted updates can be hidden from the Timeline.

The new profile pages are thought to constitute one of Facebook's most extreme redesigns so far, completely reimagining what a social networking profile can be. Timeline also means that Facebook now bears fewer similarities to Google+, a social network from Google which currently uses the standard format of showing the most recent updates first.

GarageBand for iPad and iPhone

GarageBand already has a long history on the Mac, letting people use intuitive controls and a huge library of instruments and prerecorded loops to create songs. But for the iOS version, Apple needed to come up with creative ways to record music using only a touch-screen interface, and we think the company did an amazing job. The iPad version was released in March 2011, but the app has now gone universal in the latest version, letting you record and create songs on your iPhone and iPod Touch as well.

As a general overview, GarageBand offers several Touch Instruments, guitar amps and effects, eight-track recording and mixing, and more than 250 loops to play with. You can export AAC files of your projects through e-mail or add them to iTunes.

Immediately upon launch, GarageBand makes it easy to get started creating a song. Simply choose an instrument and start playing around with GarageBand's many options. GarageBand offers instruments you can play in real time like their real-world counterparts, but you also have the option to play Smart Instruments that do most of the heavy lifting for you. Every instrument has its own specific theme, giving all of them their own feel as you play. Some instruments even have added controls such as effects boxes you can turn on and off to fine-tune your sound.

Using the smart keyboard, for example, lays out all your chords in the chosen key. This means that just about whatever you press will probably go together in a song. You can change the key by touching the wrench in the upper-right corner of the screen. Using a combination of bass notes on the bottom and chords at the top, it's easy to create a nice-sounding song, even if you have very little experience playing the piano.

Similarly, the smart guitar offers a different layout that lets you play chords with a swipe of your finger. You also have the ability to switch to individual notes and actually bend guitar strings for your big rock solos. All of the Smart Instruments come with a few prerecorded segments so you can just tap a key and let the app play for you. Drums can be played manually on touch-screen drum kits or drum-machine-like layouts. But as with the other instruments, you can choose smart drums to make things easier. Simply drag and place drum set pieces onto a grid to experiment, or hit the dice icon in the lower left for a random layout. It's clear that Apple spent a lot of time on how to make music creation easy even for people with no musical experience.

Read more: GarageBand for iPad and iPhone - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Download.com http://download.cnet.com/GarageBand-for-iPad-and-iPhone/3000-2133_4-75415495.html#ixzz1gWOjIG3V