The Financial Times‘ David Gelles reports that Apple will hold an event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. They expect Apple to “make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th.”

Citing Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, David Gelles hints that a tablet will likely be announced at the event.

Dan Frommer has since published a piece on Silicon Alley Insider saying:

Apple has been telling some app makers to prepare apps for a demo next month, according to this source. “They’ve told select developers that as long as they build their apps to support full screen resolution — rather than a fixed 320×480 — their apps should run just fine,” our source says.

According to a source who spoke with the Boy Genius Report, the Apple tablet is going to come in a 7-inch size. Their source didn’t know whether or not that was the only size, only that the 7-inch size is definitely coming.

Not to be left out of the fray, MacRumors has found evidence that Apple has acquired the domain name “islate.com” and TechCrunch has found evidence that Apple has trademarked the term “iSlate.” MacRumors, building off of TechCrunch’s findings, later found that Apple has the trademark for “Magic Slate” as well.

As Nick Bilton of the New York Times puts it:

But the icing on the cake comes from a current senior employee inside Apple. When one of my colleagues here asked if the rumors of the Apple tablet were true, and when we could expect such a device, the response from his source was, “I can’t really say anything, but, let’s just say Steve is extremely happy with the new tablet.”

Yet another recently departed Apple employee tipped me: “You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”

It sounds to me like John Gruber was right, the tablet will be a 2010 thing.

Previously:
12/8/09: ‘TabletMac’ Trademark and Apple Tablet Pricing
10/7/09: Apple Tablet Coming in Q1 2010
8/24/09: Steve Jobs Has Been Focusing on the Tablet

Update 1/1/10: MacRumors has uncovered another “buried” Apple trademark, this time for the term “iGuide.” MacRumors’ Arnold Kim thinks that the iGuide name could be related to the Apple tablet. However, I would just chalk this up as another one of those just-in-case-we-want-to-use-it trademark filings.

Meanwhile, Fox News’ Clayton Morris has “confirmed” Apple’s January event. Morris claims to have spoken with a source inside Apple that has confirmed the rumored January event. Also, saying that the event will focus on the mobility space.

Update 1/6/10: Apple May Ship Tablet in March

Hans Wu, reporting for DigiTimes:

The sources said OmniVision has secured 5-megapixel CIS orders for the next-generation iPhone model, which will hit shelves sometime during the second half of 2010.

It’s hard to tell how credible DigiTimes’ sources are, they’ve been hit and miss in the past, but a 5 megapixel camera sounds very intriguing.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has been moving forward with their plan to offer monthly television subscriptions through iTunes. Peter Kafka of All Things Digital first wrote about such a service back in November.

The service would give subscribers access to some TV shows from a selection of networks for a monthly fee. The Wall Street Journal is unaware as to whether or not any networks have signed on, but CBS and Disney are said to be interested in the service. Apple could have a hard time convincing other networks to sign on. Some versions of the deal would see Apple paying media companies $2-4 a month per subscriber to larger networks like CBS or ABC and $1-2 a month per subscriber to smaller networks. The Wall Street Journal says that even with those prices (which are often higher than what cable companies pay), News Corp., Viacom, Discovery, and Turner Broadcasting are “opposed to or leaning away from signing on, at least to Apple’s initial proposals.”

Early versions of the offer included access to advertising-free shows from top cable and broadcast networks for $30 a month. This echoes Peter Kafka’s report from November and, in my opinion, is an incredibly reasonable price (assuming users had access to a decent assortment of television shows).

Aside from the above offer there isn’t any indication as to whether or not this service would include advertising. I’m inclined to say that it wouldn’t but I’m not sure if Apple would be able to convince networks to sign on without it.

Previously:
11/7/09: $30 Per Month for iTunes TV Shows

A handy little utility has cropped up called MagicPrefs. This menubar application brings some extra functionality and configuration options to the Magic Mouse.

Options for various clicks, taps, swipes, pinches, and the ability to increase the tracking speed by an extra 200% are available. Gestures can be mapped to call Spaces, Expose, Dashboard, etc.

I installed the app and played with it for about 20 minutes. It all seemed to work well but I ended up uninstalling it because I didn’t think the functionality warranted the extra menubar icon.

An application like this should be in System Preferences, where it belongs.

Google senior VP of product management, Jonathan Rosenberg sent an email to Google employees that was recently published on Google’s official weblog.

John Gruber regarding Rosenberg’s memo:

Basically, he’s spewed 4,000 words to say that “open” is always good and always wins, Google is always open, therefore Google is always good and will always win. And please don’t worry your pretty little minds about things like Google’s search or ad algorithms or the specific details of how its data centers work, all of which things Google could not possibly be more secretive about. Because if you think about these things, you’ll see that Google isn’t open at all about certain financially lucrative areas where it has built huge technical advantages over its competitors, and that’s not possible, because Google is always open.

Rosenberg’s memo makes me think twice about whether or not I should be using any of Google’s services. I have no problem with a company being closed (Apple is a great example of this) but I do have a problem with that company misleading the public into believing that they are open.

These entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours.

Google Gives ‘Google Phone’ to Employees, originally published Dec 12, 2009
VLC is Looking for Mac Developers, originally published Dec 20, 2009
Apple Unveils New iMacs with 21.5 and 27-inch 16:9 Displays, originally published Oct 20, 2009

I regularly update previously published entries. This entry is a way of letting RSS feed and homepage readers know about the new information. You can find past updates here.

Gabriel Madway reports for Reuters:

Tapulous — with a mere 20 employees — said its “Tap Tap Revenge” game series has now been installed more than 20 million times, with more than 600 million total games played.

Tapulous also says that their iPhone app sales have approached $1 million a month.

Stories like this remind me why developers are willing to put up with Apple’s App Store policies.

Rémi Denis-Courmont writing on The VideoLan Forums:

There are now effectively zero active developers for MacOS. […] If it goes on like this, MacOS support may be discontinued as of VLC 1.1.0. There is nobody to make the necessary updates to the MacOS support code, for instance to support the new VLC video output architecture.

Rémi says that the 64-bit releases of VLC for Mac have been put on hold and with the VLC development learning curve the way it is, the situation is critical.

This is sad news. Although I usually use Perian for all my oddball video formats, I always have a copy of VLC on my hard drive for those extra finicky video files.

I wonder what the folks over at HandBrake think about this, since it now uses VLC to decrypt DVDs.

Previously:
11/26/09: HandBrake 0.9.4 Released

Update 12/26/09: It seems as though the reports of VLC’s death were unfounded. From the team wiki:

VLC for Mac is being maintained. However the old Cocoa graphical interface of VLC, is not being maintained at this time. The reason is that we are in the process of rewriting a new interface for VLC. Its codename is Lunettes. Why a rewrite? This is something really easy to see. VLC for Mac is just not “Mac” enough.

These entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours.

The DROID’s ‘1.0 Issues’, originally published Dec 5, 2009
Fusion Garage Announces the JooJoo Tablet, originally published Dec 10, 2009
Google Acquires AppJet, originally published Dec 8, 2009
Google Gives ‘Google Phone’ to Employees, originally published Dec 12, 2009
AT&T Wants to Charge Heavy Data Users, originally published Dec 13, 2009

I regularly update previously published entries. This entry is a way of letting RSS feed and homepage readers know about the new information. You can find past updates here.

From Apple’s News and Announcements for iPhone Developers page:

Use of [HTTP Live Streaming] is now required for all applications which deliver streaming video. You must include a low quality stream of no more than 64 Kbps for your app to resort to when network conditions demand it, along with the higher quality streams you want to deliver to your customers when the network can support it.

Many developers may be upset about this but Apple forcing them to adopt a new and better standard pushes the overall ecosystem forward.

Also, it helps that HTTP Streaming is a good standard. I will probably change my tune if Apple tries to pull this with a poor standard.