At $25 a year the iTunes Match service can be a little tough to swallow given all it does is synchronize your music across iTunes especially when other file-sharing services are cheaper and more general purpose (OneDrive, Mega, DropBox etc).

One important thing to know however before you let your subscription lapse or cancel is that once it’s gone all your cloud-backed-up music will be unavailable.

Space was a little tight (5GB) after my upgrade to Leopard and so I went on the hunt to free up space and ended up freeing almost 20GB of my 100GB disk — enough to let me set-up a new 20GB Boot Camp partition that will host Vista and take over from my XP Pro Parallels image with any luck.

Disk Inventory X helps identify large files on your system which may no longer be required. In my case 8GB of imported iMovie clips, a 4GB Parallels backup HD image and a 140MB download of Boot Camp 1.4. A few blank DVD-R’s later and I’m almost 13GB lighter.

I was wondering whether Apple Software Update might search for and upgrade the various Boot Camp supplied tools and possibly drivers.

I did a little digging and couldn’t find the answer but did spot that the Software Update sends a few interesting machine details to Apple’s web server….

Today’s Apple Showtime event showed some great products, and some disappointing ones.

The tiny new iPod Shuffle G2, the fantastic looking iPod Nano G2 with the return of the iPod Mini aluminum casing and 24 hour battery life and 8GB flash option weren’t to be sniffed at.

Another round-up of the best Mac OS X software I can find.

Piping Microsoft and VMWare to the post relative unknowns Parallels are on beta 6 of their Parallels Workstation for Mac OS X/Intel.

Shopping on-line from the Channel Islands isn’t always a pleasant experience. Many companies can’t be bothered with the making a VAT-exempt outside-EU sale and when they do they like to use expensive shipping options instead of the often reliable and cheap Special Delivery service.

Here’s a few tips and sites to make things a bit less painless.

Last week I was at the Apple Store UK ordering a universal dock connector for my iPod. Unexpectedly the the shipping address was not accepted — it claimed they were unable to accept orders from my post-code.

This was a strange turn of events — I’ve ordered a PowerBook G4, iLife, Apple Pro Keyboard, 20GB iPod and various other accessories in the past. I’ve not changed address or post-code for over a year so what’s the problem?

Well obviously the hot item for the next major release of Mac OS X will be Intel compatibility but I’m hoping they’ll get a chance to squeeze some new features in too. Here what I’d like to see next:

Apple’s new iMac-only media centre interface seems to gave garnered quite a bit of a attention. So much so that enterprising individuals have hacked it onto their Mac. Apple should make it available to non-iMac users, possibly as part of 10.5, the next iLife or maybe even bundled with the optional remote control.

Apple have announced the fifth generation of iPod. Improvements include better battery life, a thinner enclose, better screen and now in both black and white.

But not everything is peachy. Gone is the FireWire support, the remote socket and there is still no sign of Bluetooth. Quite how you are supposed to switch tracks without pulling your iPod out your pocket I’m not sure.

Apple hosted a media event yesterday, here’s my usual opinionated commentary.

iTunes 5 is now out — ditching the scrappy brushed-metal look in favour of the Apple Mail inspired ‘platinum’ look even on Windows. With luck we can expect the next major release of Mac OS X to take this theme across the board and finally kill off the aqua stripes and brushed metal. Let’s just hope they keep the older sane toolbars and not the Safari/Mail abominations.

Contrary to popular belief iTunes and the iPod aren’t perfect and are in fact host to a number of my own personal peeves, including:

If you are previewing a song in the music store then it will be abruptly halted the moment you visit another page. Let me just clarify that, people are here to listen to music they might want to buy and you are forcing them to spend most of their time sitting in silence while they browse. Can you get any stupider? It’s easy for Apple to fix, simply add underneath “Music Store” in the “Source” list a “Previews” play list. Every time a user clicks on a track add it to that ready to be played after the current preview finishes it’s 30 second play. Leave them there for a couple of hours perhaps and let them jump back and re-listen to a preview they are still considering, even if it streams again.