iCloud, The Downward Spiral Vinyl, and 3DShop

WWDC and E3 officially kicked off today. First of the festivites included a Stevenote at WWDC about iOS 5, Lion, and iCloud, and Microsoft's keynote which brought "incredible" announcements like Halo 4 (which apparently will spawn another trilogy, joy) Halo HD for its 10th anniversary, and a slew of announcements about updates to xbox live, including getting YouTube (yay?). Apple announced that Lion will be 30 bucks, will only be available in the Mac App Store, and will not require a reboot. iOS 5 is getting a bunch of new features that just rip off android, although to their credit the features do appear to have more polish, and will be released in fall which pretty much confirms the fall release rumor of the iPhone 4S, or 5, or whatever they decide to ultimately call it.

A lot of buzz has been around this elusive iCloud that apple has been building data centers for. Stevey gave us some insight into the service today, as expected it will allow you to upload your music "into the cloud" so that any device can pull it back down. Honestly I'm not huge on cloud storage, I would rather have a media server running on my PC and just connect to that, but it does bring some nice features as well. Any song you have purchased can be downloaded again, and if you have ever purchased a song on iTunes and later needed to re-download it, you were up shit crick, so that's a nice change. Other features of iCloud are pretty intriguing too, I can definitely see the awesomeness in automatically syncing documents, and photos, and things like that. Ultimately none of it really matters now that I have made the switch to Android, but I can appreciate what they are doing.

Received The Downward Spiral on 180g Vinyl in the mail today. Really excited to hang the best album of all time on my wall, and the frame I chose for it will allow further enjoyment of the record as it opens up. Picked it up used for less than 10 bucks on amazon and the condition is amazing.

Finally, my 3DS is going to get some use after a month of no use, Nintendo is finally launching their 3DS store thing, I think they are calling it the 3DShop. I'm hoping for 3DS demos, virtual console games in 3D, and 3D video and other content. They will be giving a 3D enhanced copy of Excitebike to everyone in the shop for a limited time, so that will hopefully be pretty sweet. Too bad they couldn't give me a better game like LoZ, but they will definitely be saving that for a cash cow.