At this week’s Apple Expo 2003 in Paris, France, Ovolab s.a.s. introduced InTouch, a new telephony product aimed at Mac OS X users. The company also released RemoteTunes, an iTunes utility, and updated AAChoo, its AAC audio converter.
InTouch is designed to work with the Ovolab Telephone Adapter, a USB device that enables Macs to answer telephone calls and identify the caller through Caller ID. InTouch can record a message, store it on the computer and send it by e-mail to a predefined address. It can also encode the message into AAC or 3GPP attachments.
What’s more, InTouch supports AppleScript, and can execute scripts, launch applications or open documents by pressing numbers on the telephone keypad. Practical examples include the ability to turn file sharing on or off, print documents or restart a server.
A preview version of InTouch is available for download from the Ovolab Web site, although the software requires the Ovolab Telephone Adapter, which is available exclusively to Apple Expo 2003 attendees for €89.95. Online ordering will be available starting in October.
With Apple’s release of iTunes v4.0.1, Rendezvous network sharing of iTunes playlists has been restricted to machines on your local subnetwork. RemoteTunes enables users to play songs on any Mac they’re authorized to log into, regardless of whether the Mac is on a local network or on the Internet.
RemoteTunes works without any software needing to be installed on the remote Mac (although you’ll need to make sure the remote Mac’s “Remote Apple Events” Sharing system preference is active. You can create playlists and edit tags, adjust equalization settings and more. The software is available for US$15.
AAC, or Advanced Audio Codec, is the audio compression scheme preferred by Apple for its iTunes Music Store. It’s more compact than some MP3 settings while retaining higher quality. AAChoo provides a streamlined way of converting your existing audio files to AAC.
Ovolab’s v1.2 release of AAChoo adds the ability to encode audio, video and other media to 3GPP format, a burgeoning standard for multimedia content shared on cell phones, PDAs and other wireless devices. As with Remotetunes, AAChoo is available for online download and costs $15.