Macworld.com - Roku will announce on Monday a major update to the software powering the company s Roku Player models. As part of that update, the company will also introduce the new Roku Channel Store.

Roku has updated the software for the company's lineup of streaming-media players, and introduced a new Channel Store that offers additional streaming content.

Stressed about Turkey Day? The App Store has many offerings that aim to help you plan and prepare a meal. We'll help you find the worthwhile apps while staying away from the real turkeys.

The Selphy CP780 is an inexpensive and nearly idiot-proof snapshot printer, but you make major compromises in performance and price per page.

The inexpensive T-Mobile Tap is a stylish touch phone.

We had previously reported that magazine publisher Cond Nast is already taking steps to produce tablet-specific content for their publications in anticipation of the Apple Tablet (and competing devices). Cond Nast publishes the technology magazine...

AP - Apple Inc's iPhone is coming to South Korea this week, a local carrier announced Sunday, bringing the iconic communications device to one of the world's most sophisticated mobile phone markets.

An anonymous reader writes "After the ikee worm that displayed a picture of Rick Astley on jailbroken iPhones, the first malicious iPhone worm (Google translation; original, in Dutch) has now been discovered in the wild. Internet provider XS4ALL in the Netherlands encountered several of such devices (link in Dutch) on the wireless networks of their customers and put out a warning. After obtaining a copy of the malware it was discovered that the jailbroken phones, which are exploited through openSSH with a default password, scan IP ranges of mobile internet providers for other vulnerable iPhones, phone home to a C&C botnet server, are able to update themselves with additional malware and have the ability to dump the SMS database as well. Owners of a jailbroken iPhone with a default root password are advised to flash to the latest Apple firmware in order to ensure no malware is present."

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What would a week in Apple be if it didn't involve some developer drama, Google, and Psystar? That's all included in this week's top Apple news, as well as a few major software tidbits and rumors about Apple building more first-party iPhone games. Read on:

Respected developers begin fleeing from App Store platform: Continued issues with the App Store approval process are prompting developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers pumping out over 100,000 iPhone apps, will migration away from iPhone development result in less quality software for the platform? Worse yet, will users even care?

News Flash: Apple already working on Mac OS X 10.7: Believe it or not, Apple has already begun work on the successor to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Well, actually, you should believe it—Apple has probably been working on it since 10.6 was announced.

The classic Choose Your Own Adventure series already had a brief flirtation with the iPhone a year ago (courtesy of Magnetism Studios) with a 99 app featuring two books Return to Atlantis and Journey Under the Sea. But now, you can collect nearly 30 more titles, courtesy of the free Amazon Kindle app.

Timed with their 30th anniversary, parent company Chooseco, LLC recently inked a deal with Amazon to make their titles available on the Kindle, including the ever-popular The Abominable Snowman and Terror on the Titanic.

The series, which has been helping kids read for three decades now, was launched in 1977 with R.A. Montgomery s Journey Under the Sea (written under the pen name Robert Mountain ). In 1979, Bantam Books took over the series and christened them Choose Your Own Adventure.

This is an extra benefit to iPhone and iPod touch users, since the free Amazon Kindle app (and soon, a Mac version of the desktop software already available to Windows users) already opens up the e-book floodgate, negating the need to buy Amazon s pricy hardware.

Kindle versions of the Chooseco titles are only $5.59 each, and Amazon is offering a free download of House of Danger (Choose Your Own Adventure #6) for a limited time. As always, Kindle books have to be purchased via their website first, then they are wirelessly transferred to your device. The iPhone app includes a Get Books link to a mobile version of the Kindle Store to enable purchasing from your device.

ZDNet s Jason D. O Grady has some further details on the rumors coming out of China this week regarding Apple s mysterious iTablet.

Following up on the DigiTimes report that the tablet has been delayed from March, 2010 to the second half of the year, component makers have claimed that the delay is the result of Apple s decision to offer a 9.7 OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) version with a panel from LG Display.

OLED offers a number of compelling benefits over traditional TFT (Thin Film Transistor) displays, among them a greater range of colors, gamut, brightness, contrast and viewing angle. OLED pixels directly emit light, unlike LCD displays, which use a backlight and are incapable of showing true black. OLED is also more energy-saving when the elements are off, they produce no light and consume no power, where LCDs require polarizers filter out about half of the light emitted by the backlight.

All this OLED magic isn t cheap. DigiTimes estimates that with 9.7 panels currently tagged about $500, Apple s OLED tablet will cost between $1,500 and $1,700 and that s just the cost to manufacture! The retail price will be upwards of $2,000, even factoring in the likelihood that component costs will drop next year.

But as O Grady concludes, The good news is that the 10.6 TFT-based version should retail for a much more manageable $800 - $1,000 as has been rumored for quite awhile.

Apple has always been fairly aggressive in protecting their product trademarks and likenesses, as The Little App Factory recently discovered when they received a letter from the law firm of Baker & McKenzie asking them to change the name of their Mac software, iPodRip.

iPodRip, originally written in 2003 at the MacHack developer conference, lets you copy and transfer your songs from iPods/iPhones to your computer, which comes in handy if your hard drive ever dies or you lose songs that you ve downloaded. According to CrunchGear, iPodRip has been downloaded more than five million times and has helped users transfer over a billion songs back to their computers.

However, including the name of the product in the name of your application has always been a no-no with Apple, as The Little App Factory CEO John Devor found out when he e-mailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs directly about the problem.

Believe it or not, Jobs replied curtly.

Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal.

The missive was signed Steve with the customary Sent from my iPhone signature attached.

Needless to say, the developer changed the name (now simply iRip) and also removed an iPod icon from their Evom software, which lets you covert and transfer movies from your computer and the web.

Problem solved.

Since Google purchased YouTube, the wildly popular video sharing site has endured a number of growing pains as it works to reinvent itself into a more commercial-minded portal. One of those pains came to light this week as YouTube announced it s cutting off API access to at least one maker of set-top boxes tied to televisions.

The move comes as YouTube is ramping up its efforts to insert advertising into the service in an effort to monetize content and share the rewards with their creators. But it s grim news for companies like Syabas, who makes a set-top box called Popcorn Hour.

Apparently, Syabas and YouTube had a loose agreement allowing the company to stream content for free, with YouTube having the freedom to change the terms of the deal at will, which they have now done.

As a result of Google s decision, Syabas is no longer allowed to access YouTube through its APIs, company COO Alex Limberis explains. To be clear, Syabas is not being singled out. With the exception of a few strategic partners Google has chosen to work with, the company has informed Syabas they are asking all over-the-top device makers that are currently connecting to YouTube content through its APIs to take down the service.

The API is important, since it s what allows a device to access the content directly, rather than through its regular Flash-based web interface, explains Gizmodo. Come December 2nd, Google is shutting off the tap.

For their part, YouTube claims it s just business as usual. Since July of 2008, YouTube s Terms of Service has restricted implementations for television based on our APIs, a statement reads. YouTube has been in active discussions with various developers on how best to implement YouTube on set-top boxes and TVs. Companies that have negotiated agreements to use our APIs, like TiVo, Sony, Panasonic and Sony s PS3 are not impacted.

There are several companies, however, that have deployed solutions, like video scraping technology, to circumvent and violate YouTube s Terms of Service, the statement concludes.

Mr2001 writes "Consumerist reports that Apple is refusing to work on computers that have been used in smoking households. 'The Apple store called and informed me that due to the computer having been used in a house where there was smoking, [the warranty has been voided] and they refuse to work on the machine "due to health risks of second hand smoke,"' wrote one customer. Another said, 'When I asked for an explanation, she said [the owner of the iMac is] a smoker and it's contaminated with cigarette smoke, which they consider a bio-hazard! I checked my Applecare warranty and it says nothing about not honoring warranties if the owner is a smoker.' Apple claims that honoring the warranty would be an OSHA violation. (Remember when they claimed enabling 802.11n for free would be a Sarbanes-Oxley violation?)"

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The new Core i7 iMac is a potent machine -- so potent, in fact, that it outpaces a couple of Mac Pro models in benchmarks. It's also an incredible bargain, offering tremendous power given its price.

Macworld.com - It was a banner week for stupid opinion pieces about Apple. Indeed, the Macalope had a hard time narrowing the field. He did eventually pick two lucky winners, but he d like to assure all the silly pundits who auditioned that they did horrible, horrible work and even though they didn t get selected, they should still feel terrible about themselves. Before we wade into the muck, though, who wants to dance with Microsoft?!

First the 10.6.2 update to Snow Leopard wasn't compatible with Intel Atom processors. Then it was. Then it wasn't again when it was finally released to the masses. Fortunately for the netbook-loving Mac OS X fans out there, the OSx86 scene is only too happy to offer a patched version of mach_kernel to enable booting 10.6.2 on netbooks once more.

The kernel is the deep-down part of Mac OS X that generally handles direct communication between the OS and hardware. Speculation swirled that Apple was actively trying to keep Mac OS X from being installed on inexpensive Atom-based netbooks. However, chances are it was more likely a result of optimizations that didn't take into account Atom processors, since Apple doesn't use them in any shipping products.

The Macalope does a do-see-do with his opposite number, sets fire to a a Droid strawman, and issues a quarantine for those afflicted by the ever dangerous tablet fever.

Once you set it up, The Missing Sync for Windows Mobile 4 will do the job for syncing a variety of types of data from a Windows Mobile 4 smartphone with your Mac.

This reasonably priced LCD makes up for its no-frills feature set with solid image quality.

An anonymous reader writes "Many game developers don't think of the iPhone as being a system which has extensive game piracy. But recent comments by developers and analysts have shown otherwise, and Gamasutra speaks to multiple parties to evaluate the size of the problem and whether there's anything that can be done about it. Quoting: 'Greg Yardley confirms that getting ripped off by pirates is the rule rather than the exception. Yardley is co-founder and CEO of Manhattan-based Pinch Media, a company that provides analytic software for iPhone games. ... "What we've determined is that over 60% of iPhone applications have definitively been pirated based on our checks," he reveals, "and the number is probably higher than that." While it's impossible to estimate how much money developers are losing, it involves more than the price of the game, he says. "What developers lose is not necessarily the sale," he explains, "because I don't believe pirates would have bought the game if they hadn't stolen it. But when there is a back-end infrastructure associated with a game, that is an ongoing incremental cost that becomes a straight loss for the developer."'"

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