Apple’s on their way to hav­ing sold 1 bil­lion apps (!) from the iPhone/iPod touch App store and they are hold­ing a con­test where you could win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Cap­sule, and a Mac­Book Pro. Each time you down­load an app, you are entered but you can also enter with­out hav­ing made a pur­chase by going here and giv­ing Apple your infor­ma­tion. You can actu­ally enter up to 25 times a day — an easy thing if you’ve got a pro­gram like 1Password to fill in all your details automagically!

Make sure to check the offi­cial rules to make sure that you are eli­gi­ble before fill­ing out the form 25 times.

Update: Speech is over. New ver­sions of iLife and iWork (sites not updated cur­rently), updated 17″ Mac­Book Pro and the news that the iTunes music store is going com­pletely DRM free by the end of this quar­ter, as well as vari­able pric­ing on songs (no more $0.99 only, now the song price will range from $0.69 to $1.29 a song).

Apple’s got a big keynote speech today in San Fran­cisco where they’ll be announc­ing new software/hardware to the world. Fol­low along at some of our favorite sites:

• Macrumorslive.com (cur­rently hacked and annoying)
• Engadget.com — Great pho­tos and coverage
• Gdgt.com — Sim­i­lar to Engad­get (for­mer Edi­tor of Engad­get, Ryan Block, runs gdgt.com)
• Ustream with Chris Pir­illo — if you want to lis­ten to the keynote and watch a nerd’s reac­tion, this is the stream for you.

So far, a new ver­sion of the iLife suite, iLife ’09, has been announced. Expect a new ver­sion of iWork to fol­low, along with pos­si­ble updates to iMacs, Mac minis and maybe AppleTV? What else are you hoping/expecting to be updated?

Jen­nifer asks:

This ol’ lap­top (Dell) of mine is slowly dying (CMOS bat­tery, CD drive is dead, other wonky stuff). So, of course, I’m pon­der­ing get­ting a Mac­Book before I head back to Africa in Feb­ru­ary since I’ll be gone for four months. I guess my biggest ques­tion is Mac­Book vs. Mac­Book Pro (I like the glowy key­board in Pro) … but for a basic/average user, do I need what the Pro ver­sion has to offer and is it worth the extra cost? I guess the other thing I won­der is would you rec­om­mend a refur­bished one from the Apple web­site or stick with a new one?

Click here to con­tinue read­ing about Which Mac­Book Should I Buy?

Alexa asks:

I haven’t installed any­thing new. I haven’t added any large files to my com­puter. But I keep run­ning low on hard drive space! How do I find out what is tak­ing up all the room on my iBook?

Apple’s Finder doesn’t cut it. It’ll tell you how much space is left on your hard drive, but it doesn’t give you a bird’s eye view on what is tak­ing up your hard drive space.

Enter Grand Per­spec­tive. This free appli­ca­tion gives you an inter­ac­tive, graph­i­cal “tree view” of your Mac’s hard drive.

Step 1: Down­load and install Grand Per­spec­tive.

Step 2: Select the hard drive of con­cern:
Step 3: Wait a few min­utes for Grand Per­spec­tive to scan your hard drive
Step 4: Be over­whelmed by the graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your hard drive. (FYI, the largest block is my iPhoto library)
Step 5: Mouse over the larger blocks to find out what they are and how much space they’re tak­ing up, then click on the blocks you don’t think you need, then click “reveal” to see where it is in the Finder
Step 7: Delete and repeat!

This is an awe­some free app and I know it saved Alexa a huge headache; she found out that Azureus was tak­ing up 7.5GB of space. Need­less to say, she deleted Azureus and is now using Trans­mis­sion and enjoy­ing hav­ing almost 1/5th of her hard drive back!

note: There is a rhyme and rea­son behind the colours and group­ings of the squares that Grand Per­spec­tive uses: Files in the same fold­ers are grouped together, then fold­ers that are in the same fold­ers, etc.