Apple has restored Genius to the iTunes sidebar, alongside the Ping service that temporarily usurped it.
The new layout displays the currently selected or playing track, with Ping’s “Like” and “Post…” buttons, additional Ping links, above a list of Genius recommendations.
If you haven’t signed up to Ping, then the sidebar just shows Genius as it did before ousted by Ping with the release of iTunes 10.
The change means that iTunes now provides two approaches to finding new music — the automated Genius and the socially-orientated Ping.
The modified sidebar is delivered by Apple’s servers so it doesn’t require an iTunes update.
Genius and Ping are integral to Apple’s efforts to sell more music; the other side of the iTunes coin is iTunes U, the free repository of academic materials from many of the world’s leading universities.
The University of Oxford has considerably enriched that archive with the release of the complete, 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Reproduced with their original spelling and orthography, the plays are available for free in the open ePub format used by Apple’s iBooks app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.
