Brand: MacNews

The Internet Streaming Media Alliance, which Apple co-founded, has released its first specification for streaming MPEG-4 audio and video over the Web to computers, cell phones, and other devices. MPEG-4 is the successor to MPEG-1 (which includes the MP3 audio format) and MPEG-2, which is used in DVD encoding. The format is capable of streaming higher quality content over significantly less bandwidth.

Galleon Software today announced its first online collection of source files to allow PowerTicker customers to add new financial resources to the desktop stock-ticker. Source file upgrades are a free service to all PowerTicker customers and are supported in PowerTicker 2.0 and later.

Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice president of retail stores, today said the company is more than satisfied with the performance of its retail operations thus far. “We’re very pleased with the stores’ overall performance and the inroads we’re making toward expanding market share,” he said. Apple this weekend will open a store in Palo Alto, California, its ninth store, and still plans to open 25 locations in total by the year’s end.

Destineer Studios’ Bold is now accepting $48.95 pre-orders for Age of Empires II: Gold Edition, the Classic and Mac OS X version of both Age of Empires II and the expansion pack The Conquerors. The game is scheduled to ship on October 31. The title holds price and feature parity with its Windows counterpart, according to Bold.

Apple has released Authoring Support 1.1.3, which lets third-party applications that support SDAP use Apple’s CD-RW drive, and adds support for a number of new CD-RW mechanisms, all of which are documented here.