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This week’s big Apple announcement featured one big disappointment: Apple TV’s relative lack of, well, TV. Out of all of the hundreds of channels available on cable and satellite, only ABC and Fox agreed to offer their programs for rent on Apple TV. The fact that Steve Jobs is the largest single shareholder in, and on the board of, Disney — owner of ABC — perfectly illustrates this digital divide.

People in Silicon Valley have focused on the set-top box as the lever to attack the cable industry. Cable boxes blow, but that's a losing battle. So why is Apple TV different? Because Steve Jobs has not just created a new set top box. He's actually created a whole new media ecosystem built around the mobile phone.

Exactly one year ago, in September, 2009, Tutorialzine was born. And it’s been a great year, with over 52 tutorials and a fresh redesign.

The facts

First, some facts about the site:

• Each tutorial takes two to three days from start to finish. This is also why you will probably not see more than one per week. But you will see more useful non-tutorial articles, in addition to the tutorials;
• The tuts are usually written in the week they are released. Which, basically, makes it impossible to have a Tutorial Monday like Chris Spooner does. However, I do plan to organize things better from now on, and have up to a month worth of articles ready to be released. This will not only optimize my time, but also add the benefit of a consistent posting schedule;
• The tutorials are mainly targeted at intermediate / advanced users. This means that beginners may find it challenging to follow the steps in the articles. I have considered starting a “beginners” section, but I haven’t observed any demand for it. If you’d like to see something similar on the site, share it in the comment section;
• I receive a fair amount of support request, regarding tutorial code. Although I try to help everybody, the accent is on the newer tutorials;
• A lot of the support questions I get (both as comments and as email), have already been answered in that same comment thread. Hopefully, the new comment section will improve this observation;
• After one year of building a readership and concentrating on the site, Tutorialzine is finally open for advertisement. The first sponsors to back the site are maxcdn, who made the new theme load significantly faster. If you want speed, I can advice you to take a look at their services.

The Giveaway

For the occasion, some fine folks have offered great prizes for Tutorialzine’s readers.

Three Scripts from ZineScripts

ZineScripts - Awesome Web Apps

Three readers will win a script of their choice from ZineScripts.com.

Three Copies of Flexi CSS Layouts

Flexi CSS Layouts Dreamweaver Extension

Flexi CSS Layouts is a Dreamweaver Extension that helps you create browser compliant table-less web pages with ease. Unlike other products that are limited to templated CSS layouts with 1, 2 or 3 columns, with Flexi CSS Layouts for Dreamweaver you can build your own custom layout structure without coding.

Three commenters will win a free copy of Flexi CSS Layouts.

Three WordPress Themes from Viva Themes

Viva Themes

Viva Themes creates quality and professionally designed WordPress themes. They offer themes for your business, blog or personal sites. All of that comes with their excellent lifetime support.

Three of you can have a theme of their choice from Viva’s site.

How to participate?

To participate, just leave a comment with a valid email in the comment section below. The giveaway ends on September 9th when 9 winners will be chosen at random and announced in a follow-up post.

For bonus points, you can tweet the following message:

Happy Birthday @tutorialzine! http://bit.ly/cSOfyg
( click to tweet )

Video calls aren't for people to see you — they're for people to see what you see.

We know — the new Apple TV is really small, and cheap and easy-to-use. That's all good, but still not knocking our socks off despite being the ripest area for expansion by a company that has already firmly established itself on the computer, phone, portable media player and tablet. Here are five reasons Apple TV is still boring.

Apple audaciously seems to think the world actually needs another social network — one that you even need special software to be part of, to boot. With the introduction Wednesday of Ping, a music-centered community that exists only within iTunes, they are probably right — and then some.

Federal regulators are putting off efforts to regain authority over the nation’s internet providers while they seek renewed public input on net neutrality.

Breaking with a longstanding but unstated policy, Apple has decided to publish a live video stream of Wednesday's press conference. The stream will be optimized for Mac, iPhone and iPad users only.

Online video creators, advertisers and producers have an unhealthy fascination with viral videos, and that obsession is dragging down the entire industry. Why? Because viral videos are, at their core, no better than a fluffernutter white-bread sandwich, delivering little or no value to anyone.

Gmail users can now choose to let Google sort their inbox by the most pressing messages, thanks to a new feature called Priority Inbox — think of it as a sort of reverse spam filter which bubbles messages to the top of the queue based on what you read and respond to.

The venerable Oxford English Dictionary isn't even one-third finished with what will be only its third revision in 80 years. But already there is talk that the multivolume work, which has informed scholars and fussy linguists, may eschew print entirely when the new edition is completed in about decade.

We don’t know exactly what to call the online collaboration between Arcade Fire and Google that launched Monday morning, but it sure is neat. If music videos were invented for the web they might have looked something like this: The project uses the web browser itself as an artistic medium, showing off the HTML5’s potential for interaction and multi-paned viewing rather than just using the browser as a frame for a plain, television-style video.

Google is reportedly in talks with the major movie studios to launch mainstream, pay-per-view video rentals on YouTube by year's end. YouTube's movie rental program currently focuses on independent filmmakers and music artists and the addition would represent a significant development.

Tutorialzine is nearing its first birthday! This means that it is about time to freshen up a bit and implement all those things that I’ve picked up during the past twelve months (a lot of which I’ve shared with you as tutorials).

I have always felt that the previous theme was a bit of a hack. It didn’t use any of WordPress’ internal APIs, and I didn’t take the time to properly acquaint  myself with WordPress’ capabilities. The development process was basically one big snippet search and a lot of needless custom code. The result wasn’t pretty, but sure got the job done.

The new look

Here are some of main features of the new design:

• Community News section – one of the most requested features (along with the redesign itself). You can now submit interesting web development articles that you stumble upon on the web. The section is moderated and only relevant submissions will be added to the site on a (hopefully) daily basis;
• Multilevel Comments – something that should have been part of the site all along. Given that the functionality has always been part of WordPress, it is just now that I implemented it in a theme. Better late than never;
• Deep integration with WordPress APIs. Although not externally visible, the new design incorporates a lot of WordPress’ capabilities. Without it, the new Quiz section wouldn’t have been possible;
• The Quiz section – this can be considered as a fully functional web app built into WordPress. Its main purpose is to complement the learning experience of Tzine’s tutorials. Everyone can create and solve quizzes. You can even choose to connect with Facebook, and set up a simple profile with your stats;
• Bye bye tabs – the new design features a pure CSS multilevel navigation menu;
• An eye on CSS3 – images are kept at a minimum, with CSS3 adding subtlety to the design. Most of the images are organized in a single sprite, which improves loading time;
• Many other little things, such as a better search, a clean 404 page, print stylesheet and typography changes, that will make the experience of browsing the site and reading tutorials a whole lot better.

There is still some work left to be done, but I am happy with how the new theme turned out. Please share your thoughts and suggestions (or noticed bugs) in the comment section below.

The New Featured Carousel (Powered By Nivo Slider)

A Pure CSS Multilevel Navigation

Our Favorite Green Demo / Download Buttons Revamped

The Quiz Creator

The social news site Reddit staged a mini-rebellion Friday, deciding to run ads for a pro-marijuana legalization campaign for free, after Condé Nast executives ruled against taking payment for the ads.

A long-simmering bill in North Carolina that sought to make community-owned broadband networks much more difficult to establish was sponsored by a prominent state lawmaker and backed by incumbent ISPs, including the cable lobby. But it’s not like those ISPs actually wrote the now-discarded bill, right? Um ...

Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes and a team of restructuring consultants reportedly met with all the major Hollywood studios last week to tell them about a plan to file bankruptcy before interest payments come due on nearly $1 billion in secured debt at the end of next month. The company might be able to survive by restructuring its debt, according to the Los Angeles Times — but even a restructuring could entail bankruptcy. Either way, the company is in big trouble.

Diaspora, a nascent open competitor to Facebook that raised $200,000 from online contributors, will launch their much-anticipated service on Sept. 15, the company said today in a blog post

Philadelphia has been under fire on the web for what's been called a "blogging tax." As a Philadelphia blogger — and the newest member of the Wired.com team — I feel I have to dispel some myths guiding the "WTF?" reaction. But I also want to point to some larger problems beneath the surface. This problem is much bigger than blogs in my city.

Netflix releases an app for the iPhone, making it possible to stream your instant queue on the smartphone, the iPod Touch and finally catching up to the iPad, on which the service was available from day one. We applauded TV Anywhere and now do so again for what might be called "DVD Anywhere" on these far-more-ubiquitous mobile devices.