Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs is far from sick, as he launched the new line of iPODs, Agence France-Presse reports.

Excerpt:

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs on Tuesday unveiled new iPod models and iTunes stores upgrades for the coming holiday season as he brushed aside reports about his health.

Jobs kicked off a theatrical press event in downtown San Francisco by poking fun at persistent rumors about his health.

iLounge.com released this weekend the new edition of the much-praised, much-downloaded online-only The Free iPod + iPhone Book.

Now on its fourth edition, it features everything you need to know about iPods, iPhones, iTunes and Apple TV in a 270-page book that can be printed out nicely if you don’t care about trees and nature. Speaking as a Mac user and magazine editor, this is one of the few titles I’d actually pick up from a newsstand and buy if it wasn’t already free and downloadable. Excellent and informative. The Doodler gives it high marks.

To get it, click here so that The Free iPod + iPhone Book 4 gets loaded onto iTunes for subscription, and you won’t have to worry about missing it and other iLounge Library online publications.

An uncovered patent made by Apple reveals plans to create an iPod powered by light.

MacRumors reports that it has found a patent by Apple to create an iPod (and presumably an iPhone) with a solar panel under the LCD screen by which it can generate additional power.  The patent postulates a thin three-level sandwich of sorts that incorporates a touch sensitive layer, a display and a photovoltaic panel. The unique Apple twist is that by doing so it won’t have to create a separate charging panel; it’ll look the same, only you don’t have to charge it as often, or at all. With its giant screen, the iPhone’ll be especially energy-efficient.

The patent also mentions that the multiple solar cells would be coupled directly with specific components within the device, including the memory and the data-processing system.

Talk about hot gadgets. This is way cool, but don’t hold your breath just yet.

One of the most anticipated things later this year (aside from the obvious new iPhone iteration announcement), is the flood of new apps borne of the release of the SDK, to be made available through the iTunes Store. A lot of these new apps likely were first discussed in iPhoneDevCamp.

Last year, the iPhoneDevCamp was a hotbed of new and innovative ideas, and this year the madness continues with iPhoneDevCamp 2. The gathering is meant to encourage development and stimulate creativitity and ideas for app creation and development for the iPhone and iPod Touch using the SDK and web standards in a non-profit, collegiate atmosphere. Think camp for geeks.

iPhoneDevCamp 2 this year will be held August 1-3 in San Francisco at the Adobe Systems Headquarters, for those of you curious, or want to somehow participate. For regular updates, follow iphonedevcamp on Twitter.

Funny how media is these days. We’ve come full circle, and then we’ve gone around again a couple more times in the past few years.

Used to be we just had radio to listen to. Then the movies came. Then TV. Recorded material came and went: wax cylinders, vinyl, cassettes, film, Beta, VHS, Laserdiscs, CDs, VCDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray - we could listen to music and watch shows on tape and discs. Cable came and opened up the world to us - we could watch anything and everything, on demand. We can now pause live TV, and record many shows simultaneously, preprogrammed weeks ahead if we couln’t be there to push the buttons.

Then internet mixed it all up together even more: you can watch live streaming TV, download music and movies and enjoy them on players and computers. All permutations existed, and there wasn’t enough hours in the day to listen to and watch everything we wanted.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’d know I’m a voracious podcast listener. While the name is new, podcasts are just old-fashioned radio shows at heart. Having worked in radio for two decades and doing three-hour talkathons twice a week for years, there’s a special place in my head and heart for the format. It’s nice to sit back and listen to folk talk about things and discuss them. In the course of listening you get to know them and they feel like they’re your friends.

One of my favorite podcasts is Buzz Out Loud, which is a daily (well, Monday to Friday) tech-news-and-views talk show of indeterminate length (usually about 30 minutes) from CNET. It’s over 700 episodes now, which is a considerable run, and I started listening to it in the upper 300s or so. Hosted by Tom Merritt and Molly Wood, with producer Jason Howell piping in now and then, it’s an interesting and fun show for geeks like me who need to get updated and hear different takes on what’s new. (Give it a try, why don’t you? It’s available free from the CNET site and through the iTunes Store. Links at the end of the post.)

BOL and CNET have lately taken to streaming their podcasts live on cam via UStream as they are recorded, which seems to be an increasingly popular trend with previously audio-only podcasts. (Leo Laporte’s TWIT is also doing the live video streaming thing, along with other shows.)

I’ve been watching, and it strikes me as odd to watch people do a radio show on TV - or in this case, live video streaming via the net. Radio is meant to be heard, and the missing dimension of sight is actually a major factor in the makeup of the show. Watching people talk in front of a mike gets seriously boring after a while - I mean, what are you watching for, facial expressions and wild gesticulation? Radio shows are best heard than seen (no offense, Tom and Molly).

In my talk shows in radio back in the day, I’ve had visitors come and sit in on a live show to watch, and they invariably go glassy-eyed after the novelty of being in the radio booth wears out. After a while they just stare at the soundproofing on the wall and listen, they way they’ve been accustomed to at home or in the car. (It’s a phenomenon similar to when I catch myself at a front row seat at a live concert watching the video monitor coverage instead of the stage - but that’s a topic for another post.)

I’ve been watching BOL vidstream live for a few days now, and I’m the same way. After a few minutes I stop watching Tom and Molly and just listen to them talk, staring absently out into space the way I normally do when I’m plugged in and listening on my morning commute to work everyday on my iPhone. The vidstream is in that odd limbo between TV and radio that sometimes exists when new technologies get mashed up, and it can’t seem to yet find its level and place in the world. Those visually-oriented will sit and watch, and those audally-inclined will just listen. (Said another way, the young ‘uns will watch, and the old farts will listen. I’m an old fart.)

Also, watching them takes out a bit of the mystery of the show. Through my months of listening I’ve created my own CNET studio in my head, and have invented places where Tom and Molly and Jason would sit while they talk, how they would act, how they were dressed - and watching the reality somehow takes the magic out of it. And lately, I find no joy in listening to the audio version of the episode I’ve already watched, and I miss my BOL in the morning.

It may work for some people, but I guess not for me. I’d rather listen to them on my iPhone on the road than watch them on my Mac at 1AM - which is the ungodly hour  they come on in my country. (I had to sneak in the Mac reference, lest some readers berate me again for posting something not Mac-related; this is after all a Mac blog.)

But it’ll find its level eventually, I’m sure. Until then I’ll just listen. After all, Buzz Out Loud is still an audio podcast, and not a TV show; the live video stream is just a bonus for hardcore fans, so I don’t really have any right to complain.

Only BOL completists and obsessives will watch it, I figure; most folk, like me, will stick to the old audio version on their iPods. So why does BOL do it? I guess because, like that adage about why dogs do what they do when they have nothing better to do, they can.

Catch Buzz Out Loud here, and the video stream here (which starts at 5PM GMT) or here, or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here.