Speaking at Apple’s music event, CEO Steve Jobs, in his first public appearance since his medical leave of absence, introduces iTunes 9. After noting that iTunes is the largest music store in the world, boasting some 100 million accounts, Jobs rattles off some of the software’s new features. Among them: Genius Mixes and improved synching. The latter enables more specific synching and supports a new way of managing applications for the iPhone and iPod touch with a nice drag-and-drop feature. Very easy to organize and reorganize applications. The crowd really likes this one.

Also included in this update: Home Sharing, which allows songs, movies and TV shows to be shared and copied to up to five home computers. Another very slick feature that allows users to simply drag and drop songs between computers to copy them.

iTunes 9 also features a new store with redesigned music, movie, TV pages and a handy new navigation bar. Beyond this, there’s also support for Twitter and Facebook.

“You know, some of us here are old enough that we actually bought LPs,” says Jobs. “You used to get liner notes, essays and photos, but that stuff left us when we moved to digital music.”

With that, Jobs announces iTunes LP–the official name of the company’s rumored “Cocktail” album bundle. As expected, these iTunes LP bundles will feature additional art, photos and whatnot. Apple is working directly with artists and labels to develop them.

A Doors “LP” is offered up as an example and it includes some videos exclusively recorded for iTunes–Ray Manzarek talking about how Jim Morrison named the Doors (“Not a door-door, man. Like the door in your MIND.”). Surprisingly nice little video, actually. Certainly, it’s likely to appeal to die-hard fans.

Apple (AAPL) is doing something similar with movies–iTunes extras. Movies bundled with additional photos, etc.

Live from Apple’s “Let’s Rock” Event

• iPod Updates, Games, Nano Video Cameras
• iTunes 9, iTunes LP, Home Sharing, Genius Mixes
• Steve Jobs: “I’m Vertical, Back at Apple and Loving Every Day of It”
• Event Photos by Adam Tow

Team,
I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

Steve

Coming as it does after Jobs’s disclosure last week that he had a hormone deficiency that had caused him to dramatically lose weight, this is very worrisome news for Apple and its shareholders.

The transdermal patch uses thousands of microneedles to inject drugs just below the skin without hitting pain receptors (a vast improvement over dot-matrix printer patches, which hit all of them at once). And it can be programmed to deliver specific dosages on a preselected schedule. It could, for example, monitor a patient’s cardiovascular system and adjust drug dosages to maintain a constant blood pressure. “The programmable part [of the patch] comes from HP’s inkjet technology, where we could program to fire different nozzles for ink, and we repurposed that for firing drugs,” Lim Eng Hann, associate director of HP’s Asia-Pacific IP Licensing Center, told ZDnet. Added John O’Dea, CEO of Crospon, a medical-device company in Ireland that will manufacture the patch: “We believe it’s an industry first to be able to deliver multiple drugs through a single patch with microneedles.”

The patch is at least a few years away from market. But when it finally arrives it may well revolutionize the drug-delivery arena–and perhaps even the market for OEM printer cartridges …