Services Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Warner Music reporting more stable sales, propped up by iTunes and streaming services

by Mike Schramm (Feb 9th, 2012)

There's finally some good news in the music business, but don't get too excited, it's not that good. Warner Music reports (before we hear about the full industry sales from 2011) that its sales were steady last year, at $780 million. In this case, steady is better than a drop, which is what most ...

Pocket Informant planning public beta for cloud service

by Mike Schramm (Jan 26th, 2012)

The team from Pocket Informant is at Macworld|iWorld this week to show off the app and announce a new cloud-based service that will share information across all of the company's mobile apps and new web interface. Pocket Informant is a GTD/calendar/tasks app that combines all sorts of functionality ...

Don't hold your breath for an Apple video streaming service

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Apr 12th, 2011)

Flickr image by tpholland I'm pretty convinced every time an analyst opens his or her mouth about Apple and we post it, a kitten is eaten by a bear somewhere*. This week's "Wacky Analyst Random Rumormongering" comes from Jefferies analyst Peter Misek who claims that Apple is about to launch ...

Feral Interactive offers digital downloads on multiple online stores

by Mike Schramm (Jan 13th, 2011)

Here's a cool note I missed last week among the hustle and bustle of CES: Feral Interactive is one of the biggest publishers of Mac games out there, often porting and publishing games from larger PC developers over to the Mac platform. Last week, the company announced that four games it has ...

How the iPhone has influnced Intamac's connected home services

by Mike Schramm (Jan 10th, 2011)

Intamac was probably one of the least consumer-facing appointments we had at last week's CES conference in Las Vegas -- the company develops and supports home monitoring systems, mostly for other businesses (security companies and telecommunications companies) rather than actual consumers. But it ...

$1,000 bar exam prep BarMax app now available on iPad

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jan 3rd, 2011)

BarMax, the US$1000 iPhone app to help law students pass the bar exam, has made its way to the iPad. The California edition of the popular bar exam prep software is now available on the App Store. BarMax for the iPad is designed to take advantage of the larger screen real estate of the iPad by ...

Lawsuit over app privacy targets Apple and developers

by Kelly Hodgkins (Dec 28th, 2010)

Apple and several mobile developers are facing two separate lawsuits over the collection and unauthorized sharing of private user data with third-party advertising networks, according to iLounge. The first lawsuit, Freeman vs. Apple, was filed in a northern California federal court and targets ...

Yelp's iOS app goes universal

by Mike Schramm (Dec 24th, 2010)

I have to say, I really like the Yelp app on my iPhone. Of course, I'm in LA where there are plenty of full listings for all kinds of things; I can see how Yelp might not be quite as useful in a less populated area. But when I need to find a new restaurant or where a certain retail place is, I've ...

Apple trademarks 'Express Lane' and 'VoicePass'

by Mike Schramm (Dec 23rd, 2010)

Apple has filed two new trademarks right before the holidays this week. VoicePass is the first one -- it's filed in the category of "construction and repair services," so it likely has to do with supporting broken devices. MacNN says that the VoicePass service is used when calling in to customer ...

Several iPhone and Android apps sharing private user data

by David Quilty (Dec 20th, 2010)

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal has found that some iPhone and Android apps are spying on users and potentially transmitting personal data to other companies. While both Apple and Google say that they have privacy protections in place for their customers, many apps are able to skirt ...

Change Case uses OS X Services to expand TextEdit

by David Winograd (Aug 13th, 2010)

Mac OS X Services have been around for a while, but not many people use them. Under the title of any Cocoa program in the upper left of the menu bar, you'll find an option for Services. This brings up a pull-down menu of services that are appropriate to the program at hand. They can be a real time ...

Apple details location information sharing

by Mike Schramm (Jul 20th, 2010)

Apple had to do some explaining recently -- after a House of Representatives probe into the company's privacy policy came up, the company sent a twelve-page letter to the members of Congress, going into detail on what all of the legalese in the company's privacy policy actually means. The biggest ...

Square delays reader distribution, says it's examining transaction limits

by Mike Schramm (Jun 21st, 2010)

Two weeks back at WWDC, Square told us that the company was "catching up with demand" of its little plastic credit card reader for the iPhone, and that it would "be there really soon." But it looks like things won't quite "be there" as soon as they thought. They've decided to delay the mass ...

Find My iPad comes to MobileMe

by Chris Rawson (Apr 1st, 2010)

Find My iPhone, a long-standing feature on MobileMe that allows you to remotely locate a misplaced iPhone via MobileMe's web interface, has been extended to the iPad. Find My iPad has the same features as Find My iPhone, including playing the little sonar sound effect with an onscreen message (in ...

Mac OS X's Automator: I learned it by watching you!

by Sang Tang (Mar 4th, 2010)

Mac OS X's Automator has the ability to perform specific tasks from its given set of actions. For example, with a Finder-based action, you can batch move copy, move or rename files that fit a certain criteria. Similarly, image-based actions allow you to batch edit images, be it resizing, rotating ...