Feature Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Lion's iOS-like Automatic Termination not ideal for some users

by Mike Schramm (Aug 9th, 2011)

Matt Neuberg over at Tidbits has noticed an interesting behavior in Lion: Occasionally, apps running without an active window on will disappear from the Command-Tab application switcher, and sometimes disappear from Activity Monitor completely. The culprit is a new "feature" in Lion called ...

Hard Candy Street Skin for iPhone 4 makes for a decent everyday case

by Samuel Gibbs (Jul 10th, 2011)

Hard Candy, the folks behind the Street Skin line of tire tread-like rubber cases for Apple's iDevices we've talked about before, also has an iPhone 4 variant. The Street Skin for iPhone 4 is made of TPU, a shock absorbing semi-flexible rubber, which encases the iPhone leaving only the screen ...

Shazam Encore updated with lyrics, how about iTunes?

by Mike Schramm (Jun 16th, 2011)

Shazam has released another update for its paid Encore app, this one adding full lyrics of over 25,000 songs on the service from provider LyricPlay. It lets you stream the lyrics in real-time as the song plays, so you can sing (or even just read) along. It's not exactly a reason to shell out ...

How iTunes Match solves my obscure downsampling problem

by Richard Gaywood (Jun 11th, 2011)

I have a longstanding audio quality problem with iTunes -- but iTunes Match will finally resolve it for me. Hurray! Hopefully this post will help others in the same situation. It all starts with the sad fact that I'm a perfectionist idiot about audio quality, so I still buy CDs and rip them ...

Nike+ GPS app adds new Tag feature to foster competition between friends

by Mike Schramm (Jan 15th, 2011)

We just talked to Nike last week about its Nike+ GPS app for the iPhone, and there's another update to the already full-featured app. A new feature called Tag brings competition into Nike+ GPS. After you finish a run in the app, you can press the Tag button to invite as many of your friends or ...

TUAW Tips: Designing covers for the iBookstore

by Michael Grothaus (Aug 30th, 2010)

For budding novelists, one of the most exciting things about Apple's iBookstore is the chance to self-publish their writing and have it potentially available to the 100 million people that own iOS 4 devices. A novel is a daunting task, and once the writing is done, the hard part is over ... kinda. ...

Box.net's iPad project at D7 Consulting: How the iPad works at work

by Mike Schramm (Aug 24th, 2010)

Here's another update from the folks at Box.net on how the iPad deployment at D7 Consulting is going. Through TUAW, Box.net found a company to give 20 free iPads to. Box.net helped D7 set up a workflow that's built and run around Apple's tablet and their service. The first fruits of that ...

Hands-on: League of Legends for the Mac

by Mike Schramm (Jun 4th, 2010)

Defense of the Ancients is one of the most interesting stories in all of gaming -- it was originally a player-created mod for the Warcraft III real-time strategy game, and it completely revamped the RTS game into a RPG/hack-and-slash mashup, where the player controlled a champion character that ...

My weekend Windows experience, or why I love Apple so much

by Steven Sande (May 24th, 2010)

All I wanted to do was install a Wi-Fi remote-controlled webcam. Nothing spectacular. I had looked at a number of webcams on Amazon.com before settling on a rather inexpensive Chinese-made device. According to the vendor, the camera was "Apple Mac and Windows compatible," so I ordered it. It arrived ...

Take a planetary tour with Solar Walk

by Mel Martin (May 21st, 2010)

Solar Walk is a nifty astronomy romp from the folks who did the popular Star Walk iPhone and iPad app. Instead of exploring the night sky and deep space, you get to tour our solar system in luscious 3D graphics. While the app is universal for the iPhone and iPad, the iPad version is breathtaking ...

Friday Favorite: BetterZip

by Brett Terpstra (May 21st, 2010)

BetterZip is a utility I might not use every day, but I'm very thankful for it when I need it. It's an archive/compression utility which handles a broad array of archive formats, including ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, and some that you rarely see on a Mac, such as 7-Zip and RAR formats. While the ...

Apple rejects iPad app for pinch-to-expand

by Mike Schramm (Apr 7th, 2010)

We've heard all kinds of reasons for rejected apps on the App Store, but this one seems new to us. An iPad app called Web Albums HD has reportedly been rejected from the App Store for including a pinch-to-expand feature in its Picasa albums viewing functionality, as reported on Apple Insider. The ...

Friday Favorite: Scrivener

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Jun 26th, 2009)

Not long after I bought my first personal Mac in late 2004, I stumbled across an article that mentioned Ulysses, a text editor geared toward creative writers -- essentially the marriage between a word processor and project management software. It allows you to have all documents within a writing ...

WWDC Live: Joe Michels of Software Ops

by Brett Terpstra (Jun 24th, 2009)

This is video from a fast-paced chat with Joe Michels of Software Ops, creator of several iPhone apps. His lineup includes several applications for secure storage of information, such as My Eyes Only (iTunes link) and ID Lock (a "lite" version of My Eyes Only). There's also Aerochive on the Mac ...

It's all about the music: tunes from Apple's keynote presentations

by Sang Tang (Jun 18th, 2009)

I hope this post gets filed in the "I knew I wasn't the only one!" mental filing cabinets of many. Because if it doesn't, then it makes me the only one who really looks forward to the music Apple uses in its keynotes. Whether it's a song that leads up to Steve Jobs' entrance on stage, or one used in ...