Services Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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 ...

Five customized Automator services to help save you time

by Sang Tang (Feb 2nd, 2010)

One gem in Mac OS X that sometimes gets glanced over is the Services menu. Lots of readers may not know yet that Snow Leopard brought with it the ability to create your own customized service in Automator -- in other words, you can get additional selections on a contextual menu when right-clicking ...

BarMax offers bar prep on the iPhone for $1000

by Mike Schramm (Jan 19th, 2010)

News is going around about yet another expensive app bucking the trend on the App Store, but here's the twist: this one actually has a good reason for such a high price. BarMax CA [iTunes link] is an app currently out that costs $999.99 -- that's right, while most developers are haggling with ...

Using LaTeXiT to display math formulas

by Sang Tang (Aug 18th, 2009)

TeX is a typesetting standard that, among other things, allows you to typeset complex math formulas. One flavor of Tex is LaTeX, for which LaTeXiT serves as a front-end for on Mac OS X. Using LaTeXiT, one can drag and drop complex math formulas to a number of apps -- Pages, Keynote and TextEdit, to ...

Foursquare tries the Dodgeball concept again on the iPhone

by Mike Schramm (Mar 17th, 2009)

We're right in the middle of convention season and as I noted last night on the Talkcast, I'm here in Chicago (at least the weather's nice) instead of down in Austin with the rest of the gang. But there is a little consolation: I've had a chance to try out SXSW's newest software darling, Foursquare. ...

Mac 101: Make any text speak to you

by Cory Bohon (Nov 20th, 2008)

Have you ever wished your Mac could read a long text document to you? Well, with the speech service, you can easily have your Mac read as much or as little text as you want. While in Safari, TextEdit, Pages, and other applications; select the text you want to be read, then click the application ...

Text to Audiobook free script

by Jason Clarke (Jun 8th, 2008)

The idea of being able to select text and have it automatically converted into an audiobook using text-to-speech isn't a new one, but it is a good one. I mean, who doesn't love the idea of being able to take longer text on the road with you and listen to it in the car or on the bus? Well, if you ...

Ask TUAW: Sharing iPhoto and iTunes between users, seeing who's connected, scrubbing Sercices, and more

by Mat Lu (May 30th, 2007)

This week in Ask TUAW we have questions about sharing iPhoto and iTunes between different users on the same Mac, seeing who's connected to your wireless network, cleaning up the Services menu, installing applications, the nature of open source software and more. Remember new Mac users and Switchers ...

TUAW Exclusive: Skitch screenshot gallery

by David Chartier (Apr 12th, 2007)

We've been blogging Skitch, a new 'hybrid' photo editing and web services tool from plasq (makers of Comic Life), since Scott first met and fell in love with it at Macworld 07. Using the app through its development, it's clear that Skitch is going to knock people's socks off, with a well-executed ...