TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

According to Bloomberg, the online video service Hulu is up for sale, and Apple is reportedly considering bidding on it. Apple certainly has enough cash on hand to buy Hulu (about 35 times over), and if successful in its bid Apple would gain a huge foothold in video media services. Put together with iTunes, an Apple-Hulu deal would...

I've been running OS X Lion for about 24 hours now. I knew what to expect before installing it thanks to months of coverage, but that was no substitute for actually diving through Lion's features firsthand. After a day of getting used to new features like Mission Control, fullscreen apps, Resume, and various other tweaks to my Mac's...

No sooner had the new MacBook Air models shown up in Apple Stores than the iFixit team grabbed one for dissection. The site always does a teardown of the latest in Apple technology for the benefit of repair technicians and for hobbyists who love to see what's inside their Macs. The 2011 13" MacBook Air teardown shows how Apple...

Let's get this understood up front: USB Disk doesn't allow you to use a USB drive on your iPad. Instead, it uses the metaphor of a physical drive to explain its function: it stores files on your iPad. You get files onto USB Disk using Dropbox, email attachments, FTP, Finder (and your local network), iDisk and of course, iTunes. Yes,...

22 Days HD is an event countdown app that tells you the number of years, months or days until an event. It even counts down the hours, minutes and seconds, but the app calculates that value according to the day, not the exact time of the event. The app looks nice on the iPad, even if its navigation is a bit awkward. It opens to...

The appearance of the MacDefender trojan back in May provoked a lot of back-and-forth between various tech writers (including your humble correspondent). Was this a sign that the good times were ending? That the Mac platform would come under ever-fiercer attack from malware authors? That soon we'd all be running resource-sucking...

I spent a good deal of the afternoon diving in where no sane person really wants to spend a lot of time -- in my Lion recovery partition. It's not hard to get there, and it's quite a curious place when you do. [For those commenters wondering about the use of photos rather than screenshots to illustrate this post, it's hard to take...

We were pretty sure OS X Lion would be a success, but this is kind of ridiculous. According to Apple, OS X Lion was downloaded over one million times on launch day. Apple says this is the fastest adoption rate of any OS in its history. How about some other crazy numbers to go along with that stat? If you assume that most of those...

For those who love to play with colors and patterns, the new Seamless Studio is to creating patterns what the excellent ColorSchemer Studio is to color palettes. It turns the free online Seamless into a powerful desktop tool with a number of additional features for pattern creators such as the ability to create seamless tiling...

Good Technology's latest report on enterprise deployment of mobile devices shows that iOS device activations continue to dominate the enterprise sector. Last quarter, iOS devices accounted for just under 70 percent of device activations, with the iPhone retaking the lead from Android activations and iPads representing 20 percent of...

There's a lot to like about Google+, Google's new social network. For one, it's still on a limited-availability beta, so the spammers haven't caught up yet, and there are no Farmville/Mafia Wars applications for your "friends" to annoy you with. Just this last week, Google introduced the free Google+ iPhone app. How does the app stack...

Update: The San Jose Mercury News got this one wrong and the info has been redacted in their original story. While Mr. Atkinson is a user, he's not a part of Google's team. Thanks to everyone who brought this to our attention and Mike Swift for the correction. Bill Atkinson, the developer of HyperCard, MacPaint and a number of...

Trying to find space hogs on your various disks can be a nightmare. DaisyDisk makes it easier by letting you visualize your hard drives with beautiful circular sunburst maps. There are quite a few disk space visualizers out there, Disk Inventory X, which we featured recently on the Daily Mac App recently, is a good example that...

One very cool new feature in OS X Lion is AirDrop. It's a way to leverage your home or office Wi-Fi network to send files to others who are also running Lion by just dragging and dropping those files onto an icon representing the other person. In this short post, I'll show you how AirDrop works and point out a few gotchas. AirDrop is...

Any major system update always has a few bugs and surprises, and Lion is no exception. There are two bugs that hit me directly -- one in Mail, and the other in working with network attached storage (NAS) devices. Let me hit NAS first. I have a pretty old Buffalo Linkstation that I use to back up lots of photos and my iTunes library....

Nokia is on a downward slide. The Finnish handset maker announced its quarterly earnings today and confirmed it shipped 16.7 million smartphones in the most recent quarter. This drop now puts Nokia in third place behind Apple and Samsung. Apple has risen to the top of the smartphone market having shipped 20 million iPhones in the...

I've been running OS X Lion for about 24 hours now. I knew what to expect before installing it thanks to months of coverage, but that was no substitute for actually diving through Lion's features firsthand. After a day of getting used to new features like Mission Control, fullscreen apps, Resume, and various other tweaks to my Mac's...

No sooner had the new MacBook Air models shown up in Apple Stores than the iFixit team grabbed one for dissection. The site always does a teardown of the latest in Apple technology for the benefit of repair technicians and for hobbyists who love to see what's inside their Macs. The 2011 13" MacBook Air teardown shows how Apple...

While we know many applications have been updated for full compatibility with Lion, often taking advantage of fullscreen mode and a few other tricks, but djay has gained greatly from several updated frameworks within the new OS. Here's a list of some updated items: All-new full screen mode (Lion only) Improved support for...

The appearance of the MacDefender trojan back in May provoked a lot of back-and-forth between various tech writers (including your humble correspondent). Was this a sign that the good times were ending? That the Mac platform would come under ever-fiercer attack from malware authors? That soon we'd all be running resource-sucking...

I spent a good deal of the afternoon diving in where no sane person really wants to spend a lot of time -- in my Lion recovery partition. It's not hard to get there, and it's quite a curious place when you do. [For those commenters wondering about the use of photos rather than screenshots to illustrate this post, it's hard to take...

We were pretty sure OS X Lion would be a success, but this is kind of ridiculous. According to Apple, OS X Lion was downloaded over one million times on launch day. Apple says this is the fastest adoption rate of any OS in its history. How about some other crazy numbers to go along with that stat? If you assume that most of those...

For those who love to play with colors and patterns, the new Seamless Studio is to creating patterns what the excellent ColorSchemer Studio is to color palettes. It turns the free online Seamless into a powerful desktop tool with a number of additional features for pattern creators such as the ability to create seamless tiling...

Update: The San Jose Mercury News got this one wrong and the info has been redacted in their original story. While Mr. Atkinson is a user, he's not a part of Google's team. Thanks to everyone who brought this to our attention and Mike Swift for the correction. Bill Atkinson, the developer of HyperCard, MacPaint and a number of...

Trying to find space hogs on your various disks can be a nightmare. DaisyDisk makes it easier by letting you visualize your hard drives with beautiful circular sunburst maps. There are quite a few disk space visualizers out there, Disk Inventory X, which we featured recently on the Daily Mac App recently, is a good example that...

One very cool new feature in OS X Lion is AirDrop. It's a way to leverage your home or office Wi-Fi network to send files to others who are also running Lion by just dragging and dropping those files onto an icon representing the other person. In this short post, I'll show you how AirDrop works and point out a few gotchas. AirDrop is...

While it only affects a few functions now, like AirDrop, your Apple ID will be even more important when iCloud is available. To set your Apple ID in Lion (provided you have one), go to System Preferences and click on Users & Groups. There you will see your login information plus a button to set your Apple ID. If you don't already...

Any major system update always has a few bugs and surprises, and Lion is no exception. There are two bugs that hit me directly -- one in Mail, and the other in working with network attached storage (NAS) devices. Let me hit NAS first. I have a pretty old Buffalo Linkstation that I use to back up lots of photos and my iTunes library....

One of the first things that new users of OS X Lion are apt to either completely love or hate with a passion is the change to "natural scrolling." This is like scrolling on an iPad or iPhone -- when you use two fingers to swipe down on a trackpad, whatever you're scrolling moves in a downward direction as well. The existing method,...

While the PC industry struggles, Apple is holding strong with its sales of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. According to supply chain estimates, Apple received shipments of 400,000 to 500,000 MacBook Air units in June. This number is expected to hold steady during July and August now that a new and improved MacBook Air model is...

If you have a lot of older programs hanging around on your Mac, chances are some of them may not work correctly (or at all) after upgrading to OS X Lion. Most programs put out in the last few years should at least launch in Lion, though it may be some time before they run well. However, there is a certain older class of application...

The young guys over at HaiTeq have been running into issues with Launchpad updating after installing software that wasn't bought on the Mac App Store. Because of this, they've figured out a workaround to force Launchpad to refresh its data base. Removing the database files from the user's Dock application support folder and...

Good Technology's latest report on enterprise deployment of mobile devices shows that iOS device activations continue to dominate the enterprise sector. Last quarter, iOS devices accounted for just under 70 percent of device activations, with the iPhone retaking the lead from Android activations and iPads representing 20 percent of...

There's a lot to like about Google+, Google's new social network. For one, it's still on a limited-availability beta, so the spammers haven't caught up yet, and there are no Farmville/Mafia Wars applications for your "friends" to annoy you with. Just this last week, Google introduced the free Google+ iPhone app. How does the app stack...

Nokia is on a downward slide. The Finnish handset maker announced its quarterly earnings today and confirmed it shipped 16.7 million smartphones in the most recent quarter. This drop now puts Nokia in third place behind Apple and Samsung. Apple has risen to the top of the smartphone market having shipped 20 million iPhones in the...

AT&T said it was not concerned about the Verizon iPhone and its Q2 2011 earnings suggest this confidence was not misplaced. In the last three months, AT&T activated 3.6 million iPhones and 24% of these activations were for new customers, not renewals. iPhone subscriber churn was down slightly, suggesting there was no mass...

I've been using an AirStash (US$99.99) for about a week and have grown to like it very much. This tidy little device stores movies, music, documents and photos for portable, wireless sharing between iPhones and iPads. It allows you to stream those files via its own Wi-Fi network and share with colleagues, family and so on, all while...

Reckless Getaway is a fun little arcade/physics stunt racer from Polarbit and Pixelbite that's been climbing the App Store charts recently. The premise is that you're in a getaway chase from a crime, but rather than just escaping, your goal is to cause as much chaos and collect as high as score as possible. There are coins to guide...

Thanks to the patent system, the tech market is looking more like Parker Brothers' "Monopoly" game every day. According to Bloomberg, Apple and Google are two of the companies reportedly interested in purchasing mobile tech designer InterDigital for its 1,300 patents related to information transfer. Google recently lost a bid for...

Apple announced last week that it would begin offering volume purchasing for iOS apps, and a week later the program is open for enrollment (but still U.S.-only, unfortunately). Enrolling in the program requires that you be authorized to make purchases for your company, and you'll also need a valid D-U-N-S number. Volume purchasing...

I really enjoyed the Wii game LostWinds, released a few years ago as a downloadable title on Nintendo's popular home console. So I'm excited to hear that the developer, Frontier Developments, is planning to bring the original game over to the iPhone and the iPad, as well as the Android platform. The game features a little...

Quest Runner is a hack-and-slash RPG, though it's probably unlike almost any you've seen before. Rather than exploring an isometric world like many games of this type, Quest Runner is more cartoony and fun. The quests themselves are pretty simple, but the RPG premise is what really makes the game, as you navigate your character...

The very popular Sonos whole house music system has announced a new wireless music player and lowered the price on its Zone Bridge device making the cost of getting into the Mac compatible system significantly cheaper. Sonos is now offering the Play: 3, a US $299.00 compact stereo speaker system small enough for a kitchen...

Square Enix has released a new set of "trailers" for the upcoming Chaos Rings 2, but you'll need to know Japanese to get anything out of them, unfortunately. They're all about the voice actors for the game, and don't really show any gameplay footage -- it's just the actors talking about the new title and how it works for them. There...

A former head programmer for mobile and iOS developer Gameloft has made some pretty damning accusations against the company in a complaint. Glenn Watson says that he was made to work over 100 hours a week sometimes, and that "it was after I worked four consecutive weeks of fourteen-hour days - including weekends - that I realised I...

Make has put together an enticing kit for those interested in doing a little Arduino programming alongside the iPhone. The Redpark Breakout Pack is basically a serial cable with a connector on it that will go from an iPhone to an Arduino and let you send signals back and forth, even without jailbreaking. There's a guide for...

I continue to be amazed at the functionality that photo apps are adding to the iPhone. FX Photo Studio for US$0.99 on sale is a case in point. The app already had barrels of photo effects, almost 200, but now it has added masking to the feature set. It's an easy way to highlight parts of a picture, and then apply an effect to only...

The Google Plus social network has kicked into high gear, despite a limited number of available invites over the first few weeks. Starting today it's even easier for iOS users to share with Circles, follow a Stream or do rapid-fire messaging with a Huddle: the iPhone app for Google+ is now in the US store. The free app supports the...