In just over a year since its 25 billion milestone, Apple’s App Store has just crossed the threshold of 50 billion downloads. As a reminder, the App Store launched just shy of five years ago, on July 10, 2008. The App Store has celebrated three major milestones since its launch, the first for the 10 billionth download in January of 2011, followed by 25 billion just a...

Google announced on Wednesday that it would be offering customers a version of Samsung's new Galaxy S4 (GS4) that has been stripped of Samsung's layered-on-top interface and other added software. At Google I/O 2013, the company's annual developer conference, Google said that it was "Google's take on Android"*, and that it would sell the device for US$649 direct to consumers.

An iPhone has been blamed for a navigation error during a commercial airline flight in 2011, fueling the ongoing debate surrounding in-flight device usage. According to a Bloomberg report, an unnamed regional airliner experienced compass malfunctions when climbing past 9,000 feet, sending the aircraft off course until a flight attendant asked a passenger to turn off an iPhone....  ...

Mophie has released Juice Pack Plus ($120) for iPhone 5, the company’s third battery case for iPhone 5, following Juice Pack Helium and Air. While falling behind top rivals in capacity, Juice Pack Plus has become the family’s most powerful battery case, featuring a 2100mAh battery that…

At today's Google I/O keynote, Google has demonstrated a revamped Maps app for iOS and Android. In the coming months, Android users will see an upgrade, bringing the Maps for iOS user interface and features. Additionally, a long-awaited iPad version of the utility will be made available for the iPad....  ...

New research from F-Secure Labs on the prevalence of malware on smartphones, along with developer data on game app piracy rates paints a pretty clear -- and damning -- portrait of Android compared to other mobile platforms. The growth in mobile malware on Google's platform is increasing at such a pace that the malware threat is approaching the relative level of compromised Windows systems, while the rampant piracy is driving developers away and making paid apps scarce in favour of the "freemium" model....  ...

TUAW readers know of my affinity for Belkin WeMo home automation tools, whether I'm using them to get Siri to turn on the Christmas tree or keep my cat cool in the summer. Today Belkin announced IFTTT multi-device control for WeMo switches.

What does that mean? It means that you can now control more than just one WeMo switch in your house with IFTTT recipes. Previously, you could only control one of those devices at a time through IFTTT. Now it's simple to write recipes for multiple switches as seen in the image at the top of this post.

Belkin announced that since the IFTTT.com WeMo Channels launched over 30,000 recipes have been created and over 400 shared recipes are available online. Now I just need to get one more WeMo...

In the midst of its Google I/O developer conference, the search giant showed off a redesigned version of its popular mapping app, one that will heighten the competition for Maps supremacy on Apple's iOS mobile platform.  ...

It wasn’t that long ago that iPhone users were cheering about the release of Google Maps for iOS.

Now Google is readying its next update to the Maps mobile app, which will be rolled out for both Android and iOS devices sometime this summer. The app will be optimized for iPad and Android tablets, as well.

Shown off today at Google I/O by Brian McClendon, Google’s vice president of Maps, the upcoming app seems to take a page from both Foursquare Explore and Waze, improving local venue search as well as live rerouting recommendations.

McClendon showed how a smart search from Maps for “Burmese food” or “pizza” in San Francisco will turn up a bunch of local results that include friends’ ratings — the way Foursquare does — but also...

Google tossed its hat into the online streaming music market on Wednesday with the introduction of its Google Play Music All Access at its annual Google I/O conference. The Interent search giant promised All Access will be available through smartphones and tablets as well as Web browsers, and includes features for searching music, building playlists, and streaming music like radio stations, and is squarely targeted at competing with services such as Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, and Rhapsody.

The Mac Observer Spin:
Google may be the new kid in the streaming music game, but the company pulls a lot of weight. Pandora, Spotify, and every other online music subscription company's job just got a little harder, and if Apple is launching its own rumored service, the barrier for entry just got higher, too.

...

Jon Seff for Macworld:

Like Spotify and its ilk, All Access offers millions of tracks (although Google didn’t say how many millions, or which music labels for that matter) for streaming on Android phones and tablets, as well as from a Web browser. And in the process, Google has also taking a big swing at its Android app partners like Spotify, Rdio, and Rhapsody.

It seems suspicious to me that Google won’t tell us which music labels they have or how many songs they have. That immediately leads to the assumption that it’s not that good.

I’m not at all surprised that Google is taking a swing at its competitors. The third-party app developers and services are making money from Google’s operating system and users — it makes sense that Google would want to cash in on some of that.

...

Although the Federal Communications Commission has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to allow more in-flight device use, a new report suggests that pilot reports and scientific studies suspect that passenger electronics are interfering with aviation equipment. More than a decade of reports show “dozens” of cases where electronics were…

Macworld is on a winning streak of constructive suggestions for how Apple could improve the products we all rely on every day. Josh Centers takes a look at some of their best ideas.

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Google on Wednesday expanded its cross-platform service offerings with a revamped version of Hangouts, now a standalone application for iOS and Android with a focus on video and text conversations within groups.  ...

Mac Geek Gab cohost John F Braun joined the Not Another Mac Podcast team to talk about Adobe and Microsoft moving into software subscription models, and the glaring lack of iTunes on Windows 8.

Apple's iBooks app.

Apple

Apple was the "ringmaster" in a conspiracy to fix the prices of e-books at rates higher than those charged by Amazon, US officials said yesterday in court documents.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed suit last year against Apple and six e-book publishers: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Pearson, and Simon & Schuster. The trial is scheduled to begin June 3 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Apple has denied being part of any conspiracy, but the government's proposed conclusions of law (PDF) include an e-mail Steve Jobs sent to James Murdoch of HarperCollins' owner News Corp., in which Jobs said HarperCollins should "[t]hrow in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this...

The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, in his legendary novel, "Stranger in a Strange Land," introduced the concept of the "Fair Witness." A Fair Witness was an expert observer with a perfect memory whose testimony in court was unimpeachable. When you think about it, that's what Google Glass offers.

I've long been a fan of the concept of a Network-attached Storage (NAS) drive, that being a device which attaches to your network and provides both storage and network-centric services beyond just simple file sharing. I've tried nearly everything out there, and it wasn't until I used the Synology DiskStation units that I finally felt someone got it right. Yes, they're "network attached storage" units, but they also easily provide additional services like an iTunes server, the ability to stream audio/video to dedicated iOS apps (even across the Internet), their own private cloud called Cloud Station (i.e. your own Dropbox), and more. In fact, third parties have created (unsupported) packages you can install to let your DiskStation become a Minecraft Server, a CrashPlan client and server, and much, much more. It's too cool, and I highly recommend these to everyone looking to add functionality to their existing network.

Yesterday Synology added the DS1513+ to their line-up...

Google has announced its music service at its Google I/O developer conference. As leaked yesterday in a report, Google Play Music All Access is the search giant's take on Spotify and other similar music streaming services, with users able to stream from the large catalog of tracks already available to download from the Google Play Music store....  ...

DirecTV has launched a new version of its iPhone app that introduces new voice recognition functionality. Located in a new Voice tab, the voice recognition tool can be used to search for programs by speaking the title, channel, keyword, actors, and more. Also new to this release is a new TV mode that can be used to view dialogue and search results on a TV screen that is connected to an HD DVR running on the same network as the iOS device. Additionally, the TV mode also offers a few of personalize recommendations.... ...

Newer Technology has introduced the GripBase Podium ($45) for the iPad and iPad mini. A floor stand podium, GripBase Podium extends from a 38-inch height to nearly five feet, enabling users to view and interact with an elevated iPad or iPad mini. The podium twists and swivels to…

Google's response to Apple's Game Center was announced on Wednesday in the form of Google Play game services, a cross-platform series of developer tools that will support iOS as well as Android and the Web.  ...

Google on Wednesday announced that its Android mobile platform has seen 900 million total activations to date, while 48 billion applications have been installed on Android devices.  ...

Belkin today announced that it is launching a new TV receiver for iPhone and iPad specifically designed to work with the Dyle Mobile TV service which provides live local broadcasts through a growing number of accessories for mobile devices. We’ve already seen some Dyle TV receivers for iPad,...

It has been busy in the App Store with a handful of new apps landing on iOS and OS X. Take a few minutes and check out our list of standout apps from the past few weeks!

iOS Apps

A Beautiful Mess [iOS Universal; Category: Productivity; $0.99] The photo app from A Beautiful Mess is the easiest way to make pretty photos and to share them with friends.Add new life to your favorite photos with custom filters, fun fonts, and hand-drawn doodles by Elsie and Emma, creators of the award-winning lifestyle blog, "A Beautiful Mess".

Limelight - Your Movie Library [iPhone; Category: Entertainment; $0.99] Limelight is a new way to browse and organize your movie library. Become a movie critic and share your library with friends.

...

Google is set to kick off its I/O developer conference with an opening keynote. The company is widely expected to introduce a new Android build, potentially alongside new hardware. Check our live page beginning at 9am Pacific, 12pm Eastern, for updates from the event....   ...

Apple’s creation of the iBooks electronic book store and its agency pricing model was not an altruistic attempt to break Amazon’s grip on the nascent e-book market, but a conspiracy to eliminate price competition and raise e-book prices.

That’s the gist of a new U.S. Department of Justice filing against Apple in the agency’s upcoming lawsuit against the company. According to the DOJ, Apple was the “ringmaster” of a plan that raised mainstream e-book pricing well above the $9.99 price point Amazon had established by shifting the industry from a wholesale model, where retailers set prices, to an agency model where publishers set prices. Among the agency’s evidence supporting that allegation:

• ...

It’s a huge update file, but it might be helpful.

Late Tuesday, Apple released iMovie 9.0.9, the latest version of its consumer-level video editing application. The new version, a 1.08 gigabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:
- Addresses issues where iMovie does not recognize video cameras connected to your Mac.

- Improves compatibility with projects imported from iMovie for iOS.

- Includes stability improvements.

iMovie 9.0.8 requires Mac OS X 10.7.4 or later to install and run and can be snagged manually or via Mac OS X’s built-in Software Update feature.

If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback to offer, please let us know in the comments.

Geneva has announced its Model S Wireless ($300), an updated version of the company’s Model S speaker. The new Model S Wireless removes the 30-pin dock from the top of the speaker, replacing the Apple-specific connector with more broadly compatible Bluetooth streaming capability. It features two full-range 3”…

The launch of Facebook's Home layer on Android appears to have been a flop, with relatively low installation rates and even lower user ratings on Google Play thus far. Now, some observers are blaming an unlikely candidate: Apple's iPhone.  ...

Et tu, power button?

Casey Johnston

Apple has been hit with a class action lawsuit over the power button on its iPhone 4, per a report from GigaOm Wednesday. California resident Debra Hilton alleges that Apple knew about the defective power button in “thousands” of iPhone 4s sold to customers, but the company neglected to do anything about the defect.

The lawsuit describes a problem that begins with a “wiggly” power button, described on Apple’s discussion forums. After about a year of ownership (around when the phone’s warranty expires), the lawsuit states that eventually the button becomes unresponsive, failing to lock or turn off the phone when pressed.

Hilton claims that Apple knew that the source of the defect was in a flex cable connected to the button, but the company continued to sell the phones regardless. GigaOm reports that Hilton is suing...

A mobile version of EA's powerful Frostbite engine, used to create recent titles in series such as "Battlefield" and "Need for Speed," will be coming to Apple's iPhone and iPad.  ...

In response to a U.S. Justice Department court filing alleging that Apple engaged in a price-fixing scheme with book publishers, Apple claims that it acted legally, and negotiated different agreements with the publishing companies. A filing from Apple says that the publishers decided on their own to eliminate wholesale e-book…

A class action lawsuit has been filed against Apple for iPhone 4s with defective power buttons. Filed by a Florida woman, the suit claims Apple knew about a flex cable defect controlling the power button but kept quiet about the problem to sell more phones. Apple discussion forums regarding…

In an interview with 60 Minutes, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates reflected on competing with Steve Jobs and visiting the Apple founder near the end of his life. Gates was uncharacteristically emotional, saying, “He and I, in a sense, grew up together.” Gates also shared a great story about Jobs bailing on a party due to illness, telling Gates’s secretary, “If he wants to know why, tell him I’m an a**hole.”

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

DirecTV has updated its iPhone app that allows users to access live and on demand programming, as well as manage their DIRECTV DVR, with new voice recognition features today. Accessible from a new tab called “Voice” within the app, the Voice Search feature allows users to “speak to the app just as you would to a person” in order to find and play specific programs.

As you can see from the screenshot to the right, DirecTV has created a UI similar to Siri and other voice-based apps that allows users to see their dialogue as they speak. The app will also let users switch to a TV mode in order to view dialogue and results from Voice Search on their TV instead of the iPhone’s display.

With Voice Search, DirecTV...

The CharityBuzz auction for coffee with Tim Cook closed at US$610,000 yesterday. The high bidder will meet Tim Cook on a mutually agreed-upon date for 30 to 60 minutes. On the last day of the auction the high bid sat at $605,000, but in the last 30 minutes someone who had not placed a bid before came in with a bid that was $5,000 higher. The only thing known about the winning bidder is that his bidding name was "a********s."

CharityBuzz will not reveal the name of the winning bidder, but it's possible that the bidder could come forward himself or herself. 20% of the winning bid goes to CharityBuzz while the remaining 80% goes to the RFK Center for Justice & Human Rights.

If you had just paid $610,000 to talk to Tim Cook, what would your conversation be like? Let us know in the comments.

...

Great song and album.

I supported this. It’s always nice to see what how people can move things forward.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Back in April of 2012, the US Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and a number of publishers for allegedly colluding to raise the price of e-books on the iBookstore.

The original suit targeted five publishing companies; Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster. While Macmillan and Penguin were initially keen on fighting the allegations, all five publishers have since settled with the US Justice Department.

As such, Apple is the last man standing.

As part of its investigation into Apple's actions, the Justice Department collected evidence which it claims demonstrates that Apple was the "ringmaster" in a price fixing conspiracy.

According to the New York Times, which took a look at various court filings in the case, one such piece of evidence is an...

Add another Samsung device to the ever-lengthening list of smartphones that Apple alleges infringe its intellectual property.

This week, Apple — ignoring a federal judge’s request that it reduce the number of infringements in its second patent suit against Samsung — requested permission to add the Korean company’s latest marquee phone, the Galaxy S4, to a list of 22 devices it believes infringes on its patents. But, so as not to raise the court’s ire, it proposed a swap. If the court approves its request, “Apple will eliminate (without prejudice) one of the Accused Products named herein, so that it will continue to accuse only 22 products of infringement at this stage of the litigation.”

In other words, Apple is proposing a sort of “one in, one out” accused-product policy as a...

If you've used InDesign, you may be familiar with styles, those handy-dandy formatting tools that can help you change the look of your documents pretty much instantly. In this tip, Melissa Holt will cover how to use paragraph styles in Apple's Pages program, and if you've never used them before, you may find them to be the official Best Thing Ever™ for formatting text.

Yes, Google plans to launch a subscription music service this week, via its Google Play store.

And yes, Google still  plans to launch a separate subscription music service, later this year, via its YouTube site.

Make sense? Of course not.

It makes lots of sense for both YouTube and Play, which was built for Google’s Android devices, to sell music subscriptions.

YouTube is the world’s biggest free music service, which could make it a fantastic funnel for a Spotify-like paid offering,...

One of the problems with giving people advice is that certain topics are so... personal. Our previous experiences, current technology and outside pressures inevitably corral us into a particular line of thinking or acting. So it is with the debate over paper vs. software solutions. Personally, I've found a mix of both to be handy. A quick poll of the TUAW crew indicates a similar divide: Some of us use paper almost to the exclusion of software, whereas some of us went digital once we found enough apps to deliver us from dead trees. Most of us use a blend of both, however. In this week's productivity tip, I want to discuss when you might want to use paper or an app, and some specific apps and resources for both.

Paper (and whiteboards, etc.)

The thing about paper is that you have to write on it. That seems simplistic, but for some that's actually a big deal. I happen to learn by doing something, and I...

Hedge-fund billionaire Daniel Loeb’s campaign to pressure Sony Corp. into spinning off its entertainment arm is the latest tremor to ripple through Japan’s electronics industry, already reeling from unprecedented losses stemming from its lost standing in the technology world.

After a miserable past few years, marked by the rise of Samsung Electronics Co. and the dominance of Apple Inc., Japan’s once-powerful electronics manufacturers are grappling with outside investors and fed-up creditors looking to break the cozy and insular bonds that were once a hallmark of the country’s corporate sector.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

There’s a popular myth that Apple’s iPad and other tablets are simply media-consumption devices, unsuitable for productivity applications. That’s just not so, and this week I tested a variety of office suites for the iPad for mini-reviews of their capabilities. In fact, I wrote and edited this entire column on an iPad using the most popular paid iPad app, the $10 Pages word processor by Apple.

[ See post to watch video ]

Not every productivity task is optimally done on tablet software, of course. Writing a plain text document like this one isn’t the same as creating a large, nuanced spreadsheet. For complex documents, I still recommend using a PC or Mac.

And then there’s the problem with typing on a tablet’s virtual keyboard. If you’re going to use your iPad for longer documents, I suggest using a Bluetooth keyboard. I used a physical keyboard to write this, though I usually am fine with the on-screen one.

Despite these caveats, iPads and other tablets...

My birthday was last week on May 6, and Firaxis must have heard about that because in recent weeks they've released not one but two great turn-based strategy games. First, Haunted Hollow was released as a great, original free-to-play title, and now the legendary Sid Meier (of Civilization and Pirates) has released a game called Ace Patrol, available as a free download on iOS.

Ace Patrol is excellent -- it's a turn-based dogfighting game, where you manuver pilots in WWII around a battlefield, climbing, diving, and swooping around into position all while trying to accomplish certain goals or take out the other side. Progression in the game is marked by "maneuvers," so pilots who have leveled up have access to more and advanced moves. Weapons fire for free, but you've got to line up closely to...

Investment bank Piper Jaffray on Tuesday announced the results in its new iPhone resale value index, finding that Apple's iPhone depreciates at a rate less than half that of corresponding Android devices from Samsung.  ...