Engadget posted a leaked photo of a Verizon Wireless marketing campaign that's being prepared to lure early iPad buyers into choosing Verizon over AT&T for 3G service. How so? Verizon offers the MiFi, a wireless router that connects to the Internet o...

For some years now, I've been using my computer to transfer analog recordings to digital. I started with all my cassette tapes, as they were physically deteriorating as they sat on the shelf. Having completed that task - I no longer have any cassette...

Do you remember car-rental firm Avis's ads: "We're number two; we try harder"? Hertz was the big dog, and Avis used this campaign to explain why its service was better, because it had to be. T-Mobile is in the same boat, except it's number four. V...

Alongside Apple's undeniable success with the iPhone App Store have been the near-constant stories of app rejections for dubious or entirely bogus reasons (to be fair, most rejections are entirely legitimate). But what gives Apple the right to reject...

Want to use a text expansion utility to save typing cumbersome phrases but dislike switching programs to create snippets? The new TextExpander 3.0 from SmileOnMyMac adds a hotkey combination that opens a quick entry window for snippet creation, and a...

DEVONtechnologies has released major upgrades of its document and information management programs DEVONnote and DEVONthink (which comes in three flavors: Personal, Professional, and Pro Office). Changes in both programs include a refreshed interface...

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen devoted his Alertbox post this week to showing how interfaces can become confusing if elements like buttons and checkboxes are too far away from the objects they act on, using the iPhone app updating interface in iTunes a...

St. Clair Software has released a maintenance and stability update to the Open/Save dialog enhancement utility Default Folder X. Version 4.3.6 improves the handling of recently used folders in Carbon-based applications such as the Adobe Creative Suit...

Ian Page has released the latest version of Mactracker, a freeware utility that provides detailed technical information on Apple hardware. The update includes a new Compare function that enables users to note differences between models easily, an imp...

BusyMac has released its latest version of BusyCal, the desktop calendar application with built-in sharing capabilities, adding a handful of minor bug fixes and performance tweaks. Version 1.2.2 removes the word BusyCal from meeting invitations and r...

DEVONthink and DEVONnote 2.0 -- DEVONtechnologies has released major upgrades of its document and information management programs DEVONnote and DEVONthink (which comes in three flavors: Personal, Professional, and Pro Office). Changes in both program...

The future of iPad development captured our attention this week, with Jeff Carlson pointing out how The Omni Group is developing for a device they don't yet have and how Penguin Books plans to go beyond the book on the iPad. Also, Adam chats about iP...

Apple has announced the U.S. shipping date for the Wi-Fi-only iPad: 3 April 2010. The company will start taking orders at the online Apple Store and at Apple retail stores on 12 March 2010. Models that have both Wi-Fi and 3G will ship in late April....

I was struck by two recent cartoons that echo a common frustration with digital rights managed media: it's so hard to use the clumsy, purposely frustrating interfaces that it's easier to download and play a pirated version of media for which you have...

The Apple Developer Connection (ADC) is no more; it has been renamed to the Mac Developer Program to parallel the iPhone Developer Program. The Mac Developer Program's price is now a uniform $99 per year, without any hardware discounts; a limited fre...

Your Mac Life host Shawn King admitted that he normally glazes over when topics like multitasking are broached, but a good time was had by all while discussing all the things we think of when we say "multitasking" and how (or if) we'll see support fo...

Our friends at the EFF have compiled a list of situations in which the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA - the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 - have been used to chill free expression and scientific research, attack fair use, impede...

Uncomplex has released a minor maintenance update to Mailplane, its WebKit wrapper for Gmail, with a handful of fixes and improvements. The latest version adds highly welcome support for Gmail's recently enhanced "separate window" feature, which enab...

WeatherBug Elite is a full-featured weather conditions and forecast app from AWS Convergence Technologies. Reviewed version: 1.0, released on 24 April 2009 and priced at $0.99. I admit it, I care deeply about the weather. Perhaps that's unfash...

How do you design software for a device that doesn't yet exist in the market? Developers can use the iPad simulator included with Apple's Xcode, but that's a limited approach when the main method of interaction is touch. In a blog post, the Omni Grou...

Apple has released ProKit 5.1 (Leopard and Snow Leopard), an update to operating system-level components shared by the company's professional and semi-professional applications (Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, DVD Studio Pro,...

A call came through to my iPhone from an unknown 866 number while I was in a meeting, so I ignored it. But when I checked voicemail later, the automated message claimed to be from Citibank, with whom we have several credit cards, and said I should ca...

PaidContent.uk writes about a recent presentation made by Penguin Books CEO John Makinson, who was demonstrating the company's ideas for how to offer content on the iPad. Penguin plans to offer books as applications, primarily, to take advantage of m...

In recent years, I've tried some applications dedicated to the elaborate Getting Things Done (GTD) model of organizing your to-do list, such as Thinking Rock and OmniFocus. I also use a calendar program, Remember?, that tells me when an event is upco...

Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 3.1 -- When companies release new camera models that are capable of capturing raw images (where the sensor saves the original image data as it was recorded, without compression or optimization), the raw format...

In a statement to Gizmodo, Apple publicly acknowledged the vexing display issues plaguing its latest iMac models. The symptoms of these issues, which mostly affect the 27-inch model, include yellow discoloration and screen flickering. In its statemen...

When companies release new camera models that are capable of capturing raw images (where the sensor saves the original image data as it was recorded, without compression or optimization), the raw format used by each is slightly (and annoyingly) diffe...

Our Web explorations this week ranged among many different topics, including Apple acknowledging iMac display issues, more on Macworld Expo and Google Buzz, the winner of Apple's iTunes Countdown to 10 Billion Songs, a survey suggesting that the iPad...

On the Tech Night Owl Live podcast, Adam talks about the success of Macworld Expo with host Gene Steinberg, after which the discussion veers off to Google's privacy missteps with Google Buzz. Read and post comments about this article | Tweet thi...

The latest versions of SmileOnMyMac's PDF editing utilities PDFpen and PDFpenPro come with brief release notes, but include at least one substantial improvement. Both editions now support OCR for 11 new languages including German, French, Spanish, It...