TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Don't walk past police with a stolen iPhone in your boot. According to the New York Times, a quick-thinking police officer and Apple's Find My iPhone managed to retrieve a woman's stolen iPhone. The woman was in a handbag store in Manhattan when a thief allegedly held her up at gunpoint and took her iPhone. After searching the immediate...

Sometimes the revolving door spins quickly at the top. AllThingsD reported today that HP executive Jon Rubinstein is leaving the company for places unknown. Rubinstein is perhaps best known for his days at Apple, when he spearheaded the rapid growth of the iPod music player -- the piece of Apple hardware widely remembered as the...

Jeff Scott of 148 Apps has announced the winners for the Best App Ever for 2011, and you can review at the official site right now. Jetpack Joyride from Halfbrick was the overall winner in the iOS devision (which is a great app, but probably also benefited from actually promoting the Best App Ever vote inside the app itself). There are...

Love Apple gear? Like math? TUAW's Doing the Math series examines the numbers and the science behind the hardware and software. Several sites -- including TUAW -- reported yesterday that 80% of all smartphones AT&T sold in Q411 were iPhones, based on AT&T's quarterly earnings report. On closer inspection, however, there's a...

Creativity is a splendid thing. It lets you come up with never-before-considered ideas, and leads to the creation of products like the Love Box. The Love Box is a videography accessory for the iPhone that lets you mix two videos together in real time. It's a wooden box with a slot for your iPhone and a sliding mirror. You position the...

The financial world's eyes are on Apple this week after it announced record-breaking quarterly earnings. In the midst of all this commentary and congratulations, there was also a sobering article by New York Times reporters Charles Duhigg and David Barboza. Titled "In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad," the story was critical...

In 2010, the Copyright Office said jailbreaking a handset did not violate the DMCA and the jailbreak community breathed a sigh of relief. What many people didn't realize was that the exemption covering jailbreaking will expire later this year. When it expires, companies can go after jailbreak developers like the iPhone Dev Team using...

For the past three years, I've had the pleasure to meet with HP at Macworld to find out what new Apple-centric products the company has produced. This year afforded another opportunity for HP to showcase their products, and I've put together a booth tour video with many of the highlights. If you can't make it to Macworld | iWorld 2012,...

On the second floor of Moscone West here at Macworld | iWorld 2012 is the Macworld Midway, a series of displays and events that are still Mac-related, but which veer a little out of the standard Apple community. One of those is this Art of South Park gallery, which features art from the very ribald (and hilarious) Comedy Central...

While there are still quite a few good comic book reader apps on the App Store, there's really only one choice for buying digital comics directly from the publishers: Comixology's aptly title Comics app. Comixology launched early on iOS devices, beginning with a web interface and then the very popular iPhone app. Since the introduction...

An interesting piece of software I've run across at Macworld | iWorld 2012 is Audible Magic, automated-content recognition software that relies on digital fingerprinting. The Audible Magic technology will identify a TV series based off the audio as it's being broadcast. Audible Magic's customers include yap.tv and Miso, which will have...

The yellow sticky note of doom has appeared, and the Apple Store is currently down. What sort of updates will this bring? Since it's early Friday on the East Coast, most likely maintenance. But with Macworld, it could be anything. We'll let you know of any changes once it's back up! Update: The store has come back up. No new items have...

With iWeb slowly fading into obscurity, Mac users who want to generate websites without a lot of trouble have been turning to apps such as Sandvox. The app was updated today to version 2.5, which is free for users version 2.0 and up. Prominently featured is a slideshow object that lets users drag a collection of photos to the app, with...

Valve has released Steam Mobile for iOS, a free app for the iPhone. According to Valve, "With the free Steam app for iOS, you can participate in the Steam community wherever you go. Chat with your Steam friends, browse community groups and user profiles, read the latest gaming news and stay up to date on unbeatable Steam sales." That's...

Vintage Radio is an interesting idea for an iPhone app: It's a ton of various old-time radio recordings (more than 34,000 mystery, horror, comedy, and other old 1930s and 1940s radio shows), all accessible to stream on demand. The app allows you to browse and search shows, set up and save playlists or even share shows on Facebook and...

Now that we can jailbreak the iPhone 4S, jailbreak developers can finally use Siri in their tweaks. One such tweak is Lingual which adds language translation to our favorite voice assistant. The tweak, available from the Big Boss repository in Cydia, lets you say "Siri, What is how are you in Spanish" and Siri will respond with...

On the second floor of Moscone West here at Macworld | iWorld 2012 is the Macworld Midway, a series of displays and events that are still Mac-related, but which veer a little out of the standard Apple community. One of those is this Art of South Park gallery, which features art from the very ribald (and hilarious) Comedy Central...

With iWeb slowly fading into obscurity, Mac users who want to generate websites without a lot of trouble have been turning to apps such as Sandvox. The app was updated today to version 2.5, which is free for users version 2.0 and up. Prominently featured is a slideshow object that lets users drag a collection of photos to the app, with...

Forrester Research recently conducted a survey of close to 10,000 workers in 17 countries to determine which workers are more likely to own and use Apple products. The New York Times has published the results, which show that "business directors" -- in other words, bosses -- are the employee group most likely to own one or more Apple...

Our Remix and WIN competition, with Olivia Broadfield, Propellerhead and SoundCloud, closes on the 31st January 2012, which means you've just a few days left to submit your remix of Olivia's song 'Say.' We've had loads of entries already (some of which are very impressive), and the judges (Olivia and the TUAW team) have their work cut...

The attention-grabbing numbers from Apple's most recent earnings statement have already made the rounds -- US$46 billion in revenue, net profit of $13 billion, 37 million iPhones sold -- and all of that within three months. Apple didn't just turn in record-breaking performance for a tech company; only Exxon has ever managed to have a...

It's hard to believe that 28 years have passed since the Macintosh was introduced by a young, bowtie-clad Steve Jobs, on January 24, 1984. It was Apple's annual stockholder meeting and Jobs (and his Macintosh crew) were going to unveil the Macintosh to the public. It was a magic moment aptly described by Andy Hertzfeld on the Folklore...

Apple's textbook endeavor may be off to a better start than anyone expected. According to Global Equities Research, a firm that tracks iBook sales, iTunes customers downloaded over 350,000 textbooks in the first three days of availability. The system also logged 90,000 downloads of iBooks Author, despite lingering questions about...

If you have an iPhone and iPad or Mac, you can set up an indoor surveillance system. All you need to get it going is AirBeam, which is software that turns your iPhone into a spy cam and your Mac desktop into a remote viewing station. Setup is simple -- just install AirBeam on all your hardware and the software will do the rest. There's...

TUAW's Erica Sadun and I are ebook publishers. Late last year, we started up an ebook publishing company -- Sand Dune Books -- and were fortunate to hit a publishing home run right off the bat with our book "Talking to Siri." Since we're familiar with the tools used to create documents for publishing on both the Amazon Kindle bookstore...

The Wall Street Journal's Livemint blog reports that Apple may be considering opening up retail operations in India as soon as it possibly can, following a new governmental ruling in that country that foreign companies can indeed open and own retail stores. Apple's been poking around India for a while -- the company reportedly thought...

Last year's 360|MacDev was filled with good food and great company, plus sessions with some of the best developers in the world. The annual event in Denver is one of the must-attend Mac developer conferences out there if you want to learn from the best. This year's conference is almost upon us, but there's still room to attend. Check...

Pad & Quill has been making book-bound iPad and iPhone cases for a couple of years. By book-bound, I mean that the cases made using traditional book-binding materials and techniques. Like DODOcase, the cases have evolved a bit over the years to meet the requirements of new devices; unlike DODOcase, Pad & Quill has created a...

From the land of Shakespeare we have a remodeled hotel that has gone Mac in every room. The Menzies Welcombe Hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon is now about as tech-friendly as a hotel can be, especially for a hotel built in 1866. All guest rooms now contain a Mac, a flat screen TV, internet connections, Skype and Wi-Fi along with...

My non-TUAW job is in print journalism, where I spend my nights as a designer for a newspaper in central Pennsylvania. Part of that work involves being able to estimate, from the glance at a photo in InDesign or a paper dummy, how much of a story I can fit on a page, photo dimensions and more. The same goes for online design. Design...

Apple has announced the free iBooks Author, an OS X application for creating any type of ebook. As with Pages, a number of templates are available for authors to use to get started with making a book. With a tap, they can be filled with stock text. Elements such as audio and video can be dragged and dropped onto the page. Keynote...

Last year, GE launched a pilot program that lets its employees choose between a Mac notebook and a PC desktop. The program is not well-known, and only 1,000 employees have chosen a Mac over a PC. This number is expected to rise as more employees become aware of this option, and new employees join GE because they consider the...