At first glance, it seems like another typical Mac tempest in a teacup — a “helpless indie developer being ridden roughshod by the big bad monolithic control freak Apple.” Like Macworld media blacklisting and the Proteron LiteSwitch and Konfabulator incidents before it, it’s a cause celebre that unifies the Mac web, but makes them look [...]

Acknowledging continuing problems with its successor to .Mac, Apple sent another note of apology to subscribers tonight. We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension. This is in addition [...]

From “Rock Norris” on Twitter: “Re: Apple Cupertino HQ fire “Firefighters battled the blaze for 3 hrs.” (Note: 2 hrs were spent signing NDA’s)” (via Shawn King)

In what may be the most pretentiously titled session yet, I joined a great panel of Mac and technology pundits for the latest installment of Chuck Joiner’s MacJury podcast. We discussed Apple’s financials for a bit, then launched into our thoughts on what should be next on the feature list of the iPhone. (Voice dialing [...]

I use a VoIP service from AT&T called CallVantage for my home phone. One of the services features is that it sends voicemail as a .wav attachment to my email address. Unfortunately, my iPhone could never play the type of .wav the service creates, meaning I could see that I had a voice message, but [...]

MobileMe customers are getting a note from Apple regarding the shaky transition to MobileMe services. As an apology for the transition trouble, the company is extending all MobileMe subscriptions by one month. I love the straightforwardness of this line, the second sentence in the letter: “Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we expected.” The [...]

Back when this was a full-fledged journalistic endeavor — a real news site, if you will — things like re-designs and the development of additional features took place on a development server — behind the curtain, if you will. Now that we’re “just” a blog, though, I have no hesitation to do these things right out [...]

After finally getting my iPhone re-activated (thanks to the free WiFi at the Livingston, NJ public library), I spent much of yesterday examining the new features of iPhone 2.0 and happily downloading apps from the App Store. The new iPhone OS is impressive, full of wonderfully polished touches and new features. One that I didn’t know [...]

I was too busy patting myself on the back for realizing I could update my iPhone’s firmware from my company Mac (rather than my home machine, where the iPhone is “registered,”) that I completely missed the possibility that my corporate firewall might block access to the Apple servers necessary to re-activate the phone. (It did.) Until [...]

It's starting out as a day of fits and starts for Apple's new mobile computing-related releases. The company's Mac.com service went down last night, as scheduled and it's replacement, MobileMe, has poked its virtual head up a few times, but was not up as of this writing. Also out: iTunes 7.7, which enables the Apps Store, and the iPhone 2.0 updater -- but not officially. (Don't worry, we'll tell you where you can find it.)