Applications

Apple's plan to allow developers to add in-app payments to applications sold through its iPhone App Store could be the next game-changing step the company takes as it charges ahead in the mobile market.

Apple announced the new feature at the iPhone OS 3.0 preview event in March. And next week at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco the company is expected to announce the release dates for the software upgrade.

While in-app commerce is only one of several new enhancements to Apple's iPhone operating system, it may be the most significant. The reason is very … Read more

Ever wish you could disarm your alarm system while sitting in your driveway? Or check in on, say, the cat while you're out of town? Alarm.com's new iPhone app lets you do all that and more. It's a freebie for Alarm.com customers.

Designed for homes and businesses alike, Alarm.com's systems (which are sold and installed by various third-party dealers) rely on wireless sensors and GSM/GPRS networks. In other words, they're highly connected.

The eponymous app gives you full control over your system, allowing you to arm or disarm it from just … Read more

Trying to predict what we'll see at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this year gives one the slight feeling of deja vu.

Heading into the annual conference last year, we knew there would be three basic topics covered in the event's opening keynote speech: OS X 10.6, the iPhone platform, and new iPhone hardware. You can bet that WWDC 2009--sold out for the second straight year--will hit on those same three areas. But there are still plenty of questions surrounding the specific details of what we'll see Monday morning when the conference opens at San Francisco'… Read more

Updated 8:53 p.m. with download links and further details and 9:47 p.m. with hands-on testing results.

Google released Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux Thursday--but only in rough developer preview versions that the company warns are works in progress.

"In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM," Google product managers Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg said in a blog post, evidently trying to employ a little reverse psychology. "… Read more

As we gear up for the WWDC here in San Francisco, the rumors are flying as usual about what we might see during the keynote on Monday morning. Some people say Apple will announce new iPhones, others say we will get a precise release date for Mac OS X Snow Leopard. One thing is likely: We will probably all have the ability to download iPhone OS 3.0 sometime next week. I'm crossing my fingers.

I'll be at the keynote speech to witness the excitement and find out as much as I can about Mac OS X Snow … Read more

The problem with statistics is that it's too easy to jigger data down to numbers that prove in the end how quickly the exercise can resemble art as much as science. Take the latest stats regarding Opera's mobile performance, for instance. StatCounter's Tuesday graph showed proof of Opera's climb above the iPhone's Safari browser for the month of May.

Yet the claim that "Opera took 24.6 percent of the worldwide market compared to 22.3 percent for iPhone" is quickly followed by the admission that one only needs to calculate page views … Read more

WorldMate, the popular travel planning and organizational service, has expanded its mobile reach onto the iPhone. The two different versions of the app, which were released late Tuesday night (one free, and a premium version that costs a hefty $19.99), give travelers tools to create and track travel itineraries including flights, hotel reservations, rental cars, and any appointments along the way.

The two versions of the app offer identical functionality for core parts of WorldMate's service, like a flight search tool, world clock list, currency conversion, and a heads-up display on what's on your schedule. However, the … Read more

Lots of apps let you sidestep iPhone SMS to send and receive text messages for free. But in most cases the apps themselves cost at least a few bucks. Enter TextPlus, a free, ad-supported app that offers unlimited texting.

That's reason enough to celebrate, but TextPlus has one other trick up its sleeve: group messaging. You can send a text to multiple recipients, and their replies will stay grouped together like in a chat room. (Obviously this works best if everyone uses TextPlus, but even nonusers can receive messages from the app.)

When you create a new message, TextPlus … Read more

Apple has started decorating San Francisco's Moscone Center in anticipation of the Worldwide Developers Conference, which opens Monday morning.

And as has become tradition, when the banners go up, the seemingly round-the-clock guessing game of what Apple will announce intensifies. This year, the banners say "WWDC: One year later. Light-years ahead." Now the objective for many is parsing that phrase and poring over every image on the banner to extract some sort of meaning.

The phrase itself, plus all the application icons on the banners, indicate the centerpiece of the conference will be the App Store and … Read more