Disney Movies Anywhere Includes iTunes Integration→

New service and app launched today by Disney. Kelly Hodgkins for MacRumors writes:

Powered by Disney’s Keychest video-on-demand service, the Disney Movies Anywhere app lets customers browse or search through Disney’s vast mobile library and then purchase titles for playback from within the app. The app streams the movie to an iOS device, with an option to download content for offline viewing.

Interestingly, Disney Movies Anywhere can be connected to your iTunes account to make eligible Disney movies also available on iCloud on all your devices, including the Apple TV (by connecting accounts, you get The Incredibles for free). The service appears to be quite convenient (it has Pixar and Marvel movies too, and it should allow cellular streaming ), and the iTunes integration is peculiar, though not surprising considering Apple’s history with Disney. Unfortunately, there are geographical restrictions for people outside the US.

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Audiophone Lets You Stream Music to Your iPhone Without Limitations→

Provided you use Subsonic, Audiophone lets you take your personal music collection with you wherever you go. As an alternative to online storage solutions like Amazon’s Cloud Player, Google’s Play Music, or iTunes Match, Audiophone is about giving you direct access to your library from your personal computer. Want to listen to songs encoded in FLAC and WAV on your iPhone? Because it’s a music player that piggybacks off of Subsonic, the music can be transcoded and pre-buffered so that your streamed tunes can make the most out of your available bandwidth, no matter where you are. Like Genius in iTunes, Audiophone can also generate playlists based on your favorite songs on the fly. Plus, it includes support for AirPlay so you can stream music to a pair of speakers through an AirPort Express or your Apple TV. The app is $4.99 on the App Store, designed for listener who wants to end-to-end control over their music streaming experience.

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Zippy: A Task Manager With Insights→

There’s lots of task managers on the iPhone, but how many break down just how good you are at getting things done? Zippy adds some recent features that have found their way into apps like Mailbox, such as a flyover grid of options for snoozing tasks until a later date, and maintains a list of completed tasks and whether you’ve completed them on time. Tags help keep your tasks organized so you can attribute things to home, work, and personal projects, and view tasks per tag. Perhaps the only improvement Zippy could make is the ability to add tags when creating tasks themselves. The insight’s tab is Zippy’s most original feature, and it breaks down things like when you complete tasks, how good you are at planning in advance, and what times of the day you’re most likely to mark things as done. Analyze your daily routine and replace your stack of sticky notes with Zippy, which is only a dollar until March 4th. Grab it from the App Store.

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OS X 10.9.2 Update Adds FaceTime Audio Calling, iMessage Blocking, Fixes Mail and Security Bugs→

If you have a Mac running OS X Mavericks, update 10.9.2 has been pushed to the Mac App Store, which adds several new features, fixes a variety of bugs, and namely fixes the SSL/TLS vulnerability. On the feature side, 10.9.2 adds the ability to initiate and receive FaceTime audio calls, while also blocking individual senders on iMessage. Mail is named as having received a slew of bug fixes: compatibility improvements for Gmail’s Archive folder and labels are listed, as well as resolutions for a bug that prevented Mail from receiving messages from “certain providers.” The update will require a restart for installation.

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Tact Adds Contacts To Your iPhone’s Home Screen→


There are plenty of apps to create Home screen shortcuts for contacts, but Tact by Marco Tabini is polished and easy to use.

If you want a more direct access to your contacts than what Launch Center Pro can provide, Tact presents a contact picker that you can scroll to pick one of your contacts that you want to turn into an icon shortcut. Each contact can be assigned one of four actions (Call, Message, Email, and Open) and icons can be tweaked: you can choose a color, title, and image – if having an iPhone Home screen with faces of your friends inside icons is your thing, Tact lets you do that. Technically speaking, Tact creates Home screen icons by generating webclips from Safari – unlike other apps, the process is well explained and, when launching Tact’s icons, you’ll get a nice preview image before being taken to the corresponding action in the Phone, Messages, or Mail app.

Tact is $1.99 on the App Store and iPhone-only.

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Yahoo News Digest 1.1 Adds “What You’ve Read” and Other Improvements→

I’m a fan of Yahoo News Digest simply for the fact that it breaks me out of the tech news bubble in short spurts. The latest point update adds atoms for Weather and Statistics, new sharing options such as the ability to tweet Cover Posters, and a new “What You’ve Read” overview has been added that shows you a grid of what digests you’ve browsed through. Shown above, there’s also a little “Did you know?” section that now precedes extra articles in the app. Yahoo News Digest is free to download from the App Store.

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Macworld’s FAQ on Apple’s SSL Bug in Plain English→

On Friday, Apple issued what seemed at first to be a run-of-the-mill security update. According to the update’s initial documentation, the patch was supposed to “provide a fix for SSL connection verification.” But when Apple posted the patch’s security information to its website, the company revealed that the fix was for something quite serious: Without the patch, “an attacker with a privileged network position may capture or modify data in sessions protected by SSL/TLS.” That was hardly run-of-the-mill.

The next time your friends, family, or coworkers tell you that Apple has been hacked or if they ask you what’s going on, send them this article by Macworld. A few of the authors on the site put together some nice tidbits of information explaining what the SSL bug is, what’s vulnerable, and what you can do to secure your communications online. Update your iOS devices if you haven’t already, and use an alternate web browser on your Mac until a patch can be downloaded.

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