caching

A news item this week over at AppleInsider uncovered a troubling practice by a developer at the iTunes App Store. Apparently, users who downloaded a free massive multiplayer online game from a Chinese developer complained of unauthorized in-app purchases, running up the bills on their iTunes accounts. One user reported the situation to Apple resulting in him getting a refund for the fraudulent purchases and Apple promising to investigate the claims.

Even with a closed system like iTunes, apparently it is still possible for dishonest people to find a way to steal our money. Let's hope that Apple gets to the bottom of this case and finds a way to prevent these unauthorized purchases in the future. Until there's more news about this problem, be sure to regularly check your iTunes receipts (sent to the e-mail address attached to your iTunes account) for strange charges and report the issue to Apple if you have any problems.

This week's apps include a unique location-based social network app and an arcade golf game where you flick to win.… Read more

HTTPWatch Basic Edition is a free browser plug-in that collects and displays information about Web sites. It's a trial edition of HTTPWatch Professional, with which it shares many features, albeit with limitations, mostly for Web sites with nonproprietary log files. The Basic version also displays a logo banner on printouts. Both work with Microsoft Internet Explorer as well as Mozilla Firefox. You can save the information HTTPWatch Basic Edition collects as a log file and view it with an included utility, HTTP Studio.

We downloaded and installed HTTPWatch Basic for Internet Explorer. During the process, we allowed the plug-in'… Read more

Hello, I'm Peggy Yu, senior manager of business development at Download.com. Just like promotions posted in this space by Catherine Hwang, I'm here today to help bring Download.com users the best software deals available. Today we have a particularly good deal for popular maintenance suite Glary Utilities Pro. For the next 24 hours, we have an exclusive offer of 50 percent off Glary Utilities Pro.

Why would you want Glary Utilities Pro? Glary Utilities Pro offers a simple, but nicely designed tabbed interface for performing system cleanup and maintenance. Its basic scan includes a Registry cleaner, … Read more

Nearly six months have passed since Slacker first announced its intentions to bring caching capability to its app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. In that time, I've received dozens of e-mails from fans of the music service who have been anxiously awaiting for updated app. Today, I get to deliver some good news: Slacker 2.0.56 with iPhone caching exists! In fact, it's downloading stations to my iPod Touch as I write this. Unfortunately, you still can't have it...and yes, I can hear the groans from here. Slacker's latest update has been submitted … Read more

With Apple not leaking a whisper of evidence as to whether it plans to bring any sort of music subscription service to iTunes, iPhone and iPod Touch owners have had to rely on third-party apps to fulfill their dreams of unlimited, on-demand tunes. However, there has been one big caveat: the available services relied solely on streaming, which means mobile Touch users and airborne (or underground) iPhone users were out of luck. Until now.

Rhapsody's iPhone and iPod Touch app is fresh out of beta, and version 2.0 of the software comes with at least one key advantage … Read more

Slacker better light a fire under its keister if it wants to be the first streaming-music service to offer offline song caching for the iPhone and iPod Touch. In the midst of all the SXSW hoopla, Rhapsody has announced its intentions to offer caching as part of the next update to its own iPhone app.

For those not in the know, this feature allows users to save music to the device so that they may continue listening to the content without the use of a constant wireless connection. It's a more compelling functionality for the iPod Touch, but iPhone … Read more

We spent quite a bit of time with MyLastSearch, and for the life of us, we just can't figure it out. We understand what it's supposed to do; the publisher's description clearly states that it "scans the cache and history files of your Web browser" and returns a list of previous queries made with search engines. Though it does perform this task--to some extent--we couldn't figure out why anyone would use this utility instead of searching within the browser itself.

The program's interface is plain and fairly intuitive by virtue of the fact … Read more

Does your Mac feel sluggish? Internet surfing, downloading software, and just plain regular use are all major contributors to filling up your hard drive with useless files. As time goes by, your Mac starts to fill up with cache files, unused language files, and even leftover installers, making your whole system struggle to keep track of it all. You can go through and try to clean out a lot of these files manually, but knowing that it might take you a significant amount of time makes it easy to put off until later.

Fortunately, there are a number of utilities … Read more

Forget about exploring your Firefox or Google Chrome cache. When it comes to browser cache, the biggest problem that most users face is figuring out in just which folder the elusive but often-important browsing history data resides. MozillaCacheView and ChromeCacheView from long-time freeware utility publisher NirSoft make it easy to not merely view your cache, but to truly get your hands deep into it, too.

The interface of either will instantly bore you. How uninspired is it? It's so dull I've got to point out that there's a menu bar, because right below it there's a … Read more