notification

To cap off a week chock-full of Apple-related rumors, we now have this: is Apple about to acquire a company in the process of giving its iOS notifications system a major makeover?

Apple blog Cult of Mac says it's hearing exactly that from a source, who is not named. The company Apple is allegedly buying isn't confirmed in the report, but is said to be "small" and currently has an application available for sale in the iOS App Store.

Now that would describe about a thousand companies. But there aren't that many that do slick … Read more

The Commerce Department today edged toward endorsing new federal laws regulating companies' data collection practices and requiring that customers be notified of data breaches.

In an 88-page report (PDF), the department also suggested rewriting a 1986 privacy law to address "privacy protection in cloud computing and location-based services," but didn't offer any details. That broad approach is backed by tech companies including Google, Microsoft, AT&T, and eBay, but is likely to be opposed by the Justice Department.

All of these ideas have been advanced before, of course: California's data breach notification law took effect … Read more

Twitter Inc. has released a significant update to its iOS App for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. This update, now version 3.2, adds push notifications for @replies and messages, fixes several bugs, and adds inline media for iPad users.

Users can now be notified whenever their name is @mentioned in an account they follow or when they receive a new direct message. Other improvements to the iPhone version of the App include better displays of shortened URLs, better loading of reserved Twitter.com paths, and a fix for connections errors when a system clock is set incorrectly.

Retina Display … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Facebook knows you don't want to see as many FarmVille news items and is doing something about it. That is, unless you play FarmVille all day. If that's the case, now there's a way to get even more of it in your news feed.

At a barbecue for game developers and staff here today, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined ways the company is changing the frequency of game notifications that show up in a user's news feed. The bottom line is that if you play a lot of games, you'll … Read more

It's not quite the solution iPhone users might have been expecting, but Google has brought yet another way to get push e-mail on the iPhone. Kind of.

Users with the company's Google Mobile search app installed will now find an option to receive push notifications for new e-mails or calendar events within the app's settings menu, along with a very neat option to enable them only for certain parts of the day. This is a particularly useful feature if you want to keep your phone from buzzing or beeping during the times when you're usually asleep. … Read more

CALGARY, Alberta--A U.S. Federal Trade Commission representative delivered a stern indictment of current privacy laws on Monday, saying they fail to protect American consumers and instead place too much of a "burden" on them.

The existing constellation of privacy laws, which relies heavily on disclosure of data collection and use practices and on informed consumer choice, "in some very basic sense isn't working," said Kathryn Ratte, a senior attorney in the FTC's consumer protection bureau.

"We've put too much burden on the consumers to understand these policies," Ratte said here … Read more

When you're working on your Mac, sometimes things happen in the background that you would like to keep track of while working in another application. Growl works with hundreds of popular Mac apps to notify you of specific events, like when a download is completed or when your CD-burning project is finished.

For example, it can notify you when a friend comes online in Adium, when your EOD backup is done, and even pop up abbreviated versions of incoming e-mails--all while you're working on something entirely different, often with the help of app-specific plug-ins like GrowlMail, GrowlTunes, and … Read more

You may run across problems with some applications where they will not quit. When you use the command-Q hotkey an application may neither respond nor shows any error, and if you go directly to the application menu you will see the "Quit" option is greyed out.… Read more

Developers who use Amazon's cloud-based Web services should now have an easier way to send out messages to their users.

A new messaging feature called Amazon Simple Notification Service will let developers with Amazon Web Services accounts push out notifications to subscribers from their cloud-based applications, the company said Wednesday. Currently in beta, Amazon SNS will offer developers a Web-based interface in which they can create different topics of interest, subscribe people to those topics, and then automatically send out messages to subscribers via e-mail, HTTP, or other means.

Developers can use Amazon SNS to update subscribers on the … Read more