Back when the iPhone Developer Program was first announced, developer provisions (the 'permission slips' that allow developers to distribute pre-release builds of apps in progress) lasted one year. It seemed natural to have a one year expiration, as our developer memberships also lasted one year.

Everything was all fine, developers created new provision profiles as they grew, and each lasted one year. However, sometime in May of this year, provision profiles seemed to start expiring after 90 days. At first, many thought this was linked to the expiration time of their iPhone developer memberships, which would decrease the time to use a provision.

However, it seems that it's been set that provisions are only going to last 90 days. Also, distribution provision profiles, which are needed to submit applications to the App Store or distribute applications via ad-hoc, now only last about six months instead of one year.

If your provisions are expiring, your iPhone will remind you to renew your provision, and will state when that provision will expire.

If this is the way it's going to be, we may have to live with it -- it's just something that I would like to stay consistent, rather than wondering every time I renew a provision whether Apple has swapped out its stopwatch again.

Sometimes Auntie TUAW gets emails from anxious iPhone developers. In this case, the correspondent is running into issues with Apple's new automated checks for private API use in iPhone apps.

Dear Auntie TUAW,

I got an email from Apple's App Review team saying the code in my iPhone app uses private APIs. They pointed to -setOrder, which is a method I created in code, and -setThumbnail, which was created automatically from a Core Data property.

But those are all from my own code, and thumbnail is actually a property for my CoreData class. Any idea why? I don't even have a setter for thumbnail, it is just a dynamic property for the CoreData class.

I don't want to rename my properties because I'm not sure that CoreData will automigrate my renamed items and my users are going to start crying if everything breaks.

Love & snuggles,

Lauren

Read on for Auntie's reply.

Several of my colleagues here at TUAW and other people around the country are seeing some slowness and timeouts from MobileMe mail today.

The web interface seems to be working faster than the Apple Mail app, but even the web is slow. No communication from Apple support about what the problem is, but something clearly is wrong for some customers. Others may be doing fine.

I'm not seeing any reports from users on the Apple support board yet, but I expect they'll be flowing soon. Several MobileMe customers are seeing repeated timeouts from Apple servers.

Hopefully this will be just a short lived glitch, and not an epic failure.

Update: Service seems to have been restored for as of 3:15 EST, but still no word on the MobileMe support site.

For some Magic Mouse users, the streamlined human interface device is not only a dog, but a dog that pees on the carpet, smells bad, and barks continuously. Apple support boards are beginning to fill up with complaints about tracking issues and Bluetooth disconnects. There are also complaints about the lack of a third mouse button, and some all-too-early hardware failures.

I liked the Magic Mouse when I saw it at my local Apple Store, so I took one home for my Mac Pro. It seemed to work for awhile, but now it is very erratic at tracking and speed, even when MouseZoom is installed. Its Bluetooth connection has dropped several times, and it either comes back after a long wait or simply fails to connect again.

When I moved back to my wired Apple mouse, I found that I had actually preferred the form factor of the Magic Mouse, and I missed the button-less scroll wheel.

The Magic Mouse seems to be working fine for many users, but there are some hints that the little rodents are having trouble with some older hardware. My 2006 Intel-based Mac Pro may be one of the computers at issue.

Apple will hopefully issue a software update, if that is the problem. In my case, the only magic I'm going to see from the Magic Mouse is when it disappears from my desktop.

How is it going for you?

Face it: your address book and your contacts, they're personal. They reveal a lot about you: your friends, your business partners, your cake buying proclivities, and more. The address book you see at the top of this post appears to be for someone in the Denver area. I know that because of the REI Denver listing and Le Bakery Sensual on 6th, which I drive by whenever I head East from Broadway.

These contacts, along with their notes, their phone numbers, dates of birth, and other information say a lot about the person whose address book this is, and also about the people who appear in that contact list, with all their personal and professional info.

There's one big problem. The screen shot you see wasn't made by the person who owns this me.com account. Under certain very specific conditions, Apple is inadvertently sharing data from other people's accounts. Ouch.

A TUAW reader sent us a video made as he renewed his me.com account from the UK. The address book data he accessed during that time included this Denver-based set shown here, as well as data from an Ireland-based user of Polish descent (all his contacts were back in Poland although his business was based in Ireland).

This all went down during the period when his MobileMe account was renewing. Each time he logged off and back on, he was presented with yet another set of contacts--none of them his. He writes, "Each time I logged off and on I got a different address book. All the other options were disabled (because my renewal was being processed) but clicking the Contacts icon showed me *an* address book," just not his address book.

With a little Internet-fu, he checked out some of the numbers and found that they were valid and operational. This leads him to believe that this is real data. My inspection of the local Denver data from his screen shots convinces me of the same. Further inspection of work addresses and personal family names makes us believe we know whose Denver-based address book this is. We've attempted to contact this person but as yet have not heard back.

The address book glitch ended once the registration process finished, leaving our TUAW reader with a series of screen shots and videos and a deep concern about Apple's ability to safeguard personal data. He's already contacted Apple about the bug. "I contacted them by two means: their web-chat thing where they told me that they 'had no reports of such an issue'. They suggested closing and reopening Safari (helpful eh?) and a generic autoresponse saying they'd reply within 5 days when i sent an email." He adds, "I don't think the people manning the help desk appreciated the seriousness of the situation."

TUAW has sent a heads-up to Apple and will keep monitoring the situation to see how it develops.

Looks like it. You can't access the main MobileMe page. Apple says this on their MobileMe support page:" MobileMe members are intermittently unable to access MobileMe services. Mail is available via a desktop email application, or Mail on iPhone or iPod touch. Normal service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Well, at least that page is up. Seems like MobileMe has had a rough couple of weeks with issues concerning mail, Back to my Mac, and syncing.

The MobileMe service had a rocky start and has had a variety of issues over the last year or so. Let's hope Apple gets things back on an even keel soon. So far this morning, MobileMe is MobileGone.

UPDATE: Some of us are able to log in, but it has been up or down for various people throughout the morning. The status page still says the issue is intermittent as of 3:15pm ET.

UPDATE #2: Looks like everything is back to normal. Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

We reported on the abundance of Time Capsule failure-to-boot after 18 months in September. A new site has emerged from the mist to help Time Capsule owners who are struggling to get Apple to acknowledge the issue. TimeCapsuleDead.org exists as a register for the owners of dead Time Capsules and has links to self-help discussions as well as the Apple Feedback page. Of the devices that have been registered thus far, the average time until ports-up is 17 months and 29 days -- eerily close to the estimated 18 month mark.

We'd like to give you a friendly reminder that our own Lauren explored the AppleCare agreements, and found that any computer-centric AppleCare agreement that's in force should cover this Time Capsule failure (as it's considered a peripheral used with the Mac). That does not mean that our readers who don't have a current agreement should be left begging on the streets by Apple. This is something that needs to be addressed. Hopefully this new site will be a good resource for all of our readers.

Thanks, Pim and KB!

UPDATE 2: Be sure to read Engadget's analysis of what appears to be a non-event here.

Apple is apparently getting hot and bothered over Australian/New Zealand supermarket chain Woolworths' new logo. Woolworths insists the logo is merely a stylized "W," but Apple's copyright lawyers aren't buying it. They're trying to knock down Woolworths' copyright application for the logo by claiming it violates Apple's intellectual property.

Apparently, according to trademark lawyer Trevor Choy, Apple does this fairly often, trying to make sure that some other company's branding can't be mistaken for its iconic logo.

I'll admit that at first glance the logos look similar (to me, anyway – my ex-graphic designer wife doesn't agree). Even so, it seems kind of a stretch to assume anyone is going to confuse Woolworths, a supermarket chain based only in Australia and New Zealand that mostly sells, you know, food, with Apple, a worldwide company that sells computers. Trust me, I shop at the Woolworths here in Palmerston North every week; it's a decent grocer, but nobody's going to wander in there looking for a MacBook Pro.

What do you think? Does Apple have a case here? Or is it sort of ridiculous for Apple to claim that anything roundish with a leaf on top endangers its trademark? Sound off in the comments.

UPDATE: A couple of points we should clear up on this post. First, Apple is not, in fact, the aggressor in this case. No one is, really. It is a trademark action, and as far as we know it has NOT become a lawsuit. It appears to be a part of the trademark process as it happens down under. Apple is free to object, and since Woolworths is attempting to register their mark across a huge range of products (like computers), they are practically obligated to do so. We'll keep an eye out for any interesting developments, however. - Ed.

Something new, unexpected, and possibly worrying has popped up in iTunes. iTunes now "calls home" to the Apple mothership whenever you restore an iPhone or iPod touch. It tells you that it's "Verifying restore with Apple...", checking your device identifier and the firmware with Apple's new signature server.

Today, TUAW has the pleasure of talking with Jay Freeman, otherwise known as "Saurik", the developer of Cydia. Saurik has constructed a server that duplicates Apple's functionality, ensuring that you'll be able to downgrade your iPhone or iPod in the future, even if you have not jailbroken your device. This topic is for all iPhone users, regardless of whether they use jailbreaking. Please join us with your questions and comments as we hear from Freeman about why this move matters to you. Read on to see the full live chat transcript.

Please join us this afternoon at 4:15 Eastern for a live chat with Jay "Saurik" Freeman. Jay is going to talk to us about Apple's new signature server and what that means to you as an iPod or iPhone owner.

Have you noticed a new message in iTunes when you restore an iPhone or iPod touch? "Verifying restore with Apple..."? iTunes is now checking your unit against a registered database and deciding whether to allow you to install your firmware or not. Potentially, Apple could disallow downgrades to previous firmware versions. According to Freeman, this move allows Apple to "recall existing firmwares by keeping people from restoring to them in the future. To do this they simply would refuse to ever sign, for example, iPhone OS 3.0 again."

Freeman will explain why this is a real problem to both the standard App Store community and to the jailbreak community. Join us with your questions.

Something seems rotten, at least for some Mac users, with the Apple Mail program. Apple support boards are lighting up with reports of email messages being downloaded multiple times. This problem seems to be mostly with POP mail accounts, but even IMAP users are seeing it. There is another Apple support thread here with 10 pages of comments from unhappy Mail users.

I've noticed it myself twice. In the morning I bring up Mail and read what's come in overnight. Then a little later I re-open Apple Mail and the same messages download again. Of course my POP account is set to delete everything from the server, and my settings have not changed.

This is the first really bad behavior I've seen from Apple Mail since OS X came out in 2001. This most recent glitch seems to have popped up in the 10.6.1 update. There are enough people reporting it that it seems like there is an issue for some users, but obviously not everyone is seeing it.

There have been some suggestions posted, but while they worked for some they did not work for all. Are you seeing this strange behavior? Did it start with 10.6.1? Let us know, and hopefully Apple will kick the code for the next update and put this bad boy to rest.

Thanks to Mark for the tip.

The latest festival of issues with Snow Leopard alongside a round of people unhappy with the latest iPhone update both suggest that Apple might need to work a little harder on pre-release testing.

One thing Microsoft does rather well is gets a lot of people testing software releases in extended public betas. Of course that didn't go so well for Vista, which was a mess for many people, but it seems to have gone better for Windows 7.

Apple, secretive as always, doesn't get really wide testing of new software builds, and when those updates finally get released there seems to be an ever increasing, ever louder response from customers that things aren't going swimmingly.

Snow Leopard was supposed to be a cleanup of Leopard, but it appears that some people are having lots of issues. In my own case, some fonts were pretty messed up, and Keychain was jumbled pretty badly. The fixes in both cases weren't onerous, but they were nasty enough that it made me wonder how thoroughly the release had been tested. I still don't hear new mail sounds from MobileMe, a problem that has been going on at least since Leopard was released. I'm not alone in this, but not everyone has the problem.

Most of the people I know had flawless upgrades, and of course here at TUAW we are more likely to hear about problems, which is also true of the Apple forums where people are able to report the smallest or the largest bugs.

Therefore, from my perspective it's hard to say for certain if things are slipping away from Apple quality control, but it's starting to look that way. Apple was quick to release 10.6.1, which was a good effort, but it is not quieting down the roar of users who don't think that this latest release of Snow Leopard 'just works.' What's your perception? Does Apple have some work to do?

In the last week, we have had a constant barrage of iPhone issues break through the lines... so much so that we feel it is our duty to inform the two of you who haven't updated what you could experience by updating to version 3.1 of the iPhone OS. This is no small problem, as you can read from the discussions on Apple's website here, here, here, and here.

The first two links are where we're getting the majority of our tips -- random shutdowns and very poor battery life. The second two, bricked phones and general slowness are still worth a mention -- even prompting our own Erica Sadun to do a live walk-through for debrickifying iPhones. We received a lot of praise for her help in that session and we'd encourage you to go back and read through the chat if you're experiencing trouble with a bricked iPhone.

I've spent quite some time reading the hundreds of posts about the "mysterious random shutdowns" and have determined that it really is what it is. As of this writing, there have been 409 posts and 28 pages in that discussion -- I've seen very little repeats and no real solutions. Some people have said that they've gone to Apple and received replacement phones because of this issue but for those of us who have out-of-warranty phones, Apple has merely said "It's $199 for a replacement." I have to agree with our tipsters -- this needs to be addressed. These people simply did not break their phones, it's a well-documented issue which we, as consumers, shouldn't have to pay to fix.

Battery life is a completely different debacle. I cannot seem to find a trend in the discussions at all. Some people claim to have removed certain apps, some claim that MobileMe sync is the culprit -- all of them agree that there is an issue with 3.1 and that battery life shouldn't dramatically decrease overnight. I'd really love to get into one of these phones and replace the battery to see what happens because the hardware guy in me says that it's not impossible. However, deductive reasoning says that there's something in the software. Whether there's a memory leak in 3.1 itself, or some apps that we're running aren't as "compatible" as they should be... we need to see another update soon to help alleviate the issues with version 3.1 of the iPhone OS.

Please feel free to use our comment system to express your concern, anger, resentment... whatever. Try to be helpful if you've come across a solution and be nice if you're not having these problems. Until Apple issues a fix or acknowledges the problem at all, just hope that you're still in-warranty.

There are quite a few unhappy Time Capsule owners over at the Apple support boards. It appears that some Time Capsules are going belly-up at roughly the 18 month mark, simply refusing to power on.

As Brian from Texas wrote:

"My TC did the exact same thing two days ago. It is 18 months old. After doing some research, I have found others with the same problem. At 17-18 months, the power supply goes out. I went to the Apple store today and they said too bad, out of warranty."

There are 6 pages of TC owners with similar issues, most of them happening after about a year and a half, so it looks like something is going on with the units.

This seems eerily similar to the 'dead airport express' syndrome of a couple of years ago where the products would simply fail to work and all the data and power lights went off. Sometimes there was an audible popping sound. Other times, the APX just died.

If you are having this issue it might be a good idea to report it to Apple and see if the weight of complaints gets them to look into this. Let us know too.

Thanks to Mike for the tip.

Update: As it's being discussed in the comments here, Lauren went ahead and investigated whether AppleCare for your Mac will cover an out-of-warranty Time Capsule. The answer may surprise (and please) you.

Buyer beware: one of the features that has silently disappeared from iTunes 9 is the Shopping Cart, where you used to be able to place songs, albums, videos, and apps for future purchase. It has been replaced with a new feature called "Wish List" that functions similarly to the old shopping cart, storing your potential purchases on iTunes's servers.

What's slightly sneaky about this is there's nothing apparently different from an end-user's perspective at first glance. Clicking "purchase" or "buy now" used to automatically place items in your shopping cart if you had that preference enabled, but now the behavior has been completely altered – now all purchases on the iTunes store are 1-click if you click the "Buy Now" button, and there's no way to cancel them once they start. So whether it's a $1.29 song or a $129 iPhone app, if you click that "Buy Now" button, you're getting charged.

If you want to emulate the old "shopping cart" purchase behavior, you have to instead click the arrow to the right of "Buy Now" and select "Add to Wish List."

A big thanks to the many readers who sent this tip in.

Update: If you had items in your shopping cart before updating to iTunes 9, they won't have disappeared. All of the items that used to be in your shopping cart in iTunes 8 or older should have migrated to the new Wish List in iTunes 9.