iTunes

Daft Punk are back, and their fans could not be happier. Well, until now, that is. The latest creation from the legendary pairing, Random Access Memories, is their first full studio album since 2005 and is due for general release on May 21. But, waiting sucks, so iTunes has come up big by allowing fans to stream the new album in its entirety before it's released. Every, single, track. All you need to do is head on over to the Daft Punk landing page in iTunes on your computer.

According to the chief financial officer of Windows -- what, your company doesn't have a product-level CFO? -- Microsoft has laid out the welcome mat for iTunes for Windows 8, but Apple has yet to come a knocking. Why ever could that be?

Apple's two-step verification service first rolled out in March, though only to a limited number of countries. Anyone outside the U.S, UK, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand was out of luck, but as 9to5Mac reports, the service has just been switched on in a host of new locations.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft wants Apple to create a Windows 8 version of iTunes. Apple already makes a version of iTunes that runs just fine on Windows 8, but it's an old-style "desktop app" not a new-style "Windows 8 app". Not that that seems to be bothering Apple in the slightest. According to CNN Money:

We'll always take free WiFi first, or good LTE coverage, but sometimes there's just no alternative but to use a Boingo subscription. Boingo has around 600,000 hotspots around the globe, and with todays update to their iOS application, accessing them became a lot smoother.

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One of the very few highlight of an otherwise arduous tax season is adding up all the iTunes receipts in my inbox and finding out how much I spent on iOS and Mac App Store apps the previous year. For 2012, that number turned out to be something just north of $1800.

Apple has moved age ratings in the App Store to a higher, more prominent position, right at the top between the app and developer name, and the star rating. Like the previous change, which added a clear, highly visible label to apps offering in-app purchase, it seems designed to make important information easier to see, and hopefully better inform customers of what they're downloading before they download it...

...except, of course, for age ratings on the App Store are still confusing.

Former developer tools evangelist at Apple, Michael Jurewitz has been going flat out on the writing circuit this past week, topped off by a an insane final lap consisting of a 5-part series on understanding App Store pricing.

Apple is being sued by a state-run animation studio in China over apps that contain unlicensed material from the studio. Shanghai Animation Film Studio is seeking total damages of 3.3 million yuan, or $530,000.

Apple has added a new warning label to apps in the iTunes App Store that contain in-app purchase options. You can now see at a glance if a particular app you are considering buying has in-app purchases. This new feature will hopefully help you make good decisions when buying apps that appear to be free but then later encourage you to upgrade them within the app; sometimes at really high costs.