A man named Robert Herskowitz has filed a federal class action suit against Apple, alleging that the company ‘double-bills’ for purchases made on iTunes with “troubling regularity” and that the company’s “illegal” policies also apply to other digital stores like the App Store, the iBookstore and the Mac App Store.

Herskowitz seeks an injunction and punitive damages of more than $5 million for a national class, alleging breach of contract, breach of faith, unjust enrichment, unfair competition and business law violations.

Apple violates its own terms of agreement as well as California state and common laws, according to the complaint.

The man claims he bought a single (admittedly crappy) song from the iTunes Store for $1.29, for which Apple charged him twice. He claims that he received the following response from Apple after he lodged a complaint:

“Your request for ‘Whatya Want from Me’ was carefully considered; however, according to the iTunes Store Terms of Sale, all purchases made on the iTunes store are ineligible for refund.

This policy matches Apple’s refund policies and provides protection for copyrighted materials.”

According to the complaint, Herskowitz asserts that the agreement governing use of Apple’s digital stores “says no such thing.” He claims the policy has “resulted in substantial numbers of Apple customers throughout the country having been double-billed by Apple.”

Apple’s refund policy states that Apple does not provide refunds in the event of a price reduction or promotional offering. Charging twice for a digital song, book or movie does not fall under that policy because its own terms limit it to price discount events only, Herskowitz asserts.

To be continued, no doubt. You can see the full complaint embedded below:

Herskowitz v Apple, Complaint

Ever since the iPad 3 new iPad was announced, developers have been furiously packing new Retina Display friendly graphics into their apps to make sure that once the new devices landed into people’s hands, their new and prettier apps were ready for download.

Needless to say, just about every iPad app in existence have been re-launching with “Support for Retina Display” listed in its “What’s New” copy. Finally though, we have an app with Retina support that was well worth the wait. The official iTunes Movie Trailers app was launched last October and has been providing us with amazing HD content ever since.

Today, the app has gotten the Retina Display update with version 1.1:

Clearly this is the type of content that Apple invented the Retina Display for, and any updates to make movie trailers look prettier is just fine with me. No other new features come with the update, but the prettier graphics will definitely keep us busy for a while.

➤ iTunes Movie Trailers for iOS

Skipping tracks and pausing your music is something that you probably do twenty to thirty times a day. If you’re at work and someone starts chatting with you, you’ll start seeking out the pause button until the conversation is done.

What if you didn’t have to click a button at all? A new app by a company called Flutter lets you simply hold your hand up to your webcam to start and stop your music and it’s pretty freaking awesome.

The free app for Mac is a lightweight download and once you open it up it leaves your webcam on. While you’re playing your music in iTunes or Spotify, simply put your hand up in a “stop” gesture from at least six feet away from the camera:

This gesture for playing and pausing is the only one available right now for Flutter, which is in alpha, but if you start using your imagination then this app could get infinitely cooler with the addition of a few more gestures. Imagine being able to make a swipe motion that changes tracks without even having to click a button. Check out the app in action below:

It’s a really neat concept that could become quite handy when you have to quickly grab a phone call or want to pause your playlist during a party at your house. This app is definitely one to watch as I get pretty excited at the notion of being able to do more by just making hand signals and gestures.

The one downside to this is that if you’re using other apps like Skype that use your video camera, you won’t be able to use them at the same time. Other than that, get to gesturing!

➤ Flutter for Mac

When you’re heads-down and working hard on something, you might have some music playing on your computer. When that happens, you don’t necessarily want to stop what you’re doing and switch to the app that’s playing the music just to skip tracks. Mac users known that you can simply tap F7 or F9 to go back and forth between tracks, and F8 to pause or play a song, but there’s no graphical representation of what’s being played, until now.

Skip Tunes is a super simple app for Mac that’s $0.99 and gives you a more robust option to just tapping the F keys, and less of a pain than switching to the app that’s running.

The app sits in your OSX menu bar, and without taking up much space at all, lets you take a look at the track information that’s being played in Rdio, Spotify, or iTunes.

Tiny app, big help

Once I’ve got my Spotify playlist going, I would rather not go back to the app until I’m ready to either switch to another playlist or add songs to it. In other words, I want to forget that I have the app open at all. Skip Tunes gives me a lightweight window into what’s playing, and conveniently keeps itself in the menu bar until I want to click it.

Skip Tunes shows you the album art and name, track title, and artist name in a compact window. It even tells you how far along you are in the track. The app also lets you switch shuffle on and off if you like.

When I’m typing, like I am with this post, I don’t want to have to stop to make sure I’m pressing the right key to switch tracks, so for me, the graphical interface for this is the key. I can now forget that I have my apps running in the background at all, especially iTunes, because I personally can’t stand its interface.

➤ Skip Tunes for Mac

You might remember that some time ago Apple launched its first attempt at a social network with “Ping“. When it launched, many thought this would be a perfect spot for Apple and Facebook to partner by sharing and selling music on Facebook’s platform.

That turned out to not be the case, and many stories surfaced about how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t see eye to eye with then Apple CEO Steve Jobs. No deal was done, no partnership between the two were made. That fact however, hasn’t stopped Apple from utilizing Facebook for marketing purposes, just as other companies do on the platform.

The folks on the marketing team for Apple’s App Store and iTunes have found its Facebook pages as a great way to promote new apps and music available, and interact with people who are doing the buying.

Its Facebook page has 4,087,987 Likes and currently has 99,795 talking about it in status updates and comments on the social network. Its iTunes page is doing even better with 19,391,307 Likes and has 460,070 talking about it.

What’s more interesting than the numbers is what Apple is doing on its pages. For example, on the App Store page, the company is playing word games with fans by scrambling up the name of an app and letting people guess which app it is:

The iTunes page is currently taking advantage of Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime performance by promoting her new album:

While Apple’s Ping product has proved to be a serious loser in its attempt to becoming a huge music-focused social network, it looks like Apple hasn’t taken the lack of partnership with Facebook personally at all. So while no deal could be made between the two companies, Apple wasn’t willing to run away from the social network, because without Facebook, Apple would have nowhere else to turn to socially pimp its wares. Facebook knows that, and ended up getting Apple to use them just like everyone else.

You can spend hours checking out new apps, books, and music on iTunes. Some of the time you spend requires you to click through to these items when doing searches.

Macstories spotted a feature that gives you a “quick preview” which happens when you hover over a search result. The desktop feature may have been around since last month, but has gone unnoticed. When you hover, a tiny “i” will show up and when clicked, you’ll be shown a preview pane with most of the information you’d see if you were to have clicked through to the actual item. This is a huge time saver if you’re just browsing your way through the store.

While you still have to click on the little info button, you don’t lose your place during a search and you can simply click the close button to get rid of it. Sure, you could click the back button after you’re done checking out an app, but it felt clunky and Apple agreed.

This quick preview feature isn’t just for apps, and includes all items on iTunes. It appears that the preview includes most information except user reviews, but it does show you the current rating for the item. Apple’s attention to detail comes through again with this minor, yet welcomed feature.

I’m a big fan of simplistic design and when it comes to web apps, I want to know important things up front without having to click around a lot. If you’re a fan of minimalist web app design, and also a movie buff, this app might be exactly what you’re looking for.

WhatsOutt pulls in all of the latest movies that have hit theaters or are available for purchase on DVD and Blue-Ray. While the site could use a little bit of polish, I’ve found it to be quite helpful over the past week.

I’ve bookmarked the page as my default “I’m bored” alternative when there’s nothing to go out and do. I’m a big movie fan, so knowing what flicks are in the theater is important to me.

What’s out?

When there’s nothing left to do other than go to the theater for some popcorn and a (hopefully) mildly entertaining Hollywood movie, the question that you ask your friend or spouse is usually “What’s Out?”. This app lets you take a look two weeks in advance, and links you directly to Fandango for ticket purchases and Apple’s site for movie trailers.

Additionally, WhatsOutt will tell you what movies are available for purchase on DVD, Blue-Ray, or iTunes. Similarly, the app gives you the quick links to buy them just by hovering over the movie’s tile. I’m not a fan of using iTunes on the desktop so this is super helpful for me. I’d love to see the developer pull in Netflix’s latest titles for streaming as well, as it would make this app perfect for me.

I find that sites like Fandango and IMDB are extremely crowded when all I want is a tiny bit of information to help me make a decision, so when apps like this pop up they’re an automatic bookmark for me.

➤ WhatsOutt

The best part about music on the internet is that it’s available in quite a few formats. If you’ve spent the last few years buying up a lot of music on Apple’s iTunes, then you might feel a little left out when it comes to streaming services like Spotify and Rdio.

Developer Jacob Budin decided that you should be able to easily port any playlist you’ve created on iTunes over to Rdio.

And I do mean easily, as in two simple steps that almost anyone can figure out. He calls the service “Trnsmit“.

Export and Upload

When you land on Trnsmit, you’re asked to log in with your Rdio account to authorize the app. Once you’ve done that, all you have to do is export any playlist that you created in iTunes.

To export a playlist, just click on it in iTunes, then click File > Library > Export Playlist. Be sure to choose the XML format and then save the file.

Once you’ve exported the file, click browse on Trnsmit and choose the file. The larger the file you upload, the longer it will take to process. Once it’s complete, you’re given a link to your new Rdio playlist.

It’s almost like magic. Here’s what the translated version of your iTunes playlist will look like on Rdio. I only used one song for demo purposes, but all of the songs that are available on Rdio will show up.

A simple service like Trnsmit helps you get more out of your music, and more importantly makes sure that you don’t have to replicate all of the work that you’ve put into making your killer party and workout playlists.

➤ Trnsmit

It’s not that finding music is hard these days thanks to iTunes and Spotify, it’s really about presentation at this point. On iTunes, you can listen to 30 second clips of music before buying, or listen to the whole track on Spotify with a subscription.

Both services have similar desktop apps that are meant to run in the background when interacting with the music you want to hear.

AllSongsBy uses the iTunes and YouTube APIs to make music listening a more visual experience than that. It’s like watching a TV station made up of your favorite artist.

I want my music TV

AllSongBy is a super slick app that lets you search for music by artist or track, then compiles a playlist of videos based on what it finds on YouTube. You don’t have to leave the service at all, everything plays right there.

Once you’ve searched for an artist, for example, the entire catalogue of music by them is shown below the video playlist. You can listen to iTunes previews, or click the link to purchase them on Apple’s platform. For those who really like getting into the entire catalogue of a musicians, AllSongsBy lets you sort by views the video has, title, or what album it’s on.

A search for The Rolling Stones created a playlist of 116 songs, as well as 7 hours and 32 minutes of video footage.

Wow.

I wish the app had direct links to tracks on Spotify, since the platform has its own API too. Understandably, the affiliate links to iTunes might make the developer a few dollars, but this type of music portal could really catch on if it mashed up tracks and data from different services.

Since AllSongsBy taps the YouTube API for its searches, you can find pretty much any artist in the world, even if they don’t have tracks on iTunes.

So why not sit back and queue up over seven hours of The Rolling Stones music? You’ve got the time, right?

➤ AllSongsBy

With the launch of Google Music, and iTunes upgrading its solution with a new feature called “Match“, the stream your music vs. buy each track debate rages on.

It’s truly a personal preference, but some artists aren’t interested in having their music streamed just yet. Numbers out of Sweden might have them thinking otherwise though.

According to a report from Swedes And The Internet (PDF), Spotify usage has surpassed that of instant messaging, blog reading, and playing games online in Spotify’s native country. Since Spotify has been available for some time in the country, it could be a tip-off to the type of usage we’ll see in the United States and other countries.

Spotify allows you to pay a premium fee to stream all of the music you like, on any of your devices. The service is built to be social by nature, as it is only available to Facebook users. Tracks are shared on your wall and shown in the Facebook ticker, causing your listening habits to instantly go viral among your friends and family on the service.

Spotify beats IM

Here are some of the stats that Swedes And The Internet unearthed during a survey:

• Just over half (57%) of the Swedish people listen and download music via the Internet.
• The percentage of file sharing (21%) have never been greater.
• But the proportion who listen to streaming music using Spotify is even greater.
• Amongst those aged 16 to 25 years, almost 9 out of 10 (85%) are on Spotify and half (55%) listen daily.
• The older people buy CDs and pay per song, while the younger subscribe, share files or listen to Spotify.
• If we compare file-sharers with those who do not share files, we find that there is no difference in how often they buy CDs. However, a larger percentage of file sharers pay to download individual songs than those who do not share files.
• One in three people (37%) listen to Spotify during a month, which is twice as many as file sharing (18%) and many more than those who buy a CD (9%) or pay per song (4%) during a month.
• In Sweden, Spotify usage is even running ahead of use of community sites, IM, blog reading and game playing.

The past, and the future

Spotify launched in Sweden back in 2008, so it had a three-year head-start on the United States. National music revenue grew by ten percent in Sweden at the end of 2009, showing that Spotify indeed has staying power and could be a good thing for artists and record labels.

Will these trends show themselves in the U.S.? It’s too early to say, but traction on Facebook after the f8 partnership announcement has been massive. The Spotify app on Facebook has risen to the top, and surpasses all other music apps by far.

The key for Spotify, I believe, is that it’s not just a music streaming service. It’s a platform that other developers can build apps on top of. That type of platform has never been witnessed on the Internet before, and could drive huge revenue for bands and labels if they just stick with the service and not turn on it. Apps need music, and musicians need distribution. It’s a match made in heaven.

Do you prefer to buy or stream? Perhaps a mix of both? Personally, I prefer to stream all of my music, and if an album is good enough, I go ahead and purchase it. I also spend a lot of money on concert tickets, and that’s where artists make a huge chunk of their money. Maybe Spotify will start offering streams of live concerts, that’s something I’d pay extra for.