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Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is just a week away and although it’s highly unlikely we’ll see any new iOS devices, we will get our first glimpse at iOS 7.

iOS 7 could be one of the biggest iOS updates to date, with many rumors claiming it will be completely overhauled with a new look and new features as Jony Ive makes his mark as the head of software design. A report that was published earlier this month claims that Apple has had to pull engineers away from OS X 10.9 to help complete it.

Personally, I couldn’t be more excited about iOS 7. I made the switch to Android just before Christmas because I found Jelly Bean on the Nexus 4 to be better than iOS 6 on the iPhone 5 at a lot of things, which I wrote about back in February.

Having used Android for four months, I’ve compiled a list of things iOS 7 should learn from its biggest rival. If Apple adds these things to its own platform — or variations of them that provide the same experience — then I think iOS 7 could be fantastic.

Check out the list below and see if you agree.

Apple just posted videos for every session at WWDC 2013 so developers who didn’t make it out to California for the conference can still get all the new info on how to prepare their apps for iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

The WWDC 2013 videos can be streamed from Safari, or you can download them straight to your desktop to watch later. You have to be a registered Apple Developer to view the videos which can be found here once you sign in.

Source: Apple

With iOS 7 Beta 1 now out on the iPhone, the next obvious question is “When is iOS 7 Beta 2” coming out? And what about Beta 3? Beta 4? When will iOS 7 go gold?

Good questions, and obviously, only Apple could tell you for sure. But Apple’s been releasing post-WWDC betas long enough at this point that it’s pretty easy to track how long on average each beta takes, and by doing so, we can not only forecast when iOS 7 will be released with a probable amount of accuracy: we can put a date on the iPhone 5S’s release.

Here’s what we think. We think iOS 7 Beta 2 will be released next Monday, the 24th. iOS 7 will go gold on September 10th, the same day the iPhone 5S will be announced. And the iPhone 5S and iOS 7 will be released on September 20th. Here’s why.

Testing a beta version of OS X 10.9 can always be risky, but to mitigate the possibility of losing all your data thanks to a crazy bug, you can always try running Mavericks in a virtual environment.

Parallels just announced that developers can install the OS X 10.9 Developer Preview in a virtual machine by using Parallels Desktop 8. To help users get started using Mavericks in Parallels, the Engineering team published the following guides:

Apple just scored a big win with the education industry last night as the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced it has signed a $30 million contract with Apple to supply its students with iPads in the classroom.

The terms of the contract show that Apple will provided the iPads to LAUSD at a cost of $678 per iPad. That price is a bit above retail, but the iPads will come pre-loaded with a bunch of educational software, and Apple’s giving them a three-year warranty as well.

Apple SVP Phil Schiller had the following to say about the deal in the official press release:

Steve Wozniak was the first guy to power up the vintage Apple I, the computer that gave the world Apple, Inc. and lead to all the products that followed: the Mac, the iPhone, the iPad and more.

Now Steve Wozniak is powering up the Apple 1 again, this time ceremonially for the History San Jose Museum.

Jony Ive didn’t even make an appearance at the WWDC keynote last week, but that didn’t stop his name from spreading all over Twitter and Facebook, thanks to his influence on iOS 7’s new parallax UI.

A report from the people at ViralHeat shows that Jony Ive had the most social media mentions of anyone at Apple, including CEO Tim Cook. Sir Jony Ive had 28,377 mentions across Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, while Tim cook was mentioned 20,919 times.

Not only did Jony get more attention on social media, the comments about him trended more positively than those about Cook (72% positive for Ive, 64% positive for Cook)

Here are the full social media stats about WWDC:

Readdle’s awesome Calendars+ app, which is normally priced at $6.99, is now free for 48 hours. It’s one of the best Google Calendar apps for iOS, packed with useful features and a great user interface, and it won’t cost you a penny if you download it now. But hurry!

Ever since Jony Ive took over Apple’s industrial design, it has been important to Cupertino to make their products out of material with authenticity and substance, not just cheap plastic. In the pursuit of these goals, Apple has managed to revolutionize the mass-production of not one, but two different materials that had previously gone virtually unused in gadgets, at least externally: glass and aluminum. And Apple’s made big plays to experiment with even more cutting-edge materials, like Liquid Metal.

Here’s a question, then. Apple likes to make its Macs and iPhones out of materials that feel authentic, that give them a unique look and feel. In the pursuit of those materials, Apple has revolutionized at least a couple of industrial design processes.

So what if Jony Ive got it in his head to make iPhones out of wood?

XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the highly-acclaimed tactical role-playing game from 2K Games, is coming to iOS this week, and it’s just begun its App Store rollout. It’s an exact port of the title that first hit the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 late last year, so you can expect a true console-quality experience and amazing visuals.

Those things don’t come cheap, however, with XCOM priced at $19.99 in the U.S.

Apple just rolled out a new software update for the Apple TV that adds new channels for HBO GO and WatchESPN, as well as Sky News, Crunchyroll, and Qello. The iOS 5.3 release is compatible with both the second- and third-generation Apple TVs, and is available to download now.

https://youtu.be/zut2NLMVL_k

A video from 1994 that has purportedly never been seen by a mass audience before features a bushy-bearded Steve Jobs discussing his legacy during his so-called NeXT wilderness years. And surprisingly, the egocentric and charismatic founder of Apple believes that in two hundred years, he will be forgotten.

When you set up a personal hotspot on your iOS device, the first thing you should do is delete the password Apple generates for your and enter your own. Researchers at the University of Erlangen in Germany have discovered a way to crack Apple’s hotspot passwords in under a minute, leaving your iOS device vulnerable to attack.

An exciting new update that brings new maps, weapons, and guns to Gameloft’s Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour is now available to download on iOS. Called Meltdown, the update is free to existing owners of the popular first-person shooter, and it’s one of the biggest the game has received since it hit the App Store back in December.

I’m completely reliant on Mailbox for my mail processing now: it’s just so easy to swipe and tap my way to an empty inbox that I prefer using my iPhone over the iPad or even the Mac to get things done (the iPad version of Mailbox is plain terrible, with a janky layout and tiny tiny body text for many messages).

But iPhone mail newcomer Ninja Mail might usurp Mailbox’s place in my daily e-mail “workflow.” No, it can’t file things for later, or even send the messages to folders. But it has one thing that makes it amazing fun to use: Swishing sword sounds that accompany every swipe.

We last saw Miniot making the rather hot MkII wooden Smart Cover for the iPad. Now it’s back with this equally stylish Miniot Book for the iPhone 5. The Book uses the same clever bendy wooden hinge as the iPad case, and adds in a rather smart protective “box.” And one thing is certain: Our wood-obsessed editor John Brownlee is gonna freak out over this.

Q: How Does Bob Marley like his donuts?
A: Wi’ Jam in [1].

And Jamn is also the name of this little pocket software toolkit for musicians. It’s an iPhone app which shows you the notes in a any scale in any key, but it has a rather clever gimmick that makes it a lot easier to read: the notes are on a wheel.

If you stayed in any but the most flea-bitten of hotels in the last few years, you will have seen an iHome dock on the nightstand, ready to be mostly ignored until you need a place to charge your iPhone at night.

And as you eyed the clock/radio/speaker you may have chuckled to yourself and muttered something about the poor hotel owner, who just wasted like tens of thousands of dollars on now-obsolete 30-pin connector-equipped boxes.

If only he's waited, he could have had this new Lightning version, which also works with older models.

Admit it: When your iPhone/iPad/camera lens/spectacles get greasy fingerprints all over it, you don't reach for a microfiber cloth,right? Nope. You do exactly what everyone else does, and polish off the dirt with a corner of your shirt.

But what if you could continue with your filthy (if rather popular) habit, but with the magical results of microfiber? Thanks to the Voy Voy Summer Oxford, you can.

Wondering what iOS 7 will look like running on an iPad? Then look no further than this video from Russian blogger Rozetked, which shows just that.

If you haven’t played Torchlight, yet, you’re missing out. It’s essentially a Diablo-style dungeon crawling hack n slash game, which is no surprise considering that Max Schaefer and Erich Schaefer, co-designers of Diablo and Diablo II, were on the team that made it.

Today, and for the next 48 hours, Torchlight is free to download and own on GoG.com, formerly known as Good Old Games, one of the best ways to get older games for your Mac without any digital rights management (DRM) mess.

That’s some seriously worth it for a download, but wait, there’s more!

Louie Mantia is a renowned icon and visual interface designer in Silicon Valley who has worked at big companies like Apple and Square. He was involved in designing many of Apple’s pre-iOS 7 app icons, like Trailers, Remote, Garageband, and iBooks. He even designed the Starbucks and Obama campaign app icons, for crying out loud.

The point is that this guy knows good icon design. He’s posted the above iOS 7 concept on his Dribbble, and I think it looks fantastic. He did the same thing last year for iOS 6. This time around, I think he’s nailed it better than Apple.

“Today, I revisited that original task and took about a day to understand the new style,” said Mantia. “Simpler, smoother, subtler. While I don’t employ the grid they created (and while I instead use the colors I chose), these feel interesting and balanced. Vibrant and bold, but not overbearing.”

Indeed. Please hire this guy back, Tim Cook. He gets it.

Source: Dribbble

Simple, a great bank I’ve been using for the past several months, has brought its “Goals” budgeting feature to the iPhone. If you haven’t checked out Simple as a banking alternative yet, then go do that now because it will entice you. The whole service is exquisitely designed on web and mobile, and the customer support is top notch (there’s an open ticket to chat with a real Simple employee right in the app, if that says anything).

While Simple still has some growing to do, it got better today. Goals helps you manage your money on the go so you don’t go broke buying overpriced lattes and such.

Following the rising success of Twitter’s video sharing app Vine, Facebook is set to bring video to Instagram at a press event this Thursday. According to a report from AllThingsD, Instagram’s “video product” will revolve around quickly sharing short clips, although the allowed length of clips isn’t yet known. Vine lets you record up to six seconds per share.

Facebook just came out with version 6.2 of its iOS app. The update includes a new feature that allows users to add icons to status updates that show what you’re feeling based on a number of categories.

To use the new icons feature, just draft a status update in the new app and tap the new emoticon icon. The new icons screen is divided into 7 categories: Feeling, Watching, Reading, Listening to, Drinking, Eating, and Playing. You also change who can see something you’ve shared and start new conversations with photos.

What’s New in Version 6.2

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