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Here’s another lovely short video from Matthew Pearce, the man behind the Matt’s Macintosh YouTube channel.

MacPaint doesn’t just explain what MacPaint was, but is more about why it was an important part of the software lineup back in those days. Things we take for granted today (like copying a graphic and pasting it into another document) were new and exciting back then.

As Matt points out, MacPaint in 1984 laid foundations for features you still see today in modern graphics applications.

(And one other thing: Matthew’s original Macintosh 128K looks pristine, and the screen as clean and bright as the day it was made. He even has an as-new copy of the original printed manual. Where does he find this stuff?)

Enjoy!

China Telecom and Apple have officially confirmed that the carrier will get the iPhone 4S on March 9th. China Telecom’s 130 million subscribers will have access to Apple’s latest handset for $0 RMB with select carrier contracts. The device will be sold in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB flavors.

Nestled in Maiden, North Carolina is a 500,000 square-foot data center for Apple’s iCloud services and Siri. The company published its 2012 Environmental Update today with new details about the upcoming solar farm and fuel cell facility that will power the billion dollar data center.

Today’s painfully obvious report comes from Japanese site Macotakara. Citing a “reliable source,” the report claims that Apple’s sixth-generation iPhone will be released in either September or October of this year.

Apple broke its typical 12-month release pattern with the iPhone 4S, and it looks like the trend will continue in 2012.

It’s never been easier (or as cheap) to translate words and phrases between over 60 languages than it is with the free Google Translate app for iOS. Simply select the language you require, type or speak your phrase, then wait while Google does the hard work. Here’s how to get started.

This morning we showed you the preview of ABC Nightline’s exclusive look inside Foxconn that’s set to air tomorrow night. Apple has granted anchor Bill Weir unprecedented access to its Chinese supply chain, and ABC News has already published a fascinating report and gallery of pictures from its recent trip.

If you’ve jailbroken your iPhone 4S, you have access to some great tweaks for adding functionality to Apple’s digital assistant, Siri. You can turn Siri into your personal translator, launch apps and toggle system settings, tweet, and and even change the look of the Siri UI.

We’ve collected the best tweaks in Cydia to help you supercharge Siri on your jailbroken iPhone 4S.

The VideoLAN organization has released VLC 2.0 “Twoflower” with a completely revamped interface, hundreds of bug fixes, performance enhancements, experimental BluRay support, and more. We told you that version 2.0 had hit the final design stage last week, and it’s finally ready to download!

Following its launch in the U.S. back in January, CloudOn has finally arrived in the U.K., allowing British users to access Microsoft Office applications on their iPad. The free app lets you view, edit, and create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on your tablet, which can then be saved directly to your Dropbox account.

This weird-looking gadget is a Strap Stylus for iPad, designed for people who require assistive devices to help them use computers.

The Strap Stylus, along with the Mouthstick and Steady Stylus pictured below, all come with soft-touch capacitive tips. They’re the brainchild of Dutch designer Ivo Beckers, who now sells them worldwide on Etsy under the name ShapeDad. (We previously mentioned his conductive paintbrush socks a couple of years ago.)

His company makes a lot of 3D printed stands and supports for iPads, but assistive devices are now an important business line.

James Thomson, developer of esteemed iOS calculator PCalc, posted an interesting image on Twitter earlier today.

He mentioned that he was working on iPad Retina artwork – “just in case” – and the results were, well, big.

The image above has been resized to 640 pixels to fit inside Cult of Mac’s layout, so make sure you click here to see the original at full size.

Chances are James isn’t the only iOS developer trying out a little Retina-scale artwork at the moment. There’s still nothing official from Apple, but speculation about the likely resolution of the iPad 3 screen is hotting up since last week’s MacRumors story that claimed to confirm the device’s resolution at 2048×1536.

Following intense scrutiny from the media over working conditions in its supply chain overseas, Apple has granted ABC Nightline anchor Bill Weir exclusive access to its Foxconn factories. In a special edition of Nightline that will air tomorrow night, Weir will tour the largest ‘iFactory’ in Shenzhen, China.

Apple has settled a class action lawsuit over the ‘antennagate’ debacle that surfaced shortly after the launch of the iPhone 4 in 2010. Around 25 million customers in the U.S. will be entitled to $15 in cash or a free bumper case.

Apple finally brought the rich text format to its Mail app in iOS 5, but the Cupertino company is yet to introduce it to an app that I think needs it just as much: Notes. According to the screenshot above, however, it’s coming in iOS 5.1.

A photograph of what is believed to be an iPad 3 logic board with an unreleased Apple “A5X” processor has appeared within a forum post on Chinese site WeiPhone. If the component is genuine, it suggests Apple’s next tablet may not ship with that quad-core A6 processor after all.

Yet another rear panel for Apple’s iPad 3 has surfaced, refueling rumors that claim the third-generation tablet will feature a new camera and a slightly modified design to accommodate its new components.

Fans continue to make the trek to the late Steve Jobs’ home in Palo Alto, California to pay their respects. The Apple co-founder’s silver Mercedes SL55 AMG is still sitting without a license plate outside the 5,768-square-foot home he lived in for many years.

According to The Los Angeles Times, admirers and tourists from around the world are still coming by to pay their respects:

“I wanted to see where the great man lived,” said Anna Bonaccorso, a 63-year-old from Brooklyn, N.Y. She paused furtively to snap a photograph of the house on a recent afternoon before trying to slip away unnoticed.

Following widespread speculation that Apple will introduce a super-hi res display in the next-gen iPad, MacRumors has been able to confirm that the iPad 3 will indeed have a ‘Retina’ display with a 2048×1536 resolution. The site got ahold of one of the displays that has been floating around for the last several weeks.

Are you interested in making iPhone and iPad apps for the App Store? If you’d like to get your feet wet, or at least see what’s involved, Apple has posted a new walkthrough called “Start Developing iOS Apps Today.”

The simple guide takes you through the initial setup and teaches you about basic tools, frameworks, Apple’s design policies, and more. The goal is that you will be able to create an app from scratch and have it ready to debut in the App Store.

Apple’s announcement of Mountain Lion breaks with the past in a few ways including by announcing with out a major Apple event. One of the other changes is the news the Apple is moving OS X to a yearly release cycle like iOS. That may be a great way to introduce new features for consumers, but it’s likely to create problems for organizations that have a large number of Macs.

Schools and colleges are still among the organizations that have large Mac populations and have always been a key market for Apple. A yearly release schedule stands to impact them more than any other type of organization and that impact isn’t likely to be a positive one.

Laaaaaaaaaaadies and Gentlemen, welcome to Friday Night Fights, a new series of weekly deathmatches between two no-mercy brawlers who will fight to the death — or at least agree to disagree — about which is better: Apple or Google, iOS or Android?

After this week’s topic, someone’s going to be spitting teeth. Our question: What’s the better music-in-the-cloud service? Google Music or iTunes Match?

In one corner, we have the 900 pound gorilla, Cult of Mac; in the opposite corner, wearing the green trunks, we have the plucky upstart, Cult of Android!

Place your bets, gentlemen! This is going be a bloody one.

With all the news about OS X Mountain Lion, one can only wonder which felines didn’t make the cut for Apple’s next-gen operating system. Luckily, iPhoneSavior managed to get its hands on exclusively leaked images of all the rejected cats. As you can see, there were several great candidates.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen this great image in every copy of Mountain Lion:

Ferocious.

One of the easiest and most effective ways of taking panoramic photos on your iOS device is with 360 Panorama. Unlike other apps that have you moving your device an inch at a time and snapping a number of photos, this one allows you to simply pan around while it snaps the images automatically.

Once complete, 360 Panorama stitches everything together to provide a fantastic 360° image which you can share with the world on Facebook, Twitter, or via email.

Here’s how to take panoramic photos with 360 Panorama.

Yep, we said it. The new Windows 8 logo is pretty ugly. It actually looks a lot like the Windows 1.0 logo, only slightly worse. Say what you will about using big kitties as the title and logo for an operating system, at least the OS X logo doesn’t look like it was drawn by a 10 year-old using Microsoft Paint.

The world is mad for smartphones. Everyone wants the latest and greatest smartphone that blows their mind with its ability to tell you where your friends are at, what they’re eating, their opinions on Rick Santorum’s sweatervests, and their favorite cat videos. But phones become outdated so quickly that we quickly toss out last year’s trend and pickup the next great mobile device more frequently than we change our car’s oil. It should come as no surprise, then, that pretty soon there will be more smartphones on the planet that humans. In fact, it will happen by the end of the year.