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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.

Apple has announced another promotion celebrating the 25 billionth download from the App Store. As the huge milestone draws near, Apple is encouraging customers to enter to win a $10,000 App Store gift card for hitting the lucky number.

If you’re fortunate enough to download the 23 billionth app, you could win $10,000 to spend in the App Store!

Can’t get enough of whizzing those Angry Birds through the air using your trusty catapult, knocking down the fortifications of those adorably cute, wonderfully evil, egg-guzzling Green Piggies?

Well, how are you going to do that without gravity in outer space, hmmm, smart guy?

Yup, that’s right, Rovio has just announced their upcoming Angry Birds sequel, Angry Birds Space.

Were you one of the people who freaked out about OS X Lion not shipping on DVD? Did you get outraged that the cost of a OS X Lion USB thumb drive cost $69.00, more than double the price of Lion through the App Store? Well, prepare to be incensed, because when OS X Mountain Lion ships, it’ll be a Mac App Store exclusive. That means it won’t even ship on a thumb drive anymore.

One of the big new Mountain Lion features is AirPlay Mirroring. This will let you beam your Mac’s desktop, videos and Keynote presentations to any screen connected to the Apple TV. This feature alone will probably sell zillions of Apple TVs into conference rooms the world over. But who wants to wait until OS X 10.8’s summer launch? With a couple of apps, you can use AirPlay on your Mac right now.

What do you do when you’re sitting on a mountain of cash and have a labor condition crisis that has resulted in terrible PR? Give your employees a couple more dollars and hope that satisfies everyone, duh! Apple’s manufacturing partner, Foxconn Technology Group released a statement today that they have raised the wages of their Chinese workers by 16-25% this month. This is the second time wages have risen for Foxconn employees, but the first pay raise still didn’t resolve criticisms over Apple’s labor conditions.

Yesterday we showed you how in OS X Mountain Lion, Software Update has shifted from its own app to the Mac App Store. But how will that work with updating apps that weren’t purchased through the App Store, but were instead bundled with your Mac at point-of-sale or installed from a DVD?

As you can see in the screenshot above, Apple’s got it covered: the Mountain Lion App Store will automatically detect any app that has historically been updated through Software Update and ask to register it to your Apple ID, along with a unique hardware identifier.

One of the features that immediately caught my eye about Mountain Lion was AirPlay Mirroring. As I noted yesterday, this offers a powerful presentation tool for business users as well as a great classroom addition for teachers and trainers.

Of course, it’s also a great entertainment solution and one that has some dramatic advantages over AirPlay Mirroring on the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. Those advantages are likely to set the stage for a showdown between Apple and the entertainment industry.

The psychedelic Whale Trail for iOS has been updated with 32 brand new levels and more power-ups. As the lead developer of Whale Trail told us in a recent interview, the popular App Store game now includes a second Challenge Pack called “Baron’s Revenge.” Among other additions, players can now keep progress synced across multiple devices.

The new levels in Whale Trail 1.2 will take you to the dark side. Now that’s what we’re talking about!

If you live in a city, the people that you meet when walking down the street are often great photo subjects.

But if you, like me, have a hard time getting decent shots with your iPhone of the woman with the cascade of facial tattoos you pass every day on your way to work, check out a free workshop at San Francisco’s Apple store this Sunday.

Brad Evans and Travis Jensen will teach you how to add some street cred to your everyday iPhone photos. They’re a pair of veteran urban shutterbugs who teamed up for #iSnapSF Field Journal, which showcases 42 images from thousands snapped on the streets of San Francisco using the iPhone 4 and the Hipstamatic app. (If you can’t catch the workshop, stay tuned for Cult of Mac’s interview with Jensen for some great iPhone photography tips.)