Google has today confirmed in a regulatory filing that it has completed its $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs, the smart home thermostat company founded by Apple’s former iPod chief, Tony Fadell.

Last week we revealed that Steve Jobs was set to feature in a forthcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, titled “American Cool.”

With the exhibition having now opened, this is the portrait of the Apple co-founder that curators Joel Dinerstein and Frank H. Goodyear III chose to use: an image taken by photographer Charles O’Rear — perhaps most widely known for his digitally augmented “Rolling Hills” background used for Microsoft Windows XP.

A new Cydia tweak lets Snapchat users easily log their conversations in a way that subverts the original concept behind the private one-time message sending tool.

Integrating with the existing Snapchat app, the tweak adds an additional option under the “Open Settings” button on the official app. To access past conversations, users can hit the the settings icon to access the popup menu, then tap on the “Open Snapchat Log” option to view the log.

When Heidi from Waterfield Bags wrote to tell me about the Rough Rider, I had no choice but to write about it. It’s called the Rough Rider after all, which pretty much means I can make as many “going commando” and “bareback” jokes as I like.

It’s almost too easy.

New app Metadata+ tells you whenever a drone strike kills somebody overseas.

Working by pulling data from the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the app plots the location of each strike on a map, and then sends a push notification when an attack takes place.

If that doesn’t strike you as something the often-conservative Apple would want available in its App Store, you’re not wrong.

The app’s official release comes on the back of five separate rejections by the company, and a renaming from Drone+, Drones+, and Dronestream to the more innocuous-sounding Metadata+. The official App Store description reveals only that the app deals in, “Real-time updates on national security.”

Popular account manager and bill organizer app Manilla has received a significant update.

Back by the Hearst Corporation, Manilla is designed to let you manage and share personal finances, household bills, subscriptions, healthcare account, and travel rewards — alongside acting as a handy reminder tool for various bill payments.

Fancy a blue virtual keyboard for your iOS 7 device? If so, the appropriately named Cydia tweak BlueBoard may just be the tweak for you.

Once installed, users need to launch the Settings app and respring the device to get the tweak up and running. The tweak affects both keyboards within iOS 7, so that when enabled both the standard light keyboard or dark keyboard come with blue keys.

Ever wanted to save just one sentence of a web page? Or have you ever bookmarked a page, or sent it to your favorite read-later service, only to come back and wonder what the hell it was you’d wanted to remember?

Then Gloss is for you. It’s a bookmarklet and service that lets you highlight a single line of text on any web page, and it rocks.

Excessive demand and limited production cycles have pushed the Mac Pro’s estimated shipping date back to April.

The high-end machine, available in both Quad-Core and 6-Core editions, was originally supposed to ship in December, before being pushed back to February, then March, and now April.

If you Google Cult of Mac for “minimal iPhone case” you get a lot of results (too many, in fact, including a Mac-only music app – nice job Google). But you should ignore every last one of them, becasue the Bumprz really is a “case” so tiny you almost can’t see it.

Canon’s new G1 X Mark II brings good news and bad news. The bad news is that it ditches the optical viewfinder that has been found on G-series compacts like forever. The good news is that it adds a faster lens, better manual controls, a flip-up touch-screen LCD panel, Wi-Fi and NFC.

So, on balance, not so bad.

Rdio users can now ditch the desktop entirely, thanks to an update which brings playlist editing and reviews to the iOS version of the app. No more booting up that dusty old Mac just to remove an accidentally-added song from your “awesomest songs evah” list.

Weekend Read is a way to squeeze old-fashioned movie manuscripts onto the iPhone’s little screen so you can read them on the go. If you’re a professional script reader – or even a script writer – you’re going to love it.

BloomThat is a unique flower delivery service that harnesses the power of the bicycle to deliver a bouquet of flowers “in under 90 minutes” — pretty fast. But before you read on, there’s one big catch to using the brand-new BloomThat iPhone app to order roses on Valentine’s Day: Your sweetheart must be in the Bay Area — specifically in the tech (and bicycle)-rich towns of San Francisco, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View or Sunnyvale.

Getting so many naked pictures from beautiful, nubile women that are in love with you that your iPhone crashes? That sounds like one of those good problems to me… and to Russian snowboarding athlete Alexey Sobolev, whose iPhone was bombarded by nude pics after he put his phone number on his helmet for all the world to see. But it’s not stressing him out.

It’s easy to forget just how much the iPhone changed things. Today saw the publishing of one of the iPhone’s most familiar patents — its gesture/touch-based text selection tool.

Describing a new way of selecting text using gestures on a multi-touch sensitive display screen, the patent, which was filed back in March 2008, is credited to Wayne Carl Westerman, Apple’s Multi-Touch Architect; Bas Ording, a User Interface Designer who joined Apple not long after Jobs’ return; B. Michael Victor, and Stephen O. Lemay.

We all know Apple is one of the biggest companies around, but how big is just iTunes? Bigger than many famous, multinational corporations, as it turns out… and that’s without counting in iPhone, iPad and Mac sales.

There’s talk that the iPod is dead, but not so. Although Apple’s selling less of its iconic MP3 player than it has in years, there’s at least one place where iPods are worth their weight in gold: Sochi, where an Olypic athlete nicknamed ‘iPod’ has brought home the gold.

It’s not every day that you hear a story of someone quitting their “dream job,” especially at Apple. While people leave the company all the time, hearing anything about it publicly is very rare. Apple’s thick veil of secrecy extends to everything it does, including the talent it gains and loses.

A former mobile designer at Apple named Jordan Price has published a pretty damning explanation of why he chose to quit his job at Apple.

With the proliferation of mobile, internet-connected devices, iOS development and software development as a whole are rapidly expanding fields. The demand for new developers (of all skill levels) far outweighs the supply, and don’t think you need a degree in computer science to get your foot in the door…passion and hard work can get you just as far.

The Complete iOS 7 Developers Course is a true iOS boot camp, you’ll gain the skills and learn the tools needed to develop iPhone and iPad applications for iOS 7. And now you can get it for only $59 – a savings of 88% – thanks to Cult of Mac Deals!

Getting a screenshot on your Mac using the default keystrokes can be adventure in dexterity to say the least. This Cult of Mac Deals offers you a one stroke solution to this dilemma…and at a price that’s tough to beat.

DreamShot uses just one keyboard shortcut to take and send screenshots to all apps, services, and destinations on your Mac that deal with images. Keeping your current system in place, DreamShot is the brain of your screenshot workflow, tying it all together into one seamless experience. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for 50% off – just $4.99.

Facebook’s main iOS app has just added a feature to automatically play videos–sans sound–when you swipe the video preview onto your screen.

If you have data caps, or just don’t want to waste your cellular bandwidth on videos you don’t want to see anyway, there’s a simple way to restrict the auto-play feature to only when you’re on a Wi-Fi network.

Sadly, there’s no way to just turn the feature off, though.

If Indiana Jones carried an iPad, he’d carry it in the Outback Solo. It’s a beautiful, tough waxed-canvas and leather number, with a padded lining for an iPad, pockets on the front for an iPhone and a wallet or a charger, a little loop on the front for handing your whip and a leather flap that closes with a magnetic clasp to keep out snakes. It’s pretty great.

Apple announced this morning that it has promoted Denise Young Smith to lead its human resources worldwide for the company.

Smith has been working as Apple’s chief of human resources for retail operations, but will replace Joel Podolny, who’s moving over to work full-time on Apple University

The iPhone 6 is still many months away from launching but the rumor mill has sprayed a steady stream of rumors about Apple’s next handset, with the latest claiming Apple will ditch the iPhone’s bezel for an edge-to-edge display.