One month after its launch in the App Store, Codeacademy: Hour of Code has gone universal — being optimized for iPad and iPad mini, as well as iPhone and iPod touch.

Google has lost its battle against a patent troll after a Texas court found Android guilty of infringing a push notification patent. SimpleAir — which has also targeted Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and other technology giants — is now seeking $125 million in damages.

Sony Pictures Television has a new iOS game available in the App Store and, unlike previous titles, this one’s based on an original property.

Called Suits and Swords, the game is a cross between a blackjack card game and an RPG, set in four different fantasy realms.

You’ve most probably seen Apple’s tear-jerking “Misunderstood” Christmas commercial: an ad about a seemingly isolated teenager who spends the holidays with their face buried in their iPhone — only to reveal at the end that they’ve been using the device’s camera to create a touching tribute to family togetherness.

Well, it seems that someone from Universal Studios Orlando’s ad agency David&Goliath also watched it (or else this whole thing is an amazing coincidence) because the theme park’s new ad — embedded above — bears an uncanny resemblance to Apple’s much-lauded commercial.

If your New Year’s resolution was to age in style, then you’re clearly thinking along the same lines as the makers of The Sims FreePlay for iOS.

In its first update of 2014, the freemium mobile version of the EA life sim now lets you “complete your family tree” by aging your teen Sims into adults by completing the “Adulthood” quest, while also letting you socialize with senior sims by completing the “Seniors” quest.

Evernote continues to suck as an app, and excel as a back-end service for better-designed apps. EverMemo is yet another quick note taking app which posts your important scribblings direct to your Evernote account to be indexed and assimilated, all without having to launch Evernote’s own bloated monster and tap desperately as you try to find the new-note button before you forget whatever it was you were trying to remember.

You’re most likely using one of two calendar services, or maybe both: Google Calendar and/or iCloud. Now – if you’re using the truly excellent Fastmail email service – you can test out the beta version of its new calendar. It’s as clean and simple as the mail service, and syncs perfectly with your iDevice or Mac using CalDAV.

A large number of users have reported issues with a problematic status bar in iOS immediately following a jailbreak.

While it’s hardly the biggest issue for a liberated iOS device to encounter, having the carrier name, signal status and remaining battery turn from white to black — or sometimes not vanish when it’s supposed to — while using certain apps can be both annoying and overall detrimental to user experience. Thanks to a straightforward resolution , however, that issue can now be sorted out in the form of a Cydia package installation by following these steps:

Got a car? Got an iPhone? Like to tap away at the iPhone screen and distract yourself instead of watching the road ahead and earning the trust that pedestrians and cyclists put in your every time they venture out onto the road? Then I have good news! Now you can careen down the highway, secure in the knowledge that your precious iPhone will never slip off the dash, nor even deviate from it’s perfectly-chosen angle.

If you have a modern Mac, there’s almost no reason not to use FileVault, the all-disk encryption that’s built in to OS X. It doesn’t slow the computer down, it keeps your data safe and – if the machine is switched off – then even if a baddie pulls your drive he’s stuck with a useless chunk of silicon.

And now Apple has added one more convenience for the cautious user: authenticated reboots.

Seemingly just moments after an iTunes update added the ability to browse our App Store wish lists, along comes Mentio, an iPhone app to do the exact same thing. Only instead of using your existing iTunes wish list, it lets you build your own, and buy apps, movies and music from within the app itself.

To quote the all-seeing Strobist, “Memo to @Nikon: THIS is how you do a retro-dialed digital camera.” Take a look. These are the official product shots of the Fujifilm X-T1, an SLR-style mirrorless camera joining Fujifilm’s X-Series lineup. Isn’t she purdy?

More than two million videos from the web are being saved to Pocket each week now. To make the viewing experience more seamless, Pocket has integrated AirPlay into its iOS app for sharing with the Apple TV. The update went live today in the App Store.

Thanks to the slickness of AirPlay, users can exit the Pocket app when a video is streaming. There’s a new AirPlay button embedded in the app’s video player.

“This is just the beginning of how Pocket plans on truly becoming the DVR for the Web, and we think it’s going to be a great addition to our users’ experience in general,” said Pocket.

Source: App Store

Twitterrific 5, a popular third-party Twitter app for iOS from The Iconfactory, was updated today with a few new features.

Beats Music launched yesterday as a Spotify/Rdio alternative, and the new music service is already having scaling issues.

Due to an “extremely high volume of interest,” Beats Music has stopped adding new users until it can support the unexpected demand. The app is currently sitting in the number one position in the free chart of the App Store’s Music category.

Have you had problems with iOS 7 randomly crashing and rebooting? For many, the white screen of death (or black, depending on your device color) has been a big enough problem to fill countless pages of complaints on Apple’s support forum.

“We have a fix in an upcoming software update for a bug that can occasionally cause a home screen crash,” said Apple today in a statement. While Apple hasn’t specified when the fix will be released, iOS 7.1 would be a safe bet. The software is rumored to drop in March.

Source: Mashable

I’ll be honest: Missile Command was never my favorite classic game from the glory days of Atari. Originally released as a coin-op in 1980, designed by Dave Theurer (the man who also created Tempest and the world’s first commercial game to feature 3-D polygonal graphics, I, Robot), Missile Command came straight out of an era in which the scariest thing imaginable was a nuclear attack.

Today Apple released a minor update to iTunes that brings the ability to view your iTunes Store wish list directly in your local library. Support for Arabic and Hebrew has also been improved with other stability improvements.

Source: Apple

So, I finally broke down and bought a Pebble Smart Watch the other day. Just rolled into Best Buy and looked at both the FitBit Force fitness tracker and the Pebble. At just $20 more than the Force, I figured I’d get a fun geeky gadget that would do more than tell the time and count my steps.

What I got for my $150 was a geeky gadget that tells me the time and passes notifications–usually–from my iPhone. And that’s about it, really.

I’ve grown up with this last name, so I’m fairly used to people butchering it. I’m surprised at the amazing number of pronunciations given to my last name over the past several decades, with people adding all sorts of weird consonants that just aren’t there.

Siri isn’t much different, though she does manage to say my name phonetically, but my family doesn’t say “Luh-Feb- Vree.” We say, “Luh-Fay” with an accent on the second syllable.

Turns out, it’s easier than you’d think to teach Siri how to say names correctly.

Last night Bill Gates jumped onstage at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to talk about how he’s curing the world of polio as well as the next big tech ideas – weirdly there was no mention of an iWatch. What begins as a gushing interview takes an awkward turn when the former King of Windows starts eying Jimmy’s MacBook at the of his desk corner.

Watch the awkward exchange in full glory below:

Carl Icahn’s relationship with Apple has been rocky ever since he became the company’s most loquacious investor last Fall. While ribbing Tim Cook publicly with one hand for not doing a bigger buyback, the other has been busy forking over fat stacks of cash for more and more AAPL shares.

This morning Carl went classic Icahn and took to Twitter again to complain about Cook and the Apple board not giving him and other investors more money with his proposed $50 billion buyback, while also announcing he’s been gobbling up AAPL shares faster than Jaws went after those guys on the boat:

Tico Timer — Education — $0.99

Here’s another app from the maker of the very clever Humming Timing. Developer Ricardo Fonseca made Tico Timer for children, and it counts down using animated shapes instead of numbers. So the clock will expire when, for example, all the squares disappear from the screen. Or when the large circle shrinks down to a point and disappears. And all of this happens while some very relaxing music plays.

The goal of the app is to teach kids a sense of time, but I’ll probably use it myself because it’s the most relaxing timer I’ve ever seen.

Tico Timer

https://youtu.be/8ShyrAhp8JQ

Apple added two new videos ads to its YouTube channel this afternoon – ‘Light Verse’ and ‘Sound Verse’. The two ads have been running on TV for a couple days now and are pared down 30-second variants of their new 90-second ‘Your Verse’ ad that debuted during the NFL playoffs.

As the name implies, Light Verse features a bunch of scenes featuring the iPad Air, light beams and enough lens flair to make J.J. Abrams proud. Sound verse focuses on, you guessed it, sound. Both ads also featureRobin Williams’ narration from Dead Poets Society.

Here’s Sound Verse:

Science is cool, and Atomic Fusion: Particle Collider wants you to know that.

It’s a tough game to describe. It’s kind of like a shooter, but you don’t shoot anything. It reminds me a bit of Tilt to Live except that nothing is really trying to kill you. You’re basically just flying around collecting stuff. So maybe it’s also a little like Katamari Damacy but not nearly so goofy.

Whatever it is, though, it’s fun.