The big intrigue in the tech world today is why Google bought Nest Labs for $3.2 billion and Apple didn’t.

A lot of the speculation is paranoid: Google wants to track everyone offline as well as online, and Nest’s thermostat and smoke alarms give the Googleplex motion sensors right in peoples’ homes.

But wouldn’t Apple be a more natural fit for the home-automation startup? Nest was co-founded by two former Apple staffers, Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers. Fadell was one the fathers of the iPod — a key hardware engineer who led the music player’s development over 17 generations. Rogers was one of Fadell’s top lieutenants.

With great design and easy interfaces, Nest’s combination of hardware and internet software services makes its products very Apple-like. And as home automation is poised to take off (thanks largely to the iPhone and iPad), Apple is surely interested in this potentially huge market.

So why didn’t Apple didn’t pick up the company? Maybe it’s because Jony Ive, Apple’s head designer, was responsible for getting Tony Fadell pushed out of Cupertino.

A lot of us were surprised that Apple didn’t even put up a fight to outbid Google for Nest – co-founded by Tony Fadell aka, the Father of the iPod –  and its army of smarthome employees. Not only did Google score Nest’s innovative smart-thermostat and smoke detector in the $3.2 billion deal, but in an age where quality talent is getting harder to come by, the company also scooped up 100 ex-Apple employees in the process.

As if we didn’t have enough fat shaming to go around, there’s a new game on the App Store called Plastic Surgery For Barbara, and it’s a doozy.

The idea here is that Barbara (or Barbie, if you will) is overweight. The developers want kids aged 12+ to play a game in which they can assume that fat is ugly, and that the only way to fix a weight problem is through surgery.

“Barbara likes to eat a lot of burgers and chocolates and once she found out that she looks ugly,” says the App Store description. “She can’t make it up with this situation any additional second. And today plastic surgeon is going to make operation on her body and face in order to return cute Barbara’s look.”

So, she’s fat, which means she’s ugly, and she can’t wait any longer. If she just gets surgery, she’ll be “cute” again. Whew.

Gag.

Legítimo — Productivity — Free

Sometimes, it’s a good idea to get something in writing, like if you and your roommate agree to split utilities in exchange for the right to have pizza and Hawaiian shirts on Fridays. Crucial dealings like those are the sorts of things you bring ink and paper in on. But what if you don’t know how to speak Official-Sounding Legal Document?

Legítimo is here to help. You can use it to draw up loan agreements, leases, sales and purchases, and service contracts and even sign them in the app. And everyone gets a copy via e-mail or text.

Also, help me figure out which category that utilities/Pizza Day deal falls under. No reason.

Legítimo

If you’re used to games taking time to explain what they are and how you play them, then Simian Interface may not be for you.

But you should play it anyway, wuss, because you don’t need that much instruction to understand this one. The game leaves it up to you to figure out what it wants and how to do it, but it’s really not that hard to figure out.

And if you put the time in and go along for the short time it takes to play through it, you’ll get a unique, entirely satisfying experience.

The team behind Evomail, a popular third-party mail client for iOS, today released Evomail+, a new version of its app designed for iOS 7. In addition to a beautiful new design, the new release adds a whole host of new features, including customizable gestures, filtering tools, and Dropbox and Box.net integration.

Oh, and like it’s predecessor, it’s completely free.

Samsung wants all the beautiful people to use its phones (and, probably more importantly, to be photographed using them). So how does the South Korean company get its latest, greatest smartphones into the hands of celebrities hooked on iPhones?

One method for getting Samsung gear into the manicured hands of Hollywood’s biggest stars is the company’s White Glove program, which smooths the way for the rich and powerful to make the big switch away from Apple’s shiny gadgets.

Moment has taken high-end, multi-element lens design and brought it to the iPhone. Going up squarely against Olloclip, Moment’s two new lenses promise “no” distortion, minimal chromatic aberration and great build quality. Sounds amazing.

You probably have a regular login password for your Mac, which you type in when installing software or maybe even when you deactivate the screensaver. It’s fairly secure, but there are indeed ways around it.

If a malicious person with physical access to your Mac wants to get at your data, they can simply boot into a different mode, like Recovery Mode, Single User Mode or Verbose Mode. Or, they can boot your Mac using a USB drive and get around the password that way.

Setting a firmware password will add another, lower level of security to your Mac, and will make it so anyone who wants to boot into an alternate mode will need your second password. It’s fairly easy to enable, too.

It’s possible to make a lot of money by writing an iOS app. In fact, the top iOS app makers each gross as much as $90,000 a day from their offerings. Yet despite these success stories, the vast majority of app developers are finding it difficult to make money on the App Store, and the bad news is, it’s only going to get worse, with a new forecast predicting that less than one app in 10,000 will make money by 2018. Woof.

We’ve been waiting for years for Apple to start using Liquidmetal in its products. The company has an exclusive licensing agreement to use the space-age alloy in its products, but until now, the only thing made by Apple of Liquidmetal is the SIM Ejector tool for the iPhone.

That’s not stopping Apple from dreaming about exciting new uses for their T-1000 alloy,, though. New patents from Apple published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office suggest that future pressure sensors, like the home button, could be made of Liquidmetal.

One of the most bizarre games of recent memory is The Binding Of Isaac. Inspired by both The Legend Of Zelda and the Old Testament, The Binding Of Isaac is rogue-like game that follows a deformed naked child as he explores a subterranean world of his own Freudian nightmares to try to escape his insane Christian fundamentalist mother. I told you it was weird, and playing it is even weirder.

The Binding Of Isaac is already available on the Mac, and thanks to a remake/sequel The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth, it may — may! — be coming to the iPad as well.

If Apple makes a larger iPhone this year — say, a 4.7-inch model — it’s unlikely that they will just phase out the 4-inch iPhone. Instead, they could take an approach similar to this year’s iPad Air and iPad mini: two functionally identical devices with different screen sizes.

So what would an iPhone Air look like? Designer Federico Ciccarese of SET Solution has put together some renders of his dream iPhone Air, and, well, to be honest, it’s pretty much a fantasy. But it’s a pretty one.

While games dominated the App Store in 2013 in terms of top grossing apps, digital comic app comiXology has announced that it was the highest grossing non-game iPad app  — for the third year running.

Originally arriving in the App Store last Thursday, Rhythm Thief & the Paris Caper mysteriously vanished the following day after SEGA discovered “unexpected problems” with the game.

Do you get annoyed at struggling to find symbols on iOS, or find yourself missing the Unicode library found on OS X?

If you’re the kind of person that needs to make frequent use of symbols and characters not found on QWERTY keyboards, you could a lot worse than checking out the new Simbol app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

For some time now, a number of pundits have been calling on Apple to release a cheaper version of the iPhone to grow market share in developing countries.

To some extent Apple has apparently listened — since it is reportedly planning to sell the discontinued iPhone 4 in India for the reduced price of around RS 15,000 ($250) — making it among the cheapest unsubsidized iPhones in the world.

Feedshare is a great new service for sharing your RSS feeds. That is, you can upload the OPML file containing all your subscribed feeds and it will be available to anyone who cares. And you don’t just have to share your entire RSS setup either. You could use this to share a set of feeds on a particular subject for instance.

The iOS 7.1 beta seems to be way more in flux than previous betas, adding odd little experiments (f.lux-style white-point adjustment) and handy – and surely temporary – little tweaks for developers (manual deleting of install files). But one thing that has been going crazy throughout the betas 1–3 is the keyboard.

And man is the keyboard in iOS 7.1 beta 3 a pain in the ass.

A new feature in iOS 7.1 beta 3 is the ability to delete iOS installation files that have been automatically downloaded over-the-air.

Until now, iDevice users who chose not to install a particular update to iOS would find that their iPad or iPhone would nonetheless download the install file and store it locally — the only way to remove it being to update your device’s firmware.

The verdict is in — and Apple is stuck with Michael Bromwich, the antitrust monitor appointed to ensure the company’s compliance in e-book price fixing antitrust rulings.

The new bandwagon onto which camera makers can desperately throw themselves in the hopes of saving their low-end camera sales is “smart lenses,” like Vivitar’s new Vivicam IU680. These are in fact just cameras, only they look like lenses and they sit on your iPhone, connecting wirelessly to allow you to control the device from an app and receive pictures from a large-sensor camera in return.

But really, what’s the point?

When Sunrise Calendar got its big iOS 7 makeover last fall, it solidified itself as one of the leading third-party calendars in the App Store. The biggest thing it was lacking was an iPad version—well, until now. Released last week, Sunrise had made its way to the iPad, and it’s great.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has been working on a big-budget Steve Jobs biopic for awhile now. Not only will it have way less zero Ashton Kutcher, but it will be funded by Sony and probably go down as the Jobs movie of record.

Sorkin was confirmed to write the script back 2012, but there’s been little news out of the project since then. Today it was reported that the script has finally been turned into Sony, which means that production is just around the corner.