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.

Not content with stopping game creators from using the word “candy” in their titles, Candy Crush Saga developer King is now trying to block indie developers from using the word “saga,” too. The company has filed a “Notice of Opposition” against Stoic for its Viking-themed role-playing game The Banner Saga.

If you’ve been thinking about ditching your iPhone for an Android-powered smartphone, but you’ve been put off by the time and effort it takes to transfer all of your data, you no longer have an excuse not to make the move. Motorola just updated its Migrate transfer tool to support iPhone users who want to make the switch.

Using Migrate, users can transfer all of their contacts and calendar entries from their old iPhone to a new Motorola handset in just a few simple steps. It all happens without wires, and it’s completely free.

Have you ever been browsing the internet, opening new tabs, and blithely going about your business when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, an ad begins blaring at you from one of your various tabbed windows?

This can happen in Safari or Chrome (or any other browser, really), but Chrome has a new feature that will let you find the guilty, noisy culprit and shut it down.

If you’re anything like me, as much as you love your Apple TV, the fact that it is so small actually causes some problems in your entertainment center, as it can actually be nudged around and fall behind things. That’s a big pain, especially since the accompanying Apple remote isn’t just equally tiny (and even easier to use), but depends on line-of-sight to work properly.

The Apple TV holder by Tinsel & Timber is a wonderful solution to this problem. A beautifully carved block of walnut with indentations for your Apple TV and remote, not only will it keep your entertainment center organized and the remote where you can find it, but it also looks great.

Tinsel & Tinder’s Apple TV holder is also available in maple, and no matter which one you buy, you can choose between three different felt colors to line it. It’s not actually that expensive, either: each one costs just $49.99.

Looking for a slightly cheaper alternative? Consider the similar product Bloc, which we previously wrote about here.

Source: Tinsel & Timber

As with many of Apple’s more prosaic advertisements lately, Apple’s recent Dead Poet’s Society inspired ad for the iPad Air and iPad mini, “What will your verse be?”, has alternately been praised and ridiculed by critics who were either touched or wanted to barf at the idea that buying an iPad is heling you write a living human poem.

Even if you love the ad, though, you have to admit that the ad shows a very different use scenario for the iPad Air than the one you have. In the ad, it’s used by helicopter rescue pilots, storm chasers, ice hockey coaches, musicians, Bollywood filmmakers, scuba divers, rock musicians and artists. You? You mostly just use it on the toilet. Admit it. You’re reading this on the toilet right now.

Source: Doghouse Diaries

In this era of heightened security fears, when headlines routinely shout about hackers stealing millions of personal records in a single digital heist on some of the nation’s biggest companies, you should never be handing your Apple ID and password over to anyone who isn’t Apple. Yet that’s just the permission that the new Sunrise calendaring app asks when you first load it up, and not only is there no rule against apps doing so in Apple’s internal guidelines, but Cupertino’s actually awarded Sunrise with a coveted spot in the “Featured” section of the App Store.

Every time, the game of cat-and-mouse between Cupertino and jailbreakers goes like this. Apple releases a new version of iOS, patching existing jailbreak exploits. Jailbreakers poke and prod at the code for a few months, until they find a new exploit. They hold off on revealing the nature of this exploit to anyone for as long as humanly possible, lest Apple get wind of it and close the hole in a point release. Then, when the finished jailbreak is finally released, Apple’s programmers sniff out the exploit, patch it, and the whole game starts anew.

When Team Evasi0n released the iOS 7 jailbreak, then, it was only a matter of time before Apple fixed the exploit that allowed it to happen to begin with. Surprisingly, though, Cupertino did not patch Evasi0n in the developer betas of iOS 7.1… until now.

The glass cube of Apple’s 5th Avenue Store in New York City might look iconic, but there’s one big problem with glass: It shatters. And in the latest wave of polar weather to hit the East Coast, that’s just what happened when a snowblower got too close to the Apple Store.

For any longtime Apple fans, it’s amazing to think that today marks 30 years since the January 22, 1984 airing of the Nineteen Eighty Four-inspired Macintosh commercial, directed by Ridley Scott.

Not only did the commercial usher in Apple’s most famous desktop computer brand, but it also served as a perfect articulation of the Apple identity: an identity that continues along the same lines three decades later.

Despite the lack of concrete news available on the subject, we’re hardly short of concept designs for Apple’s eventual iWatch.

This one, by San Francisco UI designer Todd Hamilton, is among the best yet — a sleek design that resembles a cross between the Nike Fuelband and an iPhone.

There are bound to be teething problems as Google Glass rolls out to users. Back in October last year, Cult of Android reported on the Glass user given a ticket for “driving with monitor visible to driver.”

Now we have the not dissimilar case of a theater-goer removed from a screening for alleged piracy.

The viewer in question was watching Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit with his wife at an AMC movie theater in Columbus, Ohio, when he was roughly removed from the screening by Department of Homeland Security officials.

The team behind cult drawing app DrawQuest have sadly announced that it will be closing shop.

For those unfamiliar with it, DrawQuest is was an iOS app — originally for iPad, but with an iPhone version launched in November last year — that set daily drawing challenges to a niche community of artists.

In a blog post on the DrawQuest site, app creator Christopher “moot” Poole (also the man behind 4Chan) wrote the following:

The Todoist todo app has been updated and renamed. It’s now called “Todoist Next,” and it has been turned into a lean, mean visual-scheduling-and-collaboration machine.

Adobe has issued an update to Adobe Reader, its popular PDF reader app.

Version 11.2.0 introduces a new design that matches the look and feel of iOS 7. The new look includes alterations to the color scheme as well as plain glyphs, as well as improvements and relocation of menu bars for better navigation.

The update also places recently viewed documents up front, adds a better integrated help system, and includes improves single file edit (which lets you perform basic operations without having to open a file) and text selection features (letting you select a single character rather than entire words).

Source: iTunes

Instapaper’s Instapaper Daily feature, which shows the day’s most popular new story for your quick-consuming delectation, was apparently so successful that it has spawned a sequel. Instapaper Weekly. This time it’s not a new website which shows you an ultra-clean view of the day’s top Instapaper story: it’s an email newsletter.

Quick: You have taken a bunch of great photos of your recent birthday weekend in [EXOTIC LOCATION], and your parents want to take a look at your vacation pictures on the big screen. But you also spent some “quality time” with your girlfriend/boyfriend/spousal unit in the hotel room, and you sure as hell don’t want your folks to see those photos. What do you do?

You use Boinx’s PhotoPresenter, an app that’s designed for impromptu slideshows.

Tech companies such as Apple and Google will pay $1 per stop, per day for employee shuttle bus services using public bus stops in San Francisco — according to a new pilot program approved by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA).

In a scheme that will bring in around $1.5 million in fees over an 18-month trial, companies such as Apple will pay SFMTA more than $100,000, while smaller tech companies will pay around $80,000 per year. Any money gained will be put back into the program to cover administrative fees, permits, enforcement, and other related costs.

Keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures are fine, but they’re not as good as dedicated knobs and dials for just getting out of the way and letting your concentrate on the job instead of the interface. But knobs and dials are annoyingly fixed, whereas an on-screen control panel can be changed to fit the function.

Can you see where we’re going here? The Palette does both. It’s a modular, Lego-like set of buttons, knobs, dials and sliders which can be configured in hardware and software to do whatever you want them to.

K’lip is a USB thumb drive that’s actually useful. Yes, you can use it to take PDFs of your boarding passes to the local print shop, but you can also just use it as a keyring, until one day you need to copy a movie or rare bootleg album off your friend’s computer.

Or you could wear it.

You’re going to love Phoenix Photo Editor from the second you launch it. After a neat but not-too-long launch animation, you get straight into your photo library, with oversized thumbnails that let you actually see what the photos contains before choosing to load it. Confused about another “import” button down at the bottom of the screen? Tap it. It’s for grabbing pictures from your i{hone albums, Instagram, Facebook or Flickr.

And it gets better from there.

Today Apple’s Phil Schiller tweeted a link to Cisco’s 2014 Annual Security Report. The biggest takeaway from the report is that mobile malware is becoming much more prevalent on Android vs. any other platform.

Cisco has calculated that 99% of malware targeted Android last year. 71% of Android users came into contact with web-related malware while iOS only saw a 14% encounter rate. Last year, Schiller tweeted a link to another security report that said 79% of malware targeted Android in 2012.

Via: @pschiller