Tesla Motors announced this afternoon that it has managed to snatch up Doug Field who has been serving as Apple’s Vice President of Mac Hardware Engineering for the past five years. Field is joining the Tesla as its new Vice President of Vehicle Programs and will be responsible for developing new electric vehicles for the company.

Before joining Apple in 2008 to help make the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iMac, Field worked at Segway for nine years, but he actually started off his engineering career at Ford Motor Company. Elon Musk released the following statement regarding the company’s newest addition:

Today Twitter’s Vine app was updated with a few new features, most notably the ability to save multiple video drafts at once and editing tools.

Draft support, which Vine is calling “Sessions,” allows you to save up to 10 clips at once in the app. “Time Travel” means you can “remove, reorganize or replace” any clip before sharing. Tapping the green bar in the camera view enters Time Travel mode, and there’s also a new edit button while you’re reviewing a video.

Innovative iOS game, Badland, just updated with a new Halloween theme, four new multiplayer characters, and a new level. In addition, the update drops the price to $0.99, giving us all a chance to discover the scary action for 75 percent off the regular price.

This is the first time the developer has dropped the price so far, so be sure to check it out if you have a buck to spare; it’s worth it.

Last night Carl Icahn took to Twitter to talk about one of his favorite subjects, Apple. The billionaire investor tweeted that he had just sent a letter to Tim Cook and would be publishing the letter on his new website tomorrow.

True to his word, Icahn published the full letter this morning urging Tim Cook and the Apple Board to immediately tender an offer for $150 billion AAPL shares at their current price, rather than wait, as other investors have suggested. Icahn also stated that he will continue to invest in Apple and has already increased his stake in Apple from 4 million shares to 4.7 million.

Here’s the full letter:

Instagram already gave us the heads up that it’s introducing ads in the coming months, and now the Facebook-owned app is giving us a preview of what “Sponsored” posts will look like.

You’ll start seeing the above image in your feed in the “coming week.” It’s a “one-time ad from the Instagram team that’s meant to give you a sense for the look and feel of the ads you will see.” Tapping the Sponsored label will teach you how ads will work.

There you are, listening to your favorite song, when you just want to get to the good part. So you look at the Music app that’s playing that favorite song, and you wonder, “How on earth am I going to scrub through the song to move to where I want to?”

In iOS 7, the visual upgrade gives us a red line in the track being played. You can definitely tap, hold and drag that red line along the track for some high-speed scrubbing, but what if you want to move along the track more slowly, or have a more fine-grained approach?

Here’s how to do just that.

In order to make the Retina MacBook Pro so thin, Apple had to make some sacrifices. One of those was doing away with its optical drive — which is no longer an issue for most in the digital age — and another was using flash storage rather than old-fashion hard-disk drives.

But Apple made another, slightly more subtle change that the average consumer may not have noticed. It did away with the Kensington lock, providing users with no way to secure their device to their workstation to prevent it from being stolen.

Fortunately, Maclocks has a number of solutions to solve this problem, and I’ve been testing two of them over the past few months. First up is the Lockable Cover, a protective case that covers the top and the bottom of your MacBook Pro, and adds a lock to its base that you can plug a universal security cable into.

The Lockable Cover costs $24.71 on its own, or $30.90 if you need the security cable as well. That’s a small price to pay to protect your beloved notebook when you can’t always keep an eye on it, but is the Lockable Cover worth it?

Dead Trigger 2, the sequel to heavily-downloaded hit zombie game, Dead Trigger, burst onto Google Play and the App Store late Wednesday night, bringing next-level graphics and gameplay to devices in your very pocket.

This first-person shooter has an all new touch control scheme that was created, says the developer, Madfinger Games, specifically for casual gamers. You’ll be able to use the virtual joystick, of course, and Android players can use supported game controllers. What’s interesting, however, is the new casual-gamer-style touch control scheme.

You’ll immerse yourself into a world where the humans are fighting the zombies, like you do. The game itself, however, is played out in real time on a global scale.

R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App – News – $0.99

Halloween is just a week away, and here’s a weird little app to keep you informed while you’re eating tiny versions of regular candy and watching horror movies of varying quality.

R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App is as basic as its title is punctuated: It’s a news feed that updates every time a person of note passes away. So if you want to be the first among your friends to say, “Oh, no, that guy died?,” it has you covered. It’ll even send you notifications, and you can instantly share any of the eulogies of Sausage Kings or 1960s character actors on social media and in text messages, if that’s your thing.

It all sounds pretty tacky, but it’s actually a pretty good resource for learning about interesting people that you can never, ever meet now. For example, did you know that recently deceased Filmation co-founder Lou Scheimer, who produced Star Trek: The Animated Series and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, also provided the voice for Tracy the Gorilla in the unfortunate knock-off Ghostbusters cartoon?

Well, you do now.

R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App

This week sees the release of Batman: Arkham Origins on consoles, but if you can’t wait to spend your nights beating criminals to death with your bare hands, a companion game is out now for your favorite iOS device.

Batman: Arkham Origins is a free-to-play brawler in which you play as the Dark Knight in a series of battles against groups of criminals who attack him one at a time. Between bouts, you upgrade Batman’s abilities, purchase new equipment and suits, and wait for your stamina to recharge so that you can go on more missions.

It’s pretty much everything you’d expect from a free-to-play Batman game. But it has Batman in it, so there’s that.

Airmail, the wonderful third-party email client for Mac, which we’ve written about a number of times here on Cult of Mac, has today been updated with a whole host of new features and improvements for OS X Mavericks. In addition to quick reply from notifications, the release also adds new icons for the Notification Center, offline editing, local drafts and sent folders, and lots more.

O2 U.K. has partnered with Evernote to give all of its customers a one-year Evernote Premium subscription for free. The offer applies to all business, pay monthly, pay-as-you-go, and mobile broadband customers, and it’s available starting today.

In case you missed it, OS X Mavericks came out yesterday and it’s free. If you’ve downloaded the latest operating system from our fine friends in Cupertino, then you’ll be able to check out this neat little tip.

We all love emoji, right? Those cute little emoticons came into vogue for iOS a while back, and then were rolled into Apple’s mobile operating system as a special keyboard. They’re also avaialable in OS X Mavericks, and you can pull them up with very little effort, in almost any app.

Samsung has been fined $340,000 by Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission for an Internet campaign against HTC that violated fair trade rules. The South Korean company paid students to praise its own smartphones in online reviews while slamming those of rival HTC.

Last night, Apple released four new videos, including ads for the iPad mini with Retina Display and the iPad Air. One of those ads, Pencil, Apple used the width of a pencil as a reference point to just how light and magical the Air actually is.

If you paid close attention to the ad, though, you might have been surprised who voiced it: none less than Heisenberg himself, Bryan Cranston, also known as Walter White on TV’s Breaking Bad.

For those of us who have been running OS X Mavericks since it was announced at WWDC in June, it’s been obvious for a while that OS X Mavericks is a complete miracle when it comes to battery life. Installing Mavericks on any MacBook is enough to eke an hour or so more battery life out of it, but especially when running on MacBooks boasting Intel’s power-sipping Haswell processors, it’s a game-changer.

What kind of battery life increases are you looking at on, say, a 2013 MacBook Air? Up to 30% improvements, according to legendary Apple OS reviewer John Siracusa.

For years, Adobe Flash has been the point-of-entry for countless exploits, vulnerabilities and malware. Steve Jobs hated it, famously penning a scathing public letter talking about how irrelevant Flash had become; it’s even been shown that just refusing to install Flash on your MacBook, you can significantly improve battery life.

In OS X Mavericks, though, Adobe Flash is getting more secure, thanks to Apple’s new App Sandbox feature.

Blackberry’s in trouble. Ever since the iPhone’s debut in 2007 blindsided them, the once-dominant smatphone company has been struggling to recover its mojo. Who can save the floundering Canadian company from ruin? Former Apple CEO John Sculley to the rescue!

If you’re hoping to get your hands on the new iPad mini with Retina display next month, then you’ll want to be one of the first in line at the Apple store when it goes on sale. According to one tablet industry expert, supply of the new device will be “ridiculously tight” at launch, likely leading to long delays for those who aren’t lucky enough to bag one on day one.

BlackBerry has today updated its new BBM app for iPhone, addressing an issue that caused it to crash under Apple’s latest iOS 7.0.3 firmware. The update also brings a number of new features, including contact categories and list sorting and filtering in BBM Groups.

Written by Greg Keonig, product designer and publisher of Atomic Delights.

As a product designer, one of my favorite parts about any new Apple product launch is the inevitable “How it’s made” video. The Mac Pro incarnation did not disappoint.

What makes Apple fascinating is not that they are using some wiz-bang alien technologies to make things – even here in Portland, Oregon, all the technologies Apple shows in this video are in-practice across numerous local factories. What makes Apple unique is that they perform their manufacturing with remarkable precision and on a scale that is simply astonishing, using techniques typically reserved for the aerospace or medical device industries.

ForeverMap 2’s brand-new update is ostensibly an iOS 7 makeover. But if you’re a regular user, one look at v3.3 will tell you that it has been improved almost everywhere.

Tublme is possibly the stupidest name for a thing, ever. But it’s also a fantastic name if you think about anagrams, lost vowels, Tumblr and .me domain suffixes. It’s got em all.

Tublme is also an OS X Tumblr app, and it’s pretty gorgeous.

Here’s a neat tip for OS X Mavericks users. It lets you choose how long a Notification Center alert goes away for when you snooze it.

It happens to all of us at some point: you get a little tipsy, you open up your computer and you’re trying out some fancy new contacts app; or you’re just not really paying attention to what’s happening in your browser. And then BOOM, you’ve signed up for a LinkedIn account. Good luck. You have now ruined your e-mail forever.

We all hate the seemingly unstoppable spam that LinkedIn loves to spray all over our inboxes almost daily, but now the company has gone one better, able to inject its insidiousness right inside the native mail app of your iPhone, using a kind of “plug in.” How is this sorcery done?