The Nova is yet another external “flash” for your iPhone, only this one is different in a few ways: It’s Bluetooth, it’s iPhone-controlled, and it fits in your pocket or even your wallet.

Who knew that those free charging stations at airports could be such disgusting repositories of viral filth? Not me, that’s for sure. I’m the kind of guy who sticks his things into any available hole at the slightest invite, and airports have the extra bonus of always seeming so anonymous. What happens in LAS stays in LAS, if you know what I mean.

Except you might be leaving behind more than just bad memories and hangovers; according to the folks behind the LockedUSB, “identity theft, government surveillance, ‘rogue’ and unstable chargers, are also on the rise,” meaning that those innocent and attractive-looking USB ports could be festering hives of malware, ready to suck your data right out of your iPhone.

This is another “why has nobody done this before” product. The mBAck is a small, bus-powered USB 3.0 hard drive that mounts onto the stand of your iMac.

The Good: Fantastic idea
The Bad: Those prices. LOL

Viewfinders are the new fast lenses, or something. At least according to Nikon, which has put a proper viewfinder back in its P-series cameras with the new P7800. And when I say proper, I mean “proper” – the viewfinder isn’t a nice bright optical one but an electronic model.

At last, the Sony QX “lens cameras” are officially official. They’re a pair of regular compact cameras built-into lens-shaped bodies, and they’re made to pair with your smartphone, using it as both a viewfinder and a controller.

The lenses connect via Wi-Fi, and if you’re using an Android phone then they’ll pair with it using NFC.

The details follow:

Despite the fact that the new Bluetooth speaker looks like it is little more than a regular JamBox that has been sliced lengthwise down the middle, the Mini Jambox a whole new thing. Built like the unibody MacBooks, the new Mini Jambox is carved from a single block of aluminum. This means that despite its diminutive size, it still sounds a lot bigger than it looks.

VMware announced the release of its latest virtualization software for Mac, VMware Fusion 6, which allows Mac users to run Windows applications inside OS X. Along with Fusion 6, the company also released VM Fusion 6 Professional which is geared toward enterprise admins deploying corporate desktops.

Fusion 6 is compatible with both OS X Mavericks and Windows 8.1 and promises more efficient battery performance thanks to its new Haswell processor optimization. While Fusion 6 only weighs in at $59.99, Fusion 6 Professional will set you back $129.99, but an upgrade for exsisting customers drops the price to $69.99.

Full release notes after the break:

Apple just sent out an email to developers that promotes the upcoming Mavericks fature of Safari Push Notifications. The subject line reads, “Get ready for Safari Push Notifications,” and features the above image, with a push notification from well-known site, CNN, prominently displayed.

Apple is set to unveil the iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S during a press event at its Cupertino campus on September 10th, but rather than letting the mothership have all the fun, Apple plans to spread its marketing message with three satellite launches in Europe and Asia.

Apple seeded a the latest beta of OS X 10.8.5 to developers this afternoon with Build 12F36. Devs can pick up the update from the Developer Center or Mac App Store.

The latest beta build comes more than a month after Apple’s last beta for OS X Mountain Lion. The seed notes asks developers to focus on Wi-fi, Graphics, Wake From Sleep, PDF viewing, and Mobile Device Management. Developers will also find a new beta of Safari 6.1 in the Mac Dev Center that’s focused towards testing extensions for compatibility with Safari 6.1.

Source: Apple

Over the past ten years, some Apple customers have argued that the iTunes store is an illegal monopoly because songs purchased inside the store can’t be played on Apple devices, but an appeals court in California has finally thrown out those claims once and for all.

A three-judge panel confirmed that Apple’s digital right management system known as FairPlay has not broken any antitrust laws, after a long-running class action lawsuit claimed Apple is running a monopoly by forcing iTunes users to also buy Apple products to listen to their songs.

Apple has been on a hiring binge of ad executives lately as its ad-supported iTunes Radio product nears launch. During the month of August alone, Apple has posted over 40 job listings for iAd related positions on its own job board and LinkedIn. The positions range from account coordinators, ad design managers, and engineers, all of which will be used to create new media ads for iAds.

Are you jealous of all that Android/KitKat business in the news today? What you need is a chocolate-bar-related product for the Mac, and I have just the thing: It’s the CURB, a Toblerone-shaped stand for your MacBook.

I’ve got a MacBook Air, an iPad, and an iPhone. There are certain apps – some that are made by Apple and some that aren’t that are only at their best when they sync across all three platforms. Here are some examples – and these are apps I use every single day:

• Day One
• OmniFocus
• Evernote
• Byword
• 1Password

But not all apps function like the above ones. Some won’t sync across all platforms (especially those outside of the Apple ecosystem) and keeping tabs on which ones sync what can become cumbersome.

That’s where SyncMate comes in – an app that Cult of Mac Deals currently has available for just $15.99.

SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – As I sit here on the 10th floor of Seattle’s public library, I’m trying to make some sense of the last four days of gaming conference, the Penny Arcade Expo.

It’s not like gaming is as important as, say, the current crisis in Syria, or attempts to fight poverty and homelessness, or even the inability of spaces like PAX to provide a safe place for women or people who are trangendered.

On the other hand, gaming is a massive cultural phenomenon. PAX’s founders, webcomic writers Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, wanted to create a convention that would focus on gamers, whether they play tabletop games, video games, or card games. That there is a massive interest in this convergence of different kinds of gamers, from D&D nerds to arcade geeks, is an understatement, as evidenced by quickly sold-out tickets months in advance of the conference as well as by the huge herds of human beings of all stripe who I saw traipsing from one booth to another this weekend in the Washington State Convention Center.

There are some truly awful things happening in Syria right now. For more information on exactly what is happening, and why, I suggest this excellent Washington Post round-up of what exactly is going on, and why Congress is now considering an intervention. But the takeaway is pretty bleak, and basically comes down to the notion that there’s not a lot America can do to stop what’s happening in Syria.

That doesn’t mean, though, that the hearings going on in the Senate about whether or not America should intervene aren’t important. Far from it. Which is why Senator John McCain is getting a lot of flack for being caught playing an iPhone poker app during the hearings.

At an event in Berlin in just under two hours time, Sony will announce two attachable lenses that you’ll be able to stick onto the back of your smartphone to take better photos. They’re called the QX100 and the QX10, and you can see exactly what they’ll look like in the leaked press images above — and exactly how they’ll work in the leaked TV ad below.

iOS 7 isn’t for everyone. With its brightly-colored, flat candy chiclet design, it’s an update that many people are going to find jarring after playing in Scott Forstall’s skeuomorphic playground for so long. In fact, given how polarizing iOS 7 is, I imagine some long-time iOS users might decide not to come along for the ride at all.

Even if you hate iOS 7, though, there are some elements to love. For example, the new dock. Sure, functionally, it’s exactly the same, but the frosty two-dimensional glass looks just so much better than the faux-3D nonsense that was going on before.

Enter CopyDock. For jailbroken iDevice owners, CopyDock strips out the iOS 6 dock and replaces it with the iOS 7 dock. Simple, beautiful, and free. You can find it in the BigBoss repo on Cydia. Now how about bringing Control Center to iOS 6, jailbreak devs?

Via: ModMyi

Right now, Apple sells three generations of iPhone. The iPhone 5 is the high-end phone, starting at $199 on contract. The iPhone 4S is the mid-tier device, and costs $99 on contract. Finally, there’s the iPhone 4, which is free on contract.

Come September 10th, though, Apple’s going to change things up with the colorful iPhone 5C, a device that Cupertino has designed from the ground up to be a modern budget iPhone (rather than just a hand-me-down iPhone a couple generations old). So the iPhone 5S will take the high-tier, and the iPhone 5C will take the lower-tier.

What about the mid-tier, though? Evidence suggests it’ll be the iPhone 5.

With all the hubbub about new iPhones and new iPads coming, it wouldn’t be surprising if Apple slipped a small Apple TV update in there too. Although Apple dismisses it as their “hobby,” the Apple TV usually inherits the previous generation A-series chip when a new iPhone or iPad comes out. In this case, it’s the A6. In addition, Apple’s been building up steam when it comes to the Apple TV lately, releasing a number of entirely new channels in the last few months. It would be natural to follow that wth an update.

These are all good reasons to believe that Apple might try to slip in an update to their set-top box on September 10th, and lo and behold, a new report seemingly confirms that new Apple TVs are already making their way into the country.

Being a nerd, a pedant, and a Virgo, it’s painful to me to see terminology misused. Like when people say that a lens or photo has “a lot of depth-of-field” when they really mean a “shallow” depth-of-field, for instance.

I am destined to go through life constantly disappointed (and of course making my own dumb mistakes), but at least the depth-of-field problem has now been solved: there’s an app for that, and it’s called Lens•Lab.

You wait weeks for an invite to an Apple event, and then two come along at once. Shortly after the company invited the media to its September 10 shindig in Cupertino, it sent out invitations to a second event in Beijing on September 11. It’s the first time Apple has made an announcement in China, so it must be for something pretty special — but what?

Well, we have some ideas.

The secret iPad supply chain is starting to look as leaky as the roof of my 100-year-old building during a rainstorm. Only instead of aluminum saucepans covering every flat surface, there are aluminum iPad 5 parts strewn all across internet rumor sites.

The latest is this rather convincing effort from Unbox Therapy, and shows just how small the new iPad 5 case is compared to the fat monster we’re forced to use at the moment.

If you take a lot of pictures on your iPhone, I can highly recommend the Canon Selphy CP900, a dye-sub photo printer which spits out 6×4 prints, and connects wirelessly to iPhones, iPads and Macs.

I’ve had one for a couple months, and the result is that I have a bunch of iPhonographs littering the apartment. It’s addictive, but now I don’t know what to do with all these prints. This graffiti-ready picture frame, though, might provide an answer.

Identity is like a Smart Cover for your iMac… kinda. It’s an aluminum strips that sticks to the iMac’s “chin” using magnets, and, uh, adds a strip of color. There’s even a cutout to let the Apple logo show through, a phenomenon familiar to aficionados of iPad cases (I call these peek-a-boo cases “assless iChaps”).

But wait: the iDentity isn’t quite as useless as it first seems. The strip can be customized – using lasers – to any design you like.