Spoke to Tim. Planning dinner in September. Tim believes in buyback and is doing one. What will be discussed is magnitude.

— Carl Icahn (@Carl_C_Icahn) August 22, 2013

Famous billionaire investor Carl Icahn took to Twitter this afternoon to announce that he and his new buddy Tim Cook are going to be meeting up for dinner in September to talk about Apple’s stock buyback program.

According to Icahn, Tim believes in doing the buyback, but the two giants are going to talk about the “magnitude” of it later to see just how much cash can be wrung out of AAPL.

Icahn made a lot of noise last week with claims that AAPL stock is extremely undervalued. AAPL shares shot up quickly after Icahn’s tweet last week, but his tweet this afternoon seems to have less of an effect on the stock. AAPL is down -3.83 and trading at 498.53 a share today but NASDAQ has been down part of the day, so maybe we’ll see a jump when things get back to normal.

Source: Twitter

The Griffin IntelliCase for iPad mini is designed to provide you with all-over protection for your device without adding too much bulk and spoiling its sleek and sexy design. It combines a hard polycarbonate rear shell with a flexible, hinged cover that doubles as a stand for typing or watching movies, and its micro-textured surface promises to increase grip, making those nasty slips a thing of the past.

The IntelliCase clips onto the sides of your iPad mini, and it provides access to all of its buttons, ports, and cameras. It has “strategically-placed” magnets embedded inside its front cover that will automatically put your iPad to sleep when you close it, and then wake it up again when you open it.

The IntelliCase is priced at $39.99, and it’s available in black, red, black and gold, and blue and grey. I’ve been using it for the past two weeks to find out if it’s any good.

Over at iPad Insight, Patrick Jordan found this unique feature in YouTube’s new version of its iOS app, and I though it was too cool not to share.

If you’ve used the iOS YouTube app in the past, you know that in order to find a new video, either browsing or searching for it, you had to stop the video you were watching and then perform your search, or scroll through videos on offer.

No longer is that the case – check it out.

It seems like every time you turn around lately, there’s some new photo leak of what sources promise to be a true look at Apple’s upcoming iPhone 5S or 5C casing, LED flash, or colors.

It’s with that caveat that we cast a skeptical eye, then, on this latest reveal, sent to us by Twitter user @leakschina, of what a Chinese language website claims to be a photo of the back of the box of the new iPhone 5S, showing a capacity of 128GB.

We’re a few weeks away from the final release of iOS 7, but it looks like Apple is starting to prep its non-stock apps with an iOS 7 update. This morning Apple released an update for Find My iPhone that comes with a new icon more fitting for iOS 7.

A few bug fixes were tossed in, but early reports claim the update has broken the app for non-developers, so we’d advise against updating right now. The new Find My iPhone icon was also added to the beta.iCloud.com homescreen, but hasn’t been updated on iCloud.com yet.

In a new profile of Apple CEO Tim Cook, Reuters spends time painting the two-year veteran of Cupertino’s top spot as deft, methodical, and tough. While he has earned a reputation as more of a delegator and less of a diva than Jobs was, the sources in the article say that he is still a focused CEO who expects results.

A person familiar with Tim Cook’s meeting style said “He could skewer you with a sentence. He would say something along the lines of ‘I don’t think that’s good enough’ and that would be the end of it and you would just want to crawl into a hole and die.”

Not bad for a CEO whose own board is deeply concerned.

Lucky Frame’s fantastic iPad and Android game, Gentlemen!, is now available on the Mac App Store, bringing the delightful Victorian-themed dueling game to the big screen for the first time.

We reviewed the game favorably when it released on iPad, enjoying the frenetic gameplay and the whimsical art style. It’s still a go-to app when we’re looking for something to play with a friend on the same iPad.

Now that it’s on Mac, though, we can now go head to head with up to four friends via local multiplayer, flipping and leaping and, well, stabbing our buddies with glee.

Let’s be clear: I love tower defense games. I’ve been a fan since the first time I played Desktop Tower Defense on Kongregate, I fell hard for Gem Keeper and Fieldrunners, and I carry a torch for Kingdom Rush.

These are tough waters to compete in, especially with a free-to-play business model that needs to encourage players to spend real money to help fund the game itself. There’s a delicate balance in tower defense games, between too easy and too difficult.

Does Super Hippo Studios Limited’s Pirate Legends TD bring enough to the table, then, to stand next to these others?

This is #BackToSchool week at Cult of Mac Deals. There will be several new deals launching each day. Check in here each day for new deals for #BackToSchool. There will be a ton of apps, gear, gadgets, games, and more to buy just in time for the start of school, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for deals that have school — and savings — in mind.

There are numerous productivity apps out there – no matter what platform you’re using (except perhaps Windows, but that’s another story). Many of them are simple to do list applications. These apps don’t dive in too deep into what David Allen calls the “Horizons of Focus” but tend to focus on the immediate future. That’s all well and good for the things you need (or want) to do now, but it’s not so good for those things down the line that you need (or, again, want) to accomplish. And when you’re a student going back to school you need to be able to look right in front of you and further down the road – and do so in an efficient and effective manner.

That’s where an app like Todoist shines. And right now as part of Cult of Mac Deals’ Back To School Week, you can get 1 year of Todoist Premium for only $13.99.

Apple is reportedly looking to skirt the cable companies and strike up deals with HBO, ESPN, Disney, and Viacom to offer their content on a new pay TV service. Rather than distributing content in channels, Apple’s strategy would emphasize apps over cable TV according to a report from QZ.

Sony, Google, and Intel are also trying to score similar deals and might even get their pay TV services up before Apple. However, Apple is also looking to release a TV set as well, in order to control the entire TV-watching experience.

Documents by Readdle — the free iOS app that replaces a dedicated document viewer, PDF reader, download manager, music player, and more — has today received another new update that adds even more nifty features.

In addition to photo library integration, you’ll also find drag and drop file organization, and the ability to “star” your most important or most frequently used files.

I don’t think I’ve ever downloaded an app that comes with an instruction manual, but it seems BlackBerry felt the need to create one for its upcoming BBM releases for Android and iOS. We’re expecting the apps themselves to arrive any day now, but the user guides have been leaked and they are already available for reading online.

Ever end up with a lot of Finder windows floating around your Mac screen? In previous versions of Mac OS X, the choice was to close them all with a keyboard shortcut, Option-Command-W, which will end all your Finder suffering in one short tap.

In Mavericks beta, that still works. Yet Apple has also added another way to deal with multiple Finder windows: merging them. Here’s how.

Three years ago, Tim Cook very memorably said that although Apple was selling $40 billion worth of products every year (that number has since more than quadrupled), all of Apple’s products could fit on a dining room table. That amazing quote was slightly disingenuous — many of Apple’s products are virtual, and take up no physical space at all — but it still made a point: Apple chooses what it does so carefully that everything has its place. What Cupertino doesn’t do is just as important as what it does.

It’s all interesting food for thought, to be sure, but what if we took Tim Cook’s table metaphor and broke it down? For every foot of table, how much money does Apple make on each product?

MyFlavors for the iPad is a clever recipe app which auto-rips recipes from the web and separates out the various components, tidily parsing out and filing directions, ingredients, photos, the description and the cook time. The app is free, but requires a $5 in-app purchase to actually do more than try it out.

Doctors in Germany have just used an iPad to operate on some guy’s liver, not by smashing the screen and using the jagged shards as a scalpel, but by using Apple’s tablet as a second-screen for an augmented reality app. Will wonders never cease? Is there anything the iPad can’t do?

Google clearly has high hopes for Google Glass, and it’s confident that in the future, we’ll all be wearing one. In fact, you may be able to pick one up in your local Best Buy when you pop in for that new Justin Bieber CD. Rumor has it Google is renting 6,000 square feet of floor space inside every Best Buy store next year just to sell its new wearable tech.

It’s almost instinctive these days for me to place my iPhone or iPad facing in in whatever bag or pocket I use, to protect its screen from bumps. But the new Portal series of bags from Osprey might just make it worth breaking the habit: The bags have a pocket at the front with a flap that opens to let you use your iPad without removing it from the bag.

If you’re having problems accessing the iCloud this morning, it’s not just you: Apple’s official Systems Status page indicates that multiple iCloud users are having problems accessing Apple’s services.

If you’re anything like me, no matter how much evidence has mounted that Apple is indeed planning a gold iPhone 5S, you’ve had a hard time believing it. Gold in a gadget usually turns it into gaudy, undignified bling, more appropriate for a Saudi oil baron or diamond-toothed rapper than, say, the pocket of Jony Ive.

It looks like I needn’t have worried. Apple may be planning on making a gold iPhone 5S, but as you can see from the image above (you can see it in the middle), it’s a very tasteful affair… more champagne, or even platinum, than anything else. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if I were going to buy a new iPhone 5S, I might even opt for that color.

There are more images below the fold. What do you think?

Ever tried to snap a self portrait with your iPhone? And I mean a proper self-timer self portrait, not an arm-out-the-side-of-the-frame selfie. It’s almost impossible. First, you have to deal with the lack of a self timer on the iPhone. And second, you have to find somewhere to balance it.

What you need is Joby’s new MPod mini.

Every time I use my iPhone 5, I’m less and less convinced that it even needs a dock. It’s far easier to use the phone when it’s laying flat on my desk than when it’s propped up at a steep angle. The only place I’d like one is on my nightstand, and as I don’t have a nightstand that option is out. However, many people want docks, and of these many of them keep their iPhones in fat, ugly protective cases. The Sarvi Dock is for them.

In camera years[1], Canon’s G-Series is now drawing a pension and should really be scratching out a will. And when a product line is so successful and so mature, it gets hard to improve on it. The G15 had a big sensor, a fast ƒ1.8 lens and a handy front control dial, as well as all the rugged capability that made the G-Series last this long.

The new G16 adds very little, but it get one hugely handy update: Wi-Fi.

Great news for automatic fanatics: Twitter is back on If This Then That (IFTTT). The Twitter channel was pulled from the service some months back thanks to authorization issues, but now it’s back, and ready to trigger and be triggered.

One of the more intriguing digital media platforms is Narr8, a Moscow-based startup that offers a platform with which to publish or enjoy multimedia creations crafted with a hodgepodge of animation, text, images and sound; think motion comics with added audio punch.

The app has been available for a while on the iPad, but has just now been given Universal App treatment, making it available on the iPhone too — though how the app’s experience translates onto the iPhone’s smaller screen is an interesting question.