Apple has reduced the price of the refurbished Apple TV to $75. That’s $10 cheaper than its original price tag, and $24 cheaper than a brand new model. It’s believed the drop may have been made in response to the Google Chromecast, which has been selling fast since it went on sale last week for just $35.

Sometimes, when you’re tapping away at a calculator, it helps to hear what you’re typing in. It’s like a second stream of information for your brain, and it helps keep things more accurate. There are a variety of talking calculators on the market, and a bunch of iOS apps that do the same thing.

Did you know, however, that you can make the calculator bundled in with OS X talk to you, too? Me neither.

Here’s how.

Developer tap tap tap just announced the details on its latest Camera+ update for iPhone and iPad. The folks behind one of the best camera app replacements out there add the ability to layer effects in editing, letting you quickly and easily add and remove a multitude of effects per photo, stacking and re-arranging the order of the effects to attain your own unique look and style.

If you’re not into doing all the micromanagement, Camera+ is also releasing two new filter packs.

Kanex’s MeDrive looks like an essential bit of kit for anyone with an iDevice and a whole mess of media files. It’s a personal file server, only unlike most solutions we’ve seen, it lets you hook up any USB drive to share and access its contents.

There’s something that happens to a certain kind of person when it comes to hobbies: The acquisition of gear becomes more important than the hobby itself. Take photography, for instance.

One short trip to the Internet will fill your browser with awful, pointless photos taken by men with cameras that cost them a fortune. You’ll see truly lame family snapshots taken on an $8,000 Leica Monochrom, posted with notes about the tonality and the bokeh, as if the gear makes these snapshooters into great photographers.

And you’ll see accessories. All kinds of crazy accessories that do little but fuel the need to upgrade to ever more specialized and expensive models.

Back when I worked a Saturday job in a camera store, we’d joke about the men who’d spend so much on a camera that they could only afford the cheap off-brand film. For these folks, there’s the Artisan Obscura shutter release, a tiny, $30 circle of wood that screws into a camera’s shutter release.

Cobook has updated its contacts/address book app, adding some long-overdue features, some neat new tricks, and – finally – a store, so you can give the company some money at last.

I got talking to an old man with a long beard yesterday. It was almost down to his jewel-studded belt. And he told me that “back in the day,” “where he comes from,” gentlemen would try to fill their living rooms with ugly black and silver boxes covered with flashing and pulsing lamps. They’d lay rope-like cables around the rooms of their homes, and the “coffee table” – as he called it – would be covered with smaller, button-covered boxes.

These gentlemen would argue with their ladies, who “just wanted to relax and watch a bit of TV for God’s sake WHATS WRONG WITH YOU.”

“Back in the day” was of course “the 1980s and 1990s,” and these boxes were stereo and home theater gear. Now we live in an enlightened age where these things are as beautifully integrated into our homes as, well, as baskets of potpourri, I guess.

Just like the Sound Spot.

You might – as I did – laugh at the idea of a solar-powered keyboard for the iPad. And then you will remember that independence from power supplies is one of the iPad’s main features. And then you will take a closer look at this aluminum and plastic slab and see that it looks a lot like my favorite iPad keyboard from Zagg.

All Panasonic’s hopes of a surprise launch of its GX7 camera have been dashed. The Micro Four Thirds body has now been fully leaked, with what look to be official pictures and specs. And what a camera. If you have had your eye on one of Fujifilm’s retro-styled but ultra-modern x-series cameras, but already own a clutch of Micro Four Thirds lenses, then this camera may well be for you.

Autodesk has a rich history of offering stunning, free iOS apps that do some pretty spectacular things. Their latest app, Homestyler, lets you virtually redecorate your house with remarkable detail.

It was a bit of an odd moment when Incase — which up to that point almost exclusively focused on bags and cases — announced a couple of years ago that they’d started making headphones. Even more surprising was that the headphones really, really rocked.

Of the four models, the best deal was probably the second-most expensive of the bunch, the on-the-ear Reflex: velvety looks, a rugged build and sound quality that many gadget sites, including us, thought beat out headphones twice as expensive.

Still, the Reflex didn’t generate as much buzz as perhaps they should have, and at $90 they were one of the most underrated headphones on the market; then Incase cut the price to $60.

And now they’re on sale at $30, which makes them, well, completely irresistible.

You know how camping is all about roughing it and rusticity? Forget it. Goal Zero teamed up with Eddie Bauer to design a solar-powered tent.

Elevens is a solitaire card game in which players lay down cards, face-up and in a grid of 3X3. They then remove the cards in groups when they add up to eleven, and go until they can go no more.

Cassandra’s 11 is based on this game, in that you must tap cards from a grid when they add up to eleven. Tap a Nine and Two card, for example, or a Five, a Four, and a Two. What takes this universal app from developer Plexonic to the next level is the puzzle aspect.

Walk the halls of Macworld or the Consumer Electronics Show for too long, and the sheer googolplex of injection-molded iCases hanging all around can actually make you go cross-eyed. The bedazzled ones are especially dangerous—that’s a medical fact.

Bucking that trend, the Zattere from Papernomad is a naturally-crafted iPad sleeve you’ll enjoy looking upon as much as using. No, paper, wool, cotton, and thread might not sound like the materials that belong in a protective iPad sleeve, but they do work well, and then there’s this: in five years, a plastic case will look positively forlorn; paper though, artfully aged with your doodles and sketches, becomes an artifact you may wish to keep even after its utility has long gone astray.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wHwKGw0Yno

With features like Easy Mode, Smart Switch and that hand-waving feature thing, you’ll totally ditch your “simple” iPhone after spending a three hour flight crammed next to a hipster with a Samsung Galaxy S4.

At least, that’s what Samsung wants you to think with their new ad that shows a bunch of nerdy middle-aged iPhone users instantly converting to the Galaxy S4 after some hip dudes start showing off Samsung’s gimmicky features.

Source: YouTube

Via: MacGasm

Today the GoPro iOS app hit version 2.0, and the update includes several additions that make it easier to interface with the GoPro camera from an iPhone or iPad. The app is way more than a remote control now.

The biggest feature is the ability to wirelessly transfer photo and video from the camera to a dedicated album in an iOS device’s camera roll. Once the you download version 2.0 of the iOS app and the most recent software update for the camera itself, you can browse, view, and delete media right from the camera’s memory card. Photos and videos that have been wirelessly synced over to your iOS device from the camera can be shared through email, text, or other apps like Instagram and Facebook.

GoPro users are going to love today’s update, so grab it now.

Source: App Store

Afterlight is one of the most popular photography apps in the App Store, but until now it’s only been optimized for the iPhone. Today’s update brings full support for the iPad, meaning you can edit in a native interface for the iPad’s larger display.

If you’ve seen pics in your Instagram feed that are framed creatively or look like they aren’t filtered in Instagram itself, chances are they were probably edited in Afterlight. It’s nice that the app officially supports the iPad now, but the interface is basically just a blown up version of the iPhone app. Some iPad-only UI tweaks or features would be nice for future updates.

Afterlight costs $1 as a universal download in the App Store.

Source: App Store

Apple and Motorola are set to do battle in a Miami courtroom in August 2014, but before the fight can begin, the two companies have decided to drop 14 patents from litigation.

At the behest of Federal Judge Robert N. Scola, the two companies are starting narrow down the list of patents they want to sue each other over. The trial originally started with 24 patents under review, but Apple dropped six patents yesterday and Motorola dropped eight. 

Yesterday, I told you how to delete podcast episodes from your iOS device, which lets you manage how much stuff you’re carrying around on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

Today, I got an email from Justin P, who said,

Thanks for the tips on deleting individual episodes of a podcast. However how do you remove the entire podcast icon from ‘my podcasts’ ? Tried unsubscribe but that doesn’t work. If you could let me know that would be great.

It’s a good point, Justin, so I did a little poking around in the Podcast app and figured it out.

Amazon updated Kindle for iOS today with a new feature that will make purchasing Amazon e-books through your iPhone a bit feature.

The new ‘Free Sample’ feature in Kindle for iOS 3.9 lets users search through Amazon’s catalog of Kindle books, download free samples, and if you like it you can email yourself a link to purchase it from Amazon’s website later.

There’s also a new Bring Your Own Dictionary feature so you add medical, legal, or other translation references to define words while you’re reading. Here are the full notes:

Cult of Mac Deals is offering an elegant, simple solution to put an end to “station frustration” once and for all, courtesy of the team at Bazaared. This device allows you to share any audio output (including Pandora and Spotify) from your iPhone, iPod, or any other device with a 3.5mm audio socket by simply tuning in your car radio to the frequency you choose on the transmitter.

With the Universal Hands Free Car Kit, if it’s playing through your device it’s playing in your car and Cult of Mac Deals has it for just $19 for a limited time!

Providing access to old episodes just isn’t enough for cable channels to be competitive on iOS anymore. The latest trend is to allow users to tune into live TV if they have a cable subscription. ABC, Time Warner, and ESPN are all doing it, and now Showtime is jumping in too.

Showtime Anytime 2.0 hit the App Store this morning with a new feature that lets you tune into Showtime’s live programming. Now you can ride around town and not miss a second of Homeland season 3.

Here are the release notes:

Planning to get the new “iPhone 5C” when it goes on sale this fall? Well, you’ll want a good case to protect its smooth, plastic back from getting all scratched up, and Amazon already has you covered. Elago Design has begun taking pre-orders for its $24.99 slim fit case, which will ship on August 23.

Remember that cool iOS 7 Control Center port for Android that hit Google Play earlier this month? Well, Apple obviously didn’t like it, and it has contacted Google to have it pulled. Fortunately for us, developer Hi Tools Studio has already released an updated version to Google Play, so go grab it before it disappears again.

Over at Stack Exchange, one intrepid user asks,

I would like to know if there is any way to block Facebook and other sites from being added to Safari’s Top Sites. Someone knows how to do that?

One answer is to completely keep new tabs or windows from showing Top Sites, but that’s not really the best answer. There is an answer, pulled directly from Apple’s own support page for Safari 6, however, that fits the bill.