Apple has sent out an email to registered developers to outline its restoration plans for a number of services that are still down following its Developer Center outage. Those include Xcode automatic configuration and access to license agreements, program enrollments, and renewals—all of which are to be reinstated this week.

For a long time after its launch, the iPad was by far the best-selling tablet on the market, and no matter how hard they tried, rival devices didn’t stand a chance of stealing its market share. But that’s all changed, according to the latest figures from IDC.

Android-powered slates saw a staggering 163% increase in the last year, and they’ve now overtaken the iPad and opened up a rather large gap in market share.

Feedly, the company that picked up the Google Reader API, cloned it, and made it available for all and sundry, just announced their first attempt at monetization: Feedly Pro.

Coming in at a very affordable five dollars per month, Feedly Pro gets paying members more features than the standard Feedly, with promises of more to come, sourced from Feedly users themselves.

I’m always looking for ways to get things done more efficiently and—better still—effectively. After all, those two elements combined are the true keys to improved personal productivity. And while I’m not a coder, I am well aware that the term “lifehack” has its roots based in the realm of coding. The term essentially originally meant “a more general solution related computer problems that occur in a programmer’s everyday life” but now it means a lot more.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t still apply to the realm in which it was born.

Those with older iPhones and iPods are now being contacted regarding a possible payout over faulty liquid damage indicators that caused some customers to lose out on free AppleCare repairs. Apple agreed to pay $53 million in a class action lawsuit earlier this year, and those who may be eligible for damages should be receiving an email soon.

I love Google Chrome—it’s my browser of choice on Android, Mac, and iOS. But navigating your bookmarks within the mobile apps is nowhere near as easy as it should be. Fortunately, there’s an awesome little tweak for jailbroken iOS devices that solves that.

It’s called BMarks Bar, and it introduces a handy bookmarks bar that offers one-tap access to your favorite sites.

Pegatron may be gearing up to take on future iMac orders from Apple after “some related upstream supply chain players” revealed that they have sent iMac components to Pegatron for assembly. Quanta is currently tasked with assembling Apple’s popular all-in-one, and it’s unclear whether the two will now work side-by-side or whether Pegatron will take over.

Have you ever lost your user account password for your Mac? You know, the one which lets you get into your Mac at login, or install software, or delete stuff from the Applications folder? You haven’t? Well, you’re a better person than I am, because I’ve forgotten mine (usually on older Macs I haven’t used in a billion years, but still) and had to pop in a Mac OS X CD and go through the recovery process.

While that’s not too big of a pain in the butt, it does take some time. Time which could be better spent drinking beer, or solving a Rubik’s Cube, am I right?

If you’re running Mac OS X Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks, you can assign your Apple ID to your user account, which can help when you need to reset your password. You know, if you forget it or something. Ahem.

Over the weekend, President Obama weighed in on the famous Apple vs. Samsung patent disputes by vetoing an import ban proposed by the International Trade Commission that would have prevented Apple from bringing iOS devices older than the iPhone 4S and iPad 3 into the country.

An avowed fan of Apple’s products, it was the first time a U.S. presidential administration had vetoed a product ban by the ITC since 1987, and seemed to signal that the Obama Administration was not going to penalize an American company like Apple in favor of a foreign company like Samsung.

Financial Markets took notice. Samsung’s market cap is down a billion dollars since the vetoing.

If there seems to be one universal law of commerce, it is this: If you purchase an iPhone from a strange man in the back of a Burger King parking lot who you initially contacted through Craigslist, it is a fact that there will be anything except an iPhone in the box he sells you.

This is a law of commerce more nitwits should probably internalize, since yet another poor sucker has fallen for this classic ploy, with one important difference: It was a McDonald’s! Dum dum DUM!

Leica’s incredible Monochrom camera costs $8,000, and shoots only B&W images. That is of course an absurd price, but it does bring amazing light sensitivity and detail thanks to the fact that there are no color filters blocking light from the sensor, and that all three dots from each pixel are dedicated to grabbing luminance data.

New Zealander Raymond Collecutt clearly liked the look of a dedicated monochrome sensor, but didn’t like the price. So he did what anyone would do—he sacrificed one of his two Canon EOS 1000Ds to the cause, and scraped off the color micro lenses on top of the sensor.

As someone who has been testing iOS 7 for months, I can tell you that when it drops, some app icons are going to stick out like a sore thumb. Why? Because icon design that looked good in the house Scott Forstall built are going to look really out of place in the house Jony Ive knocked flat to the ground.

Unfortunately, unlike on OS X, there isn’t an easy way to swap out an app’s icon for a custom one of your choosing. That said, a new app called Iconical has figured out a workaround. The app lets you customize your homescreen, no jailbreak required, by taking advantage of the custom URL schemes of over 14,000 apps. This, my friends, is a clever idea.

In about a month, every iPhone and iPad on Earth will suddenly gain the ability to stream an unlimited number of tracks for free, thanks to iTunes Radio.

For people who want more granular control over their music even when it’s streaming, iTunes Radio isn’t likely to tear them away from the likes of Spotify and Rdio, but if all you want to do is hear new jams without thinking about it, iTunes Radio is a killer feature that could potentially get you to cancel your service.

So Spotify, at least, is acting defensively. They’re rolling out a new feature called Expert Playlists. And it’s potentially way better than iTunes Radio.

Squaready is one of my most-used photo apps on iOS. It has one purpose: to take your rectangular photos and turn them into squares by padding the edges, letting you post them intact to Instagram.

The trouble is, it’s ugly as sin, with the kind of interface that you’d expect to see if Linux and Windows XP got drunk on cider one night and had a little “surprise” appear nine months later.

Happily, Squaregram exists, and its a lot prettier. It also now works with Camera+, and has had some UI tweaks to make it even better.

You’re going to love this one. What if I told you there was an iPad accessory that combined a full-sized keyboard, a case, a desktop tray and an iPhone dock, plus a compartment for storing a whole mess of charging and connection accessories. And what if I told you this behemoth was styled into a package that would make a 1990s-era traveling businessman proud to use it?

Well, as you may have suspected, this absurdity does exist. It’s called the Modus III, and it’s all kinds of awesome.

If there’s one thing I hate more than kids, it’s the thought of their filthy hands touching my pristine gadgets. Worse, these walking fetuses have brains so undeveloped that they will drop something the second they stop thinking about it.

For me, the solution is easy—just avoid the little monsters. But parents aren’t so lucky (although you could argue that they brought it upon themselves), and need a little help. And today that help comes in the form of Kensington’s “SafeGrip™ Rugged Case & Stand for iPad® mini.”

If you thought the switch from the squat screen iPhone of the iPhones 1–4 to the tall and slim screen of the iPhone 5 was bad, then wait for iOS 7. I have the beta in daily use on my iPhone, and when I go back to my iOS 6-encumbered iPad mini, it feels like I’m visiting my grandmother’s house. Worse: any apps with a lot of heavy UI chrome start to seem as oppressive as a serial killer’s basement.

Thankfully, there’s an easy fix in the simple and clean shape of Glyphish, a set of beautiful icons, illustrations and (not so hot) backgrounds.

Did you ever find yourself pinching to zoom a paper map, or tapping and holding on an unfamiliar word in a newspaper trying to pop up a dictionary definition? It always ends in frustration, no? Not anymore. Not the second one, anyway: Meanings is an app that lets you use the iPhone’s camera to look up up real-world words in the fake-world dictionary.

It has the technological sophistication of a sonic screwdriver. Its design elements look as if pulled straight out of another dimension. And there may not be another set of headphones on this planet — or any other — baked with as many ingredients as the Parrot Zik.

But we were curious — would all this tech work? And how would the Ziks sound? So we poked them with a stick, and here’s what we discovered. Allons-y!

There’s a key difference between paper clutter and digital clutter: you can actually see paper clutter. Digital clutter can clog up your Mac in various places, and sorting your files into folders will only help you to a point. There are tons of other little files that can keep your Mac running at less than optimum levels.

Suddenly, Google is a major hardware company. And a surprisingly great one. But why?

I asked a Motorola executive involved in the Moto X project recently whether Google’s ownership of the company had any effect on their decision to get radical.

By radical, of course, I mean doing things no handset maker had ever done, such as make phones operate hands-free and build them to order in the United States for delivery in four days.

You’ll note that these and other radical attributes of the Moto X are options that would have been available to Motorola with or without Google. After all, the X8 Mobile Computing System that enables hands-free usage is Motorola’s, not Google’s, and was originally developed for Motorola smartwatches.

So why is Motorola suddenly radical now that Google owns the company?

The Obama administration has vetoed a product ban on older Apple devices that was proposed by the U.S. International Trade Commission in June. Apple was found guilty of infringing a Samsung wireless patent, and the ITC declared a sales ban on iOS devices older than the iPhone 4S and third-gen iPad.

Trade Representative Michael Froman issued the veto for the executive branch today, marking the first time a presidential administration has vetoed a product ban by the ITC since 1987.

In the film The Nines, Ryan Reynolds’ writer character uses gaming as a means to get away from the rigors of writing…and I do the same.

One thing that has always fascinated me about gaming isn’t so much the playing of games, but the creation of games. But I’m a storyteller and not a coder, so I’ve left my ideas for stories that could be built into a game environment either unwritten or put to page or screen to read instead.

Friends—this week’s episode of The CultCast is so much fun, you might find yourself doing the Balki Bartokomous dance of joy. Join us and special guest Adam Christianson from the very popular MacCast podcast as we discuss why the low-cost iPhone 5C is a unicorn you might soon see. We’ll cover all the recent rumors. Then, we’ll cover what’s new, like the just-seeded iOS 7 beta 4. Plus, there’s new evidence of a fingerprint sensor coming to future iPhones, but will the 5S be getting the upgrade? All that and so much more!

Have a few LOLs and get caught up on this week’s best Apple stories. Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin.

Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode. Show notes up next.

It feels like Apple is falling way behind. But I don’t think that’s true.

I believe Apple puts enormous brain power and good judgement into envisioning the Next Big Thing. It takes them a long time to get it to market. But once it’s there, they iterate to perfect the original vision.

In the year or two after Apple launches an iPhone or an iPad, everybody falsely believes Apple can do nothing wrong.

But then, as we get further away from the last launch and closer to the next one, everybody falsely believes Apple can do nothing right.

Completely separate and unrelated to false perceptions about Apple, Google lately has been on fire. And lately they’ve been kicking butt not only in their traditional role of algorithm-based Internet services, but also in Apple’s sandboxes—namely design and hardware.

Apple has never been the kind of company that copies out of a lack of vision. Nor have they avoided copying.

What’s great about Apple is that they develop an ultra-clear vision about how to maximize the user experience, then they make that experience happen regardless of whether the solutions have to be invented, copied or—most commonly—Apple’s own unique spin on something invented elsewhere.

There are many ways in which Apple should not copy Google. But there are six ways Apple should copy Google and, in doing so, make Apple a better company with better products.