Although Apple beefed up the MacBook Air line at WWDC last month with new ultrabooks packing Intel’s Haswell processors, they have yet to upgrade the venerable MacBook Pro with the same technology. That’s a bummer, because Haswell can greatly improve battery life without sacrificing speed… surely the kind of tech you’d want in a Retina MacBook Pro.

We still don’t know when we’ll see the MBP line updated, but it’s looking like it might be happening soon, with new benchmark results for a next-gen 15-inch MacBook Pro popping up on a community benchmarking site.

In the new OS X Mavericks beta, there’s a new Notification system in place that mimics much of the way iOS handles notifications. Your iOS notifications, in fact, can push right to your Mac desktop as well.

Much like iOS, each app that uses Notification Center can be set to a fine-grained level of customization, letting you show them in Notification Center (activated with the icon in the upper right corner of your Mac’s screen), decide whether to let them use a Badge app icon, and whether or not to play a sound for each app’s notifications.

If, however, you value your privacy, you may want to disable the default setting that has your notifications showing up even when the display is off or locked.

Here’s how.

Apple finally allows us to put the Newsstand icon in a folder in iOS 7, but wouldn’t it be great if we could completely hide all the built-in apps we don’t use? Thanks to a glitch in the latest iOS 7 beta, you can. After following a few simple steps, you can remove stock icons from your home screen so that they’re nowhere to be seen.

The Pandora app for iOS has today been updated with a number of new features that promise to make your listening experience all the more pleasurable. In addition to improved playback buffering, there’s a new automatic pause feature, Pandora URL support, and more.

If you obsess over even the tiniest speck of grease or dust on your camera lens, then you should probably avoid this video, which shows a poor Canon 50mm ƒ1.8 standard prime being tortured. And I do mean it when I say “tortured”: Evil photographer Richard Choi really gets elemental on that front element. The surprise? The lens (almost) doesn’t feel a thing.

Diamond Scale is what looks like a kind of fake novelty app which purports to turn you iDevice into a scale. The best thing is to just describe it to you.

The little drilled aluminum Braven 650 is one of my favorite portable Bluetooth speakers – it’s small, it’s light and tough and it sounds great. Plus, it’s a lot louder than the Jambox, and it has a USB port so that you can recharge your iPhone from the speaker’s battery.

So I have high expectations for the new 850. If the 650 was a competitor to the Jambox, the 850 is a rival for the Big Jambox

Do you snap pictures for your blog using your iPhone, and then do the actual blog writing on your Mac? Or some other combination of devices? Then PUPS is for you. It’s a new iPhone app from the makers of crash-happy blogging app Blogsy, and it has one purpose – to upload pictures from your iDevice to your blog’s media library.

Ever wonder just how much light a polarizer filter cuts out from your photos? You can easily see the effect in the viewfinder as your turn the filter and see the reflections disappear, but what if you could take a photo of the light it cuts out?

Sounds impossible? Not if you use math… and Photoshop.

Garmin has just announced a neat new HUD box that takes the map info from your iPhone and projects it up onto your car windshield. Named after the Paul Newman character in the movie of the same name[1], the HUD is designed to work with Garmin’s Navigon and Street Pilot apps, connecting to the host phone via Bluetooth.

Following the release of the iOS 7 beta 3 this morning, Apple has also released the third preview of OS X 10.9 Mavericks to developers this evening. The new preview comes two weeks after Apple released the second beta for Mavericks.

The  new release doesn’t contain any major new features, but focus mostly on bug fixes and performance. In an email to developers, Apple encourage beta testers to: haven’t discovered any major changes in the Mavericks preview 3 yet,

“Take advantage of new features, like APIs that optimize the new energy saving technologies in OS X Mavericks, as well as new AV Kit frameworks, Sprite Kit, Map Kit, and many powerful additions to existing frameworks.

Here are the release notes:

Spiderweb Software is an independent game developer based in Seattle. It’s been in operation since 1993, when it released its first game, Exile: Escape from the Pit, an old school RPG with tons of plot, dialogue, and fantasy storytelling.

Now in its twentieth year, Spiderweb continues the indie role playing game genre it’s been developing for the past two decades by releasing its twenty-first game, Avadon 2: The Corruption.

By now you’ve probably caught wind of the short list of great apps that’ve gone free in celebration of the App Store’s fifth anniversary (if you haven’t grabbed these apps yet, take a look now before all the free ends).

Missing from that list of free apps is Localscope, a fantastic navigation and discovery tool that Apple called the best navigation app of 2011.

Nothing screams “summer!” like a bag full of beer and ice. The messenger-bag gurus at Timbuk2 know this, and have re-clad and re-released their stealthy party-in-a-bag bag, the Dolores Chiller Messenger — this time in Pilsner Urquell’s signature green and white colors.

You may be asking “can’t I just dump all the stuff out of my own messenger bag and fill it with beer and ice?” Why no, you can’t. Your bag’s interior isn’t insulated; and more importantly, your bag doesn’t come with a handy bottle opener.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is on the list of guests expected to attend the annual Sun Valley conference in Idaho this week.

The conference is held by New York-based investment bank Allen & Co., and hosts over 300 industry leaders participate in panels on politics, business, tech and more over a four day period. It’s basically a place for some of the most powerful business people in the U.S. to figure out how to become more powerful as they hangout and try to strike up business deals.

Apple released the third beta of iOS 7 to developers this morning, and even though it doesn’t come with any big new features, the new update has plenty of small fixes and encouraging UI refinements.

Here are six GIFS of the biggest UI tweaks Apple made in the new beta:

The ability to jump into iTunes and download practically any major motion picture ever created is just one of the many reasons why the iPhone and iPad have become so successful, but a Florida lawyer claims Apple’s HD video rentals are actually a scam.

According to a class action lawsuit filed this June by Scott Weiselberg at the San Francisco federal court, Apple may have violated consumer production laws and deceived customers into paying $1 more for HD videos by serving up HD versions of iTunes video rentals on iOS devices that don’t support HD video.

Facetime is Apple’s video conferencing solution, offering high-quality video chat across any iOS or Mac device. It simply blows away any other solution I’ve tried in terms of quality and ease of use, but it’s always been a video-only proposition, leaving me sticking with Skype for audio-only voice chats.

With iOS 7 beta, however, Apple has given us the ability to make audio calls with Facetime as well, which may cause me to ditch Skype altogether (though there’s still a cross platform ability Skype wins).

Here’s how to make audio calls to other Apple users via Facetime.

Twitter is continuing to refine its Mac and iOS apps with a new update that brings direct message notification syncing and a host of other features. Now when you view a DM on your iPhone, Mac, iPad or Android or Twitter.com, all other devices with your account info will be updated to show that you’ve read the message.

The new Twitter update for iPhone and iPad also features a new reply composer to make it even easier to join conversations on Twitter. There’s also a new “People” button to help users find new accounts to follow and a ton of bug fixes.

Here are the full release notes:

As the App Store’s 5th birthday approaches this Wednesday Apple has decided to run a special promotion to celebrate all the incredible apps that have made the iPhone and iPad so successful.

“From the 500 apps available at launch in 2008 to more than 900,000 at your fingertips today, it’s been a remarkably prolific five years for the App Store. To celebrate, we’re giving everyone five landmark games and five groundbreaking apps for a limited time. Plus, look back at the key moments that have made the App Store the world’s most innovative destination for apps.”

iOS users looking for the freebies can go to the App Store to find the promotional page that offers the five landmark games and five groundbreaking apps that we mentioned earlier this morning. Apple also published a timeline on the page to commemerate the milestones the App Store has enjoyed over the past five years.

Two weeks after releasing the second iOS 7 beta,  Apple has seeded iOS 7 beta 3 to developers along with a third preview of Xcode 5. The new beta build of iOS 7 (11A4414e) is available for both iPhone and iPad as an OTA update, or you can download it directly from the Dev Center.

Here are the full release notes:

Your website is often the first interaction customers have with your brand; and effective UX can boost sales, bolster conversion rates, and improve customer satisfaction – so don’t you owe it to yourself to know how to implement it?

Well now you can learn how to create websites your users will love – thanks to Cult of Mac Deals – with this UX video course for only $59. That’s a savings of 70%!

There’s nothing wrong with the default unlock animation on iOS, but having lived with it for six years, it’s nice to have a change. With LiveWire Pro, a new tweak for jailbroken iPhones, you can choose from seven different unlock animations and quickly switch to another when you fancy a change.

Android has held a pretty sizable lead over the iPhone for a long time now, and in the United States, it would appear there’s little chance of that changing any time soon. But Apple’s smartphone is gaining ground on its rival, and it’s all thanks to T-Mobile.

Today is the day Strobists have been longing for. Why? It’s the official launch day for the LumoPro LP180 flash, an amazingly capable little (or not-so-little) flashgun which costs way less than the equivalents from the likes of Canon and Nikon.