The Genius Bar is a little sparse, and the flooring never would have been approved by Steve Jobs, but if you find yourself in Kabul with a deep thirst for the latest Apple gadgetry, the unofficial Apple Store of Afghanistan is the place to go.

While Apple has been busy dominating the retail world with its highly profitably shops, poor Afghanistan has been left without an official Apple Store to call its own, so someone decided to open one up.

I like to keep my iPhone’s lockscreen clean and free of distractions. Jailbreak tweaks that add weather, RSS, and more are useful for many, but the lockscreen can easily start to feel cluttered after awhile.

That’s why I’m excited to present “atom,” a new jailbreak tweak for the lockscreen that replaces the unlock slider with a beautifully subtle app launcher.

Apple’s iTunes catalogue revolutionized the way people consume media. Why go to BlockBuster to rent a movie when you can download it from iTunes just as quickly? While most of the market has been trying to catch up, Apple’s lead in online video sales has remained dominant in the U.S.

NPD released a new report that highlights Apple’s strength in electronic video sales and rentals. While everyone else is fighting for second place, Apple still commands over 67% of the market.

Tweetbot — just our favorite Twitter client for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad — has just gotten a sweet update with one killer new feature: a swank new media timeline that allows you to quickly browse through just the images and videos popping up in your Twitter stream.

Although PC makers are feeling the pinch, Intel actually posted a surprisingly decent quarter yesterday. But Intel’s still feeling a big pinch from ARM, which is just showing explosive growth, shipping 35% more ARM-based chips (like, yes, Apple’s A-series SoCs) than it did a year ago.

Apple will announce its second quarter financial results at 5 p.m. EST today, and this could be one of the company’s most interesting earnings calls for some time. Wall Street has been less than optimistic about the Cupertino company’s recent performance, and some believe that Apple will post its first quarter of negative growth income for over a decade.

But some analysts are a little more positive. According to averages put together by Yahoo! Finance, Apple is likely to announce revenue between $41 billion and $43 billion for the second quarter, with margins between 37.5% and 38.5%.

Our last “name your own price bundle” performed so well that we’re bringing a second one to our Cult of Mac readers. And once again we’ve delivered 10 top Mac Apps for a price that only you can name with The Name Your Own Price Bundle 2.0!

That’s right. You pay what you want for 3 different Mac Apps that will make you faster and more efficient on your Mac including: HoudahSpot, Elmedia Player Pro, and PhotoBulk. And, if you pay more than the average price, you’ll also receive Snapz Pro X, CrossOver XI, DiskTools Pro, Gemini, Mac Blu-Ray Player, Musictube, and Paperless.

We’ve chosen three charities, Child’s Play, World Wildlife Fund, and Creative Commons, that we believe make a significant positive impact across the globe. 10% of your entire purchase will go to help one of those charities – whichever one you choose!

I have gotten more mail asking about how I keep my Lightroom mostly in my Dropbox than pretty much anything else recently, after I mentioned it in a recent article. So here goes: an in-depth look at how I have things set up.

It’s not just for Lightroom/Dropbox nerds either: Using this method, you can keep pretty much anything in Dropbox and sync it between computers, even if the folders involved absolutely have to stay in a certain place on your hard drive, like your ~/Library folder.

If you got a $15 in the mail for no apparent reason, well, it’s because way back in 2010, Steve Jobs failed in convincing the world at large to “just avoid holding it that way.”

Yes, that cool $15 bucks you got in the mail? It’s an Antennagate settlement check.

Rogers is the latest Canadian company to broaden its horizons with the introduction of LTE. This week the carrier introduced LTE to 7 new markets, keeping the promise it made a fortnight ago.

You don’t necessarily have to spend $1,200+ on a new MacBook Pro to get a computer with a Retina display. Providing you’re happy to pull apart your iPad and you know what you’re doing with a soldering iron, you can build your a Retina display for your PC.

That’s what Polish hacker Andrzej did.

If you’ve ever impotently raged against the FedEx man for ignoring the note you left on the door and not leaving a package for you behind the toolshed like you asked, great news: FedEx has just updated its Mobile app, allowing for you to sign for packages, reroute a package to another address or provide delivery instructions, all from your iPhone or iPad.

Today at 2PM Pacific/5PM Eastern, Apple will announces its 2013 first quarter earnings. Cult of Mac will, of course, be covering it live, but here’s a very brief primer of what to expect.

Apple’s iCloud services have suffered a number of outages in recent weeks, and this morning the service has gone down again. The downtime appears to be affecting Mail, Find My iPhone, and Find My Friends on Macs and iOS devices, while visitors to iCloud.com cannot access any of Apple’s cloud-based services.

Namco Bandai’s Idolm@ster series has been exclusive to Japan since it first debuted in 2005, so you’ve probably never heard of it, despite their popularity. But Namco has translated three of the titles into English and ported them over to iOS, giving fans all over the world the chance to experience the Japanese sensation for the first time.

The only problem is, they’re priced at $54.99 each!

The Mac App Store is a great way to download apps to your Mac, as it takes care of the download, the install, and the post-install clean up for you. Sometimes, however, things can get a bit wonky, whether by accident or design, and you’ll want to go and download an app you think you’ve deleted.

Sometimes the Mac App Store will think the app you’ve deleted is still on your Mac. Or, you’ll want to re-download an app that’s behaving weirdly. When that happens, there will be a “Downloaded,” or “Installed” button there that won’t let you do anything.

While not all Mac App Store apps will work the same way, here are a few things to try out.

Logitech has today announced a new addition to its growing family of iPad keyboard cases, but this one is unlike anything the company has offered before. It’s called the FabricSkin, and it offers a fabric keyboard much like that that comes with the Microsoft Surface tablet.

The great thing about a fabric keyboard is that its super slim and liquid resistant.

Twitterrific for iOS has received yet another new update that’s packed full with new features and improvements. In addition to app badges for push notifications, you’ll also find Favstar support, Twitter trends, and a long list of tweaks and bug fixes that’ll improve existing features.

GeoTag Photos Pro just hit v3.0, and with the update comes a new, less-ugly UI. It also adds automatic Dropbox uploading, making it just about the easiest (and still most battery-friendly) photo-tagging app for the iPhone.

FocusTwist attempts to turn your iPhone into a Lytro Light Field camera, complete with photos that can be focussed after you take them. How does it perform this technological magic? It cheats.

Timebar is an ultra-simple timer app for your Mac. Click! its icon up in the menubar, drag! to select a period of time and then Go About Your Life! as it ticks the seconds away by running a blue progress bar across your menubar.

But there’s more.

Netflix has announced a new family plan that will allow an account holder to have four simultaneous streams. The plan will cost $12 per month. A specific launch date for the plan has not been announced, but Netflix revealed the news in a letter to shareholders today.

I don’t know if you have kids or not, but one of the more difficult things to keep track of, at least for me, is their allowance. Yeah, you might say, just write it down on a piece of paper or something. While that may seem to have merit, it rarely works out in my family. Let’s say my son gets $5 every two weeks for allowance. That’s a $5 bill I need to have each and every week.

Honestly? It never works out that way. So we tried using a calendar, on which I created a repeating event, set for every two weeks, figuring we could just count it up when he needed something. Well, that didn’t really work out, either. We’d be at a store, and he’d want something, and it’d be some non-multiple of five, and we’d try to remember to write it down, and so on.

Suffice it to say that I am doing a poor job at helping my kid keep track of his allowance, and an equally poor job of prepping him for real life money management.

So imagine my joy when I saw Allowance Manager for iOS, a Universal app that basically does what we need: tracks allowance on the iPhone or iPad. Win!

Last week saw popular photo-editing iPhone app FX Photo Studio go free for a day. MacPhun, the app’s developer, then extended that free day indefinitely — a result, they say, of the app’s overwhelming popularity as it’s blown through a million new downloads since going free.

Now the developer’s doing the same thing with the even-more-fantastic iPad version of the app, FX Photo Studio HD. Only this time, they say the app will be free until it hits 10 million new downloads. Since this is such a stellar app, ten million is not nearly as steep as it seems.

Alternative iOS informational website, AppShopper, had an app that was pulled from the App Store last December due to a conflict with new App Store rules that went into effect at that time. The team behind the app, who also run the website, have spent the hiatus working hard on a new app that is both compliant with Apple’s current App Store rules and useful to consumers.

AppShopper Social was announced today as live in the App Store, bringing with it a host of new social discovery systems along with the familiar Wish List functionality it’s always had.

This is a completely separate app, so if you still have the original AppShopper app on your iPhone or iPad, you can use them both alongside each other.