When AppGratis was yanked from the App Store last week, it didn’t take a genius to work out why. The app violates an App Store guideline that was introduced last October banning iOS apps from promoting other iOS apps from different developers. It also used push notifications to deliver marketing messages by recommending apps with a once-daily notification, which is also not allowed.

What is confusing is why AppGratis was pulled — just days after its iPad app was approved — when there are plenty of similar services that remain in the App Store. But according to sources familiar with Apple’s plans, its ban was the first of many the Cupertino company is about to dish out.

If you have a Nikon DSLR, then you can now shoot long takes of more than 30 minutes each, thanks to the tireless work of the Nikon Hackers team. This might be of limited interest even to our camera-loving readers, but what is interesting is the reason Nikon added the 30 minute limit in the first place.

Piper Jaffray has once again asked the teenage blight upon our fair nation to stop popping pimples and sexting for a second to tell them what gadgets they want to buy next year. And, duh, it’s the iPhone.

We’ve all heard the rumors that Apple will move away from Samsung and find another fab to make all of their sexy, super-fast A-series processors, but today, The Korea Times is reporting it as a done deal, saying that Apple has shut Samsung out entirely from the design of their A7 processors. Who are they going with instead? The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC for short.

Hama’s descriptively-named Wi-Fi SD/USB Data Reader for Apple Devices seems to be solving a problem that doesn’t exist. To wit: you stick your photo-filled SD card (or USB stick) into this ~$100 box and it will beam the contents back to your Mac or iPad, all over the conveniently slow Wi-Fi network.

Foxconn sales declined 19% during the first quarter of 2013, and “disappointing” demand for Apple’s iPhone is getting the blame, Reuters reports. Between January and March, the company’s sales totaled NT$808.97 billion ($26.96 billion), down from NT$988.24 billion ($32.99 billion) in the fourth quarter of 2012, and NT$1 trillion ($33.38 billion) a year ago.

Can this cockpit hold the vasty plains of Cupertino? The Lyon Opera is about to find out. Coming in 2014 to the famous French opera house is Steve Five, an operatic mash-up of Shakespeare’s 1599 play Henry V and, wait for it, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography.

You know what? I’ve never looked at my desk and thought “I really wish that I could open two drawers at the same time, and yet still have easy access to the bottom one.” That’s not to say the Cartesia Desk is a bad idea. Rather, it shows my lack of imagination. The only thing I think of when I look at my desk is “where the hell am I going to put all my junk while I use the ironing board to actually iron some clothes.”

The official Foursquare app for iPhone has been updated today to make it easier to see Explore recommendations when you’re out and about. The Explore feature now has its own page within the app, which provides you with a list of nearby places you may wish to visit.

When you create a Calendar event, you have the option to have your Mac notify you of that event before it happens. In the case of an all-day event, however, you don’t have an easy option to change the time of day you’ll get the notification.

It can be done, however, with a little digging into the filesystem and a configuration file, letting you change the time of day you’re notified by default for all-day events.

T-Mobile USA has announced a new iPhone trade-in program ahead of the carrier’s official iPhone launch on Friday. Customers who trade in their old iPhone 4 or 4S will see the $99 down payment for a 16GB iPhone 5 dropped to $0, plus they’ll receive up to $120 additional credit.

Rumor has it that Apple’s fifth-generation iPad — expected to launch later this year — will boast a new form factor much like the iPad mini’s, with thinner bezels down each side of its display. The first evidence we have to prove those claims has surfaced today in the form of a leaked front panel.

Zenbox’s slogan really says it all: “Hide the mess behind the desk.” As a dedicated throw-everything-in-the-closet-and-slam-the-door-before-it-falls-out practitioner, I can get behind this 100%. The Zenbox is a dock for your MacBook Pro: you plug one end into the left side of your Mac, and plug your various peripherals into the other.

The USP of this dock over others is that those peripherals sit at the end of a cable, letting you throw all of your junk behind the desk and only have to deal with one tidy box.

iDropcopy is a super simple clipboard sharing app which uses Dropbox for its storage. It comes in iOS (universal) and OS X flavors, and is almost as simple as copying on one device and pasting on the other. And because it uses Dropbox you can – theoretically – dive in and edit the raw snippets.

Stills shooters have been having all the fun recently, with high-end cameras with tiny bodies, big sensors and fast lenses. Now it’s the turn of videographers: the new Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera is a RAW-shooting body that will fit into your pocket.

Thanks to those leaked screenshots that appeared on Tuesday, we’re pretty confident that Google Babel is no longer just a rumor, but a real product that’s patiently waiting to get its grand unveiling. And according to sources that are familiar with Google’s plans, it’s worth getting excited about.

They claim Babel aims to be “everything we have ever asked for in a unified messenger service,” with cross-platform syncing and a “first class iOS experience.”

Yahoo is talking to Apple about how it can integrate more of its services in iOS, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. Apple currently uses Yahoo to provide weather, stocks, and sports information. But Yahoo reportedly wants to play a more “prominent role on Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices.”

An obvious change would be making Yahoo the default search engine in Safari, but that won’t be happening anytime soon. Microsoft’s Bing engine currently provides results for Yahoo search, which complexes things. Google also has a deal in place with Apple that gives it the default search position in Safari. Apple would obviously want to cut Google out if possible. Siri already avoids using Google search for a lot of queries.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

So many apps are designed first for the iPhone, and the iPad is more or less an afterthought. Not so with Status Board, a brand new app from Panic that is designed meticulously with the iPad’s larger display in mind.

If you know Panic’s pedigree (Coda, Transmit, etc.), then you know what kind of app to expect: something incredibly powerful, focused, and impeccably designed. Status Board is no exception. And although the app won’t appeal to most iPad users, it is perhaps Panic’s most consumer-friendly app to date.

Looks like Brian K. Vaughn’s Saga isn’t the only digital comic getting warned off by Apple’s terms against material it deems to be pornographic lately. French comic app portal app, Izneo, has also been affected by a recent Apple warning to remove a ton of the comic books from its app offerings that Apple deems pornographic, and thus in violation of its Terms of Service.

Hardcore Vault Hunters may have noticed that the opportunity to venture forth with their PC-based comrades — a huge boon that arrived in an update almost two months ago — was no longer an option as of early this month, when the latest Borderlands 2 patch hit PCs, throwing the two operating systems out of sync again.

But the two platforms are now synced again, thanks to Aspyr’s lightning-fast release of a Mac-side patch. They’ve also brought us the $5, Steam-only Ultimate Vault Hunter’s Pack DLC, which raises the level cap and adds a “super-rare line of weapons.” Yeehaw.

I’ve never had much luck with Google Goggles; it’s a fancy feature tacked on to the Google Search iOS app that’s supposed to return search results related to any item or text photographed from within the app. But it’s sent me shopping for dresses after I’ve snapped a picture of speakers, and  tried to conduct searches using text it thinks it’s found — when their wasn’t any.

Brand-spanking-new CamFind attempts more-or-less the same trick — only it’s better at it.

To stay on top of its prediction game, analyst firm Piper Jaffray’s just finished its 25th bi-annual teen survey to find out what all the cool kids are doing with tech and what do they want next.

The survey found that Apple is the most desired tech brand by teens, but Google has made some improvement compared to last year. Yet while analysts are still busy predicting the demise of Apple, 48% of teens in the survey say they own an iPhone, and 62% say they plan to buy one next.

Barely a week has passed and Apple already has a new update for the OS X 10.8.4 beta. Apple just released build 12E30 of OS X 10.8.4 to developers.

The seed’s release notes don’t contain anything significant, but devs will surely find new stuff once they get to digging through the OS. Apple does note for developers to focus on Graphics, Drivers, Safari, and WiFi.

OS X 10.8.3 was released to the public a couple weeks ago after going through 13 beta revisions over a period of nearly 5 months. The next version of OS X should premier at WWDC this year, if not before.

Having a hard time sending iMessages to friends recently? You’re probably one of those that are affected by the current iMessage and FaceTime outage.

Word of the outage quickly spread across Twitter this afternoon that users are experiencing outages with iMessage. A FaceTime outage quickly followed and Apple just updated its support page to acknowledge the service outage.

We’ll let you know once things are back on.

Update: Looks like everything is back up and running.

AppGratis is a popular App Store app that’s used by more than 12 million iOS users. The company consists of 45 employees and recently raised $13.5 million in funding. AppGratis offers promotions and discounts for popular paid iOS apps in conjunction with third-party developers, and the company has continued to thrive over the last few years.

Everything was going great until Apple threw down the hammer over this past weekend. Without much warning, AppGratis was suddenly pulled from the App Store for violating some developer guidelines. Poof. Gone. Now it’s a matter of working with Apple to try and fix what caused the problem. The app’s removal came as a shock to AppGratis and has left the CEO wondering how the App Store review team “could have possibly changed their minds overnight.”