The Amplifiear from BiteMyApple is a nifty little accessory that clips onto the corner of your iPad and boosts its sound output. It’s specifically moulded to amplify and direct the sound from your iPad’s speaker, and it promises to increase its volume by up to 10 decibels.

While the iPad’s speaker might not need amplifying in a quiet room, add background noise — such as a busy street or children playing — and it becomes hard to hear whatever it is you’re watching or playing. But by projecting your iPad’s sound towards you, the Amplifiear is designed to be “perfect for these conditions.”

The Amplifiear comes in six colors — black, white, red, green, blue, and orange — and is priced at just $24.99. Let’s find out whether it’s worth it.

Assisted Touch is an accessibility feature for iOS, usable on any iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, that recreates the hardware buttons and other gestures that someone with a motor disability might need to use. It also lets other folks use the Home, volume, screen lock, wake/sleep, and multitasking bar without using any of the hardware buttons themselves.

This can be pretty handy if you have the device in a case or holder of some type where accessing the buttons is tricky or impossible, like a home-made picture frame, for example.

Here’s how to activate this useful feature.

If you weren’t one of the lucky few that bought a WWDC 2013 ticket within the first 120 seconds they were available, then you’re probably super bummed that you’re not going to hangout with Jony Ive and the gang in San Francisco.

Don’t worry though, you can still get into the party if you’re desperate and have a few extra grand on you. Someone’s already put their WWDC ticket on eBay and the bidding starts at a cool $10,000.

Many of us thought Twitter was content to watch its Mac app die a slow and painful death, as the company hasn’t updated the app in forever, but new life has been breathed into the app at last.

Twitter just announced an update for the Twitter Mac app that brings Retina display support, better photo sharing, and support for 14 more languages. The app icon also received an update, along with the tweet composer, in what is the first update in nearly two years.

Here’s Twitter’s list of updates: 

WWDC 2013 is already proving to be Apple’s most popular event ever. After opening ticket sales for the event a mere two minutes ago, Apple has already sold out.

Cult of Mac’s John Brownlee was trying to get a ticket. He says: “I started refreshing ten minutes before WWDC, and when the tickets went live, I was instantly hit with an error message when trying to login on multiple browsers. So many people were slamming the WWDC ticket page, Apple’s login system just keeled over. By 10:02AM PDT, all the tickets were totally gone. Unless you got lucky, you didn’t even have a chance.”

Apple announced the dates of WWDC 2013 yesterday, but tickets didn’t go on sale until 10AM PDT this morning. That’s a new one for Apple: usually, tickets for WWDC are available immediately upon the announcement of the dates for the conference. This system, however, has been criticized by many developers, especially those overseas, who never even had a chance to get a ticket.

It’s hard to imagine they liked this year’s free-for-all any better. Apple has got to come up with a better system for WWDC. May we suggest a lottery for 2014?

Even though Apple announced the dates of WWDC yesterday, tickets for the event didn’t go on sale until today. Apple just flipped the switch on WWDC 2013 ticket orders, so if you’re hoping to make it to this year’s event, you better hurry up and get to ordering.

Apple sold out of tickets for WWDC 2012 within 2 hours last year, so we expect this year to be even more crazy. Going to the event will set your back $1599, not including your flight and hotel. The event will be held at Moscone West in San Francisco this year from June 10-14th.

Update: You never had a chance. Apple sold out of WWDC tickets within 2 minutes. 

Source: Apple

Without a doubt, the coolest thing we saw at CES 2013 this year was the JamStik, a tiny, ukelele-sized guitar with real strings that connects over WiFi that you can use to record, perform or learn instruments on your iPad.

The only problem was, when we saw it, it was such a new product that it didn’t even have a booth, let alone a distributor. But now it’s finally inching closer to release, spearheaded by a new IndieGoGo campaign that promises to bring the cool-as-hell iPad guitar into your hands and ready to shred by the end of the year.

LinkedIn has launched a new iPhone app today called LinkedIn Contacts, which promises to make it easier to stay in touch with your most important relationships. It brings all of your contacts together in one place, then provides you with alerts for birthdays, job changes, and more.

(Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on Medium, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Evan Williams’ new publishing platform.)

Usually during Apple’s quarterly earnings calls, you have to read between the lines to guess what Apple’s really thinking. On Tuesday, all you had to do was read the actual lines, because Cupertino was remarkably candid for a change: there was no way that the Apple of 2013 could match the numbers of the Apple of 2012, but “new product categories” — like the iWatch — were going to blow the roof off the house in 2014. In the meantime, Apple needs investors to be patient… and they’re not above paying them off to make it happen.

Not long after an FCC approval, a planned shareholder vote, and a revised deal on T-Mobiles front, MetroPCS shareholders have voted to approve the reverse merger between T-Mobile and MetroPCS. In the so-called “reverse merger,” the significantly smaller company, MetroPCS, will be buying into the networking giant, T-Mobile.

Get ready to splatter some grays, slice up some sectopods, and run screaming from some Chryssalids. Firaxis and 2K Games have today released XCOM: Enemy Unknown for the Mac, the official OS X port of last year’s best strategy game.

Are you the kind of guy who needs to compulsively catalogue everything in your life? Good news. Delicious Monster have just released a brand spanking new version of Delicious Library 3, a (no pun intended) monster of an updat that will allow you to easily and beautifully catalog all of the physical media in your life, publish your collection to the web, see how much it’s worth at a glance… and use your iPhone as a scanner. Wow!

Tim Cook suggested during Apple’s earnings call earlier this week that the Cupertino company wouldn’t be announcing any new products until later this year. So it’s no surprise to see that analysts from Citigroup are now reporting that the iPhone 5S will be available in early September, alongside a new low-cost iPhone for emerging markets.

Apple has been ordered to compensate three Chinese writers for infringing their copyrights when it made their books available on the App Store without first seeking their permission. The Cupertino company will pay more than ¥730,000 ($118,000) for the infringement.

It’s almost been five weeks since OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter teased the release of Draw Something 2, and had Ryan Seacrest advertise the title on Twitter. But it’s finally time to dust off your sketching fingers, because the sequel to one of 2012’s most popular social games is now available to download on iPhone.

Another advantage of the Mac App Store, besides pausing downloads, safe uninstalls, and easy re-downloads of Mac OS X apps, is the safety of knowing that anything in the Mac App Store has been vetted by Apple.

One way your Mac makes sure you’re (relatively safe) from rogue apps is what’s called Gatekeeper. By default, this bit of software only allows you to install verified apps from the Mac App Store on your Mac. What if, however, you want to download software from a Mac developer who doesn’t distribute their software on the Mac App Store? You’ll need to bypass Gatekeeper in order to do so.

Here’s how to do that safely.

iCloud push services could soon resume in Germany more than a year after they were killed after a high court stayed Motorola’s patent trial against Apple on Wednesday. Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court issued a press release that said both Apple and Google — which now owns Motorola — agreed to the stay, which has called into question the validity of Motorola’s patent.

Samsung warned us that its Apple Store clones were on the way, and this week they’ve begun popping up in Best Buy stores across the United States. Dubbed “Samsung Experience Shops,” the locations give customers the chance to get their hands on Samsung smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other devices so that they can try them out before making a purchase.

Ever wish that there was a kind of Instagram for video? Not the sharing part – I still think that’s wrong for video – but the filters part. There are a metric frak-load of photo-processing apps for the iPhone and iPad, but precious few for grungifying your videos. Thankfully, that just changed. With an update and a complete redesign, VideoGrade is now an essential app for iOS videographers.

I always thought the handiest thing I could do with a pizza box was to toss it in the trash and use the little three-legged plastic widget (the one that stops the lid from touching your cheese) as a milking stool for my Barbies [1] .

But I was wrong. Assuming that you can keep the cheesy grease off the box, then a few cuts and folds will turn it into this awesome MacBook stand.

One of my bikes has a bottle dynamo that presses on the tire and powers the front lamp. The Siva Cycle Atom is a modern-day equivalent, only it won’t rub away your tire or slow you down, and it’ll charge your gadgets instead of just running your lights.

I’m a big fan of waterproof speakers. Not just for in-shower podcast listening, so I can get all excited about CultCast host Erfon Elijah’s sweet vocal tones as I froth myself into a soapy lather. No, I also like to listen to Erfon in the kitchen as I cook, perhaps kneading a soft and supple bread dough by hand, or washing the dirty dishes with my rough hands plunged into the hot suds…

Anyway. Splash-proof speakers. Muji makes one .

Why buy some dumb iPhone telephoto lens when you could just drop $70 on an adapter that weds your iPhone with a pair of binoculars. That’s what Daniel Fujikake and Mac Nguyen were thinking when they came up with the SnapZoom, a universal mount to do just that.

Perfect B&W is a pretty great black and white photo app for the iPhone and the iPad (it’s universal). It’s built by OnOne Software, the folks behind high-end (and high-priced) desktop photo apps and plugins, and the results show it: Perfect B&W will let you make a great black and white conversion with one tap, or dig in and tweak almost every aspect of the picture.

Sony is saying that their new Cybershot HX50V camera is the lightest, smallest 30x optical zoom-equipped camera in the world.

Seems like optical zoom is the new megapixels, at least as far as high-end point-n-shoots are concerned; it’s amazing to see the increasing zoom range camera makers are scrambling to pack into their pocketable shooters these days. For now, looks like Sony might just be the race leader.

Let’s take a closer look at the HX50V.