Cult of Mac

US District Court Judge Lucy Koh rejected requests today from both Apple and Samsung regarding the parties’ proposal to keep portions of key legal documents out of the public eye during their upcoming patent case in California this month.

If you’ve been following all the current pre-trial back and forth between Apple and Samsung in the Apple Inc v. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al, 11-1846 case, in which Apple has claimed Samsung is infringing on several patents, Samsung has counterclaimed similar infringement arguments, and Apple’s request for a temporary sales ban on the Samsung Nexus Phone has been accepted and enforced by the court.

You’ll also know that Judge Koh has been steadily, one might say doggedly, dealing with both parties, trying to keep the case as relevant, simple, and direct as possible.

In a new visual for the Apple Store website, Apple has posted a “We’ll be back” note for potential web visitors. What’s news about that? Well, there are 18 different languages that rotate through, each (assumedly) saying the same thing. We’re assuming this is regular maintenance for the site, but will keep an eye on things just in case.

It’s a nice international touch, and in keeping with Apple’s continuing success worldwide. Click on through to see if you can figure out all the languages – feel free to share in the comments below.

Another day, another patent infringement story. Today, HTC brought a couple of counterclaims against Apple in Florida over two patents it bought from HP last December.

The case they’re asserting the claims in is one that started in 2010, with a Motorola lawsuit against Apple. Six of the twelve Apple counterclaims in that lawsuit also concerned HTC. While HTC motioned to transfer the case out of Miami, they had to respond to those counterclaims. They did so by filing their own counterclaims.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson responded today to the recent rumor that the telecommunications company is planning to charge customers for data used in FaceTime calls over 3G. The feature was announced for iOS 6 in June at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.

Asked about the rumor at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Stephenson acknowledged the rumor, but then also said it’s “too early to talk about pricing,” which may in fact be executive-speak for, “we won’t tell you how much we’re gonna charge.”

It seems like there’s a zillion different Twitter clients out there today, but on our latest CultCast, we’ll reveal which apps we love and why using their website to tweet is so very uncool.

And then: he dances; he prances; he likes to yelp and yell! He’s Microsoft’s eccentric CEO, Steve Ballmer, and he LOVES. HIS. COMPANY. But would Microsoft be a cooler biz if they had a hip CEO who was a whole lot less uncouth? Don’t miss this fun discussion.

Subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes, or easily stream new episodes right on your iPhone or iPad with Apple’s brand new Podcasts App.

Full show notes coming up next!

The uses for Apple’s iPhone and iPad in healthcare seem to be growing by leaps and bounds. The latest field of medicine to take note of the power that iOS devices offer doctors and healthcare providers is ophthalmology. A new study shows that the iPhone may make a better tool when reviewing certain types of ophthalmology images that a standard desktop PC workstation.

What’s truly amazing is that the iPhone used in the study was a four-year-old iPhone 3G.

Back in June at the I/O developer conference, Google announced  they are bringing their Chrome web browser to the iOS platform. Many Apple fans prefer Chrome over Safari on desktop machines, so the unveil was met with a lot of excitement from iOS users. However, it looks like Chrome has a long  road ahead if it hopes to become a prominent power on the iOS web scene.

A new study by Chitika shows that after Google Chrome for iOS has been at the top of the App Store charts for weeks, it has earned a 1.5% marketshare of  all web browsers on iOS. Safari dominates with an 85.6% marketshare, while other third-party browsers take up the other 13%. Chrome’s overall 1.5% browser share translates to a 10.3% share of the total iOS third-party browser market.

According to a new study, mobile technologies like the iPhone and iPad aren’t delivering all the applications and features that most small businesses feel they need to succeed. The issue is less with Apple (or Google or RIM) and more with the developers and technology partners that create and market solutions tailored to the somewhat unique needs of the small business market.

The study was performed by Techaisle, a research firm that specializes in the small to mid-size business (SMB) market. It looked at whether small businesses felt that they were getting adequate options and support from cloud and mobile technology vendors. It found that across several areas, mobile technology solutions are failing to provide needed capabilities.

When we first saw the promo vide for Checkmark, Cult of Mac reviews editor Charlie Sorrel called it the “reminders app Apple should have made.” Today the app makers at Snowman released Checkmark for iPhone in the App store. Available for $0.99, Checkmark aims to replace Apple’s own Reminders app with a smarter workflow and much smarter location-based reminders.

Even though the iPhone 4S didn’t come with a radical new design and a few features customers were hoping for, it was still Apple’s most popular iPhone ever. During the first quarter of its availability, Apple sold over 37 million iPhone 4S units, but analyst Gene Munster says Apple is going to murder than number and sell at least 80 million iPhone 5’s.

Mobile management vendor BoxTone announced an aggressive pricing and sales campaign for its mobile management platform today. From now through the end of September, companies will be able to license BoxTone’s mobile device management (MDM) suite for a monthly fee of just $0.99 per device.

The move comes just a week after BoxTone announced the latest generation of its mobile management tools that includes the now-discounted MDM module as well as modules focused on mobile app management (MAM), mobile device support solutions for help desk agents and IT support teams, and a mobile operations module for monitoring and managing mobile IT staff.

Using Apple’s recently released Podcast app for your browsing and discovery needs? Apple’s latest evolutionary step in the podcast world is a standalone app that took the podcasts out of the standard Music app and gave them a home of their own. This makes a lot of sense, as most podcasts are not strictly music. Audio, yes. Music? Not always.

The hype around the release of the app has been about discovery, of course, as giving the media type its own separate place for users to look at, complete with Apple’s own special sauce for featuring and categorizing things for their users, really helps us all find the podcasts we didn’t even know we wanted to listen to.

However, once caught up in the discovery process, you might not have known that you can subscribe to any podcast, whether it is featured or not, right from the Podcast app itself.

Don’t forget your iPhone’s password, because if you do your device might get disabled for  a few decades. That’s what happened to this poor fellow’s iPod Touch. After erroneously entering his passcode ten times the iPod locked up and said it can’t be used for another 22,338,550 minutes. That’s 42.5 years he’s going to have to wait to listen to The Biebs new album. The poor sucker.

The longest a time lock on iOS is supposed to last is 60 minutes, so this is obviously a bug. A really bad bug. Should this ever happens to your iPod you can fix it by plugging the device into your Mac and restoring it to your last backup.

Source: Reddit

Most camera bags today offer a big pocket or pouch you can use to keep safe your motley crew of memory cards and batteries, but I really hate digging through a man-purse full of photo nicknacks just to find the SD card I need. Worse, in my years as a photographer, I can’t count how many times I’ve misplaced or lost entirely items from my conglomerate of memory cards because I end up just throwing them somewhere in my bag.

The SD Pixel Pocket Rocket (PPR for short, $15.75) and DSLR Battery Holder 4 (DBH 4, $16.50) from ThinkThank Photo aim to fix those storage woes by keeping your ample nacelles and secure disks stored and stashed in their own teensy little wallets.

Hmmpph! Their own wallets? It’s a wacky notion, to be sure — but I think it’s working!

When it comes to using mapping APIs on mobile, it’s hard to think about any name other than Google Maps. However, the truth is that Google Maps doesn’t fit the needs of every developer and/or company. Thankfully we live in a country that allows competition and choice (even though large companies continually try to squash it). There is, in fact, a broad number of mapping solutions available to developers, and with Apple and others recently abandoning Google Maps, we’ve seen a spark of interest in these alternatives. One that’s been working hard to provide a viable option to its customers is deCarta.

Have you ever wondered how much time you spend in an app? There are those staple iOS apps most of us use everyday (Phone, Messages, Mail, etc.), and then there are our favorite third-party apps from the App Store. Which apps command the most of your time? Now there’s an easy way to find out.

A new jailbreak app called App Analytics tracks your app usage on the iPhone and iPad. Once installed via the jailbreak App Store known as Cydia, App Analytics stays out of the way. The app is simple, lightweight, and scarily revealing.

We’ve been drooling over the amazing power of Leap Motion’s powerful 3-D motion control software since we first got wind of it back in May. It’s the coolest way to interact with a computer since the invention of the mouse, and it looks like Leap Motion is bringing in some serious firepower to help get the company’s first product off the ground.

Former Apple VP, Andy Miller, has just been hired as Leap Motion’s COO and President. Miller left Apple in August of 2011 after working as Apple’s VP of Mobile Advertising since 2010 when his mobile advertising company, Quattro Wireless, was purchased by Cupertino. Hiring Miller gives Leap a significant figure who’s familiar with Silicon Valley and the challenges Leap will face when marketing their product against Microsoft’s Kinect controller.

Parallels, the company behind the acclaimed virtual desktop software that lets you run Windows alongside OS X on your Mac, just scored a big name. The former vice president of Mac Software Engineering at Apple, Bertrand Serlet, has joined the board of directors at Parallels. Serlet will bring his knowledge and expertise of all things Mac to Parallels, and he is also working at a startup called Upthere in Palo Alto.

Serlet left Apple in 2001 after working for 14 years alongside Steve Jobs at NeXT and then Apple. He led the original development of OS X and previously worked at Xerox PARC, the research facility where Jobs was inspired to begin work on the graphical interface for the original Macintosh.

There’s no shortage of under-the-radar games on the iOS App Store that have ripped off some art, an idea, or even an IP from bigger and more successful products, but we haven’t seen a rip-off as shameless as Armed Heroes for a while, which seems to have stolen all of its art assets wholesale from the wildly successful (and wildly addictive) Mac and PC action game, Torchlight.

If there’s a sucker born every minute, that person is probably hoping to find a crazy-cheap deal on an iPad or iPhone in the newspaper.

The San Francisco Examiner published an article about Apple’s flap with local government over their withdrawal from the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment (EPEAT) rating system with a half-page ad selling discount iPads right below it. An ad that was way, way too good to be true.

Apple is expected to launch Mountain Lion next week. At the same time, the company will be launching Mountain Lion Server. The new edition of Apple’s server platform is revolutionary in a lot of ways, not the least of which is its $19.99 price tag.

Mountain Lion Server includes the basic server functionality that you’d expect from a product intended for the small to mid-size business (SMB) market. That means features like file sharing, network printing, client backups, website hosting, VPN, email services, centralized contacts for an organization, and shared calendaring. All of that is important and Mountain Lion Server seems destined to make those services easy to set up and manage.

In addition to those basic capabilities, however, Mountain Lion Server comes with some pretty incredible functionality for businesses or workgroups of any size or type. Here are ten of the big money features that are easy to overlook.

If you’ve ever used Steam’s platform for purchasing and downloading games — and you probably have if you’re a Mac or PC gamer — then you’ll already be aware of just how great it is. In fact, if there’s one platform that beats the Mac App Store when it comes to buying games, it’s Steam.

And that rivalry could be about to get a whole lot greater. After a list of productivity software categories briefly appeared within Steam’s mobile app, it looks like the company could be about to take on Apple’s store by selling apps as well as games.

AgileBits has updated its 1Password app with Retina graphics in the Mac App Store. Version 3.9.6 of the password manager is available now as a free update for existing customers in the Mac App Store, and version 3.8.20 is also available from the AgileBits website. The Mac App Store version plays by Apple’s sandboxing rules, while the web version does not. 1Password is sold for $50 in the Mac App Store and $70 on the web.

1Password will also be ready to run on Mountain Lion when Apple ships the OS later this month.

Every once and a while here at Cult of Mac, we like to peel open our gadget bags and catalogue what’s inside them for a bit of fun in our “What’s in our gadget bag?” series. The scope of our gadget bags has nothing on Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s, though: his bag contains two iPads, a MacBook Pro, two iPod nanos, three iPhone 4Ses, an iPhone 4, a Mophie, a Jambox and even more.

When Apple unveiled iOS 6 and released the first beta at WWDC back in June, it quickly became apparent that a number of new features wouldn’t be supported on older devices like the iPhone 3GS, and Apple mentioned these restrictions in the fine print of its iOS 6 preview page.

In the iOS 6 beta 3 release, however, shared Photo Streams and VIP mail — two of the features that are unsupported on older devices — are now supported on the iPhone 3GS.