Apple has always had a lot of “crazy” ideas that they throw around the company and see if it’s something they could do really well. The iPhone and iPod came about because Apple was frustrated with their MP3 players and cellphones, so they decided to see if they could do it better.

In the past there were even rumors that Steve Jobs wanted to design a car. Well during Phil Schiller’s testimony this morning at the Apple vs Samsung trial we found out that those iCar rumors actually had some serious weight behind them.

Was the $14 iPhone macro lens a little too rich for you? If you can’t afford to drop the price of a cheap lunch onto a DIY photo accessory for your $650 phone, then perhaps I can interest you in Zaheer Mohiuddin’s $1 version.

That’s right: a $1 macro lens for the iPhone (or iPad). The only work you’ll need to do is take a walk to the dime store and find a roll of tape.

Lantronix, a company which sounds like a Transformer, has added a home version of the xPrintServer to its lineup. Like its office-bound older brother, this xPrintServer lets you print to any printer in your home via AirPrint.

Real Racing has been a staple of the App Store’s gaming catalog for years. As a game that pushes the boundaries of what iOS devices can do with console-like graphics, the developers behind Real Racing are always improving with new iterations. Real Racing 2 was one of the first games to take full advantage of the iPhone 4S’s faster processor and the iPad 2’s ability to stream 1080p video over AirPlay.

Now the folks at Firemonkeys (a combination of IronMonkey and Firemint’s gaming studios) have announced that Real Racing 3 is coming this year. A specific date has not been confirmed, but the game will feature real racecourses from around the world and 22 cars will be in each race.

The USDA is working its way through an ambitious iPad deployment that may come to serve as a model for a range of government agencies within the U.S. and around the world. The challenge was to develop a simple, intuitive, and effective field survey and data collection system.

The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) is a division of the USDA that is charged with surveying and reporting agricultural data across the country. NASS operates in all 50 states plus Puerto Rico. With a staff of around 3,000 enumerators NASS conducts thousands of survey each year about agriculture across the country. The service has been operating since the mid-1800s and, until the iPad, it conducted surveys and collected data in pretty much the same way that it had back in the 19th century – with paper forms filled out by hand and mailed to various field offices. Although various technology initiatives have been tried by NASS since the 1980s, none was a successful fit before the iPad.

It’s taken a while, but finally the pressure-sensitive iPad styluses are starting to ship after a long, long time in development. Now Adonit, the company behind the hot, hot Writer jeyboard case for the iPad, has launched its Jot Touch.

Yes, that’s “launched” as in, “you can buy it right now,” as in “$99 and ships in 1-2 days.”

iPhone rumors have reached a fever pitch with the word on the street being that Apple is holding its fall iPhone event on September 12th, and mainstream media is even paying attention to the rumor mill during primetime. Everyone wants to know about Apple’s next smartphone, including millions of iPhone 4 owners with expiring contracts.

What do you do when you want to buy a new smartphone? You sell your old one. That’s why eBay has seen a huge 70% spike in used phone trade-ins during the last few days.

Mophie, the JuicePack company, has flipped out and gone in a totally new direction, head first into an equally crowded market: iPhone sports camera enclosures. Mophie’s version is called the OUTRIDE, in ALL-CAPS.

In the weeks leading up to Apple’s rumored September 12th media event we’ve seen real-looking and not-so-real-looking leaks of the next iPhone. Rumors say that the sixth-gen iPhone (commonly referred to as the “iPhone 5” for clarity’s sake) will be taller and thinner than its predecessor. The device is expected to boast a 4-inch display, 4G LTE, and a redesigned form factor.

A new video has surfaced alongside a series of images comparing the current iPhone 4S front panel with the iPhone 5’s larger front panel.

If the iShower didn’t look like something you’d find next to you if you were laying in a hospital bed, it might just be the perfect summer speaker. As the name suggests, it’s a waterproof speaker whose Bluetooth connection keeps your iPhone safely away from anything wet.

In Mac OS X Lion, Expose merged with Spaces and became Mission Control. When you tapped the default F4 key on your laptop (or F9 or use a three fingered swipe up on your trackpad) to launch Mission Control, you’d get the image on the top left in the screenshot above: all the windows of un-hidden open apps at once.

OS X Lion changed things up by grouping all the windows from each app together in Mission Control, like the image in the lower left corner of the above screenshot. This new style, continued in Mountain Lion is intended to be an easier way to find the specific window you’re using. If that doesn’t work for you, you’re not out of luck, provided you’re running the latest big cat OS.

The day has finally come, folks. Legendary designer Surenix has brought the benchmark iPhone jailbreak theme called “ayeco”n to the iPad. We showed you a sneak peek of ayecon for iPad last week, and the Winterboard theme is now available for everyone to get in Cydia. It look gorgeous.

Popular and useful note-taking and synchronization app Evernote has just updated its Mac app to version 3.30. The new version adds new keyboard commands, a new premium user account, new user controls and LinkedIn support, which is also now available in the web-cased Evernote client. In addition, Evernote sports a handy slideshow option for notes that involve pictures. This will look really nice using Evernote’s new Retina display support.

The Tweetbot for Mac Alpha just got its coolest update yet. A version released today brings multiple columns for different timelines that can float freely or attach to each other and form a Twitter command center of awesomeness. The update packs other features too, like a menu bar interface, geotagged tweets, and Notification Center integration with multiple Twitter accounts at once.

Ever wanted to try your hand at iPhone app development? The folks at Code School want to teach you, via a series of web-based coding courses focused on learning to code for iOS now available for backing at Kickstarter. The new set of coursework is called Try iOS, and it will use video, in-browser activities, and a hands-on approach to teaching anyone how to code for the iPhone.

We want to create Try iOS, a Code School course which teaches how to build your own iPhone apps. Our course will combine high quality screencasts, in-browser code challenges, and gamification principles to make learning fun. There will be no need to install anything, since students will build iPhone apps using our in-browser iPhone simulator.

Remember the excluded Samsung documents we told you about yesterday? The ones that Samsung sent out to the media after they had been denied the ability to enter them into court? We told you how Samsung’s lawyer, John B. Quinn, argued that sending them along to journalists was neither unethical nor illegal. Apple has a different opinion, which they filed in court today.

With the debut of OS X Mountain Lion, Apple brought over Notification Center from iOS. Unfortunately, they’ve still chosen to go with the now familiar dark grey linen background. Looking to change it? Well, you’re in luck, because in this video, I’ll show you how to do just that.

As the NFL pre-season kicks off, the league has begun reminding fans about the various online programming and mobile apps that it offers. While we still have a month before the season starts, August is the time to check in with how your favorite teams are shaping up for the new season. It’s also the time to begin researching your fantasy football draft options – if you haven’t already.

For the preseason and fantasy prep time, the NFL is offering a  mobile apps – many of which will be familiar to fans with iPhones and iPads. We’ll be taking a look at the various official and third-party fantasy tools for Mac and iOS users as the pre-season rolls on, but here’s a quick look at the official options from the NFL.

A Japanese repair house posted photos of what looked like the iPhone 5, and we were all sold. They looked like what the rumor mill predicted, and they had just the right amount of realness to send the internet into a tizzy. Now, Neowin has pictures from an anonymous source in Bangkok, Thailand of what could be the next iPhone. Maybe. Possibly.

Not long go, we reported to you that the FPS Dead Trigger had given up the fight and gone free on Android, due to an “unbelievably high” piracy rate. Today, it appears that Madfinger Games, the developers behind Dead Trigger have given in and made the game free on iOS as well.

If there is one, single thing that has bailed me out in my 30+ years of using computers (starting with an Apple IIe, thank you very much), it’s that you must have backups. Thirty years ago, even 20 years ago when I was in college, the idea of so much of our lives (documents, pictures, music) only existing in the digital space was science fiction. Today, today it’s a fact of life. I don’t know about you, but I’d say I have hard copies of less than 1% of the thousands of photos I’ve taken in the past 14 years.

So the question is—are you backed up?

Now, don’t get me wrong, TimeMachine is a solid app (and better now under Mountain Lion), but it’s not perfect. Things like easy exclusions, backing up other volumes, making bootable backups—TimeMachine just doesn’t do. Good thing our deal today—Data Backup 3—does.

Taking notes and managing tasks can be a full time job. For many of us, the competing worlds of work, home, school, and hobbies can threaten to overwhelm all but the most organized among us. Unfortunately, not many of us (myself included) have the time or mental energy to create a system from scratch, forcing us to rely on software designers’ ideas about task management. There are a ton of apps out there to manage notes and tasks, but none that do it quite like Projectbook, an iPad-only iOS app available in the App Store now for $1.99.

Even though the iPad is a really great gaming device, I pretty much only use it to read. It’s great, it just doesn’t feel like all the books I love with their neat cover art.

Out of Print is a new company that is trying to get people to start reading more by promoting classic literature in cool ways. Their latest product is a series of iPad cases designed to look like classic books by using the same materials used in real book covers.

It has the word “cox” in the name, and you can play with it whilst naked in the bathroom, but that’s where the childish jokes end. The ECOXPRO is a waterproof speaker with a snug and safe chamber inside that will fit your iPhone or iPod, along with your cash and keys, all the while blasting out the tunes to everyone trying to relax on the beach.

The iPad continues to dominate the global tablet market and, according research firm IDC, the iPad is responsible for the strong growth of tablets across the board.

While the numbers announced during Apple’s most recent financials call continued to show strong year-over-year growth for the iPad, they didn’t illustrate how significant the iPad’s growth is compared to the rest of the tablet market.