In a not-so surprise move today, Apple filed a proposal with the US District Court that is handling Monday’s trial between it and rival Samsung over possible patent infringements. The surprise move today is the fact that Samsung agrees with Apple.

Both companies have to submit documents as exhibits in the wide-ranging trial, scheduled for Monday, and each company would like to keep it’s sensitive business data private. The two tech industry leaders today came up with a proposal that, if accepted, will have them jointly submitting documents they would like redacted from the public.

Tonight during the Olympics, Apple aired several new Mac focused ads. The spots are drastically different than the kind of style Apple has been using in its TV ads for products like Siri and the iPad.

One features a man on a plane receiving assistance from a Genius with iMovie on his Mac, and another features a conversation between the same Genius and a customer who has just been tricked into buying “basically a Mac.” The third ad shows a scene in which a frantic dad explores iPhoto with a Genius.

One of the new features in OS X Mountain Lion is called Power Nap. Touted as a tool that get things done while your Mac is sleeping, Power Nap enables a Mac running Mountain Lion to download email, sync with iCloud, check for system updates, etc. while in sleep mode. There is a big caveat, however. Power Nap will only run on Macs with an internal solid-state hard drive (SSD).

During the developer beta phase of Mountain Lion and continuing into its public release stage, it was noticed that certain compatible Macs didn’t have Power Nap installed by default on the final release of Mountain Lion. Apple has since issued a firmware update to bring Power Nap to the MacBook Air, and now a new update today has been issued for the new MacBook Pro with Retina display.

Have you ever noticed that the Shuffle option on iTunes or on your iPod isn’t truly random? For example, if you have a playlist with ten tracks and start off by playing, say, the second track, iTunes will always shuffle to the exact same next track, everytime.

Doesn’t seem much like “Shuffling,” does it? It is, though: Apple’s just thinking about Shuffling a different way than you are.

Our Mountain Lion Megasode is here, and on this minty-new CultCast, we’ll tell you what we like, what we love, and which hidden features we’ve discovered in Apple’s new big kitty.

Plus, should you upgrade or do a clean install of Mountain Lion? We ponder that very question, then tell you when a clean install makes more sense and how to do it the right way on this all-new megasode.

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

Show notes up next!

This one’s for the ladies parents out there. You know how you hand your iPhone off to your kid when you’re all waiting for the doctor? Or slide your iPad to the backseat for those long drives to Aunt Josephina’s house? If your kid is App Store savvy – and what kid isn’t, these days – they can rack up quite a bill installing apps that look cute to them but cost you real money. They can even wreak havoc with the simple tap-hold-wiggle dance, deleting your precious apps from your iOS device faster than you can say, “Do I need to turn this car around right now?!”

Luckily, there’s a simple, built-in way to prevent this from happening. Here’s what to do.

The 2012 Olympic Games are set to kick off in less than 2 hours, so we wanted to make sure you had some apps and links to ensure you don’t miss a single lap, dive, punch, or round-off. You’ll find a list of the top apps and a few websites to keep you on track and in the game. Feel free to check them out, or if you have any other suggestions, throw them up in the comments. Now let the games begin!

The Soloshot is not, as you might suspect, a wipe-clean target aimed at the adult video market. Instead, it is a motorized stand for a sports camera, although its target customer is likely the same lonely soul that would be interested in the (mythical) pop-shot tracking gadget I mentioned above.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has only been available for 48hours but that’s not preventing many Mac owners from already upgrading. The $20 price tag, combined with easy download access via the Mac App Store has led to an incredible rate of adoption by Mac owners across the globe, and it might be on pace to be one of the most quickly adopted operating systems ever.

A new traffic report released by Chitika this morning shows that more than 3% of Mac users surfing the web have already installed Mountain Lion. Estimates are claiming that about 2.11 million Mac users downloaded OS X 10.8 within the first 48 hours of its release.

The Apple Command key (or, as you might better know it, ⌘) has a beautiful and clear history. Originally, the ⌘ key was an Apple symbol instead, but Steve Jobs thought that using the Apple logo as a keyboard shortcut in the original Macintosh’s menus was “taking the logo in vain” so he tasked the great icon designer Susan Kare to find a solution. The symbol she chose was the traditional clover symbol we all know today, chosen because it is commonly used in Scandavaniva to indicate a tourist attraction or place of interest.

Interesting, right? Unfortunately, there’s no related story as to why the Option key has its own unique (and very abstract) symbol: ⌥. Marc Edwards’ brilliant take on what the ⌥ symbol means is doubtless revisionist history, but I love the visual metaphor of a train switching tracks. That may not be the real tale, but it should be.

Source: Twitter
Via: Brooks Review

You know those big fat puzzle books you used to buy before you went on vacation? They’d be full of so many crosswords, word-searches and other mindless diversions that you could spend an entire week in a foreign country without seeing a single thing but the rough, badly-printed pages.

Now that wonderfully reclusive experience is available on the iPad, in the first game to be sold in the iOS Newsstand.

If you’ve ever searched for a wallpaper in the Google Play Store, chances are you were met by a never ending list of results. That’s because the word “Wallpaper” just happens to be the number one most frequent word in an Android app title. In fact, 26,900 Android app titles contain the word “Wallpaper” according to a list compiled by app discovery site App Brain. App Brain decided to create the list after a similar one consisting of the top most frequent words used in iOS app titles was released by Appsfire.

Mountain Lion is packed with over 200 new features, some of which you may never notice. Like did you know you can change the name of documents just by clicking its name up in the menu bar now? Or there’s tons of neat little things in the Accessibility Settings that will steal 15 minutes of your life as you play with them.

Now that you’ve had a few days to play around with Mountain Lion, what have you found that’s surprised you? Have you found any tricks and hidden features yet? If so, what are they?

CLICK HERE TO TALK ABOUT HIDDEN FEATURES IN THE CULT OF MAC FORUMS

Hueless, the excellent monochromatic iPhone photography app, has just launched its v1.2 update. And despite the pedestrian-sounding version number, it packs in quite a lot of new features. Let’s take a look.

Apple isn’t known for attending trade shows. Apple especially isn’t known for attending conferences that revolve around security research and the hacking community. That’s why it was a huge surprise when it was revealed that Apple would be making its first ever appearance at the Black Hat security conference this year. Dallas De Atley, Apple’s head security guru, was slated to give a talk on iOS, the company’s mobile operating system.

You’d think that De Atley’s talk would be pretty interesting, right? Unfortunately, attendees weren’t very impressed.

It’s official: Wi-Fi is the new megapixels. Or something. What’s certain is that the camera phone market has forever mixed up the regular camera world, and in order to offer some form of uploading and editing convenience for their dumb offline boxes, camera makers are adding Wi-Fi. Specifically, Wi-Fi that will connect to your iPhone or Android device.

The latest is the Fujifilm FinePix F800EXR, a compact superzoom which will cost you $380.

Okay, this probably isn’t what you were hoping for from the company that brought us titles such as Final Fantasy XIV and Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, but Square Enix’s next mobile release is none other than SolaRola. If you haven’t heard of it, don’t worry — most of us haven’t. This cute mobile puzzler platformer was actually launched on Java back in 2007, and believe it or not, happens to be among a handful of games to secure a perfect 10 score and Platinum Award from Pocket Gamer.

Best Buy is now selling the iPhone 4 — in white and black — for just $49.99 with a two-year service plan on AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint. This is one of the cheapest iPhone 4 deals we’ve seen so far, and it’s expected to last until Apple unveils the new iPhone later this year.

I’m totally against the wrapping of wires, ever since being shouted at on a movie location for over-enthusiastically coiling audio and power cables around my thumb and elbow. Apparently that’s not how it’s done by the pros, and the experience has made me wince every time I see somebody stretching their headphone cables around their iPod.

Still, I’m clearly in the (superior) minority, and the The Wrap proves it. It’s a plastic 3-D printed widget which wrangles your cable into order.

80 million Instagram users are no longer able to find their friends on Twitter after the micro-blogging site killed the required API. The app’s “Find Friends” feature now presents an error when attempting to connect to Twitter, though the “Tweet Photo” function is still available.

Total Recall, the official game for the upcoming science-fiction thriller, is now available on Android and iOS. It’s a fast-paced first-person shooter that follow’s the movie’s storyline across eight missions, promising a wide variety of weapons for “non-stop, adrenaline-pumping action.”

Replug is a gadget that could – if it had existed a few years ago – would have saved me a fortune; literally hundreds of dollars. It is a simple and excellent idea: a magsafe connector for your headphones, only without the magnets.

Are you wondering why I said anachronistic? Well, seriously, the old-school world of fake leather and book bindings is goofy enough when it’s a real world item (unless it’s the sweet BookBook case for your iPhone…drool), but the skeumorphic leather and book bindings in newly-named Calendar and same-old-name Contacts apps in OS X Mountain Lion are ridiculous. I haven’t used a paper calendar or address book in years, even in the days before the iPhone. I know – gasp – there was life before iPhones.

Here’s an app that will remove this fugly visual choice – then you can forever thank us for helping you use your digital world just a bit more, erm, digitally.

Whenever Apple moves to purchase a company, you know they’ve got something up their sleeves, and it’s not hard to imagine the possibilities of their latest acquisition: maker of fingerprint sensor chips, AuthenTec.

Remember that concept we showed earlier this month you for an awesome email app called .Mail? We pleaded with creator Tobias van Schneider to turn his idea it into a reality, and it looks like he listened, because .Mail is coming to your Mac. And you can sign up now to be the first to know when it drops.