Every time Apple holds a keynote or earning call they love to brag about how many apps are available in the App Store. Right now Apple’s boasting that there are 500,000 apps for the iPhone, which you know, sounds really freaking amazing when you’re thinking about buying and iPhone. Think of all the cool stuff you could with 500,000 different apps.

Yes, the App Store is awesome and it’s packed with some truly solid apps, but the truth is that most of the 500,000 apps that Apple brags about don’t ever get noticed. In fact, a recent analysis revealed that two-thirds of all apps in the App Store are “zombies,”  meaning they never get downloaded, are invisible to users, and have no ranking.

Mountain Lion’s version of the Safari browser brough many great things: a unified URL/search bar, iCloud tab syncing and some neat new gestures (try pinching when you have a few tabs open). What it also did was remove the RSS button, replacing it with the Reader button found in iOS. This – apparently – pissed off a lot of people.

So, for those of you who used this button daily, we’ve put together a list of alternatives. None of them will give you the same functionality, but all of them are great RSS readers which work in slightly different ways.

The times sure are a-changin’, and we’re now in an age where political leaders are announcing running mates via mobile apps. Much like Barack Obama’s decision to announce VP running mate Joe Biden via text message, Mitt Romney has decided to announce his VP via a mobile app entitled “Mitt’s VP.”

If you’ve never been to a Cracker Barrel restaurant, then I feel sorry for you. Where I live, Cracker Barrel is where you go for hearty, good ol’ fashioned, country cooking. Breakfast is always especially good.

The only times I ever played checkers growing up was at Cracker Barrel. While you wait for your food, there are boards set up around the restaurant with rocking chairs. There’s something about sitting down with a friend or loved one to just play a simple game of checkers. In the age of Xbox LIVE, Draw Something and Scrabble apps, face-to-face gameplay is sadly becoming a thing of the past.

A new iPad game called Checkers blends traditional board gaming with pixel-perfect digital charm.

Apple is one of the world’s only companies that isn’t content to push out a great product with a few flaws. They want everything to be perfect. It’s one of their biggest strengths, but it also prevents a lot of neat products and ideas from reaching production. It turns out that the iPhone was no different during its inception, and even after all the cool prototyping and public demand for a great smartphone, Apple nearly axed the iPhone before it was launched.

Apple’s chief designer, Jony Ive, stated in a recent interview that small design flaws with the iPhone nearly caused it to get shelved, because even though the iPhone was good, it wasn’t excellent until they figured out how to fix some fundamental problems, like the proximity sensor.

One of the best gifts I ever bought for my camera was a hand-made leather ever-ready case. These two-part cases not only look better the older they get, but they offer a whole lot of protection. I have dropped my Panasonic GF1 more times than I will ever admit to you, and it doesn’t even have a dent or scratch. Well, not from dropping it anyway.

But my handsome case looks like a piece of junk next to these gorgeous half-cases from Korea’s Gariz. You can pick up models to fit most high-end compacts and mirrorless cameras, but today we’ll take a look at a new addition for the Sony RX100.

By now, we should all know that texting while driving is a danger not only ourselves and our passengers, but to everyone we share the road with. With over 1 million new mobile users a week in the U.S., that makes for a scary number of possible distracted drivers. The temptation is there, especially in young drivers, but as AT&T has shown us, “It Can Wait.”

According to a new report this morning, Apple is considering a stock split that could add the company to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Sanford C. Bernstein & Co predicts that Apple’s decision to issue its first dividend in 17 years to shareholders makes now a perfect time for the stock split.

Apple is currently in the NASDAQ index, but given the incredible financial success the Cupertino company has seen over the past decade, it makes perfect sense to move to the Dow Jones.

Ever since Apple debuted their new Mac ad campaign during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies last week the internet has been buzzing like crazy with some people saying they’re good while many others think they’re terrible. Even Apple’s former ad-man Ken Segall came out yesterday and bashed the ads.

Apple’s definitely made some bad ads in the past, but are these the worst? What do you think about the ads? Do they make Mac users look like a bunch of Genius-dependent boneheads? Or do the ads appeal to people who might be afraid to use technology? We want to talk about it with you guys in the forums, so head on over and let us know what you think.

Click here to tell us what you think about the new Mac ads in the Cult of Mac Forums 

The search for the perfect iPad case is never ending, but that won’t stop me trying. And as you get further along in your quest, the differences between cases becomes smaller and smaller. At first glance, these two slimline cases from Lioncase look like any other slimline folios and Smart Covers, but close up they look much more compelling.

I gave up on Google Chrome for iOS about a day after it was released. Even though my iPhone is jailbroken and I can bypass iOS’s restrictions to set Chrome as my default browser, I missed Safari. Also, Chrome felt considerably slower than the iPhone’s default browser, and that was because Apple handicaps third-party apps by not allowing them to access the lightning-fast Nitro Javascript engine in iOS.

Does the lack of Nitro in your favorite third-party iOS browsers keep you awake at night? Me neither. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be cool to make an app like Google Chrome just as fast as Mobile Safari. For jailbreakers, there’s a new tweak out that makes it all possible.

One common assumption about iPads in business is that employees and executives are insisting on using their personal iPads at work or are demanding that the company provide them while CIOs and IT departments are fighting tooth and nail against the iPad. While that assumption certainly makes for good headlines and soundbites, it isn’t actually true – at least according to a new report from cloud and content management firm Alfresco.

In fact, Alfresco’s new report indicates that IT staffers are heavily involved in tablet adoption and may even be the driving force behind it. The report also provided a range of insights as to how iPads and other tablets are being used in the workplace and notes that tablets are offering new opportunities more than they are replacing either smartphones or PCs.

Even though Apple’s Pages app is a pretty solid word processing tool, a lot of Mac users still love to use Microsoft Word. If you’re one of them, that’s cool, we won’t judge you. The biggest problem with using Word on a new MacBook Pro with Retina display is that it looks pretty ugly because it hasn’t been updated to take advantage of the Retina display yet.

The great news for Word fans is there’s a really easy work around that will force your Microsoft Word app to use your MacBook Pro’s Retina display, which makes the app look a lot better. All you got to do is follow these quick steps and you’ll be on the path to more Retina goodness.

Hulu Plus has long been a curious omission on the Apple TV’s list of channels, but it now appears that Apple has quietly added it this morning to its supported steaming services. If you don’t see it, try rebooting your Apple TV. About time!

Source: Macrumors

When OS X Lion debuted, our old-friend Save As… had been sent packing for a new imposter, Duplicate. We tried to like this new one, but wow was it not the same. Luckily, Mountain Lion has brought Save As… back, only in a sneaky, less than obvious way.

We want to share how to see the Save As… command, of course, with a simple key press, but we’ll go even one step further, clueing you in on how to return good-old-Save As… to its former glory, in the exalted spot it used to reside in. Here’s how.

The 2012 Presidential Elections are fast closing in on us, with a little over three months left before Barack Obama and Mitt Romney enter the ring and, following the protocol laid out in the constitution by our forefathers, settle the question of who will become the next American president in front of a panel of judges in a Zoolander style walk-off.

Perhaps to prepare for this upcoming challenge, Prsident Obama’s re-election campaign is launching a new iOS app.

Just a reminder, friends: if you’ve ever used Apple’s iWork.com beta to share and collaborate on documents in the cloud, you need to download them to your computer today… otherwise, at the end of the day, Apple will press a big red button and your precious Pages, Keynote and Numbers documents will be ripped apart into a trillion trillion atoms and slowly dispersed throughout the universe.

First launched in 2009 as a service to let iWork users collaborate, edit and download documents online, iWork.com is being killed off having never left beta in favor of Apple’s newer and more full-featured cloud initiative, iCloud.

Source: iWork.com

Facebook has just introduced a new feature for their official Facebook for iPhone and iPad app that gives users Instapaper-like abilities to save posts shared on Facebook to read later. Now you too can collect your friends’ most embarrassing social network blunders in a favorites folder for posterity! Oh, and links you want to read later too, of course.

One of the coolest parts of digital photography is being able to use software to make your photos better than you could ever had imagined. I’m not just talking about fixing exposures or adding special effects—both of those things are very cool—I’m talking about things like HDR photography.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) is entails taking several images (one correctly exposed and several over and under exposed) and combining them into a new image that make the picture much more like how we see the world. And how is this done? Software. Software like Hydra Pro

Redditor GrandHarbler is a musician and music teacher. He took to the popular social news sharing site today to start a conversation about how the iPad has improved his own practice, teaching, and music learning workflow.

As a musician, GrandHarbler has to practice every day. A lot. He works on goals that he times with an app called TaskMatrix, setting up 25 minute on and 5 minute off practice intervals called Pomodoros. He times them with a simple timer app, called 30/30.

According to a report by Strategy Analytics, smartphone shipments in general fell 5 percent in the second quarter of the current year, 2012. The market for smartphones in the second quarter of last year was 25.2 million, while this year’s second quarter only brought 23.8 million smartphones to the US consumer. In addition, Android lost ground to iOS, falling four points to 56 percent of the smartphone market.

While Android remains the top platform by volume in the US, Apple’s iOS is gaining, having risen 10 percentage points in the same period of time as last year, from 23 percent to 33 percent. We can only assume that the release of the iPhone 5, which many pundits believe customers are waiting for, causing a lull in current iPhone sales, will only increase Apple’s rising fortunes in the smartphone market.

An interesting jury has been selected today in the high-profile patent case between Apple and Samsung. Of course, any details about said jury would be interesting simply due to their inclusion in such a pivotal legal case, but the list does sound like somewhat of a lead in to a stand-up comedy routine. An insurance agent, an unemployed video game enthusiast, and a project manager for AT&T are three of the ten jurors selected today to decide the issues behind the patent case between the two electronics superstar companies.

Last week we found out that back in 2006 Apple Industrial Designer, Shin Nishibori, was asked to create mockups of what an iPhone-like device would look like if created by Sony. Nishibori’s prototype mockups have become a hot item of debate in the Apple vs Samsung trial as Samsung was hoping to use them as evidence that Apple copied Sony.

The court recently dismissed the images, but Samsung wanted to get their creator on the stand. Even though Shin Nishibori no longer works for Apple and now lives in Hawaii, Samsung was hoping to subpoena him to the court and have him testify against Apple. How were they going to get him there? A $60 check.

iMore reported this morning that Apple will hold its next media event on September 12th and launch the new iPhone alongside the rumored iPad mini on Friday the 21st. Another report said today that Apple is planning to launch multiple new products in September, and now AllThingsD confirms that Apple will indeed hold an event on September 12th. Although Apple hasn’t officially commented, AllThingsD’s word is pretty much considered to be a confirmation.

What will Apple announce in two months? Rumors say we’ll see the next iPhone, new iPod touch, and iPad mini. Judging by Apple’s huge spike in component orders overseas, it looks this this fall is going to be a very busy time for the folks in Cupertino.

While this post is ending, don’t forget to check out the SayHelloThere freebie!

In the past few months I’ve learned something very interesting. Facebook can be kinda cool. I mean I’m using Facebook to talk about comics and other geekdom, so I enjoy that, but the one thing I haven’t been enjoying is managing the pages. Checking comments, tracking answers, running contests.

For a network that is built on frictionless sharing, it’s sure hard for the folks managing the content to do stuff.

Which is why I’m going to take a real, hard look at the deal kicking off today—AgoraPulse Platinum—which sounds like it might just solve a lot of issues for me.