The developers at Tapbots, makers of popular third-party Twitter client Tweetbot, have reassured everyone that their Twitter app isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Twitter announced a new set of rules for developers yesterday that could be interpreted as the beginning of the end for third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot, but Tapbots is confident that their app’s future is secure.

Twitter wants developers to focus on making apps that enhance Twitter’s own apps and web experience. Very little room is being left for traditional clients like Tweetbot. The good news is that the clients that already boast huge user bases shouldn’t be in danger of disappearing.

Yesterday, Instagram launched version 3.0 of their iOS and Android app. Along with some new UI improvements, the coolest thing about the update is the new Photo Maps feature which allows users to organize photos via geo-location data to provide more interesting narratives for their followers.

The new Photo Maps feature is great, but it comes with some privacy concerns. Private user photos that are added to a Photo Map are viewable to any Android Instagram user thanks to a bug in the 3.0 update.

I have no idea how many apps there are in the iTunes store that let you add filters to your photos. But I do know how many there are to remove those filters, and turn your picture into something that you can look back on in ten years’ time without cringing: One. It’s called Normalize, and it comes from Joe Macirowski.

When the burglar who robbed Steve Jobs’ house walked out with jewelry, computers, and Steve’s old wallet, I doubt he could have imagined one of his heisted Macs would call in the coppers. But he learned that you don’t mess with a Mountain Lion. We’ll tell you the tale on our all-new CultCast—and don’t worry—all mock turtlenecks have been returned to their proper place.

We talk rumor control, iPhone 5 design, the Olympics, and more. Then, by popular request, it’s a battle of the browsers! We’ll tell you which web-ware we love the most, and why Apple’s own app still has a big issue to fix.

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 ahead!

Apple has seeded yet another OS X 10.8.1 developer beta today (build 12B17). The update contains no known issues, and developers are still asked to focus on specific areas like Active Directory, iCal, and Microsoft Exchange in Mail.

The first 10.8.1 developer beta was released one week ago, and this second minor update indicates that the public release is right around the corner.

Apple released OS X Mountain Lion to the public on July 25th, 2012 for $20 in the Mac App Store. The first 10.x.x update to a major OS X release usually comes with many bug and compatibility fixes that were discovered in the first release. Expect it to drop soon.

Jonathan Zufi is the curator and owner of the Shrine of Apple, a web-based museum with a single, slightly obsessive goal: to obtain one of every single Apple product ever produced, and display them all online as beautifully as possible.

Zufi wants to do for all the retro Apple stuff what modern bloggers (not unlike our very selves) do for every newly announced product.

If ever a website earned membership of the Cult of Mac, this is it.

Cult of Mac got in touch with Zufi to ask him a few questions about the project. Here’s what he said.

Are you ready to have your mind blown? Then take a look at this 360-degree panorama of the surface of Mars, complete with cameo appearance by the Curiosity rover. And here’s the (literal) twist: the picture is gyroscope-friendly, so you can scan the surface of the Red Planet by sweeping your iOS device up and down, left and right.

When Apple makes a major investment in a community, it can be a contentious thing, sometimes leading to a lot of environmental controversy. For Apple’s latest data center in Crook County, Oregon, though, Apple is doing something for the local community that would seemingly be pretty hard to criticize: tapping an ancient, recently discovered underground stream to give the city clean water.

So Apple and Google were once friends. Then they were frenemies. Now they’re just straight up, cold-hearted enemies who would kill a cute little baby platypus if it meant the other company would suffer. Can’t they just get along and get over their “thermonuclear” squabbles? Maybe. For a minute.

Kodak’s auction of intellectual property has kind of brought the two companies onto the same team. They both want Kodak’s digital imaging patents, but rather paying for them all by itself, Apple is part of a consortium of bidders that want to nab the Kodak patents for super cheap. Even stranger, Google isn’t the only Apple rival in the group.

IPad 3. Hired: Retina screen, speedy 4G internet, lots of lovely RAM. Fired: Weight. Heat. Girth. Retired: That damn battery.

Yes, if the iPad 3 were to be leaping over a fence to escape its doom, and Paris were to fire an arrow to stop it, the arrow would hit the iPad 3 in its battery charger, not its heel (sorry about the extended and twisted Greek adventure story there). Sure, the battery lasts long enough, but it takes forever to charge the thing.

Happily, Exogear’s stackable battery packs are here to help.

The first week of college is filled with a bunch of crazy new things you have to adapt to if you want to make it out alive. Co-ed dorms. People with bad facial hair. Faux-Intellectuals. Scantly clad women. Demented professors. Weird cultish groups called fraternities. The absence of personal hygiene. And most importantly, the astronomical prices of textbooks.

Why have we had a congressional hearing on steroid use in baseball, but not a peep about college textbook prices? We thought that the iPad and eBooks were supposed to make education a whole lot cheaper, but most college students still buy physical textbooks. Here at Cult of Mac, for back to school season, we wanted to find out what’s cheaper: buying an iPad and only buying eTextbooks or going the traditional route and buying forty or fifty pounds worth of dead paper every semester.

Which is better for the penny-pinching student? The results are pretty surprising.

The perception of the BlackBerry as the most secure and manageable mobile platform seems to be faltering. According to a new report, senior IT administrators now consider Apple’s iOS to be the most secure and manageable platform – despite the fact that RIM offers ten times the number of security and device management policies that Apple provides in iOS.

We might be geeks, but we do, contrary to popular belief, like to go outside sometimes and do things. Now while I just got back from Chicago Comic Con, you might like to go to a concert or ball game (nothing beats a baseball game in the summer).

This is a short and sweet post because the deal speaks for itself: ScoreBig: Get $30 Worth of Sports, Concert & Theater Tickets for Only $7!. Head over, pick up the deal, and head out somewhere (I suggest a Red Sox game, but that’s just me). Done.

Back in February, I told you about an iPhone case from a company called cellhelmet that comes with one major advantage: If your iPhone breaks while it’s inside the case, cellhelmet will fix or replace it for free. Now the company is expanding, and it’s about to launch a new line of screen protectors that offer a similar guarantee. If your iOS device’s screen gets scratched while wearing one, cellhelmet will replace the display.

Apple has been named in a California lawsuit filed by EPL Holdings for allegedly infringing a patent that covers audio and video playback at varying speeds. The filing reports that EPL met with Apple back 2002 to discuss  licensing over the patents it had developed. But the Cupertino company is alleged to have used the technology anyway without reaching a licensing deal.

In a series of tweets summarizing a new (and still unpublished on the Internet) report by Jefferies, Apple’s forthcoming HDTV is said to already be in full production, and will be sold with a carrier subsidy from AT&T and Verizon. They estimate that two million will be sold in 2013.

It used to be that bike handlebars were for holding on to, and for telling your bike just which direction you wanted it to go. You might add a bell, or wrap around some fancy colorful bar-tape, but that was the limit of directional decoration.

Now there are so many accessories that can be clamped and clipped to the bars that touring cyclists even add an extra stumpy bar to their stems just for bags, computers and lamps. And now we can add a tripod mount to that list.

Hey! do you have 16 iPad’s and a 13-inch MacBook that you travel with regularly? Are you sick of plugging and unplugging them, and having to roll them in newspaper every time you take a plane?

Well, if you’re happy to put all your iEggs in one tough, roll-along basket and entrust it to the notoriously light-fingers of the airport baggage handlers, then Parat Solutions has just the, uh, solution for you.

App and template designer Jumsoft announced a new collection of images and patterns for Apple’s iWork suite. The new package, known as Elements for iWork, is the company’s eleventh collection of professionally designed images, templates and stationary designed to help businesses, students, and consumers create stunning documents and projects using a range of Mac apps.

Apple stock hit an all-time high of $636.64 per share on Thursday, and today that price continues to rise. The last time Apple jumped above $630 a share was back in April, right before its share price began a six-week decline that knocked $115 off the price — and $100 billion off Apple’s market cap — when it ended on May 18.

It’s unlikely we’ll see a repeat of that now, however. According to one analyst, investors are so keen to plough their money into Apple before the iPhone 5 sends share prices rocketing that there’s no sign of those prices dropping anytime soon.

Here’s an awesome little jailbreak tweak that you might find incredibly useful. It’s called Turn to Hangup, and as its name suggests, it instantly dismisses incoming calls when you place your iPhone on its face.

Reader Chris M asked us yesterday about finding a way to see the source media files in Safari now that the Activity Window has been retired in OS X Mountain Lion. He writes:

A while back you showed a great feature. If you were using Safari watching a video, you could go to WINDOW—-ACTIVITY—and it would show everything on the website and you could Option click on the video file and automatically download it. That feature went away in Mountain Lion. Will you PLEASE write an article and show if there is any way to access this feature any more.

You’re in luck, Chris, as we found just the thing. It’s not quite a full “bringing sexy back” fix, but it should serve the purpose you used the Activity Window for – finding media files in web pages.

iOS hacker and security researcher Pod2g has uncovered a major SMS security flaw with the iPhone that could lead to text message spoofing. The problem is with the way in which the iPhone handles text messages, and it’s present in the latest version of iOS — including the iOS 6 beta 4 release. However, Pod2g insists he’s pleading with Apple to get it fixed.

A professional clown has been arrested for possession of Steve Jobs’s stolen iPad a month after it was taken from the Apple co-founder’s home in Palo Alto, California. 47-year-old Kenny the Clown, whose real name is Kenneth Kahn, was busted in San Francisco while using the stolen device to entertain local kids.

Say what you like about Windows 8, but Microsoft seems to have knocked developers into line when it comes to interface design. Exhibit a: Skype for Not-Metro, which not only matches the minimal tile design of the OS, but manages to make the iOS version look positively baroque.