Twitter has announced some new changes that make it significantly more difficult and tedious to develop third-party software around the social network. We’ve known that Twitter was evolving its business model and changing its attitude towards developers for quite some time, but this recent announcement marks the first major shift towards a closed Twitter. To put it plainly, many developers probably won’t be looking at Twitter as a potential platform to build on anymore.

What’s changed? Along with a host of new rules and restrictions that limit how apps like Flipboard interact with Twitter, developers are now being told to basically stop developing traditional clients like Twitterrific and Tweetbot. The golden age of Twitter is over.

Well-known video game developer and publisher, Sega, is taking a cue from publishers like Chillingo and helping indie game studios find their footing in an uncertain market.

The initiative, called the Sega Alliance, will assist independent developers with creative consultation, marketing, production, localization, and distribution tasks. The first indie studio to get this special support from Sega is Owlchemy Labs, the makers of Smuggle Truck and Snuggle Truck for iOS, Mac, and PC.

Last week, Square announced a partnership with Starbucks to provide back-end payment processing and CRM for the coffee mega-company. Today, Square brings news of the other end of the business spectrum. Small businesses who make less than $250,000 per year will no longer have to pay the standard 2.75 percent per swipe processing fee (though they can still opt for this) if they pay one flat rate, currently set at $275 monthly.

If a small businesses chooses the flat rate option, they’ll essentially end up paying 1.3 percent per swipe – a significant savings if they meet the criteria. IF the business goes over the line, they’ll be charged the standard per-swipe rate.

This is Square making sure that it can have as many users as possible, from super corporate giants to small mom and pop shops with a bit of tech savvy.

Yesterday The Wall Street Journal shed some light on Apple’s future plans for the TV, noting that the company was in talks with cable providers to offer live broadcasts through an Apple set-top box. The report also alluded to the possibility of an Apple-branded HDTV.

Tonight The Journal published a follow-up report that adds more details to yesterday’s story, including the not-so-surprising revelation that Apple wants to greatly simplify the overall TV viewing experience.

If you haven’t played Valve’s amazing sequel to its arguably even more awesome original Portal game, now may be the time to jump in. Valve has updated the map editor for Portal 2 to include co-operative levels, called test chambers. Now you can create these yourself and share with the vibrant Portal 2 community on Steam for Mac, according to today’s news from Valve.

Developer Phosphor Games knocks it out of the park with a new, beautiful iOS game named after protagonist, Horn. The game uses the Unreal Engine and multitouch-based gestures to a third-person action adventure game. While the technology, visual style and swipe-based combat in Horn bring to mind Infinity Blade, it’s clear from the start that this is something different.

From the App description:

San Jose CA — Mani Srivastava, PhD Professor at UCLA department is now in court to bust another of Apple’s patents, this time the 460 (No. 7,577,460) U.S. patent. The claims of the patent describes the use of an email program that is allowed to send pictures from a phone, and to scroll through image galleries.

San Jose, CA — After the final financial expert testified on behalf of Samsung after lunch , the defense rested. However, the game is not over yet. There are plenty of follow up witnesses that will be around to fill out the information docket for the jury before they receive the case early next week.

We talk about the iPad’s role in healthcare pretty regularly. Many physicians and health care practices have found innovative ways to integrate the iPad into daily patient interactions. According to a new study, the pharmaceutical industry has discovered that the iPad is an excellent tool for promoting new medications and that it can influence the prescribing habits of doctors.

Apple announced a $45 billion stock dividend and repurchase plan back in March, and the company starts paying its investors today, August 16th. $2.65 per share will be payed out for all owned shares of record as of Monday, August 13th.

Today marks the first dividend Apple has payed out since 1995. If you own Apple stock, you should see the payment deposited in your brokerage account before the day is over.

During its education event in January, Apple unveiled its plans to revolutionize the K-12 classroom with the iPad, electronic textbooks, a revamped version of iTunes U that supports content for K-12 schools as well as higher education, and tools for educators to create their own digital content using iBooks Author and iTunes U.

In the intervening months, schools and districts around the country have made significant investments in iPads, including the San Diego Unified School District, which invested $15 million in 26,000 iPads for its students. Those sales created a record quarter for Apple in the K-12 education market.

With the back to school season upon us, it’s clear that the massive iPad deployments will give Apple the opportunity to disrupt the classroom in the ways it has whole industries and, in many ways, that’s a good thing.

Once again, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh has lost her patience with the lawyers at the Apple vs. Samsung trial. As noted in our ongoing Apple vs. Samsung liveblog, a frustrated Judge Koh asked Apple’s attorneys if they were “smoking crack” after trying to book too many few witnesses for their last few hours of making their case.

After the amusing skirmish between the Judge and attorneys on late-filing motions and a quick five-minute testimony from a survey expert, we get a bigger fish to fry in Samsung royalty analyst Vincent O’Brien. He is testifying about similar but separate findings than the earlier witnesses.

Here in the US, if you’re in the military or work in aviation, you might actually use what most of the rest of the world thinks of as standard, 24-hour time. While it will confuse all your US-living friends and relatives when they ask for the time and you show them your iOS device’s lock screen, that’s their issue, right? You, at least, will have the joy of knowing that you are fully prepared for the type of time tracking that most people around the globe use.

The default iOS clock in the US is a 12-hour clock, with AM and PM appended to the numbers to denote morning or evening. The other, more standard way of representing the time is with the 24-hour clock, in which any time after 12:00 is the logical 13:00, 14:00, and so on. It’s really easy to set on your iPhone or other iOS device.

Question: Do you have any idea what the following terms mean?

Multiply, Screen, Layover, Soft Light, Hard Light, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Addition, Difference, Darken, Lighten, Hue, Saturation, Color and Luminosity.

Answer (if you didn’t answer “yes” yourself): They’re blending modes. And a new iOS called Layover lets you use them to combine layered images. Still confused? Read on…

Walk into your local AT&T, Verizon or Sprint store and ask to look at the latest and greatest smartphone. A store employee will show you the Samsung Galaxy lll and other Android phones from the likes of HTC and Motorola. You may be shown a Windows Phone like the Nokia Lumia 900. At Verizon, you’re definitely going to be shown about the Motorola DROID RAZR 4G.

You won’t get pitched the iPhone as easily. In fact, many walk into a store with the plan of buying an iPhone and come out with the latest Android phone in hand.

Why? Employees and customers we’ve spoken to agree that sales reps from all three big carriers discriminate against the iPhone on the store floor, but it’s not a conspiracy: profit margins and device-specific incentives pressure employees to intentionally steer customers away.

Gura Gear’s Kiboko 22L+ ($379) can gulp down multiple DLSRs, two or three lenses, your multitude of other photo accessories, and oh yeah, a 17-inch Macbook Pro, but still fit in the overhead bin of almost any aircraft in the world.

But its tricks don’t stop there.

Back up your photos. Always shoot in RAW. After a while all the good advice starts to sound like the adults speaking in Charlie Brown cartoons. Wah-wah-wah-wahwahwah.

Especially now iCloud manages our backups and our iPhones only shoot JPGs.

But one piece of advice is still worth listening to: “always rotate JPGs losslessly.” What?

We are back at the Samsung-Apple Trial with another of Samsung’s witnesses, damages expert Michael J. Wagner. He is testifying about his analysis of possible damages based on the patent infringement Apple accuses Samsung of orchestrating for the last few years. Let’s get to it.

Instagram just released a big new update for their popular photo sharing service. It’s simple. It’s got filters. It’s got a big map with geo-tagged pictures. It’s great. But does anyone use the Instagram app to snap pictures the pictures they actually upload, or do they use something else first?

There are a lot of great camera apps on the iPhone, other than the default app, that take pictures – Camera+, Instagram, Picfx, Snapseed, Hipstamatic, Pixlr-o-matic, and way too many more to list.  I use Instagram a lot, but thing is, I don’t think I’ve ever taken a photo from inside the Instagram app and then uploaded it. I always use another app first and then import it into Instagram. Am I the only one? What’s your process for taking picture with your iPhone and getting them onto Instagram? Come tell us what you do with your photos before uploading to Instagram.

Click here to go to the Cult of Mac forums and tell us what apps you use along with Instagram

It was recently reported that Apple’s retail employees around the world have been experiencing staffing cutbacks. Word on the street was that some major internal changes were taking place within Apple Retail, and new hires were getting laid off in stores on multiple continents.

In a very uncharacteristic move, Apple today publicly admitted that it “messed up” with recent changes to its retail staffing, and that things will be going back to the way they were before the layoffs.

Instagram 3.0 is launching today on both Android and iPhone. Whereas previous updates focused on bug fixes, new filters, and speed enhancements, Instagram 3.0 is brings some big UI changes so users can interact with photos in a new way. The key? Geotagging and Photomaps.

Hidden Radio, a Bluetooth speaker and radio so minimalist it makes a sheet of blank paper look like something from a Jules Verne story, has finally emerged from a lengthy Kickstarter pupation to go on sale in a web store near you.

It’s stylish, it’s loud and it lasts longer than most other Bluetooth speakers around. What’s not to like?

Apple neglected to give its iPod line any real attention last year, and so it seems likely the devices will receive a much-anticipated refresh before the holidays. Still, we’ve seen little evidence of this, but one German rewards club has promised that there will be a new iPod nano this fall, and that the “old” model is no longer available from Apple.

If you’ve got a fairly recent MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, you’ll know that typing in a dark room is a breeze thanks to its backlit keyboard. It now seems as though Apple is looking to extend this feature to the trackpad as well. In a new patent filing entitled “Illuminated Touchpad”, the Cupertino company describes a new touch-sensitive input technology that doesn’t just light up, but also provides an “improved feedback mechanism.”