Most people seem roughly pretty happy with Siri, but you’ve got to admit: the name is a little bit un-Apple-like. Modern Apple product names tend to be strongly evocative of what the product actually does, or what it looks like. The iPod, for example, looks like something out of Kubrick’s 2001. iCloud stores your documents in the cloud. The iPad is a digital pad of paper. And so on. Compared to Apple’s usual flair for product names, Siri’s name isn’t self-explanatory.

Looks like Steve Jobs agreed. He reportedly wasn’t happy with the name Siri, but couldn’t ever figure out a better name before the iPhone 4S launched.

Loren Brichter, the developer behind Tweetie and its hugely popular pull-to-refresh gesture, which has now made its way into countless iOS apps, has spoken out about Twitter’s recent move to patent the feature. Speaking on the One More Thing podcast, Brichter said that there’s really no need for people to worry about it.

The Chinese will celebrate Tomb Sweeping Day on April 4, a ceremony which encourages them to remember their ancestors by laying out food at their grave sites, and burning paper replicas of daily necessities, such as clothes, money, cars, and houses. This year a few new items have been added to that list of necessities: the iPad and the iPhone.

Alltop, you may already know, is a web news aggregator from serial lame-e-preneur Guy Kawasaki. Now, this questionably-useful service has been ported to the iPad as an app. And it’s even worse.

Andy Patrizio of Tablet PC Review decided to get to the bottom of the sporadic reports of bad Wi-Fi reception in the iPad 3. Armed with the new iPad, a first-gen iPad, and a couple of iPhones (3GS and 4S), he fired up the SpeedTest app and pointed it at his Cisco WRT310N 802.11a/b/g/n router. The results? The iPad 3 came in dead last, but it’s not as bad as you might have heard.

Velcro. I love it and I hate it, and it seems I’m not the only one. The folks at TrekPak took one look at their camera bag and realized that, while velcro does indeed let you easily customize the dividers within, it also drives you crazy by grabbing those same dividers before you get them into place. Their answer is TrekPak, a modular padded insert for your camera bag that doesn’t use velcro.

We’ve shown you a couple of cool tips for screenshots, because let’s face it: we all take quite a few of them. Sadly, though, the default screenshot Command-3 doesn’t show the mouse cursor, and the Command-4 shortcut actually uses the mouse to define the area of the image capture, therefore leaving it out of the shot by definition. Lucky for you, though, we found a way to change that, using an app, named appropriately enough, Grab.

LogMeIn has rolled out a new feature to its Pro subscribers today, now allowing them to stream high-definition video from their Mac to other devices capable of accessing LogMeIn, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch via the free iOS app. The feature is sure to be a welcome addition to those who have just adopted the new iPad with its Retina display and super speedy 4G connectivity.

Following yesterday’s report that revealed Australian regulators are preparing to sue Apple over its “misleading” advertising for the new iPad down under, the Cupertino company has begun offering refunds to those customers who feel they’ve been misled.

Setting up a passcode for your iOS device is one of the first steps you can take to keep your data safe. It prevents access to your device, blocking unauthorized user from accessing your personal data, photographs, contacts, messages, and anything else you have stored inside.

However, that passcode lock is useless when it comes up against a piece of software called XRY from the Swedish security firm Micros Systemation. With XRY, your personal data, call logs, GPS location data, contacts, and even keystrokes can all be extracted and decrypted in under ten minutes.

Apple has released updates to its Logic Pro and Logic Express music editing software today, improving the stability of both applications and addressing minor issues that may have plagued some users in the previous release. The version 9.1.7 updates are available to download now from the Mac App Store, or via Software Update.

If further proof were needed that Instagram integration is the new Dropbox integration, then the updated Camera Awesome is it. The iPhone app, from photo-sharing site SmugMug, doesn’t post direct to Instagram like the recently updated Hipstamatic, but it will send your photo to the Instagram app at the touch of a button.

Apple’s stock price hit an all-time high today of $614.48, making it the perfect time for shareholders to sell off some stock. That includes five of Apple’s top executives, who have cashed in a total of $314 million in the last few days that was previously awarded to them in 2008, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. CEO Tim Cook leads the way, selling a total of 200,000 shares — for an impressive $119,715,170 pay out.

But he’s not the only one…

Apple’s Newsstand is only about 6 months old, but it’s already raking in a decent amount of cash for media publishers. According to a new report, iPad owners are spending $70,000 per day for content in the iOS 5 Newsstand.

Consumers are buying subcription-based content from publications like The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Daily. Unsurprisingly, the majority of revenue is coming from in-app purchases.

Apple introduced a handy lock screen shortcut for the native Camera app in iOS 5.1. You can quickly tap the camera icon from your iPhone or iPad’s lock screen and snap a picture. Unfortunately, jailbreakers left stranded on iOS 5.0.1 haven’t been able to enjoy this great feature — until now.

A new jailbreak tweak brings the lock screen camera shortcut to jailbreakers on iOS 5.0.1. 

Apple’s next-gen smartphone is widely expected to feature 4G LTE networking like the newly-released iPad. Rumors peg the product release for later this year, but no real evidence for the device has surfaced quite yet, including carrier partnerships. AT&T and Verizon are expected to be onboard as usual, but what about Sprint? The iPhone 4S debuted on all three carriers last October, but Sprint is relatively new to its Apple partnership.

According to comments from Sprint CFO Joe Euteneuer today, Sprint will be able to sell the 4G iPhone when it’s debuted by Apple.

Ever wonder who exactly Samsung hired to test out the Galaxy Note before shipping it out to retailers across the globe? It was no easy task finding a quality assurance team that measured up to the pure magnitude of the Galaxy Note, but after interviewing nearly a dozen teams, Samsung went with lead QA Engineer Peter the elephant and his expert team of mixed mammals.

Mike Daisey. Most of you are probably sick of hearing about his scandal with This American Life regarding the lies he told the media and his audiences about Apple’s manufacturing environment overseas. But there’s one more part to the story. Daisey has revealed what he plans to do with his show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, moving forward.

He’s vowed that he will continue performing in the face of his critics. There will also be some changes made to reflect the inaccurate information that were recently uncovered.

Some new jailbreak tweaks have surfaced in Cydia that allow you to open and send all kinds of files between iOS devices with iMessage. Apple’s messaging protocol can be used to send much more than simple SMS and MMS messages; you can send everything from a song to a PDF.

Attacher will let you send and receive all kinds of files with iMessage, and it includes a couple features that make it a compelling offering. A pair of jailbreak tweaks called SendAny and ReceiveAny also accomplish the same goal with a different approach. Which tweak option is best? Let’s take a closer look.

Last week, Dr. Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies discovered that when he charged his new iPad, it continued to draw current long after iOS reported its lithium-ion polymer battery as being 100% charged.

Doing some experiments, Dr. Soneira discovered that if allowed to charge until the point where the 10W charger stopped drawing full current from the mains, his iPad could last 11.6 hours on a single charge, compared to just 10.4 hours if he unplugged it the second it reached 100%.

Why does the new iPad do this? Dr. Soneira believes that it’s a bug in the way the new iPad reports its battery charge. Apple has since spoken out and called it a “great feature” in iOS. But what the heck is really going on?

The truth is more complicated. Apple’s being disingenuous calling this a “feature” of iOS. In fact, technically it harms your new iPad’s battery. That said, it’s certainly not a bug, as Dr. Soneira emphatically suggests. Rather, this is the way all gadget batteries charge. To understand why this is, and how you can maximize your device’s battery life and longevity, you first need to understand a little bit about how batteries charge.

One of the neatest things about running Photoshop on a the iPad is that it is both portable, and it has has cameras. That might not sound like much, but it lets you do a lot more than just take pictures. Photoshop Touch lets you shoot into the current project right from either camera, and you can use this to add some pretty amazing analog effects to your image.

Today we’ll take a look at two cool tricks, one using each camera. One needs a flashlight, and one needs a textured surface or a piece of paper. Go get your tools and follow along.

The enterprise app store is becoming a reality in many companies. Initially envisioned as a way to make internal apps available to employees, the concept has quickly grown to include public apps available in Apple’s iOS App Store. This allows businesses to offer employees a curated list of apps that relate to specific fields or job functions.

A curated list of public apps is a great idea and it can save employees both time and effort in selecting apps that can help them work more efficiently and effectively. The challenging part, however, is choosing which of the hundreds of thousands of iOS apps to include in your company’s app store.

There is a theory that apps are the new hit singles. You can’t make money from releasing a song any more, so you might as well try and make money from something people are still willing to pay for, like apps.

And you might not even need to charge them for the app, either. You can give the app away for free, and pad it out with extras that cost money. It’s bound to pull in a few paying customers, right? Right?

Let’s face it, the only reason I don’t get lost four times a day, even in the town I live in, is because my iPhone has Maps on it. No other navigation app I’ve tried hits that sweet spot of simplicity and helpfulness. I even use Maps for finding local business phone numbers. It’s that useful.

The inclusion of public transportation routes has been equally useful, I’m sure, for folks who live in more urban areas with good bus and rail systems. If you’re one of those lucky folks, here’s a tip just for you.

Do you like the pull-to-refresh feature found in many popular iOS apps? Well, you might want to prepare to see it go the way of the dodo, as Twitter is now trying to patent it.