Apple has brought the iOS 5 Notification Center to the Mac with OS X Mountain Lion. The new interface displays incoming notifications from different apps in one place, mimicking the functionality of the Mac app called Growl. You’ve most likely used Growl before whether you know it or not, as the tool integrates with many popular Mac apps for displaying notifications through popups.

With the birth of Notification Center on the Mac in Mountain Lion, one would assume that Growl has been sherlocked. According to the app’s developers, that is not the case. In fact, Grow will make Mountain Lion’s notification system even better.

Twitter has pushed out an update for both the Android and iOS mobile apps which brings back a few popular features as well as adding a couple new ones. Also, owners of the Kindle Fire will be happy to know that the Twitter app is now available via the Amazon App Store, and if you happen to own a Barnes & Noble NOOK Color or NOOK Tablet, you can expect to receive the app on February 23rd. So what’s new? According to the Twitter Blog, here’s what you can expect:

One of the most beautiful games on the Mac App Store, Trine, is on sale for a limited time only for just $0.99. You should get it.

Playwright Mike Daisey has released the transcript of his influential monologue, The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Steve Jobs, under a royalty-free license.

The move will allow Daisey’s hit play about the conditions in Apple’s Chinese factories to be performed anywhere in the world without restriction.Indeed, Daisey claims that more than 500 groups and individuals in 13 countries have contacted him because they want to stage it.

“No one has done this before,” said Daisey in an email to Cult of Mac.com. “Theater doesn’t do a lot of things like this, and certainly not with a transcript that could have been sold — I had offers from two publishers — for real money.”

Daisey said there’s interest from three major theaters in Germany, a mid-size theater in Spain and two in France. There’s an actor who is planning to perform it in Kurdistan, a group in Nova Scotia that is adapting it, and a group in New York planning to turn it into a full-on play.

“There’s a lot,” says Daisey. “It’s going to be interesting.

Apple has informed Mac developers that the deadline for sandboxing apps has been extended to June 1st. The date was postponed last November and set to take place on March 1st. Apple has been working on technical specifications for third-party developers since.

For those that are unfamiliar, “sandboxing” is essentially confining an app’s system access to its specific functions or entitlements, thereby hindering the possibility of an app behaving maliciously on a system level. Developers now have more time to appropriately implement sandboxing into their apps for the Mac App Store.

The big new feature in Mountain Lion’s Mail app isn’t really a Mail feature at all: Notification Center will now flash up an alert for every new e-mail you receive. But this can get old fast, especially if you get a lot of e-mail. Thankfully, you can tweak these setting to be finer-grained, and a lot more useful. And you can do this by making your friends VIPs.

As we all well know by now, the smallest decision in an Apple product can be the sort of thing that Cupertino designers can have spent man years deciding upon, experimenting with iteration after iteration until inspiration finally and serendipitously strikes. But this obsession with detail isn’t just visual: it goes right down to the sounds you never think twice about.

Here’s one great example, shared by sound designer Jim McKee on the 99% Invisible Podcast. The sound of your iPhone or iPad unlocking itself? It’s actually the sound a vice grip makes opening itself up.

Screens is one of many VNC apps available for the iPad and iPhone. Screens 2.0, which was released today, takes the concept of remote controlling a Mac or PC to another level. The update offers some very nifty features to the two year old app including integration with iCloud Siri, and AirPlay.

Screens isn’t one of the cheapest VNC solutions for iOS – it has a price tag of $19.99. The software backs up its somewhat steep cost by delivering a great user experience.

Remember that Office for iPad product shot that was floating around earlier today? Well, Microsoft won’t actually come out and call it bogus, but they do say any report of Office for iPad is based on “inaccurate rumors and speculation.” So is that a denial or what?

We recently showed you how to control iPad games using the Joypad app on your iPhone, and today we have another Joypad trick that’s guaranteed to impress your friends: controlling games on your Mac. That’s right — you can use your iPhone as a touchscreen gamepad for your Mac.

Here’s how to get set up.

The new Timbuk2 Command Messenger 2012 ($140) is nothing like the first Timbuk2 bag I ever owned, some 11 years and 20 pounds ago, back when I was heavily commited to the world of cycling. Timbuk2 called it the Bolo, and it was a real messenger bag — though messengers almost always opted for it’s larger sibling, the Tag Junkie — crafted from a single piece of vinyl and Cordura; just a massive main compartment with not much more than a small pocket sewn on the outer face for coins and maybe a patch kit.

Although it’s just about as tough, the Command Messenger is light years away from my Bolo (and is really as much a messenger bag as a Chevy pickup is an ox cart): It’s sophisticated, uses several advanced materials, has loads of pockets and a trick feature that makes air travel easier for laptop-toting jestsetters. My how you’ve grown, Timbuk2.

RIM has released the first major update to its PlayBook tablet. The update includes some of the core features that didn’t initially ship with the PlayBook last year – including a native email app. The company is also launching the first version of its new management suite for BlackBerry and PlayBook devices, which will also manage iPhones and iPads as well as Android devices in a later release.

Reading RIM’s press release really adds to the sense that company is out of touch with reality and its customers, particularly its business customers.

Next month, students at the Kensington and Chelsea College in West London will be able to sign up for a course on iPhoneography. Anyone can do the course: all you need is an iPhone, £115 ($182) for the course and all your Thursday nights free throughout March.

Apple’s OS X version of iTunes is the culprit of one of the worst UI experiences a user can have on a Mac. Even though iTunes is one of Apple’s greatest assests, it is also a horrible swampy mess of a place that most users hate to venture into unless absolutely necessary. Luckily, a report this morning claims that Apple is looking to launch a redesigned iTunes Store and App Store, stat.

At this point, we’ve pretty much seen every part the iPad 3 has to offer: rear casing, Retina Display, logic board, CPU, Heck, we’ve even seen cables for the sleep/wake button, the volume rocker, the mute switch and other assorted guts. If you only had the digitizer and front glass pane, you could probably just slap all these parts together and build yourself an iPad 3 from scratch.

Oh hey, what do you know: here are the missing parts we need to build a complete iPad 3! Will wonders never cease?

The new front panel and digitizer, spotted by Apple.pro, confirms what we have long suspected: turned off, the iPad 3 will largely be indistinguishable from the iPad 2. Maybe a squidge thicker. The real distinction will be when the iPad 3 is turned on and that beautiful 2048×1536 kicks on.

Great, but when can we expect the iPad 3 to land. Only Apple knows for sure, but popular consensus indicates March 7th.

The SmartGuard iPhone case might guard you, but it definitely isn’t smart. The iPhone 4/S compatible case will deliver a dose of pepper spray to U.C Davis students or violent attackers alike.

Apple’s iPad 2 may have the same performance in São Paulo as San Francisco, but Brazilians pay about 56 percent more for the same magical tablet.

After Cult of Mac discovered first hand just how pricey iPads are in Brazil – and why there’s a huge gray market there –  we wanted to see if the iPad stood up to the “McDonald’s Index.”

Cult of Mac’s Global iPad Index takes iPad 2 prices – the 32GB model, Wifi only – and compares them in Apple’s 37 online stores.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario where your SD cards would need to be “waterproof, shockproof and magnet proof,” but Samsung has gone and made some ruggedized cards anyway. Available in several speeds and sizes, the brushed metal cards will look as good out of your cameras as they will in it.

While investigations into the working conditions in its Chinese factories still underway, Apple has now commissioned an independent environmental group to review its supply chain and identify any environmental concerns. The reviews are set to begin next month, and will focus on the environmental impact of factories belonging to Foxconn and one other unnamed supplier.

Sometimes the morass of Mail windows on a Mac can just become too much. Various apps have tried to help manage this in various ways: Sparrow by bringing the streamlined Tweetie aesthetic to mail, Postbox by in-line quick replies, and so on.

Even so, more often than not, when I close Mail for the day, I’m closing about a dozen or two blank or half-written email windows that have been opened during the day, then forgotten. Why can’t sending an email be as painlessly fire-and-forget as sending an IM? Enter QuickMailer.

It looks like Microsoft will be brining Office to the iPad, something that’s been the subject of speculation for a while. Although a photo showing Office on the iPad has surfaced, there are a lot of big questions surrounding it. When will it ship? How much will it cost? Which features will Microsoft incorporate from the desktop version of Office? How will it compare to Office on Windows 8 or Windows on Arm (WOA) tablets?

Then there’s another big question – does it even matter that Microsoft is creating an iPad version of Office?

Apple’s iOS devices has suffered a number of passcode flaws in recent years, which have allowed anyone to circumvent their security and access features within the device. The company has always been fairly quick to address these issues, but they continue to crop up.

The latest allows anyone with knowledge of the exploit to access your contacts list, your recent calls, your voicemail, your text messages, and more.

If you went ahead and loaded the developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion onto your Mac, you likely already played around with the new Notification Center. Until you got bored and fired up Growl once again so you could enjoy notifications from all your apps, not just Mail and Calendar. Wouldn’t it be great, though, if all those Growl-capable apps could talk to Notification Center instead? With Hiss, they can.

Fluent is a web-based wrapper for your Gmail account that clearly takes cues from the much-loved (and sorely missed, by some) Tweetie Twitter client and the much-loved (and still very much alive) Sparrow mail app.

An official Microsoft Office suite for the iPad has long been the subject of hopeful rumors, but a leaked shot of the software in action on Apple’s tablet proves for the first time that it’s real, and that it is on its way to the App Store.