The Wall Street Journal has shed light on Apple’s plans for entering the TV industry. According to the WSJ, Apple is planning to reinvent not only the television itself, but the way we consume media every day.

Apple has been working on its top-secret TV project for quite some time. While the project is still in its early stages, all signs point towards Apple destroying and rebuilding the traditional way we watch movies and TV shows. The company wants to implement a unified experience that extends to the living room.

Facebook has released an update to its iPhone app that brings the highly-anticpated Timeline view to mobile users. Version 4.1 of the Facebook for iOS app brings with it the ability to access friend lists, subscribers, and subscriptions. Photo viewing and overall speed improvements are also included.

An iPad version of Timeline is coming soon, according to Facebook. Users can download the latest update for free in the App Store.

Apple’s advertising runs the gamut from motivational to touching, pragmatic to inspiring. They don’t play the humor card very often, but this latest ad showing Santa using Siri on an iPhone to help him through his rounds is actually pretty funny and appropriate for the season.

Thanks Siri! Thanks Santa! And Happy Holidaze to all…

Apple recently seeded a second revision of its iOS 5.0.1 firmware, and besides decrypting key files that aid in the legality of a Siri port, the update seemed to bring nothing new to the table. Some speculated that the second update had something to do with Apple’s continued international rollout of the iPhone 4S.

It turns out that the new iOS 5.0.1 (Build 9A406) is meant to fix SIM-related errors that a limited number of iPhone 4S customers have been experiencing.

Let’s get two big facts out the way right now: Yes, these Scosche IEM856m canalphones ($250) look a little like several of the canalphones in Monster’s lineup (eg. the Beats Tour), mostly because of the flat, ribbon-like cable; no, they’re not anything like any of the Monster earphones they somewhat resemble. In fact, one big detail makes them very different from almost any other IEM on the market.

As the Apple iPad succeeds beyond expectations, it leaves in its wake an enormous body count of dead and dying products. While consumers love it, several major industries have grown to hate it. And for very good reason.

As we reminisced in our previous poll, 2011 has been a monumental year for the Mac App Store. There have been countless new releases and updates that we’ve covered on the site, and the Mac app ecosystem has reached a whole new level of excellence.

We told you to choose the 10 most innovative Mac apps of this year, and your votes garnered some interesting results. Here are the 10 most innovative Mac apps of 2011. And now we need you to choose your number one.

Do you really need to spend a lot of money to get grade-A photo-editing tricks? Apparently not. With Snapheal ($20), developer MacPhun has taken arguably the coolest Photoshop feature in recent years, made it dead-easy to use and packaged it with all the basic photo-editing tools you’ll need — and more. And all for a fraction of what it should cost.

It’s been a great week for giveaways on Cult of Mac, but we’re not done quite yet. As our last giveaway of the week, we’ll be selecting 2 winners who will receive a free copy of the HTML and CSS for Beginners Course that we’re currently peddling over at deals.cultofmac.com. If you’ve been wanting to build a website but don’t know how then this is the giveaway you want to win.

This course is a stellar opportunity to learn the fundamentals of HTML and CSS you need in order to whip up that creative, high-quality website you’ve been mulling over for years! Two lucky winners will get the $29 course for free and will receive Mark’s HTML and CSS expertise jam-packed into nearly 4 hours of video instruction that includes highlighted lab exercises, so you can apply the very skills taught from the course. For this giveaway we’re going to do things a little differently and give you a few options for entry.

Here’s how to enter the giveaway:

Yesterday, we announced the results of our reader poll to pick the best games of 2011, but one title was mentioned by name again and again as one we had overlooked: Asphalt 6: Adrenaline by Gameloft, one of the best Forza-style racing games on the App Store.

It’s true, Asphalt 6 is an amazing game, and one of the best racing experiences on iOS, bar none. Sadly, though, it was first released in December 2010, missing our list of best 2011 games by just a month. But that’s not to say everyone shouldn’t play it, and now’s the best time yet to download Asphalt 6 and try it for yourself, because it’s now free on the App Store. Get downloading, you won’t regret it.

None of us enjoy typing out our email address, especially if we have to do it a number of times a day on an iOS device. But thanks to the new Shortcuts feature in iOS 5, we don’t have to. Here’s how to setup a shortcut that will save you from typing out your email address forever!

Over at 9to5Mac, Mark Gurman has pulled a nice little early Christmas present out of the new iOS 5.1 beta: four brand new wallpapers that Apple will roll out to customers with the update’s official release.

They’re really beautiful, although my personal favorite is the one with beads of dew on blades of grass. After the jump, we’ve put the iPad versions of the new wallpaper for your perusal, but if you’ve got an iPhone or iPod touch, head on over to 9to5Mac to grab the higher quality PNGs or their equally well-done resized versions of the same images, perfect for a smaller display. Great work, guys.

Yesterday, Apple began rolling out iTunes Match to over a dozen new countries, but as with the U.S. rollout, demand has temporarily exceeded capacity, and so Apple has halted new subscriber sign-up for iTunes Match until some of the initial crush peters out.

Not a big deal, honestly. This happened a couple times with the U.S. rollout, and frankly, iTunes Match can take an awfully long time even in the best of times to match a large collection, let alone when the servers are being hammered. You’re probably better off waiting a few days to sign up, anyway.

[via MacRumors]

It’s been a huge year for Apple. They’ve released a dizzying array of new products and services this year: two new operating systems, two new iPhones, major updates to their entire computer line, a revolutionary new voice control system, a new I/O interface that looks likely to steal the crown from USB 3.0, and even a greeting card app. All of this while dealing with the death of Steve Jobs, the design of a new, futuristic spaceship HQ, and a brand new CEO.

By any measure, it was an amazing year. Still, if you had to pick just one, what do you think was Apple’s best new product this year? Vote in our poll below, and next week we’ll declare the best Apple products of the year as voted by you, the readers.

Samsung dropped its lawsuit against Apple in Germany after discovering a Qualcomm licensing agreement could shield the iPhone 4S from 3G patent-infringement charges. The South Korean smartphone maker later denied it was letting Apple completely off the hook.

It’s always seemed like such a simple tweak, but SBSettings has turned out to be the jailbreak tweak I have the hardest time living without: a simple interface for turning on or off the most common iPhone or iPad settings with a single button press, opened by simply swiping your finger across your iOS’s status bar.

Now that Siri’s here, though, wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to just tell your iPhone to do the things SBSettings does? Turn Bluetooth On or Off, for instance, or go into Airplane Mode.

Apple mysteriously left the ability to use Siri to toggle system preferences out of iOS 5, but the functionality’s reportedly on the way thanks to a new app called Toggles. The only problem? We’ll have to wait for an iPhone 4S jailbreak first.

As Research In Motion circles the smartphone drain, its two CEOs cut their pay to $1. The Steve Jobs-like maneuver may not be enough to save a company that lost 70 percent of its profit to Apple and Android. The only question left: Are the BlackBerry maker’s leaders even worth a buck?

Can’t get enough of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography? Apparently neither can he. Isaacson is now saying he plans to expand the Steve Jobs bio to include annotations and new addendums.

Did you wait until the very last minute to do your Christmas shopping? Well, thanks to a swank new addition to Wolfram Alpha, Siri can now help you find the best deals going on electronics over at Best Buy.

A special edition of James Cameron’s Avatar is set to hit the iTunes Store on December 20, and for fans of the film it is not to be missed. In addition to an original screenplay by Cameron, it features over 1,700 images and allows fans to “deconstruct some of the movie’s most memorable scenes.”

In 1985, after a power struggle developed between Steve Jobs and John Sculley, Apple Computer’s charismatic co-founder was forced out of the company his vision had created. For the next twelve years, the company foundered, lost marketshare hand over fist and almost went bankrupt before Jobs returned to the company in 1997 to put things right.

We all know that story. Still, it’s amazing how just one item from the dark years can hilariously put the disconnect between pre- and post-Jobs Apple in sharp relief. Could anything better exemplify the now-amusing differences in vision between Apple under Jobs and Apple under Sculley than this 1987 relic, The Apple Catalogue?

We’ve seen this magnificent mod for the iPhone 4 before, from a U.K.-based iPhone repair specialist, but the best thing about this one from K.O. Store is that it’s available to purchase right now! The kit allows you to easily replace the rear panel of your iPhone 4 with one that features an illuminating Apple logo.

But you’ll have to be quick — it’s only on sale for two days, and could be pulled sooner if Apple steps in.

If BlackBerry maker Research in Motion were going to dinner, it would arrive five hours late, finding Apple and Google had already eaten, told the best jokes and gone home with all the good-looking women. That’s the image analysts are offering in the wake of RIM announcing yet another delay entering the smartphone market.

Mariner Software just updated veteran writing/blogging app MacJournal to version 6, with a double helping of new features thrown in.

We’re all familiar with how costly data can be on our iOS devices if we’re using them to get on the internet abroad with no access to a Wi-Fi hotspot. To prevent nasty charges, most of us turn off data roaming and avoid using our devices for the internet.

However, there’s a nasty bug in Apple’s iOS operating system that could cost you a fortune while you’re on vacation by allowing you to download apps over a 3G data network even with the feature turned off.