If you’ve ever spent any time exploring the world of OS X notebook applications, you’ll have bumped up against Eastgate Systems’ Tinderbox, without doubt one of the most powerful of them all.

It’s also one of the most expensive, and the one that polarises opinion most often. Tinderbox fans simply love the advanced features it comes with; critics point to the difficulty newcomers will have in getting to grips with them.

So, enter stage right: Twig, which although I’ve thought long and hard for a better term, is perhaps best described as “Tinderbox lite”. So what is it, exactly?

For those of us of a certain age, there’s an almost physical tug at the heartstrings when we see the distinctive Pacman profile. So if you like the thought of your MacBook’s lit-up Apple logo as a Pacman power pill, this decal by LastFuse should be on your Christmas “just-a-little-treat-for-myself” list. You can buy it in black or white from this Etsy store – be quick now, I have a feeling these will disappear fast.

This Wednesday, Apple holds a media event in Cupertino entitled “Back To The Mac.” As soon as they sent out the invitations, the internet started frothing with rumors. What will OS X 10.7 look like? Will there be a new MacBook Air? Will my iPad finally make coffee? The list of apple rumors is tremendous. Vegas odds makers are even taking bets on what Apple will unveil during the announcement.

I think the New York Times bits blog described the frantic Apple rumor mongering best:

When Apple makes an announcement about a coming press event it can sometimes feel like the National Hurricane Center has identified a new hurricane.

There is usually rampant speculation surrounding the importance and impact of the event: Will it be a Category 5 announcement with a revolutionary device, or a less-important Category 1, with basic updates to operating systems or gadgets?

Keeping with this tradition, the blogosphere was in full swing on Friday as technology experts and Apple fans tried to guess what Apple’s chief executive will announce next Wednesday when the company hosts “a sneak peek of the next major version of Mac OS X,” and other new products.

And this isn’t a new phenomenon. This happens Every. Single. Time.

I wanted to know why. How can a computer company create such a frenzied pitch about a routine product announcement? And what can other companies learn from the Apple method? After looking at Apple product launch and product development strategies, I have come up with a few deductions. Here are some of the secrets that make Apple fans incredibly loyal and the press keenly interested in Mac product updates.

Next time you go to the hospital, your doctor might whip out an iPad to show you X-rays,  check drug interactions or review your medical history.

These are just some of the uses doctors are finding for Apple’s handy tablet computer in the Chicago area where three local hospitals are iPad early adopters.

At MetroSouth Medical Center in Blue Island, the device “went through here like wildfire,” once doctors realized they could use the device to quickly access hospital records said Dr. Richard Watson, who works in the ER room. “At least half of our staff here in the emergency room has their own iPad and carries it and uses it.”

One expects great things from an app costing double its nearest competitor (which happens to be the excellent $5 Cyclemeter). And for the most part, BiCycle — a $10 cycling app that uses the iPhone’s GPS receiver to log data — delivers. But while the app is well-designed and contains features not found elsewhere, there’re a few gaping holes that should make potential purchasers pause before taking the plunge.

It’s war! Again. Or still. Whatever. Apple CEO Steve Jobs launched an “epic rant” during an earnings call this week blasting Google’s “fragmented,” er, “open” approach to apps and extolling the virtues of Apple’s “closed,” I mean “integrated” iOS platform.

“We think Android is very fragmented and getting more fragmented by the day… We believe integrated will trump fragmented every time.”

In retaliation, Google mobile strategy chief Andy Rubin apparently posted the following dorky reply on Twitter:

the definition of open: ‘mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make’.

That’s a set of Linux commands for copying Android.

Does Rubin have a point? No, seriously. What’s his point?

Since Google hasn’t mounted a coherent defense against fragmen… I mean the open approach to mobile platforms, does anyone here want to try?

Go here to read the whole post on IT World.

First up is a number of refurbished MacBook Pro units from the Apple Store, starting with a 2.26GHz 13″ model for $929. Next up is a Superleggera iPhone 4 case bundled with two screen protectors. We wrap up today’s featured deals with a 23-inch aluminum widescreen Cinema Display LCD monitor for $380.

Along the way, we check out a 16GB iPhone 4, an iPod touch with GPS and an 802.11g Airport Extreme. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Apple’s put down webOS before in the smartphone wars, but you can’t keep a solid operating system down for the count: six months after HP acquired Palm, they have just announced webOS 2.0 and the Pre 2 smartphone.

Over the weekend, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg met for some dinner, and smart money would rest on the bet that they were trying to work out some sort of deal where Facebook and Ping come together at last.

But could Apple’s interest be far more bold than merely ironing out some differences? Peter Kafka over at All Things D certainly thinks so: he speculates that Apple may want to buy Facebook outright with its $51 billion in cash reserves.

Here’s Kafka’s reasoning. Asked by Jobs what Apple intends to do with all of its cash, Jobs responded: “We firmly believe that one or more unique strategic opportunities will present itself to us, and we’ll be in a position to take advantage of it.” As Kafka sees it, Facebook’s a good bet for such an acquisition.

Deep down in their guts, iOS and OS X are basically the same beast, distinguished largely by their user interface shells… so could tomorrow’s reveal of OS X 10.7, “Lion,” make OS X’s UI more like iOS than ever before? An unconfirmed report says yes.

According to the report, the upcoming update to Lion will be heavily based on iOS in many of its trappings. It’ll still be Aqua, but “the iOS influence is [more] visible in the new OS user interface.”

Yojimbo users, here’s the news you’ve been waiting for.

Yojimbo 3.0 is out today, and with it comes a companion iPad application that lets you take your Yojimbo database to go.

We see sexy, elegant and manly iPad satchels all the time, but what about the sandalwood-scented fashionista who wants to sling his MacBook Pro around town with the same proud strut as a GQ model? The Shoulder MacBook Sleeve by Hard Graft might fit the bill.

Made of 100% wool woven into asphalt grey felt, the Shoulder MacBook Sleeve features a tuck-in closure, a dark black removable leather strap held in place by tanned hazelnut leather, as well as a removable extras case for cables and power adapter. Very sexy indeed, and the price isn’t actually bad: just €139.00.

Who is leading in mobile advertising – Apple or Google? A new report seems to offer conflicting views. One graph (shown above) appears to indicate mobile ads served to Android devices grew at a faster pace in the third-quarter – 37 percent versus 10 percent for Apple. However, a second set of numbers illustrates a 156 percent increase in ad impressions and 316 percent revenue jump for the iPad between July and September.

Millenial Media, a mobile advertising network, Tuesday also announced while Apple accounts for 30 percent of the devices connected to its system, ad requests sent to Android devices grew 1,283 percent since January. The iPod touch and iPad accounted for two of the top four devices connected to the company’s network.

This chart tracks the dizzying rise of new products in Apple’s sales mix. Currently about 60% of Apple’s sales come from products that the Cupertino company launched in the last three years.

“This last quarter is not a holiday quarter. Now imagine what next quarter will look like on this chart,” writes Horace Dediu, who charted Apple’s sales in the graph for Asymco. “Think back to 2001 before the iPod. The orange band was all that Apple had.”

Source: Asymco

You’ve always wanted to paint your face up like a singer at the Beijing opera, right?

No? You sure?

Although investors voiced some disappointment that Apple’s quarterly financial picture didn’t match some expectations, analysts Tuesday weighed in with a more optimism. The key phrase: the best is yet to come.

“We believe [the] iPad supply chain will expand substantially into the calendar fourth quarter,” Sterne Agee analyst Vijay Rakesh told investors this morning. Although Apple’s sales of 4.2 million iPads this quarter was below the 5 million Wall Street expected, the analyst views the lower number as a “strategic decision to allocate capacity to [the] iPhone 4 and the best is yet to come.”

This is the RM Slate, an 11.6 inch multitouch tablet running Windows 7, priced at £399 (about $630).

Exposé is an OS X feature designed to help you move around many documents and applications quickly and easily.

All you have to do is push a button (or move your mouse in a particular way, or drag your fingers on the trackpad), and all your open windows, from all your open applications, will be displayed on screen at once, shrunk down so that you can see them all.

During his anti-Google diatribe this afternoon, Steve Jobs said the Google-versus-Apple, open-versus-closed debate is a smokescreen. It makes no sense to say Apple is closed while Google is open when the real issue is fragmentation versus integration.

Jobs said Google’s Android platform is fragmented. There are too many different versions of the operating system and too many devices, making it a headache for consumers and developers. Apple’s iOS devices on the other hand aren’t fragmented, because they are “vertically integrated.” Apple closely integrates the software with the hardware, and they “just work.”

But what does he mean exactly by “vertical integration?” And why is it so important?

I wrote about this at length in my book, Inside Steve’s Brain. In fact, I think it’s critical to understanding why Jobs and Apple are killing it in consumer electronics right now.

So here’s Chapter Eight — “Total Control: The Whole Widget,” — in its entirety.

Here’s a juicy excerpt, already up on YouTube, from Apple’s conference call today where Steve Jobs dropped by and  bashed Google repeatedly with an Apple-shaped hammer.

Steve Jobs is no stranger to hyperbole, but sometimes he says things that make the hair on your neck stand up. Here he is on the future of the iPad:

Well, the iPad is clearly going to affect notebook computers. And I think the iPad proves it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. There’s a lot of development and progress that will occur over the next few years, but we’re already seeing tremendous interest in iPad from education and, much to my surprise, from business.

We haven’t pushed it real hard in business and it’s being grabbed out of our hands. I talk to people every day in all kinds of businesses that are using iPads… The more time that passes, the more I am convinced that we’ve got a tiger by the tail here and this is a new model of computing — you know we’ve already got tens of millions of people trained on with the iPhone — and that lends itself to lots of different aspects of life, personal, educational, and business. I see it as very general purpose and very big… One could argue about the timing endlessly, but I don’t think you can argue it’s going to happen.

Steve Jobs made an unusual visit to Apple’s quarterly conference call today, sounding ebullient about Apple’s record sales figures for the fourth quarter of 2010, and boasted of Apple’s dominance over RIM, bashed Google and praised both the homogeny of iOS and the careful thinking that went into the design of the iPad compared to the “avalanche of tablets. Here’re the highlights, and some juicy quotes:

Apple announced a record $20.4 billion in revenue during the fiscal 2010 fourth quarter, and a profit of $4.31 billion, in a press release ahead of their quarterly financial conference call.

Sales of Macs increased a sizable 27 percent from the same quarter last year; 14.1 million ipPhones were sold, a whopping 91 percent increase from last year’s Q4.

“We are blown away to report over $20 billion in revenue and over $4 billion in after-tax earnings—both all-time records for Apple,” Steve Jobs said in Apple’s press release.

iPad sales topped out at just over four million, and iPod sales declined by 11 percent.

For new iPhoners, the idea of gulping down unlimited swathes of data is just a magical thing of the past, spoken of with hushed tones, in the days before fear of data overages gripped the iPhone universe.

Fear not though, new iPhoner — the tools exist to keep from accidentally punching through the monthly 3G data allotment. Readers who’ve been following our Essential App series (and who live in the States) have no doubt already equipped their iPhones with AT&T’s free myWireless app, which counts and bar graphs data usage; but there’s an even more precise and powerful weapon available: DataMan

Australian airliner, Qantas Airlines, is to begin offering the iPad for in-flight entertainment to travellers on its Jetstar flights.

Qantas have been testing the tablet device on its planes since back in June, and passengers had the opportunity to rent the tablet device for $10 (AUS). Following its success, the airliner is now ready to deploy the iPad across its Jetstar flights.

A spokesman for Jetstar told Dow Jones Newswires on Monday of their plan:

“We’re in the final stages of putting in place what would be a broader roll out across the network. We’re in ongoing discussion with the manufacturer around a more integrated network proposition.”

We’re unsure what an “integrated network” could mean at this point, but it seems that it might be a streaming service for music, movies, TV shows, and games, so that passengers can choose entertainment to suit them, rather than have to pick from what’s available on the device.