Currently, Apple makes it extraordinarily easy to squat on a great app name, even if you don’t have a great app to go with it. Just pay them the standard $99 developer’s fee and reserve your perfect app name for as long as you want it, with about as much ease as registering that mot juste domain through GoDaddy.

Obviously, it’s not an ideal system, in that it practically encourages squatters to sit on great names that other app developers with real software to show for their ideas can use. Luckily, it seems like Apple is now ready to crack down on App Store squatters with a new set of rules aimed at discouraging the practice.

Here’s what the new policy looks like: you can still stake a claim to an App Name, but you need to produce a binary to show for it within 90 days. Otherwise, Apple will send you a nastygram, and give you another month to get cracking on your app: if those thirty days pass without any software to show, your claim will be deleted.

It’s a better system than the one currently in place, sure, but it’s still pretty easy to get around: any old fart, flashlight or soundboard app can be submitted as the binary, with no actual pressure on the developer to actually publish it to iTunes. Still, at least that makes remedial iOS programming chops a prerequisite for App Store squatting, which is surely a higher barrier to entry than $99.

OmmWriter, the curious word processor that we first mentioned here back in November 2009, has just been updated with a new version, OmmWriter Dana.

OmmWriter is different from other writing apps. It sees writing as a completely immersive activity, and tries to provide the writer with an environment worth getting immersed in. Not just full screen text, but also attractive background images, and soothing ambient sounds.

You either love it or you hate it. Some Cult readers loved it so much they voted it as one of the best new applications of last year.

You don’t.

There’s no need to. The OS X filesystem is designed to look after files properly in the first place, so that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – you might hear your computer’s hard disk whirring for no apparent reason. Among other things, that could be the system looking after itself – moving stuff around on the disk so that there’s no need for you to actually sit down and click a button marked “defrag.”

If you want to know more about the technical ins-and-outs behind this, go read this Apple support document. As it points out, there’s no need to defrag your disk, and even if you download a third party defragging application and run it, you probably won’t notice any difference.

Save yourself the trouble, and spend your not-defragging time doing something fun on your computer instead.

(You’re reading the 28th post in our series, 100 Essential Mac Tips And Tricks For Windows Switchers. These posts explain to OS X beginners some of the most basic and fundamental concepts of using a Mac. Find out more.)

First-year medical students at Stanford University are finding a bunch of ways to use the iPad to help them learn.

The 91-first-year students who started three weeks ago were the first crop of pre-meds to be handed iPads.

Here’s how they’re using it:

• to look closer

A slide presentation or textbook may offer a tiny diagram of a molecular structure that students need to memorize.  “You can’t even see that,” noted student Steven Sloan. “But on the iPad, you can just touch the screen to enlarge it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGmRKSds9OY

Proving a thing or two about making the most of what you have – unlike Microsoft – Amazon has come out with a cute ad poking fun at using the iPad in bright sunlight, and its premium price to boot.

I’m an iPad fan, but I will admit the little Never-Say-Die eReader does win on these fronts…

[via Digg]

If you work with multiple monitors, the following scenario might strike a chord: you’re busy working on a document in a secondary monitor, and you need to apply some software widget to the stuff you’ve just selected. You struggle to remember the keyboard shortcut but can’t; so you have to use the Menu Bar.

Problem is, the Menu Bar is back where your computer left it, on your primary monitor. Once in a while this might not be a problem, but if it’s a common occurrence in your workflow, it’s going to start getting irritating.

Binary Bakery’s MenuEverywhere is an application designed to solve this problem.

Here’s Sony’s latest attempt to get you to part with some dollars in exchange for something to plug your iPod into.

The RDP-X50iP is a speaker dock for iPod & iPhone that boasts 20W + 20W RMS, or what Sony likes to call “room-filling power.”

Weirdly, the press release we got sent makes specific mention of it supporting iPhone 3G and 3GS, but goes out of its way to not mention the iPhone 4. So we’re not betting that it’s officially supported; your milage may etc etc.

It weighs just under 4lbs and is about 14 inches from end to end. Amazon is selling it for $166, which strikes me as quite a lot for a speaker dock. At that price, the sound had better fill a room, and really well.

We start out the week with a hardware deal, some classic reading for your iPhone and some just-plain fun for your Apple handset. First u is a MacConnection deal on a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini Server for $750. The desktop machine includes two 500GB drives. Next is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, an audiobook of the Mark Twain classic for your iPhone, iPad or iPod. We wrap up our highlighted deals with “Gravity Runner,” a scrolling, gravity-altering game for your iPhone from the iTunes App Store.

Along the way, we’ll also check out other iPhone software and Mac-related hardware. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

What’s more important to you? Your iPod… or your wedding ring? Your iPhone… or your dog? A new survey conducted by a company called Protect Your Bubble has found that, in the UK at least, most people would be less willing to give up their Apple products than any other possession.

By a significant margin, the iPod beat out other objects as Facebook respondents’ favorite things, with 12% of respondents reporting it as their most cherished possession. 11.5% valued their Blackberry over all other wares, while Apple’s iPhone crept in at 10%.

Comparatively, only 9% of respondents chose their laptop, another 9% dog, 5% their cat, 4% their car and a mere 1% their wedding ring. It appears that more people in the UK these days are married to Apple than they are to their spouse.

Here’s another way of looking at the design of Apple’s new iPods: they didn’t redesign the Shuffle or Nano at all. They just cut the last Nano in half.

[via Reddit]

Much to the chagrin of consumers who want a cheaper alternative, Apple is notoriously protective of its MagSafe patent… so much so that they have a rich history of suing the third-party builders of MagSafe knock-offs.

Now it appears that Cupertino is going after another one, having filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the Sanho Corporation in the California Northern District Court. Details are still sketchy, with the actual complaint part of the lawsuit as yet unrevealed, but Patently Apple speculates
that this is all about the MagSafe connector baked into Sanho’s third-party HyperMac batteries.

Sanho seemed to think they’d dodged Apple’s MagSafe patents with the HyperMac line, since their products are actually made of recycled official MagSafe products… but Apple may well see things another way… a shame, given the amazing charging capacity and stellar quality of the HyperMac line, which can juice up a MacBook Pro for up to 34 hours.

If you’re looking to buy a HyperMac, then, best get one now. If previous MagSafe lawsuits are anything to go by, they’ll be C&Ded into extinction soon enough.

Apple Monday announced it will begin selling the Wi-Fi iPad in China on September 17, just a little over a month after that country’s government granted the Cupertino, Calif. company permission to sell its tablet device. The quick turn-around suggests Apple wants to prevent a tide of gray marketeers which hurt earlier sales of the iPhone 3G and iPhone 4 in the Asian country.

The iPad will be available in China through Apple Retail Stores and authorized resellers, starting at 10 a.m., Friday September 17, the company announced. The 16GB version will sell for 3988 Chinese Yuan or $590.78. The 32GB iPad will sell for 4788 CNY or $709, while the 64GB tablet will sell for 5588 CNY or $827, Apple said.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY-uRRCARJw&feature=player_embedded

This video purports itself to be real footage of iOS 4.0 running on an HTC smartphone, but it’s almost certainly just a skinjob: not only would hacking iOS to run on another device be nearly impossible without access to the source code, but there’s some tell tale signs (like missing folder animation, wallpaper that moves along with pages and the ability to delete the iTunes and App Store icons from the homescreen) that this isn’t what it appears to be.

Nonetheless, we’re impressed, if just by the fact someone went to so much trouble to make Android look so much like iOS. Of course, if you’re going to put in those kind of man hours, one wonders why you would bother buying the inferior phone to begin with…

[via HardMac]

The days of two competing jailbreak app stores is over: like two rogue gas giants, Cydia and Rock are smashing together and fusing into one bright star.

According to Modyi, Cydia founder Jay Freeman, also known as Saurik, and Rock’s Mario Ciabarra have agreed to an acquisition deal, in which Saurik’s company will acquire Rock Your iPhone, Inc. Over the next ten days, Rock apps will transition over to Cydia, and after those ten days are up, Rock will be no more, with existing Rock customers needing a Cydia login to continue to buy apps.

Ciabarra will be employed by Cydia and focus on app development, his true love. As such, expect his Intelliborn line of jailbreak apps, including MyWi, MyProfiles, My3G and Intelliscreen to continue to be updated, albeit under the Cydia umbrella. Sounds like a win for everybody involved.

Stuck on an iPhone 3G or 3GS and jealous of the iPhone 4’s sexy ability to stitch three photos together for a beautifully optimized high-dynamic range snapshot of what it sees out of its tiny oculus? A Cydia tweak is on its way just as soon as the Dev Team releases their iOS 4.1 jailbreak, bringing HDR capability to legacy devices. Of course, the iOS 4.1 jailbreak is still an unknown amount of time away, so we could be waiting on this for sometime… but at least there’s some hope in sight.

All good things must come to an end, and now that Apple has largely put the fires out on the public relations nightmare of Antennagate, they’ll be ending their free iPhone 4 case program come September 30th… unless you complain loud enough.

Says Apple:

We now know that the iPhone 4 antenna attenuation issue is even smaller than we originally thought. A small percentage of iPhone 4 users need a case, and we want to continue providing them a Bumper case for free. For everyone else, we are discontinuing the free case program on all iPhone 4s sold after September 30, 2010. We are also returning to our normal returns policy for all iPhone 4s sold after September 30. Users experiencing antenna issues should call AppleCare to request a free Bumper case.

Of course, given how backed up Apple is sending out free cases, even if you order one now, you’re not likely to have a bumper around your iPhone before next year. Perhaps that’s the bigger takeaway from Apple’s decision to end the program: if you’re really having problems with your iPhone 4’s reception, you couldn’t afford to wait for Apple to finally get around to sending you one anyway.

With few exceptions, the best way to predict what Apple is going to do is to look at what they’ve already done, which is why it’s best to take this rumor reported by Apple Insider with a grain of salt: they claim a FaceTime-equipped iPad will be coming in time for the holidays.

Apple Insider, on their part, realize that that their source — “a person with proven knowledge of Apple’s future product plans” — is giving them insider intel that defies Apple’s history of yearly generational cycles in their iPod and iOS line-up, but claim nonetheless that “there [is] an ambitious push inside Apple to verify the refresh for a possible launch ahead of this year’s holiday shopping season,” and that the testing of the FaceTime-equipped iPad has already reached the advanced testing stage.

That the next iPad will boast at least a forward facing camera for FaceTime calling is a given… but releasing it less than a year after the first iPad seems like an invitation for customer backlash.

Perhaps recognizing this, Apple Insider’s report ends up contradicting itself later, on, saying that the FaceTime-equipped iPad will arrive “no later” than the first quarter of 2011. Given that the first quarter ends in March, that’s close enough to a year after the iPad’s debut that it seems unlikely that Apple will meaningfully break their historic product cycle for a second-gen iPad, no matter how much they want FaceTime to be the de facto standard for video calling.

Okay, this one should be filed under “S” for speculation, but there is talk that Apple’s iPad may be appearing on the shelves of retailer Target in October. First the conjecture and then some context on why there many be a reason why there may be fire behind this puff of smoke.

According to a screenshot of a Target PDA obtained by tech buzz site Engadget, the Apple tablet device could appear October 3. Why? The price of the unspecified device is set at $599.99, the same as the iPad, and the device would be sold by the retailer in the “Digital Audio” section, where Apple’s iPods and iPad competitor, Amazon’s Kindle, are already available. Here is the PDA’s screen:

Let’s dispel here and now any notion that the next great guitar solo or hit record will be produced or recorded using Apple’s mobile devices or the myriad amplifier emulating and recording applications available for them today.

Will. Not. Happen.

That said, for the casual music enthusiast and app dabbler, a few interesting peripheral/app combinations continue to highlight the versatility of Apple’s mobile development platform — and point the way to a future in which talented individuals won’t have to invest thousands of dollars in equipment and studio time in order to produce professional sounding music recordings.

We’ve spent the past several weeks playing with three of these, from Agile Partners, Frontier Design Group, and IK Multimedia. Our report contains a decidedly mixed bag.

James McCluskey was so peeved about having his backpack stolen — containing a brand-new iPad — that he turned detective to find the crooks.

McCluskey left his backpack in the office parking lot mid-morning in Onehunga, New Zealand. (There was no explanation of why he left this catnip to crooks unattended. It’s the probably the most common way iGadgets get stolen.)

Two women reportedly smashed the car windows, grabbed his backpack and sped off. The victim, a 22-year-old logistics coordinator, managed to jot down the license plate number. The backpack contained an iPad, hard drive and other personal belongings estimated at around $1,500.

He reported the theft to police, but also took matters into his own hands. Perhaps knowing that thefts from cars are the least likely to be solved (in New Zealand the resolution rate is a dismal 3.3 per cent), he tracked down the license plate number through a $2 post office search.

Then things got a little hairy for the would-be detective: McCluskey tracked down the person whose name was listed on the registration, 17-year-old Christine Wilson.

This week’s must-have iOS games features one of the best 2D platformers yet for the iPhone, GTA goodness in high-definition and golfing that claims to be as real as it gets. There’s also some pooping pigeons thrown in for good measure!

Check out a few of our favorite games from the past week after the break.

This weeks must-have iOS apps include Nike’s latest to help you track your run stats, professional HTML emails on your iPhone with MarkdownMail, quick and easy invoice creation for your business, and AppShopper’s new app that helps you keep track of the App Store.

Check out a few of our favorite apps from the past week after the break!

Celebrating the release to manufacture of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft employees held a mock funeral Friday for the iPhone and Blackberry on their Redmond campus:

Employees dressed up in fancy dress and also modified cars to include Windows Phone branding. Aside from the crazy outfits the workers made fake hearses for giant BlackBerry and iPhone devices. Employees cheekily claimed they had buried the competition with Windows Phone 7. [Neowin]

Mourners and pallbearers were seen holding signs such as “Windows Phone 7 OS Platform buries the competition” and performed a funereal dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller as part of the remembrances.

The latest iPhone Killer launches on October 11.  Is it too early to call this another premature obituary?

[via AppleInsider]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfFfqMR6uK0

The iPad has made the consumption of digital media revolutionary and more than likely it spells out the demise of printed newspapers. It won’t be long before you’re reaching for your iPad instead of the newspaper, but is that a good thing? I’d say, “Yes,”  because the iPad will you let view content in more exciting formats, search your content, and generally do a whole lot more with it.

There’s only one drawback to replacing a newspaper with an iPad and that is demonstrated in Newsday’s new advertisement for its first iPad app and I’ll let that video speak for itself. It is the perfect humorous ending to a long work week.

The Bundleeicious folks are back with a $10 bundle of six Mac apps, worth over $100 if each were bought separately.

Included are the $29 iDatabase, a database app that has a companion iPhone app (available separately for $3) and Punakea, a $25 app that allows users to organize files with tags.

The bundle will be around for nine more days before disappearing. Hit the jump for a preview of what else is included: