Along with the new iOS 8 beta 3 release this morning, Apple has also seeded the third preview build of OS X 10.10 to developers.

We’re still waiting for Apple to open up the beta program to the public as promised at WWDC, but for now only developers can grab the new OS X Yosemite Preview 3 from the Mac Dev Center. You can also scoop up the update via the Mac App Store or by clicking Software Update under the Apple menu.

Other beta releases this morning included Xcode 6 beta 3,  Apple Configurator 1.7 beta, and new builds of Find My iPhone and Find My friends.

Yosemite brings a revamped UI to OS X along with a host of new features aimed at making your iPhone and Mac work smarter together. No official word from Apple on what’s inside the new preview but we’ll let you know what we find as soon as its installed.

Ubiquitous cloud storage and editing solutions for your photos are like buses: You wait ages for one, and then two come along at once.

Both Apple and Adobe are going all-in on allowing you to view and edit your photos on any device. Adobe has done this by bringing its Lightroom desktop app to mobile. Apple is doing it by ditching iPhoto and Aperture and starting again with the upcoming Photos app for iOS.

While the approaches are different, they both look rad. And they’ll drive a fundamental shift in the way we manage our photos.

For many people, Siri has been more of a nuisance than an empowering personal assistant since debuting on the iPhone 4s in 2011. Sure, she’s received some upgrades and is getting even more in iOS 8, but fancy new features mean nothing if she can’t understand what you’re saying.

Siri’s favoriting line, “Sorry I didn’t get that,” might soon be a thing of the past though as a report from Wired says the time is ripe for Apple to unleash a neural-net-boosted Siri.

Tim Cook has been an ardent supporter of LGBT rights while leading the ship at Apple. That continued this weekend, as Apple (in a display known as “Apple Pride”) participated in the San Francisco Pride Celebration & Parade, one of the many gay pride parades held Sunday across the United States.

Apple gave out $1 iTunes gift cards to onlookers at the parade, allowing them to download free songs from the iTunes Store. It also celebrated the event by including an “LGBT Gay Pride” station on iTunes Radio.

By enhancing discoverability and human curation in its App Store, and favoring innovative indie developers over brainless money-hungry giants, Apple is doing a lot of things right these days when it comes to iOS.

An area it could still work on, however, is kicking out knockoff titles — or making sure they never make it into the App Store to begin with.

Case in point is Cloned Blek. Brought to our attention by Gamezebo, the title is a shameless display by apparent ripoff artists Coffee House Apps.

Apple gave developers an early preview of its upcoming Photos app this month at WWDC, but what it didn’t tell anyone is that new app for iOS will also overthrow Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture apps for OS X.

A new Photos app for OS X isn’t expected to land on Macs until next year, but in a statement released to The Loop, Apple says it has already stopped development on its professional photography application, Aperture.

Here’s the official statement:

Google’s keynote presentation at its I/O developer’s conference today offered a revealing picture of the company itself: meandering, unfocused, copycat and just a little bit evil.

The two-hours-plus keynote had a lot of everything, from a new version of Android to new phones, smartwatches, TVs, cars, Chromebooks and big data — but much of it was deja vu from Apple’s WWDC two weeks ago.

Siri: “How long should a keynote last?”

As anyone who watched Wednesday’s nearly three-hour livestream of the Google I/O kickoff, the answer to that question should be 90 minutes or less.

As the event dragged on, the tone on Twitter went from restrained interest about Google’s somewhat underwhelming announcements to reports of sleeping reporters and jabs at the ponderous presentation’s length. “Apple just launched a keynote shortener,” tweeted Dave Pell.

Tim Cook and Craig Federighi took a few swipes at Android during WWDC’s keynote, but now that Google is readying its hype machine for Google I/O tomorrow, Sundar Pichai, the head of Android, tossed a few jabs Apple’s way in an interview with Bloomberg this morning.

Pichai noted that all the data points to people adopting Android faster than any other operating system, but the dude’s so gosh darn nice, he couldn’t insult Apple without flattering them in the same breath.

Addressing Tim Cook’s comments that Android is a “toxic hell stew of vulnerabilities,” Pichai said it’s difficult to compare the two, because iOS is like the $100,000 Mercedes Benz of mobile platforms, and Android is like your cheap ass Honda Civic, taking over the world one delicious dessert fueled update at a time.

Apple sure is looking friendlier these days.

This year’s Worldwide Developers Conference was geekier, more welcoming and less locked-down than any in recent history. Apple also bid farewell to Katie Cotton — the much-feared queen of PR, whose frosty relations with journalists made her only slightly less terrifying than an angry Steve Jobs — with a call for a “friendlier, more approachable” public relations face to warm up the company’s relationship with the press.

“For the past few years it’s felt like Apple’s only goal was to put us in our place,” Panic’s Cabel Sasser recently tweeted. “Now it feels like they might want to be friends.”

These recent moves represent a major change in the way Apple does business, even as the company sits atop a $150 billion war chest amassed thanks to innovative products, ruthless leadership and heavy-handed policies that fostered a culture of secrecy and utter domination. But in a world where it’s drummed into our heads that nice guys finish last, does Apple’s approach risk killing the company with kindness?

CEO Tim Cook certainly doesn’t seem to think so.