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Apple has today announced the winner of its $10,000 App Store gift card after the App Store surpassed 50 billion downloads on Wednesday. The lucky customer is Brandon Ashmore of Mentor, Ohio, who downloaded Say the Same Thing, a word game from Space Inch.

Mobileaks says the above render comes from a tipster who has seen the iPad mini 2 with Retina display. We’re not so convinced.

Google unleashed an insane amount of news during its marathon keynote at the I/O developer conference today in California. A new music subscription service, Google Maps update, and messaging platform were just a few of the announcements.

Software and services was the name of the game at I/O this year, and here’s a roundup of everything Google unveiled earlier this afternoon:

Apple just announced that the App Store just hit its 50 billionth app download ever. To celebrate the event, Apple said it would give a $10,000 App Store Gift Card to the person who downloads the 50 billionth app. Apple’s also giving $500 App Store Gift Cards to the next 50 people to download an app after the 50 billion mark.

Google Maps is already one of the best mapping services on the planet, but Google isn’t content to rest on its laurels. At the Google I/O keynote this morning Google announced that it will launch a new version of Google Maps for iOS and Android later this year.

The new Google Maps will come with a simplified UI, as well as new features like real-time traffic, dynamic re-routing, reviews from Zagat and there will even be a dedicated Google Maps app for iPad.

Apple’s got to keep the ever-mounting demands on its Siri servers down somehow, so here’s a new one. If you ask her something too long, Siri will respond with trite quotes upon the power of brevity, such as this one by William Strunk of Strunk & White fame:

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Of course, it’s not up to a voice-recognition program to dictate what is an unnnecessary word or sentence, any more than it is up to a pencil which line in a drawing is “unnecessary”, or an engine schematic which part isn’t needed.

But here’s something ironic! Take that exact quote above by Strunk and modify it into a question. “Siri, should a sentence contain any unnecessary words, or a paragraph any unnecessary sentences, for the same reasons that a drawing should not have any unnecessary lines or a machine any unnecessary parts?” And guess what! Siri will accuse Strunk of being long-winded. Take that Elements of Style!

Source: iLounge

Hard drive space is at a premium these days, with files getting larger and solid state drives (SSD) becoming more affordable and ubiquitous. I’m typing on a MacBook Air right now, and making sure I don’t clutter up the drive with unnecessary files is important to me.

One way to do this is to get rid of the voices that Mac OS X uses for text-to-speech. These files can take up a decent amount of space, which may well be why iOS only allows the one onboard, now that I think about it.

Anyway, if you’re not using those text-to-speech voices, you might as well clear them off your drive and save some space. Here’s how.

By now, you’ve probably see Commander Chris Hadfield’s tear-jerking farewell to the International Space Station: a cover of David Bowie’s classic space song, Space Oddity, filmed and performed by Hadfield himself in zero-g. In case you haven’t, we’ve embedded it above: it’s hard not to be proud of humanity after watching it.

But do you know how Hadfield actually recorded it? With his iPad, of course.

What would a budget or mid-range iPhone mini look like with a radical new vision of iOS 7 installed on it, fronted by that skeuomorph-hating design perfectionist, Jony Ive?

Martin Hajek — one of the most talented Apple concept designers around — wanted to know, so he created a new budget iPhone concept that features bighter colors, a smaller screen, and a plastic backshell inspired by the iPad mini, then “installed” Dámaso Benítez’ “really nice concept” of how Jony Ive might flatten iOS 7.

On my part, I seriously doubt iOS 7 will look anything like this: Ive’s sense of design sophistication is not going to have him making app icons that look as if they would be right at home in a preschoolers sticker book. But it’s a nice concept none the less.

Some more images after the break to wet your whistle.

The iPhone 5S could come with a sapphire crystal capacitive touch home button that incorporates a new fingerprint sensor, according to supply chain sources in Taiwan.

Apple is expected to do away with the traditional physical home button, which has long been one of the most unreliable components on iOS devices. It’s thought that using sapphire crystal, which has a hardness second only to diamond, will prevent the button from getting scratched and ruining the fingerprint sensor.

Steve & Steve, an online graphic novel being undertaken by Patrick Sean Farley, has got to be the trippiest thing you’ll ever read about the friendship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, in their early HP/Atari days.

How trippy? Well, in the graphic novel, Steve & Steve drop acid in a strange geodesic dome in the middle of the woods, where they begin to debate the origins of technology, Steve Jobs called Arthur C. Clarke a degenerate, Wozniak eludes to a strange criminal past and fantasizes about kissing a girl in his chess club. Then, a Russian nuclear weapon is fired straight at Silicon Valley… or is it?

And that’s just the prologue. It’s beautifully illustrated and written, with some incredible typography. We’ve included a few panels after the jump, but check out the official Steve & Steve site for more. This is already shaping up to be the best Steve Jobs comic we’ve ever seen.

Saving space on your Mac hard drive is a key strategy, especially when you’re using a Macbook Air, with it’s strictly solid state drive (SSD). Even if you’re using a desktop Mac with a hard drive that seemed like “plenty of space” when you bought it, there will come a time when you’ll be looking to save some of it for more data. Why not get rid of the non-essential stuff on your Mac’s hard drive?

When you delete apps to help recover disk space, they can leave user cache files behind. These are the files that help improve the performance of OS X and various apps that are installed on your Mac. If you’re no longer using an app, you can delete these files to free up some space. Here’s how.

For a long time, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were two of the biggest competitors in the technology industry. They were both early pioneers of desktop computing, and their companies were battling each other for every ounce of market share they could get their hands on.

But those shared experiences eventually led to the two becoming good friends. In a new interview for CBS’ 60 Minutes, Gates fondly remembers his old foe, and emotionally recalls his last visit to Jobs’s Palo Alto home before he passed away in October 2011.

Listen, you tech-savvy, trend-resisting cynic you. I want you to stop dismissing wearable computing as a pointless, narcissistic fad.

Wearable computing is not for people too lazy to look at their phones. It’s not a trendy toy for wealthy yuppies. And it’s not about joining Robert Scoble in the shower.

What you need to know is this: Wearable computing is the next evolution of consumer electronics. And it changes everything for everyone and not just the people actually wearing the computing.

And it will change Apple, too. Here’s how.

iOS 7 concepts are a dime a dozen these days. Everyone is coming up with short video walkthroughs of what they think the next version of Apple’s mobile operating system will look like.

Rumors say that Apple is making iOS 7 “flatter” and less skeuomorphic (no pool table felt in Game Center, for example). That has led a lot of concept creators to what I think are, frankly, some overdone conclusions. Yesterday on Twitter I made the comment that, “My gut somehow tells me that all of these iOS 7 concepts are horribly wrong.” I haven’t seen a single iOS 7 concept that actually looks believable, well… until now.

This week on The CultCast: Adobe goes rental, Bill Gates gets crazy, Nintendo doesn’t come to the iPhone, 5S begins productio, Buster gets hit on by a goat, and the other fun Apple stories from the week. Baaaah!

All that and more on this week’s CultCast! Stream or download new and past episodes on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing now in iTunes, or hit play below and let the good times roll.

Click through for the show notes!

The security features built into Apple’s iOS software are so good that the police are unable to gain access to defendant’s iPhones when they need to. Apple itself is able to bypass the security software and decrypt locked devices — and it do so when the police request it. But the company has so many requests that it has to add police to a lengthy waiting list.

Nothing’s driving design nerds as crazy as the rumor that Jony Ive is taking a torch to iOS’s egregious skeuomorphic design elements and coming up with something for iOS 7 a lot more modern and flat like Windows 8.

In truth, any hopes that Ive is going to completely raze the ground of iOS skeuomorphism for iOS 7 are probably optimistic: Ive hasn’t had enough time, and it’s just too deeply ingrained into the operating system. More likely, Ive’s sensibilities will more immediately be felt in more subtle pairing-downs, like the way Apple’s Podcast app had the reel-to-reel player removed in a recent version.

But what does Jony Ive eventually want iOS to look like? A stunning new concept video has a very compelling take on that question.

There’s no denying that iTunes for Windows is one of the most important projects Apple has ever done. It allowed Apple to sell iPods, then iPhones, and then iPads (as well as billions of dollars worth of movies, books and music) to owners of Windows PCs at a time when the iOS ecosystem was much more tethered to the desktop than it is today.

But iTunes on Windows isn’t quite as important as it used to be, especially now that the iPad is king and Windows 8 is here, which has cratered PC sales thanks to the general confusion around its new “Metro” UI.

Any surprise, then, that Microsoft’s having a hard time convincing Apple to update iTunes for Windows 8?

Science! A 14-year-old girl has discovered that a regular old iPad Smart Cover can “accidentally turn off” a person’s implantable deibrillator… a device that might be the only thing keeping them alive.

Apple’s plans for an ‘iRadio’ streaming service are still being stalled by reluctant music labels, according to a report today from the Financial Times. Last month it was reported that Universal was about to partner with Apple, and the deal has allegedly been sealed between the two companies since then. Now Sony is demanding more money before it signs on.

There’s been a lot of hullyboo about skeuomorphism in the Mac and iOS community right now. Ever since the debut of iOS, Apple’s software has become increasingly ornamented with unnecessary textures and details that many people consider tacky, such as the fake Corinthian leather in Calendar or the green felt background in Game Center. This style of design is called skeuomorphism, and outed ex-Apple VP Scott Forstall was one of Cupertino’s main proponent for its wide spread use in iOS and OS X.

All signs point to Jonny Ive getting away with a lot of skeuomorphic details in iOS 7, adopting instead a more modern, ‘flat’ design.

The way people talk, though, it’s like skeuomorphism is a unique problem of the digital age. It’s not. In fact, the ancient Greeks had a problem with skeuomorphism too. So before you revile Scott Forstall for using it too much, keep in mind, it’s a design technique as old as civilization.

Last year, there was a lot of debate about whether the iPhone 5 (the sixth iPhone at the time) would be called the iPhone 5 or the iPhone 6, and the same happened the year before as people bickered about whether Apple should call the iPhone 4S the iPhone 5.

As the seventh-generation iPhone approaches, the debate is opening up again: what should Apple call it? Ex-Apple ad man Ken Segall has raised convincing arguments saying that Apple is shooting itself in the foot with the “S” series naming convention, signalling to consumers that every other year, you get a half-baked iPhone instead of a fresh new one.

Now, some slim evidence is pointing towards the notion that Apple might be listening to their former advertising prodigy, and that the next iPhone might be called the iPhone 6.

If you want proof Apple is planning a ‘budget’ iPhone to address untapped markets, look no further than a new report which says that Apple’s suppliers are going on massive hiring sprees… and citing the imminent arrival of a new, cheaper iPhone as the cause.

It’s not uncommon to see early versions of upcoming iOS and Mac releases pop up in server logs — we’ve seen occasional blips from iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 for a while now in our own server logs — but what is less common is actually looking over an iOS 7 beta tester’s shoulder and checking out what they’re interested in.

Yet that’s just what mobile site conversion company OnSwipe was able to do, analysing iOS 7 beta tester’s reading habits to get a better grip on what people at Apple are interested in.