Later today, Apple will hold its quarterly earnings conference call. The call will cover Apple's Q3, which ended on June 30, 2013. As always, TUAW is hosting a liveblog of the event, during which we'll provide commentary on the actual results, questions from the financial community, and thoughts on how the results are likely to affect Apple's share price, if at all. To get an overview of what the Street is expecting, check out the numbers here.

The call is scheduled at 5 PM ET today and our liveblog will begin at 4:50 PM ET. If you're an IRC user, we'll have a chat room set up on server irc.freenode.net, chat room #tuaw so you can converse with the TUAW team and others. You can also listen to a live audio stream of the event...

The word “scrapbooking” may conjure visions of arts-and-crafts sessions for children with paper, scissors, and glue. But if you’ve ever done research for a project that required you to save data like images, videos, and webpages from different sources, you’re already familiar with the adult version of this activity.

To that end, Realmac Software on Tuesday released Ember (Mac App Store link), a $50 app aimed squarely at professional users who need to build a library with all sorts of digital information.

Quite the lineage

Ember is the successor to LittleSnapper, which has been around for many years and developed quite a following; true to its past, the app continues to allow you to take screenshots and annotate them with...

What's not to like about an app that can grab a web page and let you save, organize and mark it up, then share it in more than a half dozen ways? Ember is a powerful but simple application for saving and sharing web pages, images or just about anything you can see online. There's a lot to love in this focused app from Realmac Software.

Once upon a time Realmac made an application called LittleSnapper, designed to grab web pages and the like and store them in a digital scrapbook of sorts. The app had some problems, and I never really quit using Skitch for marking up images and pages. Enter Ember, the successor to LittleSnapper, and a digital scrapbooking app that pretty much nails it in every way.

Ember isn't iPhoto or Aperture, however. Think of Ember as a place to store photos, bits of the web or perhaps any visual projects you're working on, and realize Ember gives you several simple ways to annotate those images...

F-Secure

Researchers have uncovered a family of malware that targets computers running both the Microsoft Windows and OS X platforms. Janicab.A, as the trojan is known, is also unusual because it uses a YouTube page to direct infected machines to command-and-control (C&C) servers and follows a clever trick to conceal itself.

The threat first came to light last week, when researchers from F-Secure and Webroot documented a new trojan threatening Mac users. Like other recently discovered OS X malware, Janicab was digitally signed with a valid Apple Developer ID. It also used a special unicode character known as a ...

Opera Mediaworks, the “world’s leading mobile advertising platform”, is out today with its report covering the state of mobile advertising for Q2 2013. Using data from the over 35 billion mobile ad impressions its platform handles each month, Opera Mediaworks gives some insight into Apple’s dominance with iOS and its huge lead over Android when it comes to revenue & impressions from tablets. Apple continued to lead as the top platform in terms of monetization, with 44% of all ad impressions and close to half of total revenue (49.36%). Its lead over Android is largely due to the success of the iPad, however, as removing tablets from the equation puts Android smartphones and the iPhone neck and neck:

However, when comparing mobile phones using iOS and Android the two OS are in a virtual tie for share of ad impressions, with just over 30% each. Late last year, Android inched ahead of iPhone with a...

Smartphone thefts have been on the rise over the last several years, particularly in big cities such as New York, London, and San Francisco. Last week San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced that they were going to test new anti-theft smart phone measures unveiled by Apple at WWDC.

Called "Activation Lock," the feature will allow devices running iOS 7 will prevent thieves from turning off the Find My iPhone feature or wiping the device clear without first entering the user's iCloud password.

The San Francisco Examiner has followed up on the District Attorneys' testing and reports that District Attorney George Gascón has said that...

As a result of the latter's production problems, Apple won't be taking on AU Optronics as an LCD supplier for the second-generation iPad mini, says ETNews. LCDs for the first-gen Mini are provided by AUO, Sharp, and LG Display. Apple has reportedly forged a deal with LG for the next Mini, and is thought likely to take on Sharp again, since it can provide low-power oxide semiconductor panels....  ...

Earlier this month, Best Buy offered iPad owners US$200 towards the purchase of a new iPad with Retina display if owners traded in their old iPad 2's or third-generation iPads. That program will resume today and run until August 3, according to 9to5Mac.

To be eligible, owners of iPad 2s or third-generation iPads must have the device and it must be free of water damage or cracked screens. Owners will get a minimum of a $200 Best Buy gift card for their old device to put towards the purchase of a fourth generation iPad.

Best Buy will officially announce the program today on BestBuy.com, via emails sent to customers, and via social media.

Best Buy again offering $200+ for iPad trade-ins originally appeared on...

Very nice looking Les Paul. I still want one of the Slash Appetite Les Pauls.

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Ben Balser shows you three ways that Apple’s two professional apps work together.

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A bargain’s a bargain.

Per 9to5Mac, retailer Best Buy will re-launch its iPad trade-in program tomorrow, July 23rd. The program, which offers a $200+ gift card toward the purchase of a fourth-generation iPad with Retina display, will run until August 3rd.

Best Buy piloted an iPad trade-in-program earlier this month for two days due to the success of the iPhone version.

For this new trade-in-program, iPad 2 and third-generation iPad...

A new report from Chitika on Tuesday shows that Apple’s iPad is still growing its Web share usage. The iPad is now at 84.3%, its highest mark since the beginning of 2013.

Apple has reportedly dropped AU Optronics and will add Samsung Display as a supplier for its second-generation iPad mini LCD displays. Sharp and LG Display will also be suppliers for the next iPad mini’s display, which will apparently be an oxide semiconductor LCD to save power. A prior report…

The New York Post claims that Ashton Kutcher, who plays Steve Jobs in the biopic Jobs, is close to signing a $10M deal to appear in a series of ads for … Windows PC maker Lenovo.

Jobs, which will apparently be promoted by a rather psychedelic poster, is due to open on August 16th.

For more news on AAPL Company,...

These guys already got funded, but there’s still a couple of days to get in on it.

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RIH-co-lah! Maybe it’s just us, but that’s the first reaction we had upon seeing the $190 Volta Sound Block, a “passive amplifier” for your iPhone. Just dock the phone in a block of Northwest Alder, and it pipes your mobile’s music through a bison horn (!!!) to produce much louder volume levels. Each Sound Block is custom crafted, which means no two will look exactly alike.

Podcast subscriptions have topped the 1 billion mark at the iTunes Store, and to celebrate the milestone Apple highlighting popular shows dating back to 2005 when the podcasting section was first added to iTunes.

The Mac Observer Spin:
iTunes isn't the only place where people can subscribe to podcasts, so the total number of podcast subscriptions must be well over a billion. Podcasting is changing how and where we get our news and entertainment. We're still at the beginning of this information revolution.

There’s image editing and then there’s fine art—and Corel has always positioned Painter, its flagship professional painting program, on the creative end of the spectrum. With the release of Painter X3 (the 13th version of the famed natural-media software) for Mac and Windows, Corel seeks to augment Painter’s position as a leading inspirational tool for creatives working in photographic and traditional art, illustration, Manga and comic art, conceptual art, and design. Even though it emerged roughly around the same time as its image-editing contemporary, Adobe Photoshop,...

Apple has seeded OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 4 to developers. The latest build offers the usual bug fixes, but there's a couple of new small goodies tucked away inside as well. As 9to5Mac notes, so far four changes have been spotted. These include a new installation screen for OS X 10.9 Mavericks, a new Time Machine icon while performing backups, the ability to scroll through pages and windows in Mission Control, and finally, the ability to quickly post something to LinkedIn via notification Center.

OS X 10.9 Mavericks will ship this fall.

Apple releases OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 4 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 23 Jul 2013 08:00:00 EST. Please see our...

Apple's 2013 third fiscal quarter earnings report is scheduled to start at about 5PM eastern time, or 2pm pacific time, after the market closes. The Mac Observer will be here with our usual coverage and analysis for the conference call.

With Apple’s Q3 earnings call starting at 2pm PT/5pm ET today (which we’ll be covering live, of course), Fortune has posted the results of its usual quarterly survey of analyst predictions.

The executive summary is that the analysts are pessimistic, though in line with Apple’s guidance.

Earnings [per share] estimates are down across the board — anywhere from -7% year over year  (according to independent Patrick Smellie from the Braeburn Group) to -29% (Susquehanna’s Chris Caso) … 

There is consensus that year-on-year revenues will be...

An interesting patent awarded to Apple on Tuesday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office describes a method in which a first iPhone user can share stored content, like pictures or location data, with a second iPhone user that is put on hold during a call.  ...

It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world.

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Daily Update for July 22, 2013 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 22 Jul 2013 22:45:00 EST. Please see our...

There's no shortage of text editors available for the iPad, and if you're someone who uses your tablet for word processing on a regular basis you've probably been through at least a few of them. Write is one such app, and while its straightforward design masks a lot of its bells and whistles, it proves to be one of the most capable productivity apps available.

Write features full Markdown support, allowing you to compose a document using syntax and then preview the final result in real-time even as you're still editing. You can activate the standard text editor features you'd expect - like bolding, italics, etc - as well as more advanced features like in-document tables via a slim toolbar just above the keyboard. This makes composing a document a smoother overall experience than when using most other word processor apps, simply because...

Apple may have made changes to its in-app purchasing protocols to safeguard against unwanted charges by minors, but the Cupertino company still shelled out more than $6,000 in order to cover the unauthorized purchases one British eight-year-old posted to her father's account.  ...

Those who know me understand that I love traveling. I spent the last four days in Phoenixville, Pa. with my sister, her husband and my two kids. It was purely for fun and an excellent time to test Ohai (US$4.99), a travel journal app for iPhone.

Ohai lets your record places you visit, complete with geographic location, a photo and your own notes. The app resembles a journal with one day per "page." It's fun to re-live your excursions, flipping through the pages to see where you've been. Ohai does have some big limitations, however, which I'll discuss below. First, the good.

On the road with Ohai

We hit the road on Thursday to begin our seven-hour drive (I-95 in Connecticut is endless monotony). While grabbing a snack and using the necessary room at Dunkin Donuts, I decided to make my first entry into Ohai (below)....

Another great story on how the iPhone and Apple developers are helping those with accessibility needs.

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Holy shit, that’s just incredible. Thanks to everyone that subscribes to Amplified with me and Dan Benjamin—we appreciate it.

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Three days after Apple took down its developer website claiming it was performing unscheduled maintenance, the company emailed devs admitting the site had been hacked and some data may have been stolen. It also posted a message on the site stating that some developers' names, mailing addresses and email addresses may have been exposed, but that sensitive personal information was encrypted and could not be accessed. Apple made the announcement in the spirit of transparency, it said, an issue that has been getting a lot of attention lately.

Apple on Monday announced the iTunes Store now has more than one billion podcast subscriptions, and is celebrating the milestone by highlighting some of the most popular content since the medium hit the digital storefront in 2005.   ...

On its Podcasts page in the iTunes Store, Apple has announced that there have been one billion iTunes podcasts subscriptions since since the company launched its Podcasts section in 2005 as an alternative to radio shows. Podcasts allows anyone from individuals to companies to create their own shows and offer them for download/streaming to Apple’s iTunes customers. Apple has also made the announcement via Twitter:

In celebration of the significant milestone, Apple has created a special section in iTunes that lists some of the most popular...

Internet radio app, Rhapsody, received an update for iPhone and iPad Friday with the release of version 3.5. A free app requiring a monthly subscription of $15 per month, Rhapsody gives users access to over sixteen million songs, with new releases every Tuesday. Version 3.5 offers an offline playback mode, meaning users can listen to their downloaded library contents without the need for a network connection. An editorial feature is now included, where posts and playlists are created and updated daily by Rhapsody's editorial team. In addition, social network 'sharing' had been added for Facebo... ...

San Francisco's District Attorney George Gasc?n described the smartphone theft deterrent systems demonstrated by Apple and Samsung as "clear improvements" in the City's efforts to thwart crime.  ...

Congress (free) for iPhone is a handy way to keep track of what is going on in Washington in the Senate and the House. The free app comes from the Sunlight Foundation and is non-partisan.

When you first run it you will get news from both the Senate and House, but then you can drill down by state and to a particular member of Congress. You can find new proposed legislation, or track the status of any bill. You can see the latest votes from your legislator, and what bills they are sponsoring.

I gave the app a try and found it easy to use. I liked the idea of getting a map to my congressman's office, but it is only the DC office, not the local offices. Same for phone numbers. I consider these omissions surprising in an otherwise complete app. Also, when getting a map or digging deeper into a bill I'm thrown out of the app to...

Looking out a window is an easy way to see what the weather is like, but that doesn't tell you what to expect three hours from now, or in different cities. Weather apps fill in the missing pieces, like how to plan for tomorrow's weather, what to expect from precipitation and humidity, and what the day's UV index means for your skin. Unlike the iPhone, the iPad doesn't include a bundled weather app, so we put together a list of our favorites for you.

Apple's next-generation iPhone is believed to be facing production difficulties, much like the iPhone 5 in 2012, one analyst believes, while the rumored "iPhone Lite," revamped "iPad 5," and Haswell Retina MacBook Pros and iMacs could see release in the interim.  ...

Development for HopStop for Windows Phone has been canceled in the wake of the company's reported purchase by Apple. AllThingsD reported that the app, which was available as recently as last week, is showing up as "no longer being published" on Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace, as shown in the image below. For those who already downloaded it on Windows Phone, launching it gets an alert that the Windows platform is no longer supported. This usually happens with existing apps and services when Apple purchases a company. HopStop is a mapping service offering pedestrian routes in major metropolitan markets.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit gave notice on Monday that it will hear a cross-appeal of Judge Richard Posner's 2012 decision to dismiss an Apple v. Motorola FRAND patent case, with appeal proceedings scheduled for September.  ...

The Borderlands series has built a rabid fan base by providing a massive open world full of treasures to loot and enemies to fights. Even without add-on content it's a massive game to explore, but developer 2K has piled on with four large packs of downloadable content to expand the world. Borderlands 2 is already an absurdly big game. But it can get bigger.

2K Games has announced a new batch of downloadable content for the game will be released in the fall. Along with the expected new levels and boss fights gamers can also look forward to an increased level cap, from 61 to 72. While the DLC's themes haven't been announced yet the bar was raised considerably with the last release, Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep, which placed players in a Dungeons and Dragons themed fantasy world. With assault rifles.

Sadly this new downloadable content isn't available under the Season Pass that 2K...

It has been a slower summer than usual for Mac sales.

According to the latest market data from NPD Group, Apple’s domestic Mac sales declined 5 percent year over year in the June quarter and 12 percent year over year for the month of June alone. This, despite the recent introduction of new MacBook Airs based on Intel’s Haswell processors.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster attributes the decline to shifting consumer interest and iPad cannibalization. “Macs are becoming a less and less meaningful piece of the Apple story,” he said.

And there’s certainly some truth to that. But there are likely a few other reasons as well. For one thing, the overall PC market is down and has been for some time. For another, consumers in the market for the other Macs in Apple’s portfolio — MacBook Pro, iMac, etc., are likely holding off on making purchases until those machines are also upgraded to...

Samsung announced its own developer conference for the end of October. The company said it will hold the event at the Westin St. Francis Union Square in San Francisco, though it's not yet clear what the conference will focus on. My question is, why?

US Mac sales fell approximately 5 percent year-over-year during Apple's most recent quarter, which ended in June, according to new NPD data. Single-month sales for June dipped 12 percent, in spite of the launch of an upgraded MacBook Air. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster comments that he expects Apple to announce a global 5 percent decline for Macs when it reveals its Q3 results tomorrow....  ...

It's that time again: Apple is set to reveal its financials for Q3 2013 on July 23 at 5:00pm Eastern (2:00pm Pacific). As always, we'll be here to liveblog the conference call.

This quarter brought a wealth of Apple product announcements, many of them highly anticipated—iOS 7 and the completely redesigned Mac Pro are standouts. And while OS X 10.9 doesn't look like as big of an overhaul, it does introduce quite a few new features. You can't sell announcements, though, and the actual new products made available during this quarter—the new MacBook Air, a low-end iPod touch, and 802.11ac AirPort Extremes and Time Capsules—aren't...

AT&T has announced the addition of two new lower-priced Mobile Share plans. The new 300MB tier is $20 a month — considering the extremely low data amount, AT&T may be looking to make a dent in the prepaid smartphone market. This tier may also appeal to first-time iPhone owners…

Two weeks after seeding OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 3 to developers, Apple has made Preview 4 available via Software Update on the Mac App Store. If you find anything new, you can let us know at tips@9to5mac.com. We’ll update this post with a running list of changes. Changes below:

- New installation screen:

- LinkedIn quick posting to Connections via Notification Center:

...

In July of 2012, shares of Apple were trading in the low US $600 range and were about to embark on a rather sudden ascent to $700. The party, however, didn't last long as Apple shares quickly began a steady decline, hitting a 52-week low of $390 this past April.

In an effort to explain why Apple stock was falling so precipitously, we were treated to a host of analysts and talking heads who were quick to proclaim that Apple had peaked and that it had, seemingly overnight, lost the ability to innovate.

An oft-heard refrain was that everyone who wants an iPhone already has one and that Apple would face many challenges trying to sell more iPhones in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

But then a funny thing happened. Last week, Verizon reported its earnings results from Q2 2013 and the results were better than what most analysts were expecting. Last quarter, Verizon activated 7.5 million smartphones, of which...

It’s been three months since we’ve taken Apple’s financial pulse, which can only mean that it’s time for a check-up. The company is set to announce its latest quarterly earnings on Tuesday, July 23, with a conference call to follow at 2 p.m. PT/5 p.m. ET. Macworld will once again be providing live coverage of that analyst briefing and its attendant Sisyphean question-and-answer session.

In terms of actual, shipping products, the landscape in Apple’s fiscal third quarter is not much changed from the last go-round. While Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference has come and gone, most of what the company showed off there has yet to hit the market. So unless analysts plan to bombard Apple with questions about the latest revamp to the MacBook Air—“How...

The latest data from the NPD Group shows domestic Mac sales down 5 percent year over year in the June quarter, as iPad cannibalization of Apple's Mac platform continues.   ...

Aereo, a live TV streaming/DVR service has today announced that it will be expanding into Utah on August 19. With memberships beginning at $8 per month, Aereo allows customers to access 30 major broadcast channels on any internet-connected device as well as record up to 20 hours of DVR content in a cloud account. A pre-registration page has been setup online, and will provide priority access to anyone who signs up before the August 19 launch. In addition, Aereo has also announced that after the Utah expansion it will begin to prepare for a September 13 launch in Chicago.... ...