Apple Starts Decorating Moscone West with WWDC 2013 Banners

By MacStories Team

With WWDC 2013 kicking off in San Francisco on Monday, Apple has today started decorating Moscone West for its five-day event. Last year, with WWDC starting on June 11, Apple began Moscone preparations on June 5, showing off colorful banners with app icons and, in the process, confirming iOS 6’s official new icon ahead of the conference.

So far, banners put up by Apple at Moscone West are showing the same colorful graphics of the official WWDC 2013 logo that Apple unveiled in late April. While much has been said about whether the WWDC logo may hint at a visual refresh in the next versions of iOS and OS X, the shape used by Apple is simply reminiscent of iOS app icons – something that Apple has often used for WWDC banners.

This year, Apple is using the “Where a whole new world is developing” tagline for the initial set of banners.

We’re receiving the first photos from Moscone West, and we’re including them after the break. We will update this post with more photos as we receive them throughout the week. Read more

Sponsor: Creaceed

By MacStories Team

Our thanks to Creaceed for sponsoring MacStories this week with Prizmo.

Prizmo makes scanning easy, requiring nothing more than an iPhone, iPad, or your favorite digital camera. Prizmo works like magic — it takes a snapshot of your document and transforms it into a digital format which can be used and worked on just like any ordinary file. Text recognized in more than 40 languages is pulled right from the pages and transferred to Prizmo thanks to an amazing Optical Character Recognition engine that can read every word. And that text is immediately editable, so you can lay out your scanned documents, add, and delete as you see fit. Plus, you’re not even tethered to your phone. Prizmo has apps on all of your apple devices, so you can keep your documents in sync with iCloud, or via other storage apps like Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive. Who needs a big, bulky scanner when you have Prizmo?

Prizmo for iOS devices is only $9.99, with the Mac version starting at $49.99. You can learn more about the Prizmo suite of software here, and try a demo of the Mac version with your portable camera from the Mac page.

Sponsor: Smile

By MacStories Team

Our thanks goes out to Smile this week for sponsoring MacStories with TextExpander.

TextExpander saves you time regularly spent writing out the same addresses, signatures, and prose when composing emails, replying to business correspondance, and helping customers. Instead of copying and pasting common replies, TextExpander becomes your magical shorthand for quickly typing out paragraphs and signatures with just a few key presses. By setting up small, text reminders and snippets, you can quickly expand bits of text into long paragraphs, addresses, symbols, boiler plate text, code snippets, and more. Inserting dates, creating statements with customized form fields, and fixing common misspellings will make TextExpander an invaluable tool as a part of your daily workflow. Plus, you can sync TextExpander with Dropbox for keeping shortcuts shared between the office and your personal devices. TextExpander is also integrated into over 140 iOS apps, giving you the option to use your shortcuts anywhere with your iPhone or iPad.

TextExpander is available for only $34.95, and the complimentary version of TextExpander touch for iOS is only $4.99. You can learn more about TextExpander and a download a free trial for your Mac here.

Apple Q2 2013 Results: $43.6 Billion Revenue, 37.4 Million iPhones, 19.5 Million iPads Sold

By MacStories Team

Apple has published their Q2 2013 financial results for the quarter that ended on March 31st, 2013. The company posted revenue of $43.6 billion. The company sold 19.5 million iPads, 37.4 million iPhones, and “just under” 4 million Macs, earning a quarterly net profit of $9.5 billion.

We are pleased to report record March quarter revenue thanks to continued strong performance of iPhone and iPad,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services, and we are very excited about the products in our pipeline.

Apple added $12.5 billion in cash flow “from operations during the quarter”, ending the quarter with a cash balance of $145 billion.

Today, Apple has also announced they have doubled the capital return program:

The Company expects to utilize a total of $100 billion of cash under the expanded program by the end of calendar 2015. This represents a $55 billion increase to the program announced last year and translates to an average rate of $30 billion per year from the time of the first dividend payment in August 2012 through December 2015.

Sponsor: PDFpenPro 6

By MacStories Team

Our thanks to Smile for sponsoring MacStories this week with PDFpenPro 6.

PDFpenPro is the advanced version of PDFpen. PDFpenPro does everything that PDFpen does, such as add signatures, edit text and images, perform OCR on scanned documents and export Microsoft Word documents. It also has the ability to create a PDF form, build a table of contents, and convert HTML files to PDF.

The new PDFpenPro 6 adds document permission settings. When you share a PDF, you can restrict printing, copying, and editing of your PDFs. You can also use the new automatic form field creation tool to convert a non-interactive form into an interactive PDF form with text fields and checkboxes automatically added. PDFpenPro 6 is optimized for the Retina Display and now takes advantage of Versions and Auto Save available in Lion and Mountain Lion, which better saves your edits from accidental loss.

PDFpenPro 6 is available on the Smile Store and the Mac App Store for $100. A free demo can be downloaded on the Smile site. Find out why Macworld calls PDFpenPro “the crème de la crème of PDF editing and annotating applications.”

Sponsor: Smile

By MacStories Team

Our thanks to Smile for sponsoring MacStories this week with PDFpen 6.

PDFpen makes it easy to sign PDFs, make edits to text and images, and perform OCR on scanned documents. Fill out interactive forms, adjust resolution and contrast for better legibility, and mark up PDFs for proofreading and note-taking. Export documents to Evernote and share PDFs through iCloud or Dropbox to edit your files on the go with PDFpen on the iPhone and iPad.

PDFpen 6 is optimized for the Retina Display and now takes advantage of Versions and Auto Save available in Lion and Mountain Lion, which better saves your edits from accidental loss. Take advantage of the improved resolution with the easier to use editing bar. Lastly, export your PDFs to Word documents for convenient sharing with coworkers.

PDFpen 6 is now available on the Smile Store and the Mac App Store. For a limited time, PDFpen 6 is available for only $29.99, normally retailing for $59.95.

Learn more about PDFpen 6 here.

Justnotes 1.3 Syncs Twice as Fast →

Linked By MacStories Team

Justnotes 1.3 Syncs Twice as Fast

It’s been a little while since we’ve talked about Justnotes, but the developer has been progressively adding features and polishing the app in order to capture what makes Simplenote such a pleasure to use. Boiled down to just the essentials, Justnotes replicates Simplenote’s web experience in favor of a polished desktop app, providing more flexibility such as importing notes in OS X Mountain Lion or exporting simple text files.

Justnotes 1.3 is updated with Simplenote’s new syncing API, which is estimated to be over twice as fast as before. Shawn Blanc notes an additional useful feature that lets you hide the modification date thanks to a simple command that can be run in the Terminal.

You can download a trial of Justnotes to use for 15 days, but for a limited time, it’s available for $5.99 (normally $9.99) on the Mac App Store.

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Facebook Introduces Poke for Mobile →

Linked By MacStories Team

Facebook Introduces Poke for Mobile

On Friday, December 21st, Facebook announced Poke for Mobile, a brand new application that makes it easy to say hello to friends. Where Facebook’s Messenger interfaces with the web giant’s chat app, and Facebook Camera makes it easy to upload groups of photos, Poke for Mobile offers an alternative, quick way to see who’s online and send quick greetings with pokes, messages, pictures, or video. The virtual pokes, perhaps cutely, can be set to last from one second to ten seconds. The app also lets you share where you are when you send a poke and you can see when your friends take screenshots. Poke for Mobile can be downloaded for free from the App Store.

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The Brand New Apple Services, Stores, and iCloud System Status Page →

Linked By MacStories Team

The Brand New Apple Services, Stores, and iCloud System Status Page

On Thursday afternoon, Apple updated their System Status page for Apple Services, Stores, and iCloud. In an effort to be more transparent with customers, each of Apple’s main services has been broken down into categories that gives an overview of the products that are currently online or experiencing issues. Below the status board, a detailed timeline explains any issues experienced and when they have been resolved. In short, iOS users troubleshooting problems with Mail for example will no longer be left wondering if issues are on their end or Apple’s.

Via The Next Web

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