Initially Dots seems like something of an odd fit for Betaworks. The young media incubator is probably best known for its acquisition of Digg last summer, followed by its recent gain of a majority stake in popular read-it-later service Instapaper. The company simply doesn’t have a history in gaming, and as detailed on the Betaworks blog, Dots’ introduction was, in fact, something of a happy accident.

Betaworks’ resident hacker Patrick Moberg ended up creating the game following several interaction design experiments. It’s experiments like these that Betaworks hope will help the company in gaining valuable user engagement insight. Speaking to Mashable, Betaworks’ Paul Murphy explained that the release of Dots will help the company learn “how to keep people engaged,” adding that what it gains will be applied to Digg and other Betaworks products.

So, is the free game worth your time, or is it just a bare-bones experiment aimed to help Betaworks better its other products? Well, as it turns out, it can be both.

How it works

The straightforward, visually pleasing puzzler tasks you with clearing your game board of as many colored dots as possible within 60 seconds, all in the pursuit of gaining a leading high score.

To clear the dots you must match a minimum of two, dragging your finger in a straight line from one corresponding colored dot to another. Once a link is made the dots promptly disappear and the board refills, replacing them as quickly as you can remove them. A point is awarded for each dot you manage to clear.

Things get interesting when you manage to connect four or more identical dots in a square formation. Doing this will clear the board of all dots of that squares given color. After a few play-throughs, the importance of making squares becomes overly apparent, as they are key to ensuring that you set a respectable high-score that linear connections alone can’t assure.

Comparing your high score to those of your friends is done via Twitter or Facebook. You can chose to connect to just one service, or both, as a means to see your friends results. Support for Apple’s Game Center is sadly lacking, which is a shame as the ability to challenge friends to beat your tally would be a nice addition, especially considering the connections to Twitter and Facebook are underused — you can’t tap on a friend’s name to fire off a challenge via a tweet for example.

Gaining an even loftier score can be achieved by use of power-ups. Dots presents you with three choices to advance your game further, all of which add a certain degree of strategy into the mix. The first, Time Stops, pauses the one-minute countdown for five seconds, giving you extra time if you feel you’re having a particularly good run, and would like just a little longer to rack up some more points. The second power-up is known as a Shrinker, offering the ability to remove a single dot from the game board just by double-tapping it — these come in handy if one dot is standing in the way between you and completing an all-important square. Finally, the third power-up is known as an Expander — these do the same as a completed square, removing all dots of a chosen color.

To use these power-ups you need to purchase them with your gained dots. You soon amass a decent number from just regular play, as each high score is added to your dots total at the end of each game.

For the impatient, dots can also be bought with real cash — 5,000 will cost you 69 cents, 15,000 will set you back $1.49, whereas 50,000 are priced at $2.99. However, due to the ease of which dots can be attained from normal play, buying extra with real money is in no way essential, and instead just a nice way to add to the tip jar for an otherwise free game.

There are times during play when you’ll see a square for the taking made up of more than four dots, and yet despite how tempting it may be to take the time to join the additional points up, especially due to the delightful feedback you receive with each connection, it is a misuse of your ticking seconds. Whether you score a square of four dots or nine, the end result is fundamentally the same — all those colored dots are going to be added to the tally and disappear regardless, so chaining a larger square is purely wasted time. Initially this lack of reward for forming larger squares may seem like a frustrating omission, yet the truth lies in Dots’ clean and clear simplicity. One dot equals one point, and it always will.

Clearing dots is as simple as it sounds, at times captivating and calming, at others frantic and frustrating. The addition of a few select power-ups give this lightweight game just enough in terms of depth to make the high-score objective appealing and incessantly addictive.

Dots is a wholly satisfying pick-up-and-play game, perfect for those fleeting free moments.

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Before Thursday’s upgrade the desktop app — which started life as Tweetie – hadn’t seen an update since back in June 2011. In that time many users, myself included, came to accept that perhaps the standalone app was never to see any future improvements. This concern was further solidified when in September 2012 reports surfaced suggesting that the client had been killed off for good with no further development planned. But this latest small-scale update clarifies Twitter’s current position: that it intends to continue to update the popular app.

If a recent tweet by Twitter’s own Ben Sandofsky (as spotted by TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington) is anything to go by, we may be seeing improvements for Twitter for Mac more frequently. Sandofsky tweeted that he is taking a break from working on iOS apps to move over to the Mac client full time.

Whereas it’s good to finally see Twitter put more resources back in to their much overlooked Mac app, this latest update won’t blow you away by any means. Version 2.2 is but a minor improvement on what came before.

One curiosity is the lack of support for Mountain Lion’s Notification Center — the app’s preference pane still touts Growl as your de facto notification choice.

Here’s hoping that future updates come thick and fast, bearing more substance and native support for things such as Twitter’s own Vine, and Apple’s Notification Center, for example.

Oh, and Twitter, your old logo is still showing on the app’s Mac App Store listing.

New logo, meet old logo.

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This switch to digital will see the removal of the cards typically found near cash registers, instead swapping the lengthy codes for a paperless solution. Customers will now need to either connect to the complimentary in-store Wi-Fi, or fire up the Starbucks app and follow the on-screen prompts to download their latest freebie.

Starbucks and Apple first partnered back in 2007 when the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store launched. Initially offering just free music, the promotion soon expanded to offer content from outside iTunes. In 2011, free downloads from both the iBookstore and the App Store were introduced.

Speaking to CNET, Starbucks Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman explained that the action is a “reflection of Starbucks and Apple working together to strengthen the relationship for customers.” Brotman stated that the company’s apps are now used actively by more than 10 million users, adding that this latest move is just another step in their plan to “integrate more things” into their mobile offering.

To mark the move away from redemption codes the coffee chain is currently giving away for free Rovio’s Angry Birds Star Wars, usually priced at 99 cents.

The established Pick of the Week promotion has presented a great way to get paid apps into the hands of a broad range of customers, which is not only good for Apple as a way promote iOS apps, but also good for Starbucks who gets to give out a freebie with its cup of joe.

Now admittedly, Starbucks choosing to swap the tried-and-tested paper cards for direct downloads is a good move for those regular, more savvy users of the promotion (let alone the environment). Yet it could be argued that the removal of those physical, tangible cards may result in a drop in downloads. Customers could just forget to fire up the app and grab the freebie — the little cards served as a solid call-to-action to at least look at the latest promo item. Let’s hope Starbucks keep some form of in-store promo in place for the downloads, or they may just get forgotten about.

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I picked up my 32 GB white iPhone 4S from U.K. carrier Three, and there was a certain pleasure in being able to pre-order; I got to walk straight past a 40-person line of people queuing at a rival carrier. After picking up the device, I headed to the office to put it through its paces.

Out of the box, the 4S is, as promised by Apple, practically identical to the iPhone 4; you would be hard pressed to tell them apart just by looking at them. When compared to the iPhone 3GS, however, the difference is striking. The first thing any 3GS upgrader is going to notice, and appreciate, is the detailed Retina Display. Many other niceties in the overall design and feel of the handset follow, resulting in a more solid and substantial-feeling device.

Siri

After a quick restore from my old phone, the first thing I wanted to try, as I’m sure many others will want to, was Siri. Siri is the voice-powered assistant built right in to the 4S. As I’ve seen in all the various demo videos posted online, to activate Siri, you need to hold down the Home button for a few short seconds. Upon doing this, I was a little taken aback to see the old-style Voice Control that I was used to seeing on my 3GS. It turns out in order to get Siri working, you need to head into the Settings app to enable it first.

Once enabled, I began by asking the voice-assistant some basic questions. I quickly discovered that I needed to put a little emphasis into my pronunciation in order for Siri to understand my British accent. A few questions in, and although overall I was impressed, I was a little disappointed to find out that in the U.K. Siri does not support mapping related questions, or those concerning local businesses. In practice, this means no Maps or Yelp fun for U.K. 4S owners.

Of course Siri is still a beta, so here’s hoping that these extras will be rolled out eventually. Fully featured or not, Siri is an impressive piece of technology, and it will be interesting to see how it develops going forward. For visually impaired users, I can imagine Siri is a huge game-changer.

Camera

The Camera application has seen huge improvements. Apple said at its ‘Let’s Talk iPhone’ event that the camera will now launch and be ready to shoot pictures within 2.5 seconds, and this seems about right in testing. What’s even more impressive, however, is how speedy the device is when taking multiple shots. I repeatedly pressed the Volume Up/shutter button (a feature new in iOS 5) to take a series of snaps in quick succession — the 4S kept up, giving what can only be described as a blazingly fast experience when compared to the 3GS. Not only that, but picture quality is also greatly improved:

The images above highlight the differences in picture quality between the 3GS and the 4S. What’s most obvious are the differences in lighting and color accuracy. The 4S is packing one nice camera, that could easily do away with the need for a regular point-and-shoot.

Safari

Beyond the camera application, Safari also appears to have gained speed improvements, loading pages faster than before. The differences here aren’t huge, but noticeable enough to be appreciated. On paper, you can see that iOS 5 boosts Safari’s performance across most iOS devices, but no doubt the advantage of the iPhone 4S’s beefed up processor gives it a little more oomph than most.

Gaming

I’m a big iOS gamer, and I’d be afraid to actually tabulate how much time I’ve spent on games for my iPhone. It represents the perfect pick-up-and-play style gaming that made me fall in love with Tetris on the original Game Boy nearly twenty years ago. After testing a small selection of the more graphically intense games I own, I can happily report that the 4S doesn’t show any noticeable signs of lag. This is a big plus.

A big step up

As a former iPhone 3GS user, the upgrade to the 4S is a fairly significant one in regards to specifications, and I’m positive that the jump from a 3GS to 4S is bound to excite people more than a switch from last year’s model would.

My initial impression is a good one; the 4S is a solid handset offering the iOS experience we have come to know and rely on, and it makes it all the more pleasurable to use. It’s snappy, has just the right amount of new hardware features, and the introduction of Siri points towards an interesting future.

Who should pass

Personally, I don’t feel that the 4S really offers enough to tempt existing iPhone 4 owners. The look is the same, and they run the same operating system. If the introduction of an improved camera and Siri are enough, then by all means, this phone isn’t hard to recommend. It’s just that when the next iPhone hits, and you’re stuck in a contract for what is admittedly only an incremental update, you may regret it.

As for iPhone 3GS owners, I can wholly recommend the 4S. Sure, this year’s model is the evolution of the revolution, but we all need to play catch up at some point.

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The Newsstand ‘application’ isn’t really an application at all; it’s essentially just a stylized folder which stores the latest updates to your favorite news sources. Since it is a folder, anyone that’s used folder management in iOS will know that you can’t nest a folder within a folder, but someone over at The Coding Massacre has found a way to do just that.

To put Newsstand into a folder you need to be quick. The work-around requires a new folder to be made, so take any two apps and place one upon the other to create one.

While the new folder is being made, this is your chance to get Newsstand out of sight. As the new folder is being created you will need to quickly drag the Newsstand icon into the folder. If you are quick enough Newsstand, will go into the folder, and the job will be done. This simple straightforward tip will work with any other folder, too so you can now place any folder into another — handy!

It’s worth noting, however, that with Newsstand (or any other folder) placed within the newly created folder it will no longer work. Open Newsstand in another folder, and your iPhone will restart.

To get Newsstand (or other folders) working again, you will need to drag the wooden folder out back on to a top-level screen.

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German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom, the firm behind the T-Mobile brand, confirmed that customers will be able to reserve Apple’s next iPhone as of Monday, according to a Bloomberg report.

Deutsche Telekom spokesman Alexander von Schmettow told Bloomberg that the company is allowing their customers to preorder the phone now because of the anticipated demand for the future device. The plan is designed to avoid a “supply bottleneck”‘ when the next iPhone does finally arrive, whenever that may be.

Customers who choose to reserve the unannounced smartphone will be given a coupon from the communications operator. However, the preorder coupon that Deutsche Telekom users receive will of course include no product details, device name or release date information.

The German firm is not the only retailer to prepare for the presumed fast-approaching launch of the next iPhone. A recent BGR report says that U.S. Best Buy stores are also currently making arrangements for the arrival of the rumored “iPhone 5.”

No matter what moves retailers are making, it seems clear that they’re acting on speculation and not on facts. As MacRumors points out, Apple is known for keeping partners out of the loop in regard to releasing plans right up until an official announcement is made.

In other words, it’s only official when it’s official, but everyone, including Apple’s carrier partners, are getting impatient for a release.

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To get the new app, you’ll first need to ensure that your Mac is updated to OS X 10.6.6. Once you are all up to speed, with the new Mac App Store installed, you can go ahead and download the updated application for free. You can’t just update your existing version of Tweetie.

When first launching the new Twitter for Mac application, it’s clear that this is no major UI overhaul. Using small but significant visual tweaks, Loren Brichter and the Twitter team have stayed true to what made the first Tweetie such a success: a simple and clean interface, lacking unnecessary distraction.

The most obvious change is the modified sidebar, which now sports a sleek translucent black look, along with two new icons — offering access to your lists and profile information respectively.

In Twitter for Mac, what was once a “New Tweet” button in Tweetie now offers up a menu of commonly used actions. These actions include tweeting, sending a direct message, navigating to a specific user, marking all tweets as read or accessing the application’s preferences. For advanced Twitter users, this is a welcome change, but having to click twice to compose a tweet may annoy some. Either way, customizable keyboard shortcuts are still here to please everyone.

Twitter for Mac now supports native retweets — just hover over a tweet in your timeline to see the retweet button. However, for those that like to add a short message of their own to a retweet, the option to repost or “quote” a tweet instead is still thankfully present (accessible by right-clicking on any tweet in your timeline).

Trending topics have also been introduced — click on the search icon and a list of what is trending worldwide will appear.

One of the most commonly requested features has finally been introduced, as users can now delete tweets within the application. To delete a tweet, just select the one you want removed and either right-click and select the appropriate option, or press command followed by the delete button.

Conversation management has also changed. In Tweetie, you could double-click on a message to see an entire conversation. No matter how deep into the conversation you delved, Tweetie always displayed a breadcrumb navigation history of your actions at the top of the application. Sadly, this handy navigation element has been removed in Twitter for Mac, replaced instead with just a single back button.

On the plus side, for those with newer touchpads on their Macs, gestures have been introduced — select a tweet, and three-finger swipe to the right to see the full discussion. If there’s no further conversation to display, a three-finger swipe will bring you to a user column for the person whose tweet you have highlighted. If there’s a link in the tweet, the swipe will open it in your default browser.

Remember in Tweetie when you wanted to send a tweet with a long URL? You had to click that ‘Shorten URL’ button. In Twitter for Mac you can just paste in any URL, no matter how long, and Twitter will do the hard work for you. The displayed character count for your tweet will already account for the URL being shortened. There doesn’t appear to be a way to turn auto-shortening off, which might be an issue for some.

Despite a few questionable changes, including the removal of the option to see if a user is following you or not, the features introduced to Twitter for Mac make for a huge overall improvement, which is made all the more enjoyable thanks to the applications newfound speed. Twitter for Mac is fast, three times faster according to Twitter. Switching from one account to the other, from your timeline, to your replies, is all super fast and  fluid, and your feed updates in real- or near real-time.

Highs: Fast; clean, attractive and intuitive UI; free

Lows: Lacks some features power-users might miss

If you’ve just downloaded the Mac App Store, make this your first download. Even if you don’t use Twitter, this new client is a pretty good reason to sign up.

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As expected, the masses began speculating as to what this exciting announcement from the House Of Jobs would be. Of course many predicted what we now know as true, but many others hoped for something else, believing that such news didn’t warrant such a bold ‘unforgettable’ statement.

Either way, excited or not, Apple’s battle with The Beatles has been a long one. Ever since the iTunes store appeared back in 2003, folks have been asking for digital versions of the Fab Four’s music. But the story of Apple and The Beatles starts a long time before the days of iPods and iTunes.

A Tale of Two Apples

During the late sixties The Beatles formed the company Apple Corps. Their new company was a conglomerate consisting of several divisions, including Apple Records — the company even had its very own Apple Store.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer in 1976. Just two years later, in 1978, The Beatles’ Apple Corps warned the then Apple Computer (now Apple Inc) to get back, by suing the younger company for trademark infringement.

Rumor has it that the late George Harrison spotted an advertisement for an Apple Computer in a magazine, prompting The Beatles to take action. With both companies bearing a similar name and logo, the battle resulted in a court case over trademark violation, which was settled in 1981. Apple Computer agreed that it would never enter the music industry, paying Apple Corps $80,000. The Beatles agreed only to use their brand within the entertainment industry.

Apple Computer Gets More Musical

However, despite both parties settling, the fight between the two companies was far from over. During the 1980s Apple’s computers, such as the Mac Plus and the Mac II, began incorporating musical features. The computers were capable of both creating and playing music (MIDI files) — something The Beatles saw as an infringement on the original settlement.

A second round of court action again concluded with a settlement, reached in October of 1991. The altered agreement allowed Apple Computer to sell and market “computers, microprocessors and microprocessor controlled devices, telecommunications equipment, data processing equipment, ancillary and peripheral equipment, and computer software of any kind on any medium”. However, this arrangement, which cost Apple Computer $26.5 million, still gave Apple Corps the right to sue if Apple Computer started selling “creative works whose principal content is music.”

Apple Computer Becomes a Music Seller

Of course, this wasn’t the end. At the turn of the century Apple Computer began development on an MP3 player, along with a store to accompany it. These developments resulted in the release of the iPod and the iTunes Store, arriving in 2001 and 2002 respectively. Apple Corps deemed the iTunes Music Store as a direct violation of the 1991 arrangement. From 2003 to 2007 Apple Computer battled it out with Apple Corps. Various settlements fell through, including one in which Apple Computer offered The Beatles’ Apple Corps just $1 million to exercise the Apple name within the music industry.

Eventually judgement came down in favor Apple Computer, defending the company’s sale of music. The ruling concluded that Apple’s sale of music was fine, because although the iTunes Store was branded, the music that the store sold was not. This was despite Apple Corps’ best efforts to demonstrate just how many times Apple Computer’s similar logo appeared during a typical download session. Apple Corps manager Neil Aspinall disagreed with the court’s decision — “with great respect to the trial judge, we consider he has reached the wrong conclusion.”

With the case settled, Steve Jobs extended the olive branch, inviting the The Beatles’ record label to sell their music on the ever-growing store. Jobs said, “We have always loved The Beatles, and hopefully we can now work together to get them on the iTunes Music Store”. From that point, the speculation as to when the boys from Liverpool would arrive on the digital store has been ever-present.

After iPod conferences, years, rumors, hints, songs from The Beatles are finally available for purchase in the iTunes store, and I for one am glad it’s happened, and the speculation can finally end.

Will you buying any Beatles music on iTunes? Let us know in the comments.

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According to the report from Mexican technology site CamelMX, the Telcel executive claimed that the iPhone 4′s antenna design may see manufacturing revisions — revisions which would aim to fix the widely reported signal attenuation issue.

The report also suggested that the updated handset, which is claimed to be free of antenna problems and the need for a case, may be made available once Apple’s current solution, the iPhone 4 Case Program, had come to a close at the end of September.

Whether or not a carrier partner such as Telcel would be privy to information of this sort ahead of time is unknown. Considering that Apple is notorious for its secretive nature, and that claims such as these have been wrong in the past, it’s easy to cast doubt over the legitimacy of Quatorze’s claims and chalk them up as mere speculation.

However, it’s worth remembering that when Apple first announced the iPhone 4 Case Program in July, it also commented that the engineers at Cupertino would be continuing to look at the antenna issue, reassessing the effectiveness of the current situation.

Whether Quatorze’s claims are fact or just purely speculation, it’s not the first time that hardware changes have been suggested.

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The 250,000 milestone, a figure which Apple will no doubt mention at its upcoming September 1 media-event, was recorded by 148Apps, who released the newly collected data this weekend. Its numbers detailed that over 50,000 developers are now actively working on the iOS platform, with them submitting an average of 626 applications per day. Further insight revealed that the average price of a paid application is now $2.67.

148Apps new data noted that Apple’s App Store now plays host to exactly 252,227 iPad and iPhone applications. This sizable figure paints a vibrant picture of the success of Apple’s application store, which dwarfs the competition by a large margin. The second largest application store is Google’s Android Market, which is estimated to have around 100,000 applications available. Other application stores, including BlackBerry’s and Nokia’s, have a significantly smaller number of apps available for their platforms.

With new applications being added to the store every day, it’s becoming more and more difficult to find and discover new content. Of course, users can use the Genius tool to find recommendations, ask friends, or check out Apple’s own new and notable suggestions. Beyond that, application discovery is becoming a more tedious task as every day goes by. With the App Store racing towards its next milestone of 300,000 available apps, what changes would you like to see to the way in which you can find new downloads?

Let us know your thoughts on the App Store and what your favorite apps are in the comments!

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