Mike Beasley

It looks like Apple is putting the final touches on the redesigned App Store for iOS 6 ahead of the next-generation operating system’s public launch later this week. As of this evening, a new page greets first-time users to promote Apple’s own apps, providing an easy way for new users to quickly “get the most out of” their iOS device.

The promoted apps include only Apple’s free offerings, with no sign of paid apps such as the iLife or iWork suites. A “Download Free” button provides a one-tap installation of iBooks, iTunes U, Podcasts, Find My Friends, and Find My iPhone.

iOS 6 will be publicly available on Wednesday, September 19th as a free update for the iPhone 3GS and newer, the iPad 2, iPad 3, and the fourth-generation iPod touch, and will ship on the iPhone 5 this Friday as well as the upcoming fifth-generation iPod touch in October.

Adobe just announced on its blog that Photoshop CS6 would recieve a Retina update this fall:

A few days ago, 9to5Mac reported on Hiss, a system for pushing Growl messages to the Mountain Lion Notification Center. Near the end of that report, we noted Growl was also working on a similar update, and we are happy to bring a first look at that update today.

Read on to see what’s new

In recent months, the iPhone has been released on a few U.S. prepaid carriers, allowing consumers to purchase the device without a contract on a much cheaper plan than what a post-paid carrier would offer on a contract.

Unfortunately, the device selection is limited to only the 8 GB iPhone 4 or the 16 GB iPhone 4S (available in black or white) on both Cricket and Virgin Mobile. The unlimited plans are only $55 depending on either carrier. The data runs over Sprint’s 3G network, however, which is one of the slowest 3G networks available. This really limits the iPhone’s potential and ruins the experience of using such an advanced device. I am sure many people believe the old “you get what you pay for” saying is true—an iPhone on a prepaid carrier will never be as good as an iPhone on a contract carrier.

However, those people could be wrong.

Keep reading to find out how one pre-paid carrier stands above the rest.

Instagram announced earlier today that the popular Facebook-owned photo sharing service reached a whopping 80 million users who shared more than 4 billion photos total. These are impressive statistics, but it seems those 80 million users will have a more difficult time finding their Twitter friends’ Instagram profiles. Today’s Instagram update removed the option to lookup and follow friends from your Twitter profile. While this may seem like an oversight or bug on Instagram’s part, that is not the case.

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Growl is a notification app for OS X that predates the idea of Notification Center on OS X or iOS. I have used it for years, and it is supported by a vast majority of Mac apps, including high-profile ones like the official Twitter client. When OS X 10.8 was announced, many people assumed Growl was dead. Growl uses its own banners and a “Rollup” window (a place to collect missed notifications), so it seemed the overlap was too large and there would only be room for one notification system on OS X.

However, a new app called Hiss seeks to unify the two systems by putting your Growl notifications right into your Mountain Lion Notification Center. I played around with it today, and it seems to work pretty well. It grabs any incoming Growl messages and stops them, and then it replaces them with native OS X notification banners that stack up in Notification Center just as you would expect.

Hit the break for my full review

Apple included a button in the Music and Videos applications in iOS 5 that took the user directly to the respective section of the iTunes Store app. Now, in iOS 6, Apple includes a new feature to the redesigned Music app that will make purchasing even faster and easier than before. The new button, which appears at the bottom of albums, is a Complete My Album toggle. Rather than pull the user out of the Music app and into the iTunes Store, the list expands to show the entire album and allows for purchasing the songs directly in the new Music app.

The Videos app is given the same treatment with a Complete My Season feature for buying TV episodes. Screenshots of these features are in the gallery below.

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Apple just published the Gold Master seed of OS X Mountain Lion, which will go on sale to the public later this month. It is available now in the OS X Dev Center on Apple’s Developer website. The Mountain Lion GM build number is 12A269. The previous build was 12A526.

The 10.8 Golden Master comes out to a 4.34 GB Mac App Store download.

We are hearing from people who have installed the GM that it is smoother. Specifically, Dictation’s performance is said to also be improved.

The GM build is almost always the same exact build that is released to the general public, meaning Mountain Lion is now considered “ready to ship” by Apple. If you’re planning on grabbing the $20 upgrade later this month, you can save some money by grabbing one of Wal-Mart’s discounted iTunes gift cards.

More downloads after the break, including the 10.7.5 and Xcode 4.4 change logs.

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If you haven’t done so already, the time has finally come to make the switch from MobileMe to iCloud. Apple closed down their old syncing service today and removed the iDisk and MobileMe Gallery apps from the App Store, leaving behind any stragglers who have not yet made the jump to the new iCloud hotness launched alongside iOS 5 last year.

If you are one of those stragglers, you’ll be happy to know that you can move your data to iCloud right from the MobileMe homepage, and it seems Find My iPhone will still function for users who have not updated to iCloud due to their devices being too old to run iOS 5 or OS X Lion, and iDisk and Gallery files can still be retrieved for a limited time.

Hit the break to read about the fascinating history of Apple’s cloud services.

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Apple just released a new Security Update for the Mountain Lion Developer Preview that introduces a few new security features. Macs running OS 10.8 will now automatically check for security updates daily to be better protected against rising malware threats. It will also have the ability to install such updates automatically, or when the user next restarts their computer. The update even creates a more secure connection to Apple’s servers for more security.

The update is available now in the App Store for all computers running Developer Preview 4. It weighs a whopping 1.16 GB.

Update: Apple just sent an email to developers, which you can see after the break, referring to this security update as a new update to Developer Preview 4. The update includes a new OS X build number of 12A256 (the previous version being 12A248). This small change between the two builds indicates that Apple is coming closer to a finished product. If you spot any other changes, be sure to let us know at tips@9to5mac.com.

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Earlier today, Apple released a new iOS 6 beta to developers, introducing the usual “bug fixes and improvements”. Below is a list of all the new buttons and changes we’ve found so far. If you happen to spot any more, send them our way at tips@9to5mac.com.

The first thing you’ll see when installing beta 2 is actually a change that was technically made in beta 1: when installing an OTA update, the cogs in the Settings icon on the Software Update page spin (not the ones on the actual home screen, though).

Check out even more changes after the break.
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The Tumblr blogging service has launched a completely revamped version of its iPhone and iPod touch application. The new Tumblr application is re-built from the ground up and includes a redesigned dashboard interface for organizing blog posts, high-resolution image support, offline mode, and more. The new application is more intuitive and the process of writing and posting Tumblr posts is shorter. We’ve been testing the new app for a short amount of time and it is incredibly well built. Here are some of the other new features:

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Today’s update to the Mountain Lion developer preview has introduced a bunch of new options for Facebook users. Specifically, Facebook will now support native OS X banner notifications, as seen in the screenshot above, for actions such as Wall posts and inbox messages. Facebook support in Notification Center has been previously announced, but this is the first time we’ve seen it active.

Unfortunately, this build does not offer integration with Facebook Chat in the Messages app, although it is possible to setup Chat separately, so while you can get banner notifications about new messages, you won’t actually be able to reply to them without going through your web browser.

In addition, new settings for PowerNap are showing up for some. PowerNap allows iCloud and email updates to occur even while the computer is in sleep mode.

During today’s WWDC keynote, Apple gave some demos of the sharing features in the next versions of their desktop and mobile operating systems, including deep Facebook integration in iOS 6. One thing they didn’t mention, however, was the same Facebook integration for the Mac. As it turns out, there’s a good reason for that. The version of 10.8 that launches next month will not support Facebook.

According to a tiny banner hidden on Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion website, Facebook integration won’t be available in OS X until this fall. Conveniently, that’s the same timeframe given for the iOS 6 release, and the presumed timeframe of the next iPhone launch.

Oddly, Mountain Lion Developer Preview 4, released earlier this evening, does contain full Facebook integration. Why Apple chose to omit this feature from the shipping version is a mystery, since it seems to be functioning well in its current form. Perhaps Apple’s agreement with Facebook is to launch all integration in fall. For example, iOS 6 launches in the fall.

Apple just released iTunes 10.6.3, which will allow users to update their devices to the new iOS 6 beta that released a few minutes ago. The update is downloadable directly from Apple’s website and is available to everyone—not just developers. If you see any new changes, let us know at tips@9to5mac.com.