Apple wrapped up its arguments in the Department of Justice ebook price fixing trial against it on Wednesday, so Jeff and Bryan asked Fortune's Philip Elmer-Dewitt to join in and share his thoughts on the case after spending nearly every day of the three-week event in the courtroom. His take on the outcome? You'll have to listen to find out.

AltaMail from Eurosmartz just got an update, and it's a big one. The "alternative iOS email client" market is exploding right now, but thus far I haven't found anything like AltaMail. This is a pro-level mail client for iOS tailor-made for email geeks who need to do more than the built-in Mail.app will let them. 

Apple has landed a US$30 million deal to supply 30,000 iPads to Los Angeles schools. The Los Angeles School Board of Education approved the deal Tuesday evening as part of a program to equip all of its students with a tablet iPad over the next 14 months. Bryan Chaffin explains the deal and examines the ramifications.

Online and brick-and-mortar book retailer Barnes & Noble shot a massive hole through the Department of Justice's ebook price fixing case against Apple on Tuesday. When Theresa Horner, B&N's Vice President of Digital Content, took the stand she told the court her company was already negotiating agency pricing deals with publishers before Apple was on the scene in hopes of killing the profit losses it was suffering at the hands of Amazon.com. That doesn't sound like testimony that helps the DOJ case at all.

Eight years ago, Dave Teare and his business partner were developing websites with Ruby on Rails. They were working with forms and had to constantly enter user names and passwords. That was tiresome, so they eventually developed a tool that allowed them to enter that data with a click.  It was to be a one month project.  Eight years later, 1Password is going strong on OS X and iOS. And Windows. And Android.

Apple expanded its content lineup for Apple TV on Wednesday when it announced that HBO GO and WatchESPN are both available directly through the home entertainment device. Along with HBO and ESPN, Apple also added Sky News, Crunchyroll and Qello to the Apple TV lineup.

The Mac Observer Spin: Apple TV is looking a little less like a hobby.

If you're in the city that never sleeps, there's a good chance your iPhone doesn't, either. To that end, AT&T, Goal Zero and Pensa have teamed up to bring solar powered smartphone chargers to the streets of New York City. The outdoor charging stations include built-in Dock and Lightning connectors as well as USB ports for people that prefer to use their own cables, small shelves to hold your phone while charging, and can be placed anywhere there's direct sunlight. The chargers are part of a test program in several locations such as Fort Greene Park, Union Square, Central Park. They'll be moving around and could end up in other cities at some point, too. Assuming the test program is successful, this'll be a handy way to power up on the go or when regular electrical service is down. If you get the chance to try one out let us know!

Whether you've locked your iOS device with a passcode or not, anyone who happens to "acquire" it has access to Siri (and thus some of your personal data, too). There is a way to prevent that, and Melissa Holt's here to tell us how. She also plans on scolding you if you don't have a passcode set. Hey, she's just looking out for you guys.

Apple has offered some of its retail employees early access to OS X Mavericks. Genius Bar and floor staff at the company's chain of Apple Stores have been invited to install, test, and report on their experiences with Mavericks, and Bryan Chaffin argues this is good for everyone, including Apple's customers.

It was a gathering tech legends, both the computers and the people. History San Jose put together a gathering of Apple I computers that included five of the 50 or so models still considered working. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Apple employee #12 Daniel Kottke were on hand (one of the Apple Is belonged to The Woz), and by the end of the event three of the devices had been booted up and were running side by side. That's pretty darned cool, and it's not likely something that will be repeated any time soon. There is so much value attached to working models (the last one sold went for $674,100), no one wants to be the person who fried one or proved theirs no longer works. The San Jose Mercury News has photographs and more information.

Alf Watt attended MacWorld New York in 1999 and saw Steve Jobs launch AirPort in the first iBook and base stations. A geek at heart, he immediately wanted to understand this new technology, and iStumbler for Mac OS 9 was the result.  Later, he headed a team at Apple working  on Wi-Fi technologies. Basically, Mr. Watt has spent ten years making an invisible technology, indistinguishable from magic, very visible. The story of how that turned out includes fascinating technical tidbits about how Wi-Fi works.

Apple released Java updates for Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and OS X 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8 (Mountain Lion). The update brings Java SE 6 to the most recent version.

The folks at Flexibits have decided that the world would be a much better place if searching in Apple's Messages and iChat  didn't suck. Their solution is a Mac app called Chatology that not only makes it easier to find old chats, it gives you filtering options (by image and links) to make it much easier to find the specific information you're looking for. There's also a preference option that makes ⌘F in Messages or iChat open up Chatology instead of the built-in search. The app is priced at US$19.99 from the Flexibits website—there's a free trial version available—and it requires Mac OS X 10.7.5 or later.

The AluCup from Just Mobile is another inventive product from a company that provides convenience for the users of Apple’s many iOS devices. In this case, it is a small holder that works in different ways with all the iPhones, iPod touches and iPads.

Mavericks testers have reported problems installing the Mavericks Developer Preview in a Parallels virtual machine on Mountain Lion. Parallels has provided some knowledge base articles to assist, including the installation of Parallels Desktop 8 in Mavericks itself.  

Apple gave the public its first preview of iOS 7 last week during its annual World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco. A beta version just for iOS developers was released the same day, and it found its way to many people outside of that group who promptly started complaining about stability issues, non-functioning features, poor battery life, interface problems, broken third-party apps, and more. Of course iOS 7 has problems; it's beta software.

With Apple's annual World Wide Developer Conference behind us for another year, analysts are looking through the pieces the company dropped in our laps during the keynote presentation for clues as to what might be coming next. Wells Fargo analyst Maynard Um thinks iOS 7's fall release schedule means we'll get a new iPhone in September, and he also thinks iTunes Radio will be a tool to draw in and keep new customers.

The Mac Observer Spin: I've been expecting new iPhones in September along side the release of iOS 7, and Maynard Um is in agreement. It's time to start saving up for you new iPhone.

Adobe began shipping, in a manner of speaking, its new Creative Cloud design application package Monday evening. Creative Cloud was first announced in May and includes Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and more. It does away with traditional perpetual software licensing in favor of a software subscription model.

The Mac Observer Spin: Subscription software licensing isn't a new idea, but it isn't something Adobe app users have dealt with for very long. Don't expect Adobe to back off, and get ready for other companies to follow suit.

Sir Jonathan Ive's title at Apple has been simplified—flattened, if you will—from "Senior Vice President, Industrial Design" to "Senior Vice President, Design." By dropping the qualifier, Apple has officially recognized that his role at Apple has greatly expanded.

Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Services, took the stand one more time on Monday in the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust suit against the company. Mr. Cue was questioned by Apple's attorneys about the process of building the iBooks app, the iBookstore, and he talked extensively about the role of the late Steve Jobs in those processes. Bryan Chaffin walks us through what we learned.

Dave's back from WWDC and he and John have a lot of your questions to answer! Discussion includes sending and receiving SMS messages from your Mac, restoring settings for ONE iOS app at a time, creating your own secure, off-site backups, and more. Plus some follow-up discussion about running "flat" Wi-Fi networks and SSD Trim and Garbage Collection, just to round out those topics from last show. Download today (it's free!) and enjoy.

Life at Bjango for Marc Edwards started with OS X widgets, but widgets aren't really a big thing anymore on the Mac. Even so, 30 million downloads provided a sense that something good was going on. Later came iStat Menus and an evolving family of products. But after he viewed the WWDC Keynote, his reaction was "what just happened?"  

Kevin Hoctor was looking for a great money management tool for the Mac.  After experiencing the dreary life of being a Windows developer, he decided to learn Cocoa and Objective-C and discovered the joys of writing for the Mac.  His first major release was MoneyWell, and it went fabulously.  Now he's working on the iPad version. Mr. Hoctor has never looked back.

YouTube user "MrThaiBox123" has posted a comprehensive look at working with multiple monitors—six displays, to be precise—in Apple's new OS X 10.9 Mavericks. The company introduced some changes in multi-display support, including the ability to  access the Dock and Menu Bar from all of your displays, and the ability to run different full screen apps in different displays. Mavericks also handles desktop images differently. MrThaiBox123 runs through the changes and then discusses the pros and cons. [Via 9to5Mac.]

You don't interact with your iPhone in the same way that you use your Mac, so why should your mobile email app act like it belongs on your desktop? That's the idea behing Mail Ninja for the iPhone. It uses swipe gestures to reply, delete and archive messages, supports multiple accounts, includes a unified mailbox, offers Push notifications, and even includes a left-handed interface option. Mail Ninja supports, IMAP, Gmail, iCloud email, Yahoo! and AOL, and is available through Apple's iTunes-based App Store for US$2.99.

U.S. cell service providers are rolling out support for Wireless Emergency Alerts. The service launched in spring 2012, and carriers have been slowly adding support since then. AT&T iPhone owners started over the weekend that they now have the feature, so what exactly is WEA?

When reports surfaced that several large companies, including Apple, were participating in a program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to their servers the iPhone and Mac maker denied any involvement. Now Apple has issued a public statement that not only denies participation, but goes on to say that it didn't even know of PRISM before the news reports, and sometimes refuses to fulfill government requests for information.

AT&T began pushing an update to iPhone users over the weekend that adds support for Wireless Emergency Alerts. The WEA system sends text messages to smartphone owners alerting them to physical threats like earthquakes and tornados, man-made disasters, AMBER Alerts, and Presidential alerts.

The iPad is a great device for kids, for both education and entertainment. But sometimes a toddler and and iPad don't mix! You can keep your iPad kid-friendly with the built in Guided Access feature. Jared Apperson shows you how.

Dave Peck, Peter Sagerson and Nick Robinson were all doing freelance work in Seattle. They would gather at one of the many coffee shops there, getting caffeinated and doing their work. Then one day, Dave Peck realized they were using all these open wireless networks, completely non-secure, and doing sensitive client work. Then they realized they needed one of those VPN clients. Except, they were all so bad.  The rest is history.

Sandro Cuccia shows you how to use the power of templates in Apple's iWork apps for the Mac to create professional-looking documents and presentations. These techiques will work with Pages, Keynote, and Numbers.

In many endeavors these days, outsiders have a louder voice than the people doing the hard work. It's so bad that scientists have to take classes on public speaking.  The same goes for Apple. The employeees inside of Apple, designing and selling great products that are snapped up immediately, are under a barrage of criticism by outsiders who boast loudly. John Martellaro explains some of the reactions to WWDC's Keynote.

Need to tone up? You're in luck. Vern Seward points out three free apps that should help in this week's Free on iTunes. FitStar, Tabata+ Lite, and Sleep Studio.

It's like the company isn't even trying any more. Microsoft has released another iPad attack ad—this time supporting a Dell Windows RT tablet—but as far as attack ads go, this one was phoned in. Maybe they were using a Windows Phone device and were simply too bored to care?

My sincere thanks go out to Global Delight for sponsoring TMO this this week. Boom, from Global Delight, is a utility for your Mac that solves the problem of low-volume audio. Ever been watching a movie or video on your Mac and been straining to hear out of your Mac's speakers? Boom is your tool.

Bruno Virlet started his first iOS app while in college at the University of Illinois. One idea led to another, and now his app, Genius Scan, is a big seller on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Mr. Virlet tells how it all started and how he's feeling about geting his app ready for iOS 7.  

The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) reversed a "final" ruling from April that invalidated key claims in Apple's "overscroll bounce" patent. The USPTO informed Apple that it would be issuing a reexamination certificate for the patent that confirms four key claims, including claim 19 that a jury found Samsung infringed in 2012.

Brent Simmons started writing BASIC code on an Apple II+, and later started writing apps, profesionally for the Macintosh. He's famous for a lot of Mac apps that we've all used, and hs latest project, in partnership with John Gruber and Dave Wiskus is Vesper from Q Branch.  Mr. Simmons talked about his perspectives as a developer in this interview during WWDC.

Microsoft's Office Suite finally embraced the iPhone on Friday with the introduction Office Mobile for iPhone. The app lets iPhone owners view and edit -- at least to a degree -- their Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files in an iOS-native app, but only if they have an Office 365 subscription.

The Mac Observer Spin: The lack of the Office Suite apps on iOS has always felt like a glaring omission on Microsoft's part, so it's nice to see the company finally release something even though other developers stepped up and shipped their own versions long ago. The fact that Office Mobile requires an Office 365 subscription and doesn't include an iPad version, however, feels like yet another glaring omission on Microsoft's part.

If you've never checked out the Path Bar or the Status Bar in the Finder, you're about to learn some groovy stuff. Using these features, you can see how much space is remaining on a drive you're browsing or immediately know where your current folder lives on your Mac. Here's the scoop.

This is too fun: Amazon Japan sells a trash can (Google translation) that looks a lot like Apple's brand spankin' new Mac Pro. Some may find that fitting since there was a barrage of "it looks like a trash can" comments when Apple announced the device on Monday.

You've probably seen Apple's new Mac Pro. It's gorgeous. It's sexy. It's powerful, too, according to some people who have been working the device in recent weeks. In an Apple video called "Painting the World," the lead developer of 3D rendering tool MARI and an artist at Pixar both talked the Mac Pro and how powerful it is.

Here's something you don't see everyday, a frank discussion of the role that psychedelics played in the early years of NeXT software development. The story is being told by infamous NeXT developer Andrew Stone of Stone Design (Create, Twittleator, Videator—you can see the latter on the screen at TMO's Cirque du Mac Macworld/iWorld party), and it includes some of his personal observations about the emergence, growth, and eventual failure of NeXTStep and OpenStep, as well as stories about the Stone Rave parties held in the 1990s. Andrew Stone told his tale this week at AltWWDC in a presentation called DMT, the NeXT, and the Soul of the Human Machine, and posted the text at Stone Design's website. It's available as a video (starting at approximately 1 hour and 13 minutes). It's an interesting look back at an important aspect of what became the foundation of Apple's OS X.

IK Multimedia announced on Thursday the release of Lightning Cable for iRig Keys. It allows the company's iRig Key keyboard MIDI controller to be used with the current generation of iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, and iPod touch. It's priced at US$19.99 and is available now. In a meta sense, it's great to see more Lightning dock accessories hitting the market.

Joe Pezzillo has had a varied career, developed several startups, worked for Apple, and even tried his hand at being a Bohemian poet.  At WWDC this week, Mr. Pezzillo told TMO's Dave Hamilton the most important thing he learned about being a successful entrepreneur as he built Push.io.

Peter Kelly is a professor in Adelaide, Australia and teaches classes on computer operating systems. After writing his Ph.D. thesis with Lyx and LaTex, he thought it would be interesting to develop similar software for Android. That didn't work out so well.  UX Write for the iPad was the result. Dave Hamilton interviewed Dr. Kelly at WWDC this week and got the story.

Apple's World Wide Developer Conference rumor roundup gave us a flat interface for iOS 7, the redesigned Mac Pro, and iRadio iTunes Radio. With those out of the way, and WWDC about to wrap up for another year, the rumor mill is back in full swing and this time it's bigger iPhones... again.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, along with President Barak Obama, U.S. Attorney Genreal Eric Holder, NSA Director Keith Alexander, and the CEOs of several other companies have all been named in a US$20 billion class action lawsuit over privacy violations related to the PRISM domestic surveillance program. The lawsuit was filed by Larry Klayman who clearly isn't pleased with reports that the National Security Agency has allegedly been collecting information from several technology-related companies, and is calling the lawsuit part of a move to stop government tyranny.

The Mac Observer Spin: Assuming Apple and the other companies named in Mr. Klayman's lawsuit really have been giving the NSA access to their servers, were acting under court orders, the case should target the government instead. If, however, they have been voluntarily handing over information to the NSA -- and he can prove it -- it's a pretty safe bet lots of money will be changing hands in settlements and court costs.

The U.S. Department of Justice showed an email from Steve Jobs as evidence that Apple pushed publishers into forcing Amazon to move to an agency pricing model as part of its plan to artificially raise book prices. The message in question, however, was a draft that turned out to be very different from the final version he sent to Senior Vice President of Software and Services Eddy Cue.

The Mac Observer Spin: Without Steve Jobs here to say what his intent was in the draft email the DOJ is speculating as to whether or not he actually wanted publishers to force Amazon into selling books at higher prices. Since the final version of the message was entered as evidence as well -- and Eddy Cue will be testifying today -- Apple is in a good position back up its claims that it didn't care about the deals publishers made with other retailers.

Kanye West. Rapper, pop star. He's iconic and an iconoclast, both. He's not afraid to reinvent himself with each new album, and he clearly, clearly has no problem saying what's on his mind. If that reminds you of someone, let Mr. West be sure you know who, that's Steve Jobs. Bryan Chaffin offers his thoughts on the matter.