Weekly Mobile News Roundup – 27 December 2013

 Once again the week is coming to an end and that means it’s time for a roundup of the past weeks news!

Apple Gives Out First ’12 Days of Gifts’ Freebie Today – Apple has kicked off its 12 Days of Gifts program by giving away the first gift today. For me, it was a free copy of the iPad game Real Steel. The gift may differ based on your geographic location or platform, though; for example, Apple Insider reports the first gift to be Justin Timberlake’s four-song live performance from the 2013 iTunes Festival in London.

Fantastical for Mac and iPhone on sale for a limited time – Ok, this is getting a bit out of hand. After the EA sale, and the Disney and Warner Bros. sale, and the App Santa sale, I’m just not sure how many more purchases my wallet can handle. Luckily, I already own two of the three apps we’re going to be talking about this morning.

5 Mac App Sales Worth Your Attention This Holiday – We’ve already given you a huge list of the hottest iOS apps that are on-sale this holiday. Now it’s time to turn our attentions to Apple’s other platform – the Mac.

The Appleseed legend: the story behind Apple’s unofficial mascot – Close to the check-in desks at WWDC 2013, we overheard a commotion. As delegates queued to pick up their show passes, one tall, dark-haired and rather scruffy-looking man was getting angry. Event staff checked and checked again for a pass that wasn’t there, the man growing more and more agitated, his voice rising as his cheeks coloured. And while you couldn’t make out his words from across the lobby, the body language was clear enough.

This Apple TV UI Inspired By iOS 7 Begs To Be Seen – The substantial improvements to the range of Apple TV content suggests that the little black box is doing just fine for now, and if Jony Ive and his design minions did feel like revamping the OS in the image of iOS 7, perhaps the concept below, dreamed up by designer Andrew Ambrosino, offers us something of a preview.

Google dethrones Apple to become most talked-about company of 2013 – Google had a pretty good year in 2013. The company’s share price exploded to all-time highs, Android now eclipses all other mobile platforms in global market share at more than 80%, and Google’s share of search traffic is still nearly 70% despite increased competition from Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing.

Apple posts videos, slide decks for 2013 iOS 7 Tech Talks tour – n its developer website, Apple has published videos and PDF slide decks for its iOS 7 Tech Talk sessions. The Tech Talks are an expanded version of the Worldwide Developers Conference iOS app development sessions and are hosted by Apple across the world.

Apple’s iPod Still Dominates Dwindling Media Player Market – Although the portable media player market has been in decline over the past several years, Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPod still holds the lion’s share of the market.  NPD Group research analyst Benjamin Arnold recently told Apple Insider that Apple’s iPod accounted for 72 percent of the total market for standalone music players.

AirWeb Adds A Web Browser To Your Apple TV – AirWeb is a new app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch that will allow you to use a web browser on your Apple TV, and it uses Apple’s AirPlay and your iOS device to display a web browser on your Apple TV.

Apple acquires mapping company Broad Map – The Cupertino-based company nonheritable each the businesses for AN unrevealed quantity and therefore the acquisition was 1st according by 9to5Mac. The report notes that Apple nonheritable BroadMap, that may be a mapping firm within the half of 2013, whereas Catch (an Evernote competitor) was nonheritable in recent months.

The New York Times reviews Apple’s Mac Pro: Deeply futuristic; extremely, ridiculously fast and powerful – For the moment, I am living the life of a tech one-percenter,” Molly Wood writes for The New York Times. “Atop my desk sits a shiny (and I do mean shiny) new Mac Pro. It’s Apple’s top-of-the-line desktop computer, aimed at, as the name implies, the creative professionals who have always relied on Macs for video, graphics, music and photo manipulation. It makes everything around it look vaguely slower.