TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Leaked case designs have been a surprisingly good barometer for predicting the shapes of previous iPhones and iPods, and even the iPad 2. The thinking goes that iPhone cases are big business, and case-makers are willing to pay big bucks to get their hands on the details so they can have cases in stores on launch day.

Couple this with the fact that Apple is surely already building zillions of iPhone 5s to avoid any shortages at the expected September launch, and there must be some underpaid worker, somewhere, willing to sell the secrets.

ISheetMusic is yet another sheet music app for the iPad, and while it lacks polish, it has a few features that make it stand out from the morass of musical manuscript apps in the App Store.

The application is simple. You pick a song from your library and hit play. After counting you in, the app shows you the music notation, complete with lyrics and guitar chords, and indicates which bar you are on with a pulsing red band.

A tiny aspherical glass lens could turn your smartphone or tablet into a Star Wars-style projector.

It may not be holographic, but at least you and your friends could sit around a table or look up at a wall rather than huddling around someone’s palm-sized smartphone to watch the latest hilarity on YouTube.

At 1mm x 1mm x .8mm, the teensy FLGS3 Series lens is barely the size of the tip of mechanical pencil lead.

Here’s one for all the luddites who whine that “the iPad doesn’t have a proper keyboard.” Piano Apprentice is an external keyboard for your tablet, only instead of adding QWERTY, it brings do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do.

The keyboard comes with a free iPad companion app which plugs in via the 30-pin dock connector. With these two parts, you can learn how to play the piano by following the on-screen instructions and/or pressing the keys as their internal LEDs light up.

If you’re living in the U.S., we don’t have to tell you it’s hot outside. Damn hot. Dog Day Afternoon hot.

Temperatures are soaring in cities across the country, reaching (and breaking) record highs not seen since the early 20th century. The smartest of us are seeking refuge in the air-conditioned Starbucks.

Coughing up the cash for a Frappuccino isn’t your only option. Geoff Milburn of Ontario created a cheap, DIY approach to the modern air condition: The “Black Beauty.”

After rooting around for parts in his school’s science department dumpster, Milburn strapped an oscillating fan to the radiator of an old freeze-drying machine.

As expected, Apple has updated the MacBook Air. The super-portable laptop has now become a serious rival to its big brother, the MacBook Pro. In fact, read the specs and you’ll wonder why you would bother to buy a Pro ever again. And if you want a white plastic MacBook, you’d better rush to your local reseller — Apple has discontinued it.

Apple has begun shelling out dough for its location-tracking debacle lovingly referred to as “Locationgate.”

Apple was ordered to pay out 1 million South Korean won ($946) in compensation for collecting user geolocation data without permission in May, Reuters reported Thursday. The payment was made to a lawyer named Kim Hyung-suk.

This is the first payout Apple has made in response to the issue. And although $946 isn’t even a drop in the hat to the $323 billion company, it may just be the start.

For phone modification junkies, the Android software platform comes with a host of mod-friendly features. It’s too bad, then, that Motorola’s latest Android phone lacks all of them.

Motorola’s Droid 3 features a locked boot loader, which is a program that loads the operating system software on every smartphone when it’s turned on. The company said it planned to change the policy this year.

The news first came from a Motorola support forums representative.

“As we’ve communicated, we plan to enable the unlockable-relockable boot loader in future software releases, starting in late 2011, where channel and operator partners will allow it,” said a Motorola spokesperson in a statement provided to Wired.com. “Droid 3 is not built on a software version that includes this feature.”

Locking down the boot loader is a big pain for those who want to modify their Android phone operating systems. Essentially, it drastically limits the extent of modification and customization you can accomplish on your phone. If you wanted to install a particularly popular piece of modding software like, say, CyanogenMod — a very popular custom Android build that optimizes a phone’s hardware performance and adds a number of nifty flourishes — with a locked boot loader, you’re out of luck.

If you trust a website that uses an unpatched security exploit to enable root access on your iOS device, then you might want to go ahead and visit Jailbreakme.com (v3.0), a site that offers a fast jailbreak which doesn’t require a computer to do the work. The hack will work with the iPhone 3GS and better, the iPod Touch 3G and up, and both iPads. Yes, you can finally jailbreak your iPad 2.

The jailbreak works via a vulnerability in the iOS PDF display code. You visit the site in Mobile Safari, tap a link and the exploit goes to work, gaining root access to the file system and installing the Cydia app store.

It might not mitigate the ridiculous $50 price-tag, but iFixit’s teardown of Apple’s “lightning fast” Thunderbolt cable at least goes some way towards showing why it doesn’t cost the same as any other dumb cable.

After picking up the new wonder-cable and digging into its “suspicious” looking sturdy plastic sleeve, iFixit’s Miroslav Djuric was confronted with a lot of hefty metal shielding. One soldering iron and a bit of chopping later and he was in.