Not only is Minecraft - Pocket Edition listed as one of Apple’s All-Time Top Paid Apps for both the iPhone and iPad on the App Store, Mojang has been announcing their own incredible milestones this month. Following an astounding 10 million copies of the PC edition sold at the beginning of April, Mojang wrote on their blog Monday that the company has sold 10 million copies of Minecraft - Pocket Edition across mobile platforms. “We are very thankful to all the support that we have gotten and people playing and talking about our game,” Daniel Kaplan wrote. “We have been working hard on restructuring the backend of a lot of things for Minecraft – Pocket Edition to make future updates smoother.”

Minecraft - Pocket Edition feels very much like Minecraft its beta days, giving players a choice between simpler creative and survival modes. Mojang plans to continue updating the mobile edition of the popular franchise, with the company preparing to release Minecraft Realms as a multiplayer component by the end of May. Realms is a cloud service that will let players easily create their own Minecraft servers for friends and family, giving small groups of players an easy way to play together. For Minecraft - Pocket Edition on iOS, Mojang plans on letting players rent server space through an IAP subscription, which only hosts will have to pay.

Fascinating look at the widgets and hardware Panic is using for their own Status Board setup.

This bit caught my attention:

Units have been especially interesting since they reveal so much about the economics of (our) iOS software, as this Graph panel shows. Although (our) iOS apps sell a respectable number of units, the revenue they bring in barely charts compared to our Mac stalwarts. So far! We’re working hard on improving our iOS apps, and trying new ideas, in order to crack the iOS market a little bit more.

Diet Coda, priced at $19.99, is a fantastic piece of iPad software, and yet it doesn’t bring in much revenue compared to Panic’s Mac apps.

Just yesterday, I was thinking that it’s strange how Apple still hasn’t brought the Developer Tools category of the Mac App Store over to the iOS App Store. There are excellent examples of developer-oriented software, especially on the iPad: Textastic, xScope Mirror, Codea, Pythonista, and the aforementioned Diet Coda come to mind – plus many more. Two years ago, I asked whether the iPad needed programming apps.

Times have changed. Today, I wonder: would a Developer Tools category in the App Store help apps like Diet Coda get more exposure? Wouldn’t it make sense to give these tools another category, more specific and focused than the crowded Productivity one?

Horace Dediu, speaking to The Next Web:

TNW: There has been much talk recently on the ‘decline’ of Apple, as reflected in its stock price. What’s your take on this ‘decline’ and the suggestions that Tim Cook should be fired?

Dediu: I’ve written about the perception of decline several times. The quick answer is that as Apple has risen, the number of people who have taken it upon themselves to give commentary on how Apple should improve itself has increased. If the increase in commentary is in proportion to Apple’s sales then it has risen ‘exponentially’.

Our gut feeling is that professional equivalents to applications such as Aperture, Final Cut Pro, and Logic could eventually find their way to the iPad alongside a future iOS announcement or in their own Keynotes. We’ve talked at length before about how apps like Aperture could power mobile studios, utilizing Apple’s existing software stack of services like iCloud and Photo Stream. And we weren’t too far off the mark at the time — a month later Apple announced iPhoto for iOS devices, which offers more advanced editing features in contrast to the tools available in iOS’ Photos app.

Adobe, which already has its own iPhoto and Photo Stream alternatives with Revel (launched as Carousel), looks to be expanding their professional suite of photography solutions with a mobile complement of Lightroom on mobile devices such as the iPad. Jeff Blagdon from The Verge writes,

The app, which is still in the early stages of development, uses the lossy DNG Smart Previews new to Lightroom 5 to keep the footprint on your tablet to a minimum, and will use the same image processing model employed in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw.

… During his appearance, Hogarty used an iPad 2 to zoom and scroll inside a large 5D Mark III RAW image, tweaking adjustments to shadows, highlights, and color temperature.

Christian Zibreg of iDownloadBlog also has a YouTube clip of the development build, along with a preview of the Smart Previews feature included in Lightroom 5.