Dave Burns has been covering stock car racing from pit road for seventeen years, including spending the past twelve covering NASCAR's premiere Sprint Cup Series. These days he's a Pit Reporter for ESPN, covering Nationwide and Sprint Cup practices, qualifying, and races, all over the course of a single weekend -- every weekend -- for months at a time

Facebook today released a new standalone iPhone app dedicated to posting and sharing photos on the 900-million strong social network.

In line with today's claims of taller iPhone prototypes with 3.95-inch displays, one of our sources has provided us with images of what are claimed to be new next-generation iOS device parts being carried by a supplier. The most significant of these parts is a claimed front panel from the next-generation iPod touch, with the supplier claiming that the display would be taller than the current model and that the opening in the front panel measures 4.1 inches diagonally.

China Daily reports that Apple's manufacturing partner Foxconn continues to expand its operations in support of Apple's strong growth in product sales, investing $210 million to build a new production line for unspecified components. The new production line is said to be set to come on line in October of this year and will be located in the Chinese city of Huai'an in the eastern province of Jiangsu

Bloomberg reports that Steve Jobs was intimately involved in the design work for the next-generation iPhone scheduled for release later this year, reiterating claims that the device will be a substantial change from previous designs in part because of a larger display. Apple, based in Cupertino, California, has placed orders from suppliers in Asia for screens that are bigger than the 3.5- inch size now on the smartphone, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had worked closely on the redesigned phone before his death in October, one person said

Aaron Sorkin, the creative genius behind The Social Network , The West Wing , and upcoming HBO show The Newsroom was recently confirmed as the screenwriter for Sony's upcoming movie based on Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs -- though, Sorkin himself says he has a lot of work to do.

With long-running rumors of ultra high-resolution "Retina" displays for Apple's next-generation MacBook Pro receiving a significant boost with reports from several sources surfacing yesterday and similar upgrades now being rumored for the iMac , fans of the MacBook Air have been awaiting word on when they might expect Apple's smallest Mac notebooks to gain the feature. 9to5Mac now reports that Apple is indeed unsurprisingly planning to bring Retina displays to the MacBook Air, with that upgrade being the most significant change for the next-generation line. Apple’s new MacBook Air will not see major changes across the entire computer like the next-generation MacBook Pro, but this update will truly be all about the Retina Display

Bloomberg briefly reports that Apple and Disney are in talks to bring sports network ESPN's WatchESPN application [ App Store ] to the Apple TV set-top box. ESPN subscribers with AppleTV would gain access to the network’s Internet service on their TV sets.

Apple is continuing the process of preparing OS X Lion for Macs offering ultra high-resolution "HiDPI" screens, upgrading several application icons to higher resolutions in yesterday's public release of OS X 10.7.4. AppleInsider pointed to TextEdit as one example, with Apple having upgraded its icon's previous maximum size of 512x512 under OS X 10.7.3 to 1024x1024 in OS X 10.7.4. But the larger image 1024x1024 is also listed as measuring at 512x512 points, indicating that it is indeed being targeted for screens measuring at double the resolution of current displays in each dimension.

Apple today released OS X 10.7.4, the fourth maintenance update to OS X Lion. The update is currently available via Software Update and should appear on Apple's download pages soon. The 10.7.4 update is recommended for all OS X Lion users and includes general operating system fixes that improve the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac including fixes that: - Resolve an issue where the “Reopen windows when logging back in” setting is always enabled - Improve compatibility with certain British third-party USB keyboards - Address an issue that may prevent files from being saved to a server - Improve the reliability of copying files to an SMB server Detailed information is available in the full release notes .