Yearly Archives: 2015

A sleepy Jim talks to Merlin talk all about the iPad Pro: Jim’s review and Merlin’s impulse purchase of it.

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Links:

• Review: iPad Pro
• iPad Pro Review: A New Canvas
• Daring Fireball: The iPad Pro
• Logitech’s iPad Pro keyboard case is relatively affordable
• The Martian Audiobook | Andy Weir | Audible.com
• The Outfield – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Black Label Society – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• The Move – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• #HeyTDR – Twitter Search

Austin Mann:

We’ve gotten a ton of questions about gear and the trip behind this project so we cut together this BTS piece for you — it’s 17 minutes so grab a coffee/snack and enjoy!

In early October, Mann posted his review of the iPhone 6s. Now he’s giving us a behind the scenes look. These BTS videos always fascinate me.

Macworld:

The streaming music industry is about to lose a player and gain a platform. On Monday, Pandora announced plans to acquire “key assets” from on-demand streaming service Rdio, which is seeking bankruptcy protection and will wind down its current business.

The deal, for $75 million in cash, covers Rdio’s technology and intellecutal property, and Pandora says it will be offering jobs to many members of Rdio’s team. Pandora isn’t buying Rdio’s entire business for a couple of reasons.

First, to launch an on-demand streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music, Pandora will have to make its own licensing deals with the record labels, because Rdio’s deals aren’t transferable. Second, Pandora executives explained in a Monday conference call that Rdio is financially “challenged,” and would have been a drain on Pandora.

I wouldn’t take bets on Rdio relaunching. It’s also likely the first of a few more consolidations in the next 12 months.

Dangerous Business:

Alexander Graham Bell once said, “I have travelled around the globe. I have seen the Canadian and American Rockies, the Andes, the Alps and the Highlands of Scotland, but for simple beauty, Cape Breton outrivals them all.”

I’ll admit that I was a bit skeptical of this quote upon first reading it. I mean, the Rockies, the Alps, the Scottish Highlands… those are all pretty impressive and beautiful things. Could a sparsely-populated island in the Canadian Maritimes really compare?

Well, the truth is that it kind of can.

If you’re looking for a vacation full of utterly lovely scenery, wonderful people and great seafood, you can’t go wrong visiting my home province of Nova Scotia. I promise it will surprise and delight you.

Pad & Quill is offering beautiful wood and leather accessories for iPhone, Apple Watch and more. I have one of their Backpacks and absolutely love it! They are offering Loop readers a 10% discount on any order including the new Minneapolis made Lowry Leather Cuff and Lowry Leather Band for Apple Watch. Code: LOOP15.

Lowry Leather Band Features

• USA made leather strap for Apple Watch
• Each craftsman personally signs your strap’s interior
• Full-grain vegetable-tanned leather from Horween Tannery
• Rugged Stitching that is hand tied off
• Velvet soft suede interior finish
• 3 beautiful color options
• 25 Year Leather Warranty
• 30 Day Money Back Promise

Stuff:

Perhaps I’m now just an old social media git yelling at a heart-shaped cloud. Maybe Twitter isn’t misunderstanding the user experience at all, and it’s just a few long-term users who are grumbling. For all I know, Twitter newcomers worldwide are now sighing with relief because that difficult favorites button (three whole syllables!) has gone, replaced by clickable hearts. But a quick glance at replies to Twitter’s own tweets about the change suggests otherwise, and it really does feel like a mis-step that reduces the flexibility of a previously versatile feature.

As a maniacal Twitter user, I completely agree. While “Faves” may not have been great, “Hearts” seems infinitely worse. What if I wanted to bookmark someone’s outrageous or offensive tweet to refer to it later? Twitter seems to think it’s OK for me to use the universal symbol of love to do that. Worse, Twitter’s reasoning, as laid out in this piece, is either mindless marketing speak or quite literally idiotic.

Techcrunch:

Never has the cry of ‘it’s just a bigger Apple thing’ been more applicable than it has with iPad Pro – this is literally a bigger iPad. But that approach to thinking about it is also reductive. The Microsoft Surface has blazed a sort of hybrid path – for people that don’t want to compromise having a laptop experience. The iPad pro, on the other hand, is unapologetically tablety. The keyboard feels solid but it’s no substitute for a MacBook. The muti-app experience, on the other hand, is far and away better than on any competing system — and the way that it enables creatives to alternate between the various ‘modes’ is unique to this platform.

There are a lot of ways to slice iPad Pro. But one of the biggest and hardest to quantify is the way that it will end the debate about whether the tablet is a tool for creation once and for all.

Sprinkled throughout this review, Panzarino asks some interesting questions and makes some very good points. Bottom line is, who cares if the iPad Pro is an “enterprise play” or “just for designers” or “a laptop replacement”? It’s not going to be all things to all people but the tech media often seems to want to make it that.

Independent:

For American companies, doing business in Europe is getting to be a tricky thing these days. American tech companies, in particular, are finding themselves in regulatory crosshairs more and more.

But there are some things that Europe doest best, according to Cook. One of them is privacy.

He says that he feels more comfortable in Europe when it comes to privacy issues than in other parts of the world, including the US.

I love these long interviews with the press outside of the typical North American outlets. The (sometimes) different viewpoint is interesting.

Daring Fireball:

Arguing that Apple is in trouble because the iPhone is so popular is like arguing that the ’90s-era Chicago Bulls were in trouble because Michael Jordan was so good. It’s true Jordan couldn’t play forever — and the iPhone won’t be the most profitable product in the world forever. But in the meantime, the Bulls were well-nigh unbeatable, and Apple, for now at least, is unfathomably profitable.

Just like how it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, it’s better to have tremendous success for some period of time than never to have had tremendous success in the first place. Right?

This is a typically well written and thought out piece by Gruber, taking down the ridiculousness of the Apple doomsayers. They have zero basis for their prognostications and yet, rather than being spiked by their editors as posts that have no basis in fact or shouted down by the media in general, they are lauded for their “prescience”.

The Wirecutter:

After 76 hours of research and side-by-side testing with four different models, we found the $800 Epson SureColor P600 is the best photo inkjet printer for most people.

It delivers professional-quality color prints, as well as black-and-white photographs that are as close to traditional darkroom prints as you’ll see from any digital printer around. Its prints also last longer than anything you’d get from a typical online photo service. The P600 can print on a wider variety of media than the competition, and its LCD touchscreen control panel makes setup and maintenance easy.

I’m a big proponent of printing some of your photos. There’s nothing like holding a physical representation of a memory. I have an Epson R2000 and I love taking some of my better photos and printing them out and putting them on my own walls or giving them to friends.

Ars Technica:

Privacy advocates are warning federal authorities of a new threat that uses inaudible, high-frequency sounds to surreptitiously track a person’s online behavior across a range of devices, including phones, TVs, tablets, and computers.

The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can’t be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.

And the ad industry wonders why we hate them and happily use ad blockers.

Intego:

Did you know that you can set up something called a “Medical ID” on your iPhone?

This can be accessed even while the phone is locked by clicking on the emergency options, and it can display things like name, date of birth (DOB), emergency contacts, medical conditions, and even blood type!

It can be managed by clicking on the little “Health” app that comes default on the iPhone.

The Medical ID is important because, in case of an emergency, medical responders can look at your phone and know any allergies or medical conditions you have and know who to contact for you without unlocking your phone.

This only takes a few seconds to set up but if the EMTs on scene know about it, they can quickly access important medical information or your emergency contact.

Fast Company:

Once upon a time, Apple was known for its ease of use, for computers and applications that were understandable, powerful, and could be used without reference to any manuals. All the operations were discoverable (the power of menus), all could be undone or redone, and there was considerable feedback so you always knew what had just taken place.

However, when Apple moved to gestural-based interfaces with the first iPhone, followed by its tablets, it deliberately and consciously threw out many of the key Apple principles. No more discoverability, no more recoverability, just the barest remnants of feedback.

Why? Not because this was to be a gestural interface, but because Apple simultaneously made a radical move toward visual simplicity and elegance at the expense of learnability, usability, and productivity. They began shipping systems that people have difficulty learning and using, getting away with it because people don’t recognize such problems until it is too late, and money has already changed hands. Even then, people tend to blame themselves for the shortcomings of their devices: “If I weren’t so stupid . . . !”

While I wouldn’t personally paint so broad a brush, this (long) article by a former Apple Human Interface Guideline guru does make some good points and should be read, particularly by those in charge at Apple. I know I’ve often had more trouble than I expect trying to assist new iOS and Mac users in “figuring out” the interface. Maybe I’m (we) are just getting older but it seems as if the User Interface, while more powerful, is much more confusing, especially for people new to the paradigms. I’m not saying we need to go back to OS 7 but a greater focus on the issues Tog brings up might alleviate that “If I weren’t so stupid . . . !” attitude I hear from far too many users.