Yearly Archives: 2015

Forbes:

Chieh Huang knows something about upward mobility. After his parents emigrated from Taiwan, his mother worked as a cashier at a Baltimore restaurant. But education was always a priority, and despite his modest upbringing, he ended up at John Hopkins University and Fordham Law School, which set him on a course to become a successful entrepreneur. He sold his first company, a gaming studio, to Zynga in 2011, and he’s currently CEO of Boxed, an online retailer that sells items in bulk (think e-Costco) and has raised more than $30 million.

Now Huang wants to give all his employees at Boxed a shot a the same kind of upward mobility. To that end, he’ll pay for the college education of any children of Boxed workers, no strings attached.

Another great story of a CEO who, even while recognizing the limits of his plan, is still willing to go ahead to help his employees and their families.

FX Guide:

Hundreds of visual effects artists, led by overall visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, would spend considerable time crafting more than 2000 visual effects shots and helping to transform the exquisite photography into the final film that at times feels almost like a single car chase. Even more plate manipulation would also be carried out by colorist Eric Whipp, weaving in a distinctive graphic style for the film with detailed sky replacements and unique day for nights.

I’m a complete sucker for anything related to explaining the visual effects of movies. It fascinates me how these geniuses create onscreen reality. This is a long exposition of some of the effects for this summer’s blockbuster hit. Fair warning though – there may be some spoilers included in the text.

Amazing, beautiful, creepy and scary all at the same time.

Palau is part of the larger island group of Micronesia and Jellyfish Lake is a marine lake located on Eil Malk island. Wikipedia says, “Although both species of jellyfish living in the lake have stinging cells (nematocytes), they are not in general powerful enough to cause harm to humans.”

My thanks to Mapbox for sponsoring The Loop this week. Mapbox lets iOS developers add beautiful maps to their applications. Our building blocks make it easy to swap out Apple maps with our open source SDK. Choose the map design that fits your app and feels good in your hand.

I don’t often write about email clients, but I love this app. Spark is designed well, full-featured, and it’s easy to use. With support for Apple Watch, using Spark is a no-brainer.

Fortune:

Do you like the idea of an internet without advertising? You can join the soaring ranks of people who install ad blocking software to scrub out banners, pop-ups, and more. But not everyone will be happy about that.

A report this week by media analyst Frederic Filloux warned that web publishers face a crisis as ad block rates shoot up, and consequently block an important means of revenue for online publishers. Between 15 to 17% of the U.S. population reportedly use ad blockers, and the number is double that for millennials. The numbers are even higher in Europe, and up to 80-90% in the case of specialty tech and gaming sites.

The popularity of ad blockers is understandable: For consumers they make web pages look nicer, and they can improve browser speed and screen for malware too.

Of course they should be legal. What should be illegal is poorly coded sites and ads that encourage so many people to use ad blockers.

Don’t get me wrong – as a content producer myself, I hate ad blockers. But I’ve been to countless web sites that have various forms of ads pushed at us, blocking content I came for, autoplaying ads, using Flash and other cruft that slow down and, in some cases, cause havoc with my computer, that I completely understand the people who use this software to prevent those things.

What publishers should be looking at is not trying to make ad blocking software illegal but their own practices that make such software so popular.

Nextshark:

Documentary photographer Doug Menuez was given the rare opportunity by Steve Jobs himself to document what was happening inside NeXT, the computer platform development company Jobs created after being ousted from Apple in 1985. From there, Doug spent the next three years observing Jobs build a company from the ground up.

“He wasn’t a positive manager a lot of the times, but he was a great teacher.”

Leaving aside my issues with the poorly written headline, this is the guy who shot some of the most iconic images of Steve Jobs. His comments in general and on Jobs in particular are very interesting and well worth the read.

Consumer Reports:

If you want an army of geeks you can count on to tame an unruly computer, you’d better buy a Macintosh: Apple tech support is by far the most effective of any computer brand’s. With most Windows PCs, there’s only a 50-50 chance that a manufacturer’s tech support will do the trick.

It’s no surprise that Apple had the highest score for overall user satisfaction. In fact, the company has been top-rated every year since we first asked consumers about tech support back in 2007—even though Apple provides just 90 days of free phone and online tech support, compared with one year for most Windows PC companies.

If you’ve been around for any length of time, it’s easy to find/tell horror stories about poor Apple tech support but, at least in the past ten years, my experience with them, whether online, on the phone or in the Apple Stores, has been uniformly positive. I used to work in tech support and it’s a thankless, hard job. But Apple doesn’t treat it as a profit centre like so many other companies do. Apple recognizes that it is an integral part of the company’s success.

ZDNet:

Apple has acknowledge the existence of a bug which can crash the Messages applications on iPhones and has issued a set of instructions as a temporary workaround.

Apple will likely have a more permanent fix for this weird issue inside five days.

From VentureBeat:

Today was a pretty big day for Google. At its annual I/O developer conference, the company unveiled Android M, Android Pay, Brillo, Google Photos, and more.

Google explains its new photos app and service. For now, I’ll stick with iCloud. It works well for me, syncs to all of my devices and optimizes the photos. I also don’t have to wonder what Google is doing with them when I’m not looking.

There are two basic ways to read this news. The first is to take Apple at its word — that this is a promotion for Ive that will let him focus more of attention on, well, design. That he’s delegating management administrivia to Dye and Howarth, not decreasing his involvement in supervising the actual design work. The second way — the cynical way — is that this is the first step to Ive easing his way out the door, and that his new title is spin to make the news sound good rather than bad.

Personally, I think it’s both. Jony deserves a “chief” title and this is a perfect way to introduce the public to the other lead designers on Jony’s team. I don’t think Jony is going anywhere in the near future, but it’s important for Wall St. and the public to realize that he won’t leave a giant vacuum when he does leave.

It would be impossible for Apple not to have a succession plan in place for someone as important and well-known as Jony. That plan may not come into affect for years, but it’s in place nonetheless.

“Scold” is the right word. Reading the decision, I’m struck by how many ways the Court found to say that Bromwich had crossed the line.

I think the word everyone is looking for here is: “Crooked”.

Pixelmator is one of my favorite apps of all time. I started using it on the Mac, then iPad, and now it’s available for iPhone as well. The thing I truly like about the guys at Pixelmator, is that they think about each platform and figure out the best way to get things done. They think about the details that will affect the users. That’s why I love Pixelmator and why I will continue to support them.

io9:

My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

Here’s how we did it.

A great dissection of how easy it is to fool the media. Keep this story in mind the next time you read breathless news about miracle cures.