Filippo Valsorda:
Turns out Lenovo preloaded their laptops with adware that will intercept all your secure connections, and allow criminals to do it, too.After investigating the Lenovo incident we found out that many other softwares – like some Parental Controls or security packages – do things even worse for your security. This test attempts to detect them all.
Send this to all your friends. Quick, simple test.
Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note, presents three terrifically well reasoned analogies, all designed to bring home a single point: That Apple is not prepared to enter the automobile business.
A very interesting read.
This is a fantastic collection, really gives you a sense of what the Apple Watch can do, what the actual apps will look like.
Apple got permission from Martin Scorsese to use excerpts from his NYU Tisch School of the Arts commencement speech, given last year, in a new “Make a film with iPad” ad they ran during the Oscars broadcast.
Pitch perfect ad. Watch the video below.
From Apple’s press release:
Apple® today announced a €1.7 billion plan to build and operate two data centres in Europe, each powered by 100 percent renewable energy. The facilities, located in County Galway, Ireland, and Denmark’s central Jutland, will power Apple’s online services including the iTunes Store®, App Store℠, iMessage®, Maps and Siri® for customers across Europe.
Not only is it running on 100% renewable energy, but the Danish data center is doing something positive with the extra heat their equipment generates.
Academy Awards are chosen using two different systems, one for Best Picture and one for all the rest of the awards. The non-Best Picture awards go to the nominee with the most votes. Simple. But the Best Picture voting is a little more complex. Read on for the details.
M.G. Siegler makes the case that Apple building a car is inevitable, that cars are in Apple’s DNA
Mark Gurman, writing for 9to5mac:
Apple intends to release the upcoming iOS 8.3 as a public beta via the company’s existing AppleSeed program in mid-March, according to the sources.
BBC:
On Oscar night the usually car-clogged streets of Hollywood fall silent because everyone is at a viewing party or, if they’re very lucky, sliding into a dress by Dior or slipping on a tuxedo en route to the big show.The streets aren’t entirely empty: countless limousines are zipping all over town, then making their way to the Dolby Theatre, more than a dozen blocks surrounding Hollywood Boulevard closed to all other traffic as the purring cars patiently wait to drop off their clients.
Parking’s as difficult as a diva at the best of times in Hollywood, so where do hundreds and hundreds of limos – and their suited and booted chauffeurs – go to wait until they have to pick up again?
I never know whether that would be a cool job or not.
Spoiler alert, best bet is to make a reliable backup of your Mac, enable FileVault encryption, use a password everywhere you can and use a different password at every opportunity. This is worth reading.
Interesting list of historical notifications. I added a few of my own.
But the kicker here is that the Fire TV actually works. My Apple TV has been plagued by poor performance and repeated crashes—sometimes right in the middle of a show. Every time that’s happened, it’s been faster to switch inputs to my Fire TV and resume the video there than it has been to wait for the Apple TV to finish its glacial restarting process.
I found this really interesting. It’s certainly not a good sign that the Apple TV has such poor performance when watching a program. If it was caused by Dan’s Internet, then the Fire TV wouldn’t work either, but it does. I don’t have many problems with my Apple TV, except when watching the NHL station—that usually sucks really bad.
My thanks to Edovia for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Screens is a beautiful, yet powerful VNC client for iOS and Mac that lets you connect back to your computer from the comfort of your living room, the corner coffee shop or anywhere in the world.
Until the end of the month, we’re happy to offer 20% off Screens for Mac to the readers of The Loop. Simply use this link to save!
Jim’s Note: I’ve used Screens for Mac and iOS since they were first released. I love them both.
Top Hat quickly answers the one question that indie developers have every morning: How well did our apps do in the App Store yesterday?
Top Hat lives in the Yosemite menu bar and shows up-to-date daily sales figures for your apps. Revenue from In-App Purchases is aggregated to give you a single total for each app. Weekly figures can be inspected by holding ⌥ as you click the Top Hat icon.
A great new app from Oisin Prendiville, the man behind Castro podcasting app, Unread and Tokens. I’m buying this.
Use the Mac creative tools you know & love, like Photoshop, with the touch experience of your iPad.
Made by some ex-Apple engineers (of course). This is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a while.
Les Paul’s personal 1954 Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty” sold to Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay last night for $335,500. According to the New York Times, Irsay’s guitar curator, Christopher McKinney, placed the bid at the February 19, 2015 auction held by Guernsey’s in New York City.
I would love to have this guitar. If only I had a few hundred grand laying around.
The Loop Magazine Issue 31:
Jim Dalrymple looks at the key to Apple’s success. Is it design, software, hardware? Maybe none of those things; Matt Gemmell talks about the colors of his various computer bags—It’s okay to skip safe; Darren Murph looks at where the DSLR is now that so many people are using an iPhone; Joe Caiati has a look at the origins of his writing; Steven Aquino has a wonderful story on how music and the iPod helped people with memories; With so many recordings of the same classical piece, Kirk McElhearn is still searching for the perfect recording, but does it exist?; Darren Murph looks at mobile data and how everything is being commoditized in mobile; and Tim Schock talks about the resurgence of the cassette… really.
You can download The Loop Magazine and preview the latest issue on your iPhone and iPad for free. A subscription is only $1.99 per month and you get access to all previous issues.
The Smithsonian:
In 1959, Xerox released the “914”—the first easy-to-use photocopier. The culmination of more than 20 years of experimentation, it was a much cleaner, “dry” process. The copier created an electrostatic image of a document on a rotating metal drum, and used it to transfer toner—ink in a powdered format—to a piece of paper, which would then be sealed in place by heat. It was fast, cranking out a copy in as little as seven seconds. When the first desk-size, 648-pound machines were rolled out to corporate customers—some of whom had to remove doors to install these behemoths—the era of copying began.Or more accurately, the explosion of copying began. Xerox expected customers would make about 2,000 copies a month—but users easily made 10,000 a month, and some as many as 100,000. Before the 914 machine, Americans made 20 million copies a year, but by 1966 Xerox had boosted the total to 14 billion.
We don’t give much thought to the copier many of us have daily access to but this article makes a good argument for the ways it changed the world and asks if 3D printing might do the same.
Medium:
As the 19th century teetered into the 20th, the clank of typewriter keys went from solo to symphony. They were the weapon of choice for professional writers, the business elite, people with things to say and the need to say them quickly. They unintentionally provided a passageway for women to tread into workplaces from which they had long been banished, and greatly expedited the rate at which human thought could be translated into ink. An 1867 issue of Scientific American marveled at the “machine by which it is assumed that man may print his thoughts twice as fast as he can write them.”Using a typewriter at times feels more like playing piano than jotting down notes, a percussive exercise in expressing thought that is both tortuous and rewarding.
Great story about a dying technology and the men who still service it. While I am nostalgic about typewriters and love their look and feel, there’s no way I’d ever want to go back to using one on a daily basis.
1998 was still a low point for Apple. Steve Jobs had just returned, had some new plans in place, but the triumphant arc of new products that would once again change the world had not yet begun.
The Chronicle of Higher Education sent two reporters, one a seasoned reporter and one fresh out of college, to a conference for college computing administrators to grab some time with Steve Jobs. Follow the link to read about the interview and listen to the whole thing.
I can’t comment on the Nest Protect smoke alarm. I don’t own one, have never had to set one up or disable one. But this video feels like the opening of a science fiction movie on the order of Alien or Terminator.
Fear the future, SkyNet is here!
Jordan Kahn of 9to5mac did a great job pulling together the list of Apple’s recent auto-related hires, along with some background for each one.
What’s not to like?
Bloomberg supplies more evidence that Apple is working on a car.
Apple has determined that a small percentage of MacBook Pro systems may exhibit distorted video, no video, or unexpected system restarts. These MacBook Pro systems were sold between February 2011 and December 2013.
More information is available from Apple’s Web site.
A nice looking bundle of 8 apps for Mac users. The apps purchased separately would cost $469, but they are selling it for $44.99. If you use code ULTRAMAC5, you can get it for $39.99.
Wired:
The Hangzhou store’s ceilings are almost 50 feet high, with no columns to be found. The façade of glass panels reaches from floor to ceiling without interruption, meaning Foster + Partners had to push well beyond their previous feats in glass manufacturing to get 11 seamless panes.
I’ve seen a lot of pics of this new store and it is an absolutely stunning architectural achievement.
Chinese PC maker Lenovo has found itself in the middle of a public relations disaster, following revelations that it sold a number of notebook computers with pre-installed software that hijacks users’ browser sessions to inject customized advertisements and seriously degrades the security of encrypted connections.
No matter what else they may do, everyone knows that Apple would never pull shit like this.
Really nice looking game for iPhone and iPad.
Re/code:
Twenty-five years ago today, a software application called Photoshop arrived, promising photographers and graphic designers a new realm of digital possibilities. But my brother John Knoll and I didn’t realize at the time just how broadly influential our little piece of software would become.When I began writing the code back in graduate school instead of focusing on my PhD at the University of Michigan, I had no idea what it would become or how it would be used.
Photoshop might be the most complicated software application I’ve ever used. It’s an amazing tool.