How to use the iPhone 6s, 6s Plus as a scale

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Damn. That is really cool. While this is not really a practical substitute for a lightweight scale, if you’ve got a new iPhone, this is definitely worth trying.

How Microsoft plans to make the Xbox great again

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Chris Plante, writing for The Verge:

In theory, the Xbox One was an improvement on everything fans loved about the Xbox 360: a more powerful Kinect, new hardware that merged the console with your cable box, and lots of talk about the cloud. Microsoft only forgot one thing: the games.

This is a great read.

Here’s how messed up Apple Music metadata is

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Kirk McElhearn, writing for Kirkville, added the album Ultimate Sinatra to his Apple Music Library and the album metadata was all over the place. What a mess.

Wallpaper from Mars

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The default iPhone backgrounds for iOS 9 are actual pictures from Mars. Read on for the details.

BBC iPlayer comes to Apple TV in the UK

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The BBC announced availability of the BBC iPlayer app on UK Apple TVs. I wish they would bring the iPlayer app to the US. I’d gladly pay a monthly fee, as I do with Netflix, Hulu, and HBO.

Awesome visualization of the evolution of Swift

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This is worth watching, even if you have zero interest in Swift and/or programming. It is a terrific visualization, showing the busy bunnies who created Swift, hard at work crafting a brand new programming language.

Why are Apple MacBooks more reliable?

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There’s nothing like controlling the design and build of both the hardware and the software from top to bottom. This piece has some interesting conclusions.

The iPad I left behind

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Much has been written about the iPad Pro replacing/not replacing your laptop. In this piece, M.G. Siegler walks through his logic in leaving his iPad Pro behind in favor of his MacBook. This mirrors my own feelings exactly.

The MacKeeper data breach

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The short version of this: A security researcher claimed to have downloaded sensitive info from 13 million MacKeeper accounts. The sites appear to now be patched. But the story’s legs come, at least in part, because of people’s strong feelings about MacKeeper.

Tumblr iOS app adds support for Live Photos

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Tumblr adds support for Live Photo. Still no Android support. The question is, should Apple push the Live Photo experience into the Android ecosystem?

Poison Maps and a novel use of 3D Touch [VIDEO]

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Poison Maps is an outstanding mapping app, based on the OpenStreetMap database, with over 20 millions points of interest (POI, which is the POI in POIson). More importantly, it uses a quite clever one finger zoom/pan gesture that Apple should take a look at. There’s a video embedded in the post that shows the gesture in action.

A note from Sarah

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Serial is the most popular podcast of all time. Host Sarah Koenig lays out the plot for season two, whose pilot episode dropped on iTunes yesterday.

What’s new in iOS 9.2

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Juli Clover on what’s new in iOS 9.2, and Kirk McElhearn digs through what changed in Safari when El Capitan shipped (old news, but a good read).

Verizon to roll out “sponsored data”

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Ina Fried, writing for re/code:

Verizon plans in the next few days to start testing so-called sponsored data, the equivalent of toll-free calling for the Internet age.

“The capabilities we’ve built allow us to break down any byte that is carried across our network and have all or a portion of that sponsored,” Verizon Executive VP Marni Walden said during a wide-ranging interview this week.

Wow! Lots of implications here.

The subscription wars are here

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Before the great TV disruption, the cable companies owned that $150 a month we all paid to feed our TV habits, the whole thing. Now other folks have figured out how to get their own little piece of that pie.