I love shopping on The Music Zoo Web site. I want all of these.

It’s become somewhat of a tradition now—the AltBeardBash at WWDC is in its fourth year, and we have big plans for the event next week.

As with previous years, entertainment will be provided by the Amazing Embarrassonic Human Karaoke Machine—these guys truly are amazing.

While the party is an invite-only event, I always hold a few tickets for readers of The Loop and listeners of my two podcasts, The Dalrymple Report with Merlin Mann and Amplified. So, if you’ll be in San Francisco for WWDC and would like to attend the party on Monday night, send me an email and I’ll see what I can do. I can’t guarantee entry, only that you’ll have a chance to come—as you can imagine, it’s a packed place.

We have three great sponsors for this year’s party:

• Pixelmator
• Microsoft
• UserTesting

Thanks to those companies for all the support.

Deal with it.Thanks to Bold Poker for sponsoring The Loop this week.

Bold Poker: Deal with it.

I’ve been a Marshall guy forever, but those new Marshalls can’t touch what Boogie is doing. I’m getting one of these Mark Five 25 amps. I’ll post my thoughts.

Jim and Dan talk about next week’s WWDC, Apple’s interest in music and television, and more.

Deluxe editions of Led Zeppelin’s final three studio albums: Presence, In Through The Out Door, and Coda will be released in July. As with the previous deluxe editions, all three have been newly remastered by guitarist and producer Jimmy Page and are accompanied by companion audio comprised of previously unreleased music related to the original release selected and compiled by Page.

Jimmy has done a good job on remastering some of the band’s other works, so this should be worth picking up.

I can’t imagine how much data Heineken is pushing through the cloud.

I almost had a goddamn seizure.

Seasonality Pro offers meteorologists and advanced weather enthusiasts a powerful way to explore current weather model data on iOS. View weather forecast model data at full resolution quickly while on the go.

That’s some detailed weather.

Just in case you were wondering.

Jim and Merlin cover all of the exciting news from this year’s Google IO conference.

Deal with it.

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.

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.

The new version is out. Smile Software put together a series of videos going over all the features of this great piece of software. Take a look on their Web site.

I love this song.

Jawbone sued Fitbit in California State Court here on Wednesday, accusing its rival of “systematically plundering” confidential information by poaching employees who improperly downloaded sensitive materials shortly before leaving.

This one is going to get messy.

FuzzMeasure is an audio and acoustic measurement tool to produce, analyze, and publish beautiful graphs. It delivers a comprehensive suite of features for professionals in research, acoustics, live sound, room design, and pro audio. By combining sophisticated technology with an elegant user interface, FuzzMeasure offers an unparalleled experience.

I’ve talked to the developer about FuzzMeasure quite a bit over the years. Great to see this update.

There was nothing unique about these items—they were puny in size and yet they arrived in a giant box bursting with air-filled packaging material. And I looked at that box with absolute and complete disgust, wondering, Is Amazon Prime actually an EcoCrime? Others on Twitter agreed with that take, which only reaffirmed my guilt for using Prime—for being an unwitting enabler of waste.

I’m not a member of Amazon Prime, but I know a lot of people, like Om, that are. I can’t wait to hear the explanation for the oversized packaging from Amazon.

Merlin and Jim have some fun with reader questions, talk about Apple’s MacBook lineup, look at the benefits of sleep tracking, and give some advice on guitar software for beginners.

• The Dalrymple Report Home Page
• The Dalrymple Report RSS Feed
• The Dalrymple Report on iTunes
• The Dalrymple Report on Overcast
• HuffDuffer
• Trooper (band) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Why Apple is Catholic and PCs are Protestant – Telegraph Blogs
• Four guitar apps
  • PodFarm by Line 6
  • Amplitude from IK Multimedia
  • JamVox by Vox (Mac only)
  • Bias by Positive Grid

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Until now, Ive’s job title has been Senior Vice President of Design. But I can reveal that he has just been promoted and is now Apple’s Chief Design Officer. It is therefore an especially exciting time for him.

Inside the fabled design studio (cloths over the long tables hiding the exciting new prototypes from prying eyes like mine) Jony has two people with him. They too have been promoted as part of Ive’s new role.

One is Richard Howarth, English as Vimto. “Richard is going to be our new head of Industrial Design,” says Jony. “And this is Alan Dye, the new head of User Interface.” Dye is a tall, amiable American.

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.

MY thanks to WALTR for sponsoring The Loop this week. WALTR is the first Mac app in the world to allow users transfer and playback unsupported formats such as MKV, AVI, FLAC & more – directly from the native Videos/Music app.

iTunes is the only option Apple gives us for loading media onto our iPhone, iPad or iPod touch from our Macs, and it limits the audio and video file formats we can upload. That’s a thing of the past thanks to WALTR from Softorino. This awesome Mac app lets you upload a long list of file formats — such as MKV, AVI, MP4, CUE, FLAC, APE, ALAC, OGG, AAC, AIFF and WAV — to your iOS device without ever touching iTunes. Just fire up WALTR, connect your iPhone or iPad to your Mac via USB, and drag files to convert and upload them so you can watch or listen on the go. It really is drag-and-drop simple, and file transfers are surprisingly fast.
 
No iTunes required; No jailbreak required; No need to worry about 3rd party converters;

• the awesomely cool app name is inspired by Walter White from Breaking Bad.

• this is the same app that discovered 4K video playback on iPhone 6

You can try out WALTR for free and a license costs US$29.95 but you can use the Loop exclusive coupon ‘HEINEKENSPECIAL’ for a 33% discount.

Weaknesses in the factory reset function within Google’s Android mobile operating system mean data from more than 500 million phones can be discovered despite being wiped, researchers have found.

And

Recovering data was even possible with full-disk encryption switched on, the researchers discovered.

Good luck Android people. Here is a sure way to fix the security issues you’re having.

In the month since the phone’s launch, however, the response has been lacklustre. The Korean news outlet Yonhap News Agency reports that the device has seen 10 million shipments so far. For comparison, Samsung’s previous model, the S5, shipped 11 million units in the same time frame a year ago — the year in which Samsung’s sales collapsed. These are shipments, not sales, so the number of devices sold could be even lower.

I guess you can’t copy and be successful forever.