Twitter is mulling the possibility of making promoted videos automatically play 6-second previews when they pop up in people’s feeds, according to people briefed on the company’s plans. If the autoplay previews were to catch someone’s eye, that person could click to watch the full video.
I think I speak for the world when I say, NO!
Karissa Bell:
In the back of one of the smaller halls at CES, a Chinese company was showing off fake Apple Watches. So, naturally, I bought one.
Dangerous Minds: If you need any proof of how much Country pop music sucks nowadays, look no further than this video which dissects and mashes-up six Country songs. All of them sound alike. This is just awful.
I remember seeing the whale quite often years ago.
Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.
That’s just awful.
The residents of Green Bank, West Virginia, can’t use cell phones, wi-fi, or other kinds of modern technology due to a high-tech government telescope. Recently, this ban has made the town a magnet for technophobes, and the locals aren’t thrilled to have them.
Fascinating story. I had never heard of “electrosensitives,” but it’s becoming a thing.
I agree with Ben Brooks here. I am forever trying to find the best in everything I do—there is always something better.
I really like Mayer, but I’m not sure she can turn things around quickly enough for the critics.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said the plaintiffs, Uriel Marcus and Benedict Verceles, failed to show that Apple made “affirmative misrepresentations,” despite citing online complaints and Apple marketing statements calling the laptops “state of the art” or the “most advanced” on the market.
People have to stop these bullshit lawsuits.
Apple on Thursday said it set a new record during the first week of January as customers purchased nearly half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases. What’s more, New Years Day 2015 was the single biggest day ever in App Store sales history. […]
Sounds great, but…
You have to hate it when the first words of something you expect to be good end in “but.”
Waterstones has admitted that sales of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader had “disappeared” after seeing higher demand for physical books.
The UK’s largest book retailing chain, which teamed up with Amazon in 2012 to sell the Kindle in its stores, saw sales of physical books rise 5pc in December, at the expense of the popular e-reader.
Kindle sales had “disappeared to all intents and purposes”, Waterstones said.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know how to explain this shift in sales. While I think it’s good that people are buying physical books, I think it’s way too early to say that e-books are dead.
With seventeen of the most amazing people in the Apple community—some developers, but most not—Yosemite is a conference for the Apple community. Our speakers are some of the best and most-loved writers, designers, philosophers, and developers working in the Apple ecosystem.
I’ll be speaking at CocoaConf’s Yosemite Conference this year. I’m really excited about the line-up of speakers and meeting the attendees. I hope to see you there!
Gruber summed up my feelings on the MacBook Air.
Whatever, the reasons, my mind keeps going back to the number — approximately $20 billion dollars of iPhones — roughly 34 percent of Apple’s total sales for the three months ending December 31, 2014. It explains everything about the company, its priorities and why it is starting to show signs of wear and tear across its other product lines.
Om brings up a good point—Apple’s focus is, and has been, on the iPhone for quite a while. Let’s not forget the record Mac sales over that period of time, though. Perhaps it’s the halo effect, but the Mac is doing better than ever.
Update: Om’s original article stated $20 billion, but it’s actually $43 billion.
Swiss watch makers like TAG Heuer, the biggest brand in luxury goods group LVMH’s watch portfolio, had until recently largely dismissed the threat of “smart” gadgets, but LVMH watch chief Jean-Claude Biver says he had changed his mind on the subject.
Not a big surprise.
Matt Richman’s thoughts on the news:
In order to have even a chance of being as feature-rich as Apple Watch, then, TAG’s smartwatch will have to pair with an Android phone. However, TAG wearers aren’t Android users. Rich people buy TAG watches, but rich people don’t buy Android phones.
I agree.
There are very few companies that continue to impress me, but Algoriddim has done it time and again. It’s not only the products, but the attitude in building those products to be great that wins me over. […]
An 86-year-old woman wrote this to her bank manager. Priceless.
Stephen Hackett has a look at a dozen RSS readers for OS X and while the winner is no surprise, it’s a great read.
Max Piantoni presents an exploration of the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh and the rare Experience CD that accompanied the machine’s release. Including a lengthy and hard to find 1997 interview with Jony Ive.
Max did a nice job with this.
The history of the PBS NewsHour can be traced back to the Watergate hearings.
Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer covered the 1973 hearings for PBS. In 1975 MacNeil began anchoring The Robert MacNeil Report which soon evolved into the 30-minute MacNeil/Lehrer Report.
Om Malik:
How to find originality in a “networked society” is on my mind, because I have recently come across three individuals who have been original for such a long time. During a conversation for my new art project, Pi.co, Frank Clegg, a US-based bag maker put it best when he said, “If I make something different, then I don’t really have any competition. Either people like what I do, or they don’t like what I do.” Such a simple statement, but so hard to implement, because many find such comfort from hiding in the herd.
This is exactly how I see Apple. They make products that we don’t always know we need—people are going to like them or they won’t. Either way, it’s going to be different.
I’m easily entertained, but I love these.
Jacob Gube covers the six ways to declare colors in CSS.
One app that continued to impress and fascinate me in 2014 was Storehouse. Mark Kawano and his team have done a great job with the service and app.
I hope everyone had a great holiday. The new year is here and it’s time to get back to work. If you would like to get your product or service in front of the good looking, intelligent readers of The Loop, now is your chance to book. I’ve opened up the first two months of 2015 on the sponsorship page. If there’s a week that you would like to book later in the year, just get in touch.
What are Samsung Experience Stores? Why, they’re a dying species, if the latest development in Samsung’s efforts to establish its own retail empire are any indication. The flagship Samsung store in London, occupying a large and prominent spot at the Westfield Stratford City shopping center, has now been “permanently closed,” ostensibly in response to the company’s slumping smartphone sales.
As much as Samsung tries to copy Apple, they prove time and again that they really don’t understand the market.
Everyone needs a Zamboni!
Great to see Avid add Yosemite support to the latest release.
To be clear, I don’t think that people who work for Facebook are evil. Instead they are part of a corporate machine whose job is to control all of our attention, for as long as possible. On the other hand, Facebook having empathy would mean a wholesale cultural graft towards a different way of thinking, developing and interacting with people.
Great read here from Om Malik.