The Beatles anomalies list

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This is great. A list of all The Beatles songs and strange little things that happen on each of them.

Minimalism

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If done correctly, minimalist design is one of the best and most effective approaches to creating beautiful websites. Not only is the target audience subjected to less clutter and noise, but you can use colors, textures, and fonts to create a very simple yet very memorable experience for the person viewing your site.

Exactly. Minimalism doesn’t mean ugly or so spartan that it looks empty.

Improve your Web design projects

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The first few things you do after a potential client contacts you about a web design project are the most important. In fact, these initial steps can spell the difference between a good or bad project.

I don’t envy designers. It takes talent to get the client to express what they want in a way the designer can satisfy their expectations.

Don’t be an asshole

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Remember, this is a controlled test. A dog will start to panic, making the experience even worse for them. A dog also can’t perspire. If you see a dog in car, call the police.

If you leave your dog in the car, you’re an asshole.

The failure of Android’s open

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Daniel Eran Dilger:

Open Source enthusiasts love to tell you Android is winning, and that it is winning because it is open. But they’re wrong on both counts. The history of computing makes that abundantly clear, as do the current leaders in profitability.

Some great points in this article.

Appsfire

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I’d like to thank Appsfire sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Appsfire is a delightful and elegant mobile guide to the best apps. If you believe the App store is not doing enough to help you find the apps that are right for you, try Appsfire. It features an incredibly fast and accurate app search, curated lists of apps and deals, it shows you the apps your friends like and more. In addition, they also help developers grow which is very important. Download Appsfire in the App store or get it here.

UI principles for interaction design

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Interaction Design is here to facilitate interactions between people and their environment, which in our case it is a website. Interaction designers are only concerned with how users and computers interact, unlike UX designers who take into account all user-facing aspects of a software or system.

Why Google Reader was shutdown

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Marco Arment:

Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything.5 While Google did technically “own” Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance.

Bingo!

Most hated

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Philip Elmer-Dewitt does a little investigation on the company that says the iPhone 5 is the most hated smartphone and the Galaxy one is the most loved. It’s funny.

Apple vs. Google: The commoditization wars

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Mike Elgan:

Apple sells hardware and software. To Apple, services are free things they offer to support the sale of their hardware and software. So Apple wants to de-commoditize hardware and software and commoditize services.

[…]

Google, on the other hand, is a services company that makes hardware and software to support its services. So Google wants to make services less commoditized and hardware and software more commoditized.

Great article.

Samsung stock tumbles despite record profit

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Samsung shares tumbled almost 4% on Friday as the company pre-announced record second-quarter earnings that still missed analysts’ sky-high consensus.

It’s true that I don’t like Samsung’s blatant copying of Apple products, but I really do hate Wall St. too. It’s wrong for any company to see their stock tumble because analysts were wrong in their forecasts. It’s happened to Apple when they reported record profits and now Samsung. Analysts should be downgraded, bot the companies delivering record profits.

States criticize Google for selling ads for illegal products

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In a letter sent to Google, Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning and Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt complained about Google’s practice of placing before some YouTube videos advertisements for pharmacies willing to sell percocet and oxycontin without a prescription.

I imagine illegal products pay a high price for Google ads. It should be interesting to see how Google squirms out of this one.

Irish government will not hold inquiry into Apple tax practices

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An Irish parliamentary committee has voted against hauling in representatives from Google and Apple to answer for their tax affairs in the country, after the firms were accused of using Ireland as a base for their aggressive tax planning.

Good, they shouldn’t. Ireland is offering Apple—and other companies—lower taxes so they will move operations there. That’s smart business for any country. It’s up to all the other countries to ask themselves why they are taxing so much.

BlackBerry execs to face tough questions from investors

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BlackBerry (BBRY.O) will likely face tough questions about its future at its annual meeting on Tuesday after dismal quarterly results last week triggered a 28 percent plunge in the Canadian smartphone maker’s share price.

Seriously? Now you ask the tough questions?

Identifying fake images on Twitter

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A recent paper presented by researchers from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, IBM Research Labs and the University of Maryland found that it was possible to identify tweets containing fake Sandy images with up to 97 percent accuracy.

Clearly some images are fake, but in breaking news situations like Hurricane Sandy, fakes are often spread as real images.

Codename Prometheus

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Experience designer Aral Balkan has revealed plans to create an open platform that competes on user experience in the consumer space.

This is a huge undertaking.

Simplicity

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In the last year, there has been a push for simplicity in our household. While it has mainly been driven by yours truly, I have to give most of the credit to none other than our realtor for getting me in the mindset of reducing everything we use down to the bare necessities. It started with one question: ”Do you really need all these computers running?”

I suffer from this too.