Barnes & Noble abandons Nook hardware

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As was seemingly just a matter of time, the struggling book seller confirmed that it is abandoning its Nook hardware business and will instead rely on a ”partnership model for manufacturing in the competitive color tablet market” that will seek third-party manufacturers to build eReaders that run Nook software.

The tablet business is tough and companies like Barnes & Noble figured they could swoop in and easily grab share from Amazon. It’s not that easy.

Microsoft to bring “Age of Empires” to iOS

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Microsoft Corp will offer its popular “Age of Empires” game for Apple Inc’s iPhone and other smartphones through a tie-up with Japan’s KLab Inc, seeking to capture growth in a booming mobile game market.

Benjamin: A Franklin style task manager for iPhone

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Benjamin is a task manager based on the FranklinCovey method of time management. Built specifically to help replace your heavy Franklin Planner, Benjamin stores your master task list, daily task lists, projects, and daily notes so they are always at your fingertips. Best of all, Benjamin lets you sync your information between iPhone and iPad so that it’s conveniently available whether you’re at your desk or on the go.

I remember using the paper version of this. Of course, it didn’t sync and correcting entries was a pain. This looks good.

Pandora pays songwriter $16.89 for 1 million plays

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Soon you will be hearing from Pandora how they need Congress to change the way royalties are calculated so that they can pay much much less to songwriters and performers. For you civilians webcasting rates are “compulsory” rates. They are set by the government (crazy, right?). Further since they are compulsory royalties, artists can not “opt out” of a service like Pandora even if they think Pandora doesn’t pay them enough. The majority of songwriters have their rates set by the government, too, in the form of the ASCAP and BMI rate courts–a single judge gets to decide the fate of songwriters (technically not a “compulsory” but may as well be). This is already a government mandated subsidy from songwriters and artists to Silicon Valley. Pandora wants to make it even worse.

[Via DF]

Screen Time Podcast: Beyond the Physical

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Jim Dalrymple (The Loop) and Tom Hall (DOOM, Commander Keen) join Moisés to talk about the future of TV, content, and connected devices in the context of WWDC, E3, and how we like to consume content. Featured interview: Acorn Media VP of Digital Jen Linck.

Long form overload

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Many of us were too tired of the short, bloggy content that often tasted like a day old popcorn left outside on the porch. We all yearned for a deeply reported, insightful and contextual and nuanced bit of writing. And thus began the long form resurgence. It is enjoyable to read such pieces, but lately I am seeing a lot of stories that long form, because long form is new new thing to do.

Do anything because it’s the “new” thing is wrong. However, whether short blog posts or long form content, if it’s done well, it can be enjoyable.

What makes a good QA person

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Brent Simmons on his QA person Nick:

Nick does excellent work.

Which means that when I’m busy and have a lot to do, I curse his name, the air he breathes, and everybody who’s ever been nice to him. I suspect his heart is black and terrible and full of hatred toward me personally.

Which is just to say, again: Nick does excellent work.

Perfect.

All the apps have been written

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I want to take a time machine back to when I was 20 and Gibbs-slap myself… hard.

A great story from Kevin Hoctor about writing software and a wonderful bit of advice for writing an app.

10 more rules for dating my daughter

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Jeff La Grua, a former U.S. Marine, gathered these rules together from around the Web, updated them a bit and sent them to me. I like these rules very much.

iPad Web usage share grows

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Apple users are still prolific when it comes to tablet Web browsing, while Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Samsung’s Galaxy Tablet families remain in second and third place, respectively. Apple’s iPad usage share increased in May 2013 after a slight dip in April 2013, making its present Web usage share (82.4%) the highest since the beginning of 2013.

Again I ask—What the hell is everyone else doing with their tablets?

Dressing Michael Jackson

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The protectors of his presentation, we, as his personal stylists and exclusive designers for close to twenty-five years, learned through a unique creative process how to channel Michael’s thoughts, wishes, and philosophies to create clothing that would symbolize what he stood for. The King of Style: Dressing Michael Jackson is the first-ever pictorial compilation of the evolution of that process — a visual adventure of our work together.

The book just won a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Book Awards.

Samsung closing desktop business

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It makes sense for Samsung — the money is in the mobile markets and with the exception of the Mac Pro, nobody has really innovated in the desktop space in a long time.

Squarespace

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It’s never been more important to make a great impression online.

Squarespace puts world-class design in your hands and provides everything you need to create your own website in minutes. Squarespace websites are different. They’re designed to be simple, modern, and to look great on every device. With Squarespace, your personality, products, or content is always the focus.

Try Squarespace today for free at squarespace.com.

Apple owns the future of mobile

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Apple owns the future of mobile devices, not because it has erected a near monopoly market position protected by major barriers to entry like IBM in 1970s or Microsoft’s DOS and Windows in the 80s and 90s or Google’s search and Adobe’s Flash in the 2000s; Apple sells its products within a very diverse and openly competitive market and maintains minority unit market share in smartphones.

It just happens that Apple is making the vast majority of all the profits in mobile hardware, software, media and services. And the mobile segment happens to have much brighter prospects than the rest of the consumer technology market, particularly WinTel PCs.

Very well thought out and lengthy article from Daniel Eran Dilger.

Microsoft store opening fail

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“Yeah I’m here for Microsoft,” said Elizabeth Goodrich, before coming clean. “No I’m here for Weezer, I’m a huge fan.

“But I’ll look around – who knows?”

Because that’s exactly how you want your customers to react.

Apple TV console

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This is a smart article from Austin Sweeney. Where this whole thing is going, and when, is up in the air, but there is no doubt that stumbled into a great gaming device with the iPod touch. The big question for me is will it be easier for the console makers to convince the public they have an entertainment device or for Apple to convince the gamers they have a gaming device? The next couple of years are going to be very interesting.

Learning from ’80s guitar tone

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Whether you liked the tone or not, there were some great players and engineers experimenting in the 1980s that came up with some great tricks.

Website sidebars are garbage

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Eric E. Anderson:

Dumping a bunch of stuff into a sidebar doesn’t make you a blogger. Nor does it make your website more useful.

Anderson brings up some good points. I’ve tried to keep the information in the sidebar on The Loop very minimal, but there’s still more than what I’d like. This is the next project I’ll be tackling with The Loop’s design.

Guy English on the new Mac Pro

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A lot of people are probably going through this same type of thinking. Of course, there are others that will just grab the Mac Pro as soon as it’s released.