WWDC Expectations

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Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is only a couple of weeks away and everyone is wondering what the company will unveil during the keynote address. As much as we all have long wish lists for what we would like to see, I think it’s important to balance those with realistic expectations for what’s likely to happen.

Designing blogs for readers

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How about that for a novel idea — design your blog so it’s better for the reader. There are a lot of great ideas and thoughts here. You don’t have to follow them all, but it’s a good read to get an understanding of what works for readers and publishers.

The Sweethome

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The Sweethome is the sister site of The Wirecutter, our electronics leaderboard. It’s a list of the best home gear, each item chosen mindfully and with many hours of research, interviews with the world’s most knowledgable experts and testers, all in service of backing up our own testing and opinions. It’s not a blog. We don’t do news and we don’t post multiple times a day–we just want to help you pick out great gear and get on with your life.

The Wirecutter is a great site and it looks like The Sweethome will follow in its footsteps.

Apple stock got mugged

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Philip Elmer-Dewitt:

Spooner, a Canadian money manager and financial columnist, likened the burst of short selling to a “swarming,” a violent street crime where “an unsuspecting innocent bystander is attacked by several culprits at once.”

I hate Wall St.

Sony’s moneymaker: Selling insurance

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Hiroko Tabuchi for The New York Times:

Although Sony sells hundreds of products as varied as batteries and head-mounted 3-D displays, it so happens that Sony’s most successful business is selling insurance. While it doesn’t run this business in the United States or Europe, Sony makes a lot of money writing life, auto and medical policies in Japan.

Its financial arm accounts for 63 percent of Sony’s total operating profit last year. Life insurance has been its biggest moneymaker over the last decade, earning the company 933 billion yen ($9.07 billion) in operating profit in the 10 years that ended in March.

I’m happy that Sony is making money in one portion of its business, but I find it really sad that the maker of the iconic Walkman is selling insurance.

Canadians complain their money smells like maple syrup

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The national treasury released a new plastic bank note in November 2011, and they have received hundreds of emails from residents who are convinced that the bills have an added fragrance.

’They all have a scent which I’d say smells like maple? Please advise if this is normal?’ wrote one concerned citizen.

Canadians are so cute.

Oxygene for Cocoa, from RemObjects Software

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Oxygene for Cocoa

Thanks to RemObjects for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS this week. Oxygene for Cocoa is a new and modern programming language and development tool chain for creating Mac and iOS apps.

It is not a bridge or an abstraction layer, but full-featured language for the Objective-C runtime, giving you direct access to all the great APIs of the platform and letting you create truly native (in every sense of the word) apps.

The language is based on Object Pascal (but this is not your daddy’s Pascal!), it is well-rounded and provides many advanced language features that will change the way you look at writing code.

And as if that was not enough: if you are so included, the same great language also lets you natively target Android/Java and .NET development, as well – time-proven and well established on those platforms for many years.

Find out more at remobjects.com/oxygene.

Dog Beards

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We posted about cat beards, so it only seems fair.

Feral games bundle: Six games for $20

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Beginning today game fans can pre-order the bundle through Sunday for US$19.99, which includes LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, DiRT 2, Battlestations Pacific, The Movies: Superstar Edition, Tropico 3: Gold Edition & Batman: Arkham Asylum. Those who pre-order this weekend will get a US$10 virtual coupon towards the purchase of any other Feral Interactive game from the Macgamestore which must be redemmed by the end of June.

Great looking games for $20.

Microsoft caught lying about iPad size

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This is not to scale. Microsoft has drawn a 10.1 inch tablet 36% larger than a 9.7 inch tablet (140×78 pixels vs 102×79). This is so far off you can visually see it’s wrong.

Come on Microsoft, stop being dicks.

The Crossroads of Sabbath

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The Crossroads of Sabbath walking tour is an opportunity to walk in the footsteps of Ozzy, Geezer, Tony and Bill and learn about the environment that shaped them. The tour lasts approximately 90 minutes. The route has been programmed to finish at one of the finest pubs in the country where excellent ales and Thai food might tempt you.

I would love to do this.

Where Reuters try not to look like assholes

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Apple has operated almost tax-free in Ireland since 1980, welcomed by a government keen to bring jobs to what was then one of Europe’s poorest countries, former company executives and Irish officials have said.

That’s the opening to a Reuters story where they try to convince people they dug up this dirt on Apple. The only problem is that Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer are the ones that revealed this during the senate hearings earlier this week.

Reuters assholes.

The Loop Magazine Issue 2 available

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The Loop Magazine Issue 2 is now available for download from Apple’s Newsstand. There’s a great line-up of writers in this issue including Joe King, the co-founder of Denver-based rock band The Fray, UI expert Matt Gemmell, iMore Editor-in-Chief Rene … Continued

Amplified: I Was a Co-Ed

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Jim and Dan talk about Tim Cook’s senate testimony and discuss the issues involved in owning a company in the US but manufacturing your products abroad. Later they delve into Google’s new 3D maps, a very young musician’s incredible rendition of Van Halen’s Eruption, the new Xbox one, and more.

Sponsored by Hover (use code DANSENTME for 10% off), Shutterstock (use code DANSENTME5 for 30% off), and Squarespace (use code DANSENTME5for 10% off).

OmniPresence

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OmniPresence is the best way to sync all of your documents across all of your devices. And it works on most web hosts, including OS X Server, which means you can store all of your data yourself.

The folks at The Omni Group are some of the best developers around.

$100,000 comic found in a wall

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While remodeling his newly purchased home in Elbow Lake, Minn., David Gonzalez noticed something unusual amid the old newspapers that had been used as wall insulation.

It was a copy of Action Comics No. 1 from 1938, the very first comic to feature the granddaddy of all superheroes, Superman.

I’m going to rip apart my house.