Apple acquires indoor GPS-location firm

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The two-year-old startup has developed ways for mobile apps to detect a phone user’s location in a building using Wi-Fi signals. It has been offering the technology to application developers for indoor mapping and new types of retail and social networking apps. The company has a handful of employees, and its co-founders include former Google software engineering intern Joseph Huang.

Squarespace

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I’d like to thank Squarespace for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

Squarespace is a beautiful and intuitive website publishing platform that allows anyone to easily create professional web pages, blogs, and galleries all in one place.

Simply start with one of Squarespace’s award-winning designs, add images and content, connect your social accounts, and you’ll have a website that looks great on every device.

All Squarespace accounts come with award-winning 24/7 support, as well as cloud hosting, real-time analytics, and a free domain.

Whether you’re a creative professional, business owner, or blogger, Squarespace makes it easy to bring your ideas to life.

Start your website for free today at Squarespace.com.

Feedbin: A Google Reader alternative

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I saw this mentioned on App.net the other day and it looks interesting. I pinged its creator Ben Ubois and asked if it was meant to be a Google Reader alternative and he said yes. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I will.

A special guitar story

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More than two decades later he found out a dark, but compelling secret about the guitar. It had been stolen and once belonged to a well-known artist in the Austin, Texas, music scene.

It had been handmade by Ted Newman of Austin for alternative country artist Joe Ely, who has toured with The Clash, Lyle Lovett and Guy Clark, among others.

What a great story.

School principal foils iPad thief

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A high school principal took a hands-on approach to school safety in San Francisco when he chased down a suspected iPad thief and pulled him off a fence as he tried to escape, school officials and authorities said.

LG is making a watch too

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Korean technology giant LG Electronics is developing its own smart wristwatch, effectively joining the competition between Apple and Samsung Electronics who are making theirs as well.

Okay, so now we have LG, Samsung and Google that are making a watch to compete with a product that Apple is supposedly going to make.

Symbol fonts

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Brian Suda for A List Apart:

Now it’s time we embrace the third epoch in performance optimization: symbol fonts.

Embedding a symbol font lets us move some of those tiny icons into a single font file rather than a sprite. This has the same caching and file size benefits as a CSS sprite, as well as some additional benefits we’re only now realizing with high-resolution displays.

iPads at the Cleveland Museum of Art

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Throughout the museum, the iPad offers options for learning about items in the collection. “There is only so much information you can put on a wall, and no one walks around with catalogs anymore,” Mr. Franklin said. One of the app’s simplest features is also one of the most effective: in many cases, it can produce a photo of the artwork’s original setting — seeing a tapestry in a room filled with tapestries, rather than in a white-walled gallery, is revelatory.

User experience trends

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I spent a lot of time thinking about the user experience when redesigning The Loop a couple of years ago.

Apple takes password reset offline

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Earlier Friday, The Verge reported on a significant security exploit with Apple’s “reset password” functionality for Apple IDs. Armed with only your email address and date of birth, a hacker could tweak a specific URL to reset the password for your account.

Wow, that is not good. I’m glad to see they took it offline quickly.

Trusting Google

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Om Malik:

It is hard to trust Google anymore to make rational and consumer centric decisions. I said — nuanced as it might be — that I don’t trust Google to introduce new apps and keep them around, because despite what the company says, these apps are not their main business.

That’s how I feel.

Reuters iOS app

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Very well done update to their app. I especially like the transitions.

Beatles guitar goes up for auction

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The rare offering of a VOX guitar played by both John Lennon and George Harrison is what rock n’ roll legends are made of. The striking custom guitar built by Mike Bennett and Dickey Denney was gifted to “Magic Alex” Mardas by John Lennon in 1967. Harrison played the guitar while practicing “I am the Walrus” during The Magical Mystery Tour and by Lennon while recording a video session for “Hello, Goodbye.”

A great UI is invisible

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A really well designed user interface is one that goes unnoticed by the user, whereas a poorly designed user interface forces the user to pay attention to it instead of the content.

Absolutely.

Apple kills the competition in J.D. Power ratings

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For the ninth consecutive study, Apple ranks highest among manufacturers of smartphones in customer satisfaction. Apple achieves a score of 855 and performs particularly well in physical design and ease of operation.

The average was 796 points. Nokia scored 795, Samsung 793, Motorola 792 and HTC 790. LG scored 744 and lowest of the manufacturers was BlackBerry with 732.

Basically, the battle is for second place.

Two-step verification for iCloud accounts

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Apple has joined the growing list of companies offering two-step verification to secure user accounts. By enabling two-step verification, whenever you attempt to log in on a new device with your Apple ID, you will be asked to enter a 4-digit verification code. This code will be sent to a device that you have registered as a trusted device, such as your iPhone, via a Find My iPhone notification or SMS.

Google Now has not been submitted to Apple

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Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said that Google Now has been submitted to the Apple’s App Store and is waiting for approval, but Apple’s says that’s not true.

Apple told me today Google Now has not been submitted at all.

Why would Schmidt lie about this? Besides the fact he’s Eric Schmidt and works for Google.

Apple exec talks about the Environment

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Apple’s commitment to the environment is second to none and on Thursday the company released its yearly update detailing the environmental impact its products. I spoke with Apple executive Scott Broderick about the report and what Apple is doing on the environmental front. […]

Google Maps chief steps down

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Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) continues to shuffle its executive ranks, announcing Senior Vice President of Geo and Commerce Jeff Huber will step down to pursue new projects within the company. The move follows just one day after longtime head of Android Andy Rubin also resigned his post.

This happened almost a week ago, but I missed it at the time.