A 2018 NYCxDESIGN Awards Finalist, the Modern Record Player is sure to remind design-versed minds of Dieter Rams’ iconic Braun SK55, especially in its all-white iteration. Sharing a vented speaker front design with controls filtered of excess ornamentation, Symbol Audio’s modern day version houses a custom-built class AB amplifier powering custom-engineered speakers and crossovers, each developed in partnership with Morel, a company with a storied history of its own. The turntable itself offers an acrylic platter floating upon a three-phase isolation system engineered to prevent unwanted vibration.

I looked at this for a few minutes before deciding if I liked it or not. I do.

There’s now a new way to customize your drive on Google Maps for iOS. Depending on your mood, you can swap out the classic blue navigation arrow for a new icon—a stylish sedan, a timeless pickup truck, or a speedy SUV.

Okay, this isn’t the most productive feature in the world, but it’s cool.

Former President Barack Obama formally announced on Monday a multiyear production deal with Netflix in which he and the former first lady, Michelle Obama, will produce television shows and films for the streaming service.

And

Instead, a release from Netflix said the Obamas will produce “scripted series, unscripted series, docu-series, documentaries and features” that highlight issues and themes the president pursued during his eight years in office.

It will be interesting to see how these shows evolve. I imagine they will be a very popular part of the Netflix catalog.

The information in the exposed database included the email addresses of parents who used TeenSafe, the Apple ID email addresses of their children, and children’s device name and unique identifier. Plaintext passwords for the children’s Apple ID were also among the data set, despite claims on the company’s website that it uses encryption to protect customer data.

It’s incredible to me that companies allow this kind of stuff to happen. It’s inexcusable.

Thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. BBEdit is one of my most used apps over the last 25 years of my career. It was installed first on any new computer I had over the years because it was so crucial to all the work I did.

Back in the 90s, we built our Web sites from scratch, so we used BBEdit to hand-code everything we needed to get the site up-and-running. We didn’t have a CMS at the time, so BBEdit became the default app for actually posting stories as well. It was an all-purpose tool that became indispensable for us.

We didn’t just use BBEdit for building and maintaining the Website, we also used it as our default word processing tool. Every word written for the stories we posted was done in BBEdit.

Now, as BBEdit celebrates its 25th anniversary, I can still say I am a proud user. Congrats to the crew at Bare Bones Software and thanks for making such a great product.

Download BBEdit now and try it for free!

It would be impossible to get a consensus on something like this, but I always enjoy reading opinions on which albums are a band’s best.

Twitter is giving developers more time to adjust to its API platform overhaul, which has affected some apps‘ ability to continue operating in the same fashion. The company clarified this morning, along with news of the general availability of its Account Activity API, that it will be delaying the shutdown of some of its legacy APIs by three months’ time. That is, APIs originally slated for a June 19, 2018 shutdown – including Site Streams, User Streams, and legacy Direct Message Endpoints – will now be deprecated on Wednesday, August 16, 2018.

It’s sad that Twitter continues to treat developers so poorly.

Today, we use policies, human review processes, and machine learning to help us determine how Tweets are organized and presented in communal places like conversations and search. Now, we’re tackling issues of behaviors that distort and detract from the public conversation in those areas by integrating new behavioral signals into how Tweets are presented. By using new tools to address this conduct from a behavioral perspective, we’re able to improve the health of the conversation, and everyone’s experience on Twitter, without waiting for people who use Twitter to report potential issues to us.

I’m glad to see Twitter taking some action on this issue—we’ll have to wait to see how it works out. It’s a shame that a small number of people can have such a huge affect on their experience on the platform.

Yes, that’s right, a shed.

Om Malik:

In my social circles — admittedly a very tech-centric community — it is hard to find anyone who has told me that they love Apple Photos. Usual refrain tends to be – “That’s a mess.” There are no magical aha moments. Photos are Apple and by extension, iPhone’s currency. And yet the software on iPhone and Macs resembles a two-legged dog dragging itself over the rocky ground. Yes, there is assurance that it is not feeding some giant ads-spewing web monster, but by Jove, it isn’t a fun experience, and not magical.

I have more thoughts on Apple Music than photos, but I use the music app much more. When it comes to photos, I use the app to basically store whatever pictures or screenshots I take—that’s it. Om’s comment that Apple Photos wasn’t “magical” rings true to me.

The Environmental Law Institute (ELI) is pleased to announce that it will present its 2018 Environmental Achievement Award to Lisa Jackson, Vice President of Apple’s Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, in recognition of her visionary leadership and outstanding environmental stewardship over a most distinguished career.

According to ELI’s President Scott Fulton, “Lisa has exemplified leadership, innovation, and commitment to sound science and rule of law at each step of her remarkable career. She has been a tireless champion for both sustainability and environmental justice, and has left an enduring mark on both the private sector and the public sector. Her work in greening Apple’s supply chain and in reducing the company’s carbon and natural resource footprint has been exceptional, reflecting the power and reach of business leadership in advancing environmental performance and stewardship.”

Apple’s environmental efforts are amazing.

BBEdit is one of my most used apps over the last 25 years of my career. It was installed first on any new computer I had over the years because it was so crucial to all the work I did.

Back in the 90s, we built our Web sites from scratch, so we used BBEdit to hand-code everything we needed to get the site up-and-running. We didn’t have a CMS at the time, so BBEdit became the default app for actually posting stories as well. It was an all-purpose tool that became indispensable for us.

We didn’t just use BBEdit for building and maintaining the Website, we also used it as our default word processing tool. Every word written for the stories we posted was done in BBEdit.

Now, as BBEdit celebrates its 25th anniversary, I can still say I am a proud user. Congrats to the crew at Bare Bones Software and thanks for making such a great product.

Download BBEdit now and try it for free!

My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Do you sling code or compose with words? Whether you’re an app developer, web developer, systems admin or just want a powerful writing tool that stays out of your way, BBEdit is worth checking out.

BBEdit is crafted in response to the needs of writers, web authors, and software developers, providing an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and the manipulation of text. An intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit’s best-of-class features, including grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Unix scripting support, text and code completion, and of course a set of robust HTML markup tools.

Download BBEdit now and try it for free!

Silicon Valley self-driving startup Drive.ai said on Monday it will launch a pilot program for an autonomous ride-hailing service in July in Frisco, Texas, with safety drivers present.

I honestly don’t know how I feel about this. I know that autonomous vehicles are here to stay and will become more prevalent in the coming years, but sometimes I think it may be too soon. That said, riding in an autonomous vehicle is probably safer than a human driver in a lot of ways. I think it would be fascinating to get in a car and just have it drive away.

My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Do you sling code or compose with words? Whether you’re an app developer, web developer, systems admin or just want a powerful writing tool that stays out of your way, BBEdit is worth checking out.

BBEdit is crafted in response to the needs of writers, web authors, and software developers, providing an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and the manipulation of text. An intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit’s best-of-class features, including grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Unix scripting support, text and code completion, and of course a set of robust HTML markup tools.

Download BBEdit now and try it for free!

This is really cool.

It seems hard to believe that it was 20 years ago when Steve Jobs introduced the world to iMac. For me, that first iMac computer changed the history of what Apple was to become—one of the greatest, most innovative companies in ever. […]

Texture, the magazine subscription service that Apple purchased back in March, plans to shut down its Windows app at the end of June. Users were informed of the discontinuation this week through emails and a note inside the app, which said that after June 30th, “this app will stop working and will no longer be available in the Microsoft Store.” Texture’s Android, Amazon Fire, and iOS apps will still be supported.

Makes sense.

AI often sounds like some far-off science fiction concept, but it’s actually behind a lot of things you encounter in your daily life. Here’s the rundown: we train a software system with lots of examples so that it can pick up on patterns.

Clearly, the examples in this post are using Google apps, but many of them can be used in the Apple ecosystem as well. It’s fascinating how many things we do that involve machine learning these days.

Apple has acknowledged a microphone issue affecting a limited number of iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus models running iOS 11.3 or later.

In an internal document distributed to Apple Authorized Service Providers this week, obtained by MacRumors, Apple said affected customers may experience a grayed-out speaker button during phone calls. The issue may also prevent affected customers from being heard during phone calls or FaceTime video chats.

It’s always fascinating to me how these types of issue only affect a small number of users using a certain model. I’m not being sarcastic, it’s honestly an interesting phenomena.

My thanks to Marketcircle for sponsoring The Loop this week. Want to grow your business but struggle to keep track of everything on your plate as it is? Are Apple Contacts, Calendar, Notes, and Email just not cutting it anymore? If this sounds like you, you’re feeling exactly how small businesses feel before they try Daylite.

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Want to grow your business without risking things slipping through the cracks?

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Mention you heard about Daylite on The Loop and get 10% off your first month subscription.

From furniture manufacturer MOOW comes the Stüda, a LEGO-compatible table designed by Italian firm Nine Associati. Offered in three different sizes, the storage units are surfaced not in LEGOs themselves, but in Corian that they’ve CNC-milled to provide the studs.

What a great idea!

Google this morning posted a story on its Keyword Blog that highlights the ongoing growth of its AI helper, Google Assistant. According to the company, the Assistant now works with “every major device brand” in the U.S., meaning that it can connect with more than 5,000 smart home devices, up from 1,500 in January.

And

For home automation, Apple’s solution is HomeKit and Siri. Although not an exact comparison due to potentially missing products, Apple’s website has a list of HomeKit-compatible smart home products that reaches to about 200 as of writing, with some yet to launch.

The number of devices the technology can connect with is definitely important, but a lot of people are also concerned about privacy. I don’t think there is any doubt that Apple values customer privacy more than any other technology company, but a lot of the success of home products will be determined by how much the consumer actually cares about privacy versus features.

The Reform Government Surveillance coalition, which includes several major tech companies who have teamed up to lobby for surveillance law reform, this week released a statement condemning recent proposals for backdoor access into electronic devices and reaffirming a commitment to strong encryption.

The coalition is made up of multiple tech companies who have taken a strong stance against weakening encryption, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, Snap, Evernote, LinkedIn, Oath (owned by Verizon) and Facebook.

It’s great seeing some of these major companies uniting to help protect our privacy. It seems to me that it would be a long, hard road for a government to require backdoors on devices. We’ve seen this battle played out publicly in the past and I have no doubt we’ll see it again.

Tesla Inc on Wednesday posted its worst ever quarterly loss and said its Model 3 production target remains on track, expecting about 5,000 per week in about two months.

Tesla is an interesting case in the tech/auto industry, but surely they can’t continue these losses for much longer.

Hulu now has over 20 million U.S. subscribers – that’s up from the 17 million-plus it claimed in January. The news of its subscriber growth is being delivered alongside a series of pitches to advertisers at the company’s Upfronts presentation in New York this morning, where it’s also touting its upcoming original series and detailing its new ad products. One of those will be of particular interest to Hulu’s users, too – the company will at last allow subscribers to download shows to watch offline.

I love offline viewing with my Netflix account, so I’m sure this will be a big hit with Hulu subscribers. I tried Hulu a while ago, but I wasn’t all that impressed. I may give it another go.

Shares of Snap Inc sank as much as 22 percent to the lowest since its 2017 flotation on Wednesday, after first quarter numbers showed it losing confidence among users and advertisers due to a widely-panned redesign of Snapchat.

I’ve never been a big Snap user, but it seems to me that users of companies like this are very fickle—They could be very loyal one day and turn on you the next. This isn’t just about Snap, but every social media platform available today.

Amazon is pausing the unprecedented spree of headquarters construction that transformed the city of Seattle over the last decade, suspending plans to add 7,000 to 8,000 jobs in 1 million square feet of new office space.

Whether it’s a political maneuver to influence City Hall or an actual change in direction remains to be seen. But it could spook developers of housing and offices planning on Amazon’s continued growth.

Amazon has drawn a line in the sand and is sending a clear message to Seattle City Hall—approve this tax and we’re out.

Apple on Tuesday reported financial results for its fiscal 2018 second quarter, which ended on March 31, 2018. The company posted quarterly revenue of $61.1 billion, an increase of 16 percent from the year-ago quarter, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.73, up 30 percent.