Amplified: ManPhone

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Jim and Dan talk about the latest 7-inch iPad rumors, justification for Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie, iOS 6’s new Maps app, Lightroom 4, The Beard’s WWDC party, the MacMan, and more.Sponsored by Igloo Software and Hover.

Facebook co-founder renounces citizenship

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Reuters:

Facebook co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, has renounced his U.S. citizenship, according to an Internal Revenue Service report, just days before the company’s record initial public offering.The offering could leave Saverin – who once owned 5 percent of the company – with a hefty capital-gains tax bill.

That’s convenient.

‘Best smartphone ever’

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You know it’s a slow day when the media is picking up on the fact that Siri is using WolframAlpha’s search to return a query for the “best smartphone ever” as the Nokia Lumia 900 4G. Here are a couple … Continued

Reminders and Notes on iCloud

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Federico Viticci:

A few minutes ago, developer Steve Troughton-Smith tweeted a photo showing a “beta” login page for iCloud.com, Apple’s suite of web applications to access iCloud services like Mail and Calendar. The photo showed Apple’s icon-based navigation for iCloud.com, with the addition of Reminders and Notes icons in what appears to be an internal version of iCloud.com carrying future features.

With iCloud being at the center of Mountain Lion and iOS, this shouldn’t be a big surprise.

RingMindMe for iPhone

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You can choose to manage your ringer by time-of-day or your current location. By time-of-day, set the ringer “Off” and ringer “On” times using a selection wheel and press Start. By location, just tap Start and choose the desired “Ringer-Off Zone” size. That’s it. RingMindMe does the rest. No account set-up required. RingMindMe does not override your ringer/silence switch. It just reminds you to change your ringer/silence switch based on the time-of-day or your current location.

I’ve had this happen to me a number of times. Simple, yet intuitive, the way an app should be.

Apple accuses Samsung of destroying evidence

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Yoni Heisler writing for NetworkWorld:

On May 1, Apple filed a motion in the Northern District of California alleging that Samsung intentionally destroyed documents it was obligated to hand over as part of the discovery process, an act referred to as “spoilation of evidence” in the legal parlance.

Not good Samsung. Maybe RIM is heading up Samsung’s legal team.

Maps

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Mark Gurman:

While Apple has always had full control of the actual iOS Maps application design, the backend has belonged to Google. That will change with iOS 6 thanks to their purchases of Placebase, C3 Technologies, and Poly9; acquisitions that Apple has used to create a complete mapping database. Now that the application is fully in-house, it is being renamed to simply “Maps.”

Makes sense.

BBEdit 10

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Thanks to Bare Bones Software and BBEdit for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

BBEdit 10 from Bare Bones Software — The leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac just keeps getting better, with more than one hundred new features. Download the demo and see for yourself!

Frictionless sharing

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Robert Wright:

Because at some point over the past year he had clicked a button without reading the fine print and thus had entered the world of “frictionless sharing.” In this world, if you’re on a website that permits frictionless sharing (theatlantic.com doesn’t), every time you click on a headline, the site can report this behavior to your Facebook friends.

Things like this are just creepy.

The Hindenburg

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Paul Kafasis: This week marks the 75th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster, a wreck perhaps best known for introducing the phrase “Oh, the humanity” to our lexicon. While chatting with my pal Marco a while back, I realized I knew … Continued

Drafts for iPhone

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Drafts is the quick, easy way to capture and share ideas on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Very clean interface with support for Markdown, TextExpander, Twitter and other services.

The iMac was almost called ‘MacMan’

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Jacqui Cheng for ArsTechnica:

“We went through scores of names, but the one that I hit on early on was the iMac,” Segall said. “Steve didn’t like any of our names, including the iMac, and said, ‘if you can’t beat MacMan, that’s what it’s gonna be.’ We came up with a few more names and came back, but still brought back some of our old favorites. At that point, Steve said, ‘well I don’t hate it this week, but I still don’t like it.”

Fascinating.

A handmade Plexi amp

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These pages describe a personal journey – my attempt to recreate the Marshall 50 watt 1987 head I owned in the early seventies. I was a tube geek even back then, and carefully hand-drew a schematic while I owned it.

If you go the last page, you can hear how it sounds. Very impressive.

Ultimate Markdown editor wish list

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Brett Terpstra:

There are a few great Markdown text editors available, and more being worked on right now. I want to put a list of features out there that I think any true Markdown editor should include. Some of these are implemented in one editor or another, but nothing has brought it all together (aside from TextMate with all of my customizations, and even that lacks some of the polish mentioned below).

Facebook plans an app store

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Om Malik:

Facebook says it is launching an app store that will allow people to get access to social apps on the network, without much heavy lifting. The company made the announcement in a blog post today. The company is hoping that the new app store will make it easy for apps to be discovered on the platform.

Oh great, just what we need.

HP’s lying bullshit

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HP Vice President of Industrial Design Stacy Wolff talking about how they didn’t copy Apple:

I think if you look at the new Spectre XT, there are similarities in a way, not due to Apple but due to the way technologies developed. Apple may like to think that they own silver, but they don’t. In no way did HP try to mimic Apple. In life there are a lot of similarities.”

Yeah Stacy, because this looks nothing like a MacBook Air, nothing at all.

‘Readers aren’t stupid’

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Alexis Madrigal:

I’m sympathetic to the business concerns of the media industry. I really am. But this myth that slideshows are the path to salvation has got to be put into a rocket and sent hurtling into the sun. People know when your product is cheap; there is no “trick” of the web.

Please make them go away.

Ivy Bridge Macs

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Alex Brooks:

As the fifth month of the year continues to progress the time is nearing for Apple to release a flurry of new Macs. Unlike the days of IBM’s PowerPC CPU architecture it’s now relatively easy to pinpoint when and what Macs are going to get refreshed at what point during the year and that is all down to Apple’s use of Intel’s architecture.

Alex has been doing some great work lately.

James Bond shot at 4,662 in his movies

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However, by my reckoning, in the 22 Bond films to date, there have been at least 4662 shots fired at our hero. A static well-aimed shot would almost certainly have proved lethal, but assuming all 4662 were “on the run”, the probability of a single fatal shot is about 5 per cent.

British Parliament buys 650 iPads

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The iPad trials were underway since 2011, and the House of Commons administration committee recently recommended the rapid rollout of suitable mobile tablet hardware to all 650 MPs.” And by tablet they meant iPad.

Good move. Let’s hope other governments follow.

‘It’s a form letter’

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Marco Arment on AppleInsider’s report about Apple working on multi-user support on the iPad:

That’s the standard “duplicate bug” response email. It’s a form letter. It means nothing, except that he was not the first person to make that suggestion.

The story behind Steve Jobs as FDR

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Glenn, Mike, and I marched into Steve’s office to give him the pitch. Pretty much the way I outlined it in the previous paragraph. Steve’s eyes were sparkling through it all. By the time I got to, “and you as FDR,” I had made the sale.

And here is the video he’s talking about.

[Via MacStories]

HTC One X review and Android sucks balls

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Abdel Ibrahim:

When it comes to Android, though, my second in-depth experience wasn’t any less jarring than the first. Despite my time in the trenches with ICS on the Galaxy Nexus, HTC has slapped on so much paint with Sense that I often struggled to find my way. And what I recognized I still didn’t like. Granted, I cut my teeth on iOS devices, which pride themselves on simplicity, but I refuse to believe Android couldn’t be more user friendly. For all its options, there’s too much clutter. But if you can look past that or are accustomed to Android, I have little doubt you’d love the HTC One X.

Unfortunate for HTC that a review comes down to how much Android sucks balls.