Apple on Friday contacted The Loop with a statement regarding reports that iTunes is deleting music from people’s library without permission. […]

Great video showing the tonal differences between some iconic guitars.

It looks like drivers in the UK could soon be able to store their driver’s license within Apple’s Wallet app on iPhones as CEO of the country’s Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) today shared the image of the work in progress feature above.

This is pretty cool.

VocaLive lets you create amazing vocal effects by chaining up to 4 effects procesors into a single effects chain, just like you would in the studio. Use VocaLive on stage as your own personal controllable vocal effects processor adding lush reverbs, delays, multi-part harmonies, creative effects and more, all at your fingertips. VocaLive also lets you record up to 8 tracks of audio simultaneously and is perfect for tracking vocals with multi-track class compliant USB audio interfaces.

IK makes some great software and hardware for iOS and Mac.

Apple Inc. has cut the approval time for new submissions to its App Store from more than a week to less than two days.

Phil Schiller.

Some interesting notes that Gruber found in Gboard’s privacy policy—it seems it is private, which is great. The emoji tip is awesome.

Instructions in the documents appear to contradict Facebook’s earlier denials of a Gizmodo article that said Facebook editors directly inserted headlines into the trending news widget. It also contradicts what Facebook told Recode last summer.

Farhad Manjoo:

Facebook is the world’s most influential source of news.

That’s true according to every available measure of size — the billion-plus people who devour its News Feed every day, the cargo ships of profit it keeps raking in, and the tsunami of online traffic it sends to other news sites.

But Facebook has also acquired a more subtle power to shape the wider news business.

It’s scary how powerful Facebook is these days.

Having lost a referendum over whether they would be regulated by the local government, the ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft followed through on their threat to effectively fire 10,000 drivers and strand thousands of customers who had come to rely on them for transportation in this hot, spread-out, car-centric city.

I love Uber and Lyft. I use both services quite often.

Very interesting post from Rian Van Der Merwe about building Postmark.

Hilarious!

Based on several Apple Support threads, it appears that the most recent version of iTunes 12.3.3 contains a database error that affects a small number of users, and can potentially wipe out their music collection after the update.

Holy. Sweet. Shit.

I don’t care if it’s iTunes or Apple Music—this is my music library! Fix this shit.

Forbes named Apple the world’s most valuable brand, followed by Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Facebook.

A product team at Google is working on a hardware device that would integrate Google’s search and voice assistant technology, akin to the Amazon Echo, Recode has learned.

This segment of the market is starting to heat up and it’s getting very interesting.

Comey indicated that the debate involving both legal and privacy issues over whether the federal government can compel tech companies to unlock personal devices in the interest of national security is far from over in a briefing with reporters at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

I don’t think this is a big surprise to anyone. The FBI needs overwhelming support from the public and government to win, but they don’t currently have that.

“This is not true,” Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr told to BuzzFeed News, rebutting to a Digital Music News report claiming the company “is now preparing to completely terminate music download offerings on the iTunes Store” in two years — or possibly “the next 3-4 years.”

Not a big surprise. I don’t know why people thought it was true.

Keep important information about the items in your home in one place. Store make, model, serial numbers, purchase price and date, photos, receipts, warranty information (manufacturer’s, extended, and other types of warranties), and much more. Use the dated notes feature to make notes about modifications and repairs. Attach files, such as digital copies of owner’s manuals. No more digging through file folders and junk drawers to find the information you need.

Everyone really should be doing this, I think.

“This goose came up and started pecking on the side of the car,” Givens told The Dodo. “I threw some food out for her, but she didn’t take it. She just kept pecking and quacking. Then she walked away, stopped and looked back. Then came over again and pecked some more.”

Wow.

Colorizing retoucher Jordan J. Lloyd of Dynamichrome took vintage photographs of global landmarks under construction and added color to them to give us a different look at history.

These are outstanding.

[Via Kottke]

The colors they chose don’t look connected to the colors of the old icon’s rainbow. In short, it looks and feels like an altogether new brand for Instagram, not an update or refresh of their old brand — and I’m not convinced that was the right move.

Some interesting thoughts from Gruber. As with most major design changes, this one is polarizing, as John points out.

I want McDonald’s fries and bacon. Or McDonald’s fries and anything… or bacon and anything.

Calling him “one of the last members of the original Siri team,” The Information reported on Wednesday that Darren Haas has left Apple for General Electric. He’ll join Steve D’Aurora, another ex-Siri team member who resigned from Apple for GE a few weeks ago.

The changeups also come a few days after a team of ex-Siri personnel unveiled Viv, a new, advanced virtual assistant that aims to offer functionality well beyond what Apple’s Siri can currently do. Demonstrated tasks include ordering a car from Uber, buying flowers from FTD, and ordering tickets from a variety of services, and offer intelligent, contextual responses, such as alternatives when a showtime for a movie is sold out.

This is very sad, especially considering what we’ve seen from the now departed Siri team and what they’ve done with Viv. These types of advances is what we expected Apple to do with Siri.

Before the introduction of Apple News in iOS 9 I was a big user of Flipboard. I’ve used RSS readers in the past but I’ve always liked the casualness of being able to flip through the current news and add stories for reading later. I was pretty hooked on this way of working and when News launched I tried it straight away, it wasn’t ready for prime time. It was slow and didn’t seem to update correctly but with iOS 9.2 it had a big update making it useable and reliable.

Here is how to use Apple News, it’s how I use it daily and gotten the most out of it.

Interesting article from an RSS and Flipboard user. I’ve never really used Apple News—it seemed like a solution in search of a problem to me, but if you’ve been considering using it, take a look at what Lee wrote.

I love these examples of what CSS can do.

Apple cares about accessibility. They’ve shown this over the years and they’re doing it again. […]

I always find these types of deep looks into design very fascinating.

Stephen Hackett wrote a piece looking back at iTunes Ping. Apple just never really gets social and music integration.

Cabel Sasser, the co-founder of Panic, made the coolest sign I’ve seen in a long time. Really.

Locate and remove duplicate files, even if they’re in remote corners of your system. Gemini 2 scans your whole disk speed-of-light fast, no matter how massive it is. Dig through scan results and hand-pick the files to erase, or better — let Smart Select do all the work.

Very nice looking interface and something I know I could use.

The Black Album Drums is a drum library for BFD3 and Kontakt 5.5 (full version) inspired by the drum sound featured on the “Black Album” by Metallica from 1991.

This is pretty special—these guys found the kit played on that record, not just the same model, but that exact kit.