Media

Accountant pulled in off the street to play goalie in an NHL game

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[VIDEO] This is an incredible story. Due to a rare set of circumstances, Chicago accountant Scott Foster got called in to United Center in Chicago to act as an emergency goaltender. Basically, he was in the building to act as goalie for either team in case of injuries to the starting goalies.

About six minutes into the third period, starting goaltender Colin Delia goes down and he gets the nod.

Foster played 55 games for Western Michigan from 2002-06. He is the first emergency goaltender to play in an NHL game since Jorge Alves, an equipment manager for the Carolina Hurricanes, played eight seconds in a 3-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning on Dec. 31, 2016.

He’s an accountant with college hockey experience. Experience from 15 years ago. Crazy, right?

Watch the video (embedded in the main Loop post) to see this unfold. My favorite part is at the end of the game when he is mobbed by his new teammates.

I love hockey.

Drawing and smart annotation with the new Pages

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[VIDEO] Jeff Benjamin does an excellent job showing off the new Pages (video embedded in main Loop post). Even though it was announced at yesterday’s Education event, the new Pages is for all of us and is available now. Smart annotation is an excellent add. No crayon required.

Apple goes to Hollywood. Will its story have a happy ending?

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John Koblin, New York Times:

Known for its bold designs and its big marketing campaigns, Apple relishes its status as a dominant force in the corporate world. So it was noteworthy when one of its executives, Eddy Cue, struck a note of humility during a discussion this month at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Tex.

“We don’t know anything about making television,” said Mr. Cue, a senior vice president who oversees the team in charge of the company’s original programming initiative. “So what skills does Apple bring to that? And the viewpoint is: very little. There’s other things we bring. We know how to create apps, we know how to do distribution, we know how to market. But we don’t really know how to create shows.”

And:

Since October, Apple has made deals for 12 projects, nine of them “straight-to-series” orders — an aggressive method of creating new programming that skips the pilot-episode stage.

When Apple began courting producers last year, it said it had a budget of about $1 billion to work with. Now it is becoming clear that the company will blow well past that figure.

And some numbers:

With the rise of streaming, the old Hollywood system is cracking. With plans to spend up to $8 billion on content in 2018, Netflix has committed to a strategy of offering something for everyone, and other companies have been tempted to try their luck in an increasingly crowded field. There were 487 scripted shows released last year, a number that will rise to more than 500 in 2018.

Apple recognizes the importance of playing in this space, recognizes the opportunity that comes from a major business model in transition. They’ve got the cash to aggressively move in, creating content on the fly. There will certainly be mistakes along the way, but this is a new frontier and Apple will learn by doing. I think this is smart, long term thinking.

I think this headline will defy Betteridge’s law and the answer will be yes.

Netflix barred from competing at Cannes

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Film festival head Theirry Fremaux, on allowing two Netflix films in the Palme d’Or competition last year:

“Last year, when we selected these two films, I thought I could convince Netflix to release them in cinemas. I was presumptuous, they refused.”

And:

At the time, Netflix tried to secure temporary permits to screen the films for less than a week in France, day-and-date to their online releases. That move wasn’t permitted because of France’s strict chronology laws and the two sides couldn’t reach an agreement.

As a result, the festival has changed the rules to require theatrical release in France.

And:

“We have to take into account the existence of these powerful new players: Amazon, Netflix and maybe soon Apple.”

The film industry is changing rapidly. The movie Unsane is in theaters right now. It was filmed exclusively using iPhones, no film cameras involved.

Netflix is being barred from Cannes competition because they do not show their films in theaters. Why not prohibit Unsane because it was not truly “filmed”? To me, this move shows Cannes as a purist, for sure, but also shows Cannes as a festival rooted in the past.

Apple’s “pay with a glance” iPhone X Apple Pay ad

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[VIDEO] Can’t help but wonder if this ad was made by the same team that did the wonderful Unlock ad we wrote about last week.

This new ad, called “Fly Market”, has the same frenetic energy, with things flying around, jumping into place. I love the “Back to the Future” callout (the two flaming tracks as the chair leaves the store) and the catchphrase, “Pay with a glance. Apple Pay on iPhone X.”

Take a look. Embedded in the main Loop post.

The most lifelike real-time digital character I’ve ever seen

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[VIDEO] Epic Games, from their press release:

Epic Games today unveiled “Siren,” a high-fidelity, full performance character driven in real-time. Recreating the subtle intricacies of movement can be the difference between a realistic digital recreation and a trip into the uncanny valley, so Epic enlisted the real-time capture abilities of its partner Vicon, the industry leader in motion capture, to bring this project to life.

Siren is not simply a rendered character. Instead, she’s driven in real time:

Unreal Engine using Vicon’s new Live Link plugin. On a second screen, the Siren character – created using the likeness of Chinese actress Bingjie Jiang – moved in sync, driven in-engine at 60 frames per second.

Watch the video (embedded in the main Loop post). This is a step across the uncanny valley. To me, this is the future. I suspect, over time, we’ll see hyperrealistic avatars popping up in day-to-day interactions. For example, you might contact customer service, and have this avatar appear, driven by a complex script, backed up by a human.

As I said, watch the video, see what you think.

Steve Jobs on education

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[VIDEO] Nice find from Andrew Leavitt of 17 Orbits. Just in time for Apple’s March 27th Education Event, here’s Steve Jobs talking about education.

Interesting video (embedded in the main Loop post), filmed from a projected image. Not clear when this was made, but I’d guess this is around 1999 or so, given the presence of the clamshell iBook, which was released that summer.

Apple’s great new iPhone X ad, and the tiny bug it highlights

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[VIDEO] First things first, if you haven’t yet seen it, take a minute to watch Apple’s latest iPhone ad (embedded in the main Loop post). It’s a wonderful, tumultuous, explosion of visuals, all focused on a single point. Unlocking is easy.

This whimsical treat has vaulted near the top of my favorite Apple spots, a refreshing complement to the Spike Jonze HomePod ad from a few weeks ago.

Apple Marketing is on a roll.

An interesting side note, spotted in this tweet from Benjamin Mayo:

https://twitter.com/bzamayo/status/974734836115099649

Check the image in the tweet. Notice the text that has scrolled outside the iMessage bubble. This is not Benjamin being picky. This is him noting an iMessage bug that he’s campaigning to get fixed, one that made it all the way into a commercial.

Details.

“A frank, smart and captivating memoir by the daughter of Apple founder Steve Jobs”

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Lisa Brennan-Jobs has written a memoir, called Small Fry, due out in September, available for pre-order now.

From the Small Fry book page on Amazon:

Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents―artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs―Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Silicon Valley. When she was young, Lisa’s father was a mythical figure who was rarely present in her life. As she grew older, her father took an interest in her, ushering her into a new world of mansions, vacations, and private schools. His attention was thrilling, but he could also be cold, critical and unpredictable. When her relationship with her mother grew strained in high school, Lisa decided to move in with her father, hoping he’d become the parent she’d always wanted him to be.

Small Fry is Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s poignant story of a childhood spent between two imperfect but extraordinary homes. Scrappy, wise, and funny, young Lisa is an unforgettable guide through her parents’ fascinating and disparate worlds. Part portrait of a complex family, part love letter to California in the seventies and eighties, Small Fry is an enthralling book by an insightful new literary voice.

Fingers crossed, hoping this is a great book.

Stevie Nicks belts out a song while sitting in the makeup chair

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[VIDEO embedded in main Loop post] Chrysanthe Tenentes, Kottke.org:

Here you have songbird Stevie Nicks, every makeup artist’s worst nightmare, belting out an early version of her song “Wild Heart” during an Annie Leibowitz cover shoot for Rolling Stone in 1981.

This is a little gem. Think about how hard it is to sing when you are sitting down. Stevie Nicks really lets us have it, making the whole thing effortless.

And listen for the other folks joining in. This is off-the-cuff, and wonderful.

A complete guide to every Apple TV show in development

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Good list. It’d be nice to have this as a constantly updated resource.

As Apple’s media plans mature, seems to me they should add a page to their main site that makes it easy to follow along.

The world’s very first iPod commercial

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[VIDEO] Though the commercial is obviously dated (shown by aspect ratio, resolution, fashion, and tech), the sense of how deeply Apple gets music and its importance to people is clear.

Head over to the main Loop post to watch the ad.

Apple orders animated comedy ‘Central Park’ from ‘Bob’s Burgers’ creator

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Daniel Holloway, Variety:

Apple continues to grow it series-programming slate, adding its first animated show.

The digital giant has given a two-season series order to “Central Park,” a musical comedy from “Bob’s Burgers” creator Loren Bouchard and 20th Century Fox Television. Written by Bouchard, Josh Gad, and Nora Smith, the series is described as telling the story of how a family of caretakers, who live and work in Central Park, end up saving the park, and basically the world.

Two seasons, 13 episodes each.

The content pipeline is starting to fill. What’s not clear is how all this new programming will be packaged. Will it be part of the Apple Music subscription? Will Apple Music be segmented? Rebranded? Will a new Apple Media entity be created?

Apple’s case of dance fever

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Before we dig into the linked post, it might help to know a bit about Ken Segall. From his bio:

Working with Steve Jobs as his ad agency’s creative director for twelve years spanning NeXT and Apple, he led the team behind Apple’s legendary Think different campaign, and set Apple down the i-way by naming the iMac.

That said, here’s Ken Segall, from the linked post:

The Apple story of the week is the new HomePod ad. Four minutes in length, I’m not sure you can call it an ad, but it’s out there and getting mostly positive reactions. Directed by Spike Jonze, psychedelic expanding sets, cool music, emotional dance … what’s not to like?

And:

It’s not that I don’t like it. I think it’s beautifully produced, like all Apple ads. But it does make me feel like I’ve been here before. Or, more accurately, that I’ve been here many times before. Like I’m stuck in an infinite loop of Apple dancing ads.

Over the years, Apple has given us a virtual stream of ads in which music inspires someone to dance. The scenery changes, laws of physics are increasingly challenged, but the basic concept remains the same.

At least that’s been my overall impression. So the new HomePod ad moved me to action. After I finished dancing, I nosed around to see if my memory matched the reality.

At the very least, this is a fascinating walk through the history of Apple’s music advertising. Of course Apple’s ads will have a lot of dance in them. Advertising is a visual medium and if you are pitching music (and lots of Apple’s products involve music in some fashion), dance is a terrific visual storyteller.

So what’s the problem here?

In my opinion, a company like Apple can take two approaches to advertising. It can start thinking about what works for the mainstream audience—like dancing and celebrities (who are also frequently summoned by Apple these days)—or it can use its mass-popularity to take the same risks today as it did when it was the underdog.

The latter is the Apple that captured so many hearts.

And:

The iPod Silhouette campaign changed Apple advertising in a huge way. It was virtually the first Apple campaign that didn’t feature a lot of white space, a gorgeous product shot and clever words. Yes, it was a lot of dance, but it was a totally fresh take on dance.

Fair enough. This is more of a quest for a fresh take, something as groundbreaking and different as the Silhouette campaign.

No matter how you feel about this, scroll through Ken’s post, take a look back at some of Apple’s past ads. Some great stuff there.

You can watch Netflix on any screen you want, but you’re probably watching it on a TV

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Peter Kafka, Recode:

Netflix says 70 percent of its streams end up on connected TVs instead of phones, tablets or PCs.

And:

Netflix isn’t an outlier, either. Last fall, for instance, YouTube said that its live TV service, which it had pitched as a mobile-first offering, was generating more than half of its streams on TVs.

The Netflix part is not a surprise to me. Netflix grew its brand with DVDs, inexorably tied to the TV. Add to that, the TV is (usually) the biggest screen in the house and set up as a social center, typically with comfortable chairs and couches facing the screen, with a table or two nearby for food/snacks.

But the YouTube live TV bit was a surprise. To me, that really shows the long-lasting pull of the TV, strong enough to pull a service born on your computer, over into the living room.

Panic and the mystery of the slow downloads

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[VIDEO] Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser, on the Panic blog:

A few months ago, a complaint started popping up from users downloading or updating our apps: “Geez, your downloads are really slow!”

If you work in support, you probably have a reflexive reaction to a complaint like this. It’s vague. There’s a million possible factors. It’ll probably resolve itself by tomorrow. You hope. Boy do you hope.

Except… we also started noticing it ourselves when we were working from home. When we’d come in to the office, transfers were lightning fast. But at home, it was really, seriously getting hard to get any work done remotely at all.

So, maybe there was something screwy here?

This is a fascinating story, well told. In a nutshell, Panic got reports of slow downloads from a non-trivial subset of their customers, wrote a script to try to find a common link, and actually found that link. And it was Comcast.

Cabel tells the story in the video embedded in the main Loop post. Excellent detective work.

This is the result of placing my camera lens 300 feet from a rocket launch

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John Kraus, PetaPixel:

My name is John Kraus, and I work as a photojournalist at Cape Canaveral, covering rocket launches with up-close cameras at the various launchpads here. For yesterday’s Atlas V rocket launch, I had two cameras at Space Launch Complex 41. These cameras were sound-activated; the sound alone would kill anyone standing at the launchpad during liftoff.

I would love the opportunity to get a camera so close to a rocket launch. There’s one closeup shot of the rocket’s engine/boosters after ignition, while the rocket is moving, but still in frame, a shot that I find thrilling.

There’s also shots of what that launch did to the lens of that same camera.

Apple calls on Spike Jonze and FKA twigs for a gorgeous HomePod ad

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[VIDEO] Ad Week:

The 48-year-old Oscar winner has directed a new four-minute short film for Apple’s HomePod speaker featuring yet another marquee collaborator—the English musician and dancer FKA twigs. The result is a stunning piece that’s charming, surreal, emotional, playful, theatrical and utterly compelling—one of the most remarkable ads of the year so far.

This is no overstatement. Gorgeous ad. Watch it yourself. It’s embedded in the main Loop post. Worth every second.

iPhone 6s performance, before and after a battery replacement

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[VIDEO] Bennett Sorbo had an iPhone 6s with a dying battery. He ran his iPhone through some benchmarks, timing and filming the whole thing.

He then went to Apple, got a replacement battery, and ran the same tests again. The video embedded in the main Loop post shows the results.

Bottom line, replacing the battery clearly speeds things up. If you jump to about 2:34 in, you’ll see that the tasks took 5:45 on the bad battery (a presumably throttled processor) and only 4:33 on the new battery.

That’s a savings of 1:12, or about 21%. Not necessarily accurate to say that your phone will be 21% faster with a new battery, but it certainly seems like a new battery would make your phone at least somewhat more nimble.

Good experiment.

Flash usage declines from 80% in 2014 to under 8% today

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Bleeping Computer:

The percentage of daily Chrome users who’ve loaded at least one page containing Flash content per day has gone down from around 80% in 2014 to under 8% in early 2018.

These statistics on Flash’s declining numbers were shared with the public by Parisa Tabriz, Director of Engineering at Google, during a keynote speech at Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) held in San Diego last week.

That’s a precipitous dropoff, all in less than 4 years.

Last summer, Adobe announced the official end-of-life for Flash:

In collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.

So this dropoff is not a big surprise, more a sign that people are moving their content in the right direction.

An Olympic photographer got a chance to visit the DMZ

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Jeff Cable, from his blog:

As I mentioned in the last blog post, the Koreans did a really smart thing in creating tours for the media to see things other than the Olympics. One of the most popular tours, from the media I spoke to, was the DMZ tour. I did not think that I would have time for this tour, but when the USA men’s hockey team failed to make the medal round, it opened up a free day for me. I checked with the tour desk at the media village and they said that they could get me in, so off I went.

Fascinating read and, of course, pictures.

Drag around to see what a self driving car sees in real-time

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[VIDEO] This is an amazing video (embedded in the main Loop post). Hit play, then click and drag to look around as the Waymo self driving car takes you for a ride. Note that this only seems to work in a desktop browser, not in iOS. If anyone figures out how to get this to work on an iOS device, please ping me and I’ll update the post.

I’d love to have this experience in person.

UPDATE: To run on iOS device, check this tweet.

Wreck-It Ralph and the Mac

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[VIDEO] First things first, I think Wreck-It Ralph is an under-appreciated gem of a movie. Perfectly cast, beautifully animated. And lots and lots of eye candy and Easter eggs.

Yesterday, Disney released the trailer for Wreck-It Ralph 2, AKA Ralph Breaks the Internet. The trailer is embedded in the main Loop post. That little girl doing the screaming sure resembles toddler Moana. But I digress.

In the trailer, can’t miss it, about 21 seconds in, there’s a shot of a computer interface. In many movies, when they show a computer screen, they’ve mocked up some generic OS. Not sure why, but that happens all the time. Not so here. This is a beauty shot of Mac OS 9, AKA System 9, or at least I think it’s System 9.

There’s a color Apple icon. That launcher bar (that what that was?) at the bottom left, and the application menu on the upper right. That enough to pin this down as System 9?

No matter, I am incredibly excited about this movie. Enjoy the trailer.

The best Beatles cover ever?

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[VIDEO] Don’t know if it’s the best Beatles cover ever, but given that this (video in main Loop post) is two people busking in the subway, that’s a helluva performance. Sweet, sweet harmonies.

Apple embraces marriage equality with four “First Dance” ads

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[VIDEO] Apple, this past September:

“We support marriage equality and believe all Australians deserve the freedom to marry the person they love, and to have their relationships recognised with the same dignity and legal protections as their neighbours, friends, and family.”

Over the weekend, Apple Australia released four new iPhone X ads (embedded in the main Loop post), all reemphasizing that support. Each video is backed by Australian singer/songwriter Courtney Barnett, who recorded a cover of the INXS classic Never Tear Us Apart specifically for the ads.

Rene Ritchie, John Gruber and an all-star cast discuss the death of Twitter for Mac

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[VIDEO] I absolutely love this video (embedded in the main Loop post). First off, there’s the topic. Twitter is pulling their Mac client, forcing people to either go through their browser or adopt a third party Twitter client. I’ve been thinking about this, but I just can’t wrap my head around their motivation. Is this some kind of end run around Apple? An attempt to reduce maintenance costs (one less platform to support)?

No matter, this is a video of Rene Ritchie, John Gruber, Loren Brichter (part of Apple’s original iPhone dev team, creator of Tweetie for iPhone OS, and original creator of Twitter for the Mac), Twitterrific’s Craig Hockenberry, Twitter for Mac developer Ben Sandofsky, and Tapbot’s Paul Haddad, all in a round robin discussion.

The topic is hot, the panelists are all steeped in the Twitter for Mac story, and the video format gives you the chance to see these people whose names you might have heard or whose tweets you might have encountered.

Wonderful format.

People freaked out after robot dogs opened a door. Now they’re resisting humans.

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[VIDEO] Alex Horton, Washington Post:

In one of the scariest moments in the movie “Jurassic Park,” a pair of intelligent Velociraptors, brought back to Earth by man’s hubris, defy an assumption about their limitations: They open a kitchen door.

Now imagine that the raptors are real, transformed into headless robot dogs that can negotiate stairs, fling open doors with their robotic claws and generally overcome the puny obstacles offered up by the human technicians at Boston Dynamics.

Normally, I’d ignore or modify the sensational headline of the Post article. But it made me laugh and was (kind of) on point. Last week, we posted this video, showing a dog-like robot opening a door. People really did freak out. A bit.

Well, now there’s a follow-up (embedded in the main Loop post), where a human tries to stop the robot from opening the same door. I fully expected the robot to grab the guy with its claw and drag him to the ground.

Robots are coming. Do not make them mad.

How iFixit became the world’s best iPhone teardown team

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[VIDEO] This is a terrific story, well told by Jason Koebler and the Motherboard team. From the video description:

Every year there’s a race to become the first to tear down the phone, with teams from around the world flying to Australia—where it’s first released—to compete to be the first to look inside the world’s most coveted new phone.

This video (embedded in the main Loop post) is riveting, well worth your time. If this sort of thing interests you, you might check out this Twitter thread, where Jason tells the story about dropping his MacBook, cracking the screen, and encountering iFixit for the first time.