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It’s understandable the reasons behind the decision but it certainly can be argued it should have been included.

This has been predicted for a long time so it comes as no real surprise. The market is dominated by Fitbit and Apple and, while it was a darling of the Kickstarter and early adopter tech crowd, the Pebble never really had much mainstream success.

Just over a year after acquiring the scraps of Rdio, Pandora has revealed Premium, its take on an on-demand music streaming service, designed to compete against the likes of Spotify and Apple Music. Just like every other $10-a-month music streaming service, Pandora Premium will offer users an extensive library featuring millions of songs available on-demand, ad-free streaming, and the ability to save your music offline.

Where Premium separates itself from the Spotifys of the world is personalization. Pandora’s smart playlists will allow users to automatically add similar songs to a playlist at the tap of a button. Premium also features personalized search, which will give different users different results based on their listening history. The browse section is tailored to your tastes, including the new release section.

I’ve been a customer of Pandora for quite some time and love it—they have the best algorithmic radio stations in the industry. With Premium, they are combing that with on-demand music just like the other music services offer. This is going to be an interesting battle to watch in 2017.

I don’t use Twitter in such a way to make this Center Stage feature attractive to me but if you are looking for a different way to view your tweets, Twitterific is a great, free (with in-app purchases) Twitter client.

I use an app called “Rise Alarm Clock“. It has a lovely alarm sound called “Camping Trip” I use to gently wake up to. What alarm clock sounds do you use?

Try this Twitter experiment. Pick an emoji, any emoji, and send it to @botmoji. For example, when I tweet this:

@botmoji ?

I get back this:

? Money-Mouth Face http://emojipedia.org/money-mouth-face/

The response is immediate and a nice way to quickly find out the intention of the more obscure emoji.

In an interview with Billboard today, Apple’s Eddy Cue revealed that Apple Music has surpassed 20 million paid subscribers. There are a few other tidbits of info in the article as well. […]

I love Portrait mode and use it all the time. Having a few tips from pros will only make it better.

Makers of the Snuggie blanket and other products sold mainly on TV have sued Amazon.com Inc, accusing the internet retailer of trademark infringement for letting an “astronomical” number of counterfeit products to be sold through its website.

I’m glad to see that someone finally stepped up and is holding Amazon’s feet to the fire. The amount of counterfeit products being sold on Amazon is outrageous and they are doing nothing about it. If this lawsuit is successful, Amazon better watch out because the floodgates will open.

The California Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday said Apple Inc agreed to pay $450,000 to settle state claims that it had mishandled hazardous electronic waste at facilities in Silicon Valley.

I’ll be honest, everything about this story seems so unlike Apple. It’s like the opposite of Apple.

Wait a minute. Didn’t Samsung just ridicule Apple for getting rid of the headphone jack? Yes they did. At the time they did that, I said:

I’m saving this video for later because Samsung is pretty quick to copy everything Apple does.

I also said:

Pay your debt to Apple, Samsung, you thieving bastards.

Which I still stand by.

Samsung is still guilty of infringement. The only dispute now is how much they’ll have to fork over to Apple.

The best part of these and other tips is that they aren’t iPhone 7 Plus specific. You can work the tips into your photography no matter what kind of camera you use.

This campaign was one of the most interesting and divisive Apple has ever produced. I loved the overall feel and message of them.

While Apple may be straying into Amazon territory here (Amazon famously reports “amazing” sales of the Kindle without actually saying how many they’ve sold), it’s still good news that Apple is very happy with the sales figures of the Apple Watch,

The Fairchild 670 and 660 are the most coveted vintage compressor/limiters in the world, with good reason. These 20-tube tone titans — which now fetch upwards of $50,000 — impart an unmistakable silky warmth heard on hundreds of hit records from the Beatles and Pink Floyd to countless Motown classics.

I love the sound of the Fairchild. The UA emulation of this classic compressor is amazing.

This place looks really cool. I hope to lead a “Beginner Photography Tour and Workshop” in Portugal next May and, if we go, this hotel will definitely be on our list of places to check out if not actually stay at.

As to be expected, these are powerful images but beware, some of them may be disturbing for their graphic nature.

I’ve never been a huge fan of this car (although I did like the earliest versions) but the story of its origins and development is really interesting.

Om Malik:

I applaud that Facebook has taken the first step. However, I have doubts that the $20 million it is contributing toward affordable housing in East Palo Alto and Menlo Park is the answer. It is a perfect example of short-term thinking and trying to assuage your internal guilt with a check to charity.

I don’t know what the answer is here, but I do know how real the problem is in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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While I don’t use Uber, I’ve seen this kind of activity from other apps and refuse to use the ones that won’t let me limit the ways and kinds of data they collect.

If you are a Dropbox user, this is a great deal but it’s for today only and likely won’t last long.

Those of us familiar with Apple’s Retail Stores implementation of this will understand how this might be a huge change in the way retail works.

In fact, Apple has “revealed” no such thing but this is the first comment they’ve made regarding automotive “autonomous systems”.

I have been interested in the Voynich Manuscript since I first heard of it in high school. I am nowhere near smart enough to get involved in its deciphering community but the idea of what it is and what it represents fascinates me.

This feels like yet another example of how such an arguably great service like Twitter seems to not have any idea of itself. Twitter seems to succeed in spite of the executives running it, not because of them.

I would strongly disagree with the characterization but time will tell.

How many of these did you have? I’ve used at least one model of each (except for the iBook) since the Powerbook 180.

My thanks to Secrets for sponsoring The Loop this week.

Secrets is now Free on the App Store! Secrets is a simple, secure password manager for Mac and iOS. It leverages industry standard encryption algorithms to provide secure storage and macOS and iOS native features to facilitate automatic filling of logins in the browser.

Version 2.0 is the culmination of months of testing in the real world. Bugs have been squashed, important features have been added and polish has been applied throughout. With this new version you can use Secrets and all of its features for Free with up to 10 items.

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