Apple must provide “reasonable technical assistance” to investigators seeking to unlock the data on an iPhone 5C that had been owned by Syed Rizwan Farook, Judge Sheri Pym of U.S. District Court in Los Angeles said in a ruling.
Apple has said they can’t unlock iPhones running iOS 8 or later—the shooter’s phone was running iOS 9. I’m not sure what’s going to happen here, but clearly the government doesn’t believe Apple can’t break into the phone.
Ozzy and Randy.
Track time. Invoice. Get paid. Billings Pro is a time tracking and invoicing app made exclusively for the Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch. By yourself or in a team, Billings Pro makes it easy to track time from all … Continued
Bon Appetit:
You intentionally grab a café table next to the window on overcast days and you’re a pro at tinkering with your eggy photos on VSCO, but have you ever gone on a professional photoshoot with just your iPhone?Imagine the surprise the photographers we worked with on our March Culture Issue experienced when they got the call saying they’d have to ditch their DSLRs and tethers for the hippest pocket camera around. We spoke with the photographers who made the issue happen and found out what they think of a print magazine going full-on Instagram for an issue.
How freaked out were the photographers when they heard about this? Imagine your boss telling you that you had to use “inferior” tools to get your job done. It’s an interesting experiment.
Jim and Merlin talk about guitar amps, TaskPaper, and Metallica’s “Too Heavy for Halftime” show.
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Boredpanda:
I wanted to take a coast-to-coast journey across Canada in a way that had never been seen before. To give a fresh perspective to the journey I decided to take the train. It’s not just any train, but rather the legendary 1959 passenger train that was first to be called “The Canadian.”
When I saw the post title, I thought, “Wait – there’s no vintage train you can take across Canada…” Then I saw the pictures and realized what he was talking about. Very clever.
A great new album from a couple of my friends, Dave Wiskus and Joe Cieplinski. They also happen to be developers and podcasters in the Mac and iOS world. I’m listening to the album right now and it’s really good. Congrats guys!
There’s been a lot of talk about AR and VR. I think AR will hit the market sooner and bigger than VR. This video shows a practical example of how AR can help in training pilots.
Slashfilm: Have you never experienced the wonders of seeing Humphrey Bogart on the big screen? Have you never watched a John Huston film in a movie theater either? Well, now you can do both, because Fathom Events and Turner Classic … Continued
NPR:
Valentine’s Day is a time to celebrate romance and love and kissy-face fealty. But the origins of this festival of candy and cupids are actually dark, bloody — and a bit muddled.Though no one has pinpointed the exact origin of the holiday, one good place to start is ancient Rome, where men hit on women by, well, hitting them.
I love these origin stories – as a kid, I was a big fan of Roman and Greek mythology. Our present version of Valentine’s Day, regardless of your feelings about the day, is certainly better than its origin story.
The Verge:
Amazingly, the new Deadpool movie does work. That has a great deal to do with Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s screenplay, but so much of what keeps the film from flying out of control is the editing. Julian Clarke had to do the heavy lifting in Adobe Premiere to strike a balance between the character’s love of gore and gleeful absurdity, making a movie that’s accessible to both fans and neophytes. It’s not easy, since Deadpool seems made for situations that fly out of control. I spoke with Clarke about the film, the challenges he faced making it, and why the sequel might be harder to pull off than anyone expects.
Interesting interview with the editor of the film and the particular challenges he had in keeping the level and tone just right. I haven’t seen the movie but I’ve heard good and bad things about it. But, from the trailers, it feels like one of those movies you’re either going to immediately form an opinion about one way or the other. Personally, I loved what I saw in the trailers and during the marketing campaign leading up to this weekend’s release.
Hodinkee:
Having worn an Apple Watch almost exclusively for the last month, I feel absolutely confident that mechanical watches aren’t going anywhere for now. But the Apple Watch isn’t either.It’s almost improbably well done, and it shows a willingness to think creatively that ought to be heeded by the luxury watch industry – and it also suggests to me that underestimating its impact, and Apple, is dangerous.
This is a long and well detailed review of the Apple Watch from the point of view of a person who loves and lives for mechanical watches. This is a guy who reviews $95,000 mechanical watches on a regular basis so his opinions regarding the Apple Watch are very interesting.
Petapixel:
Here’s a major warning to those of you who use Adobe Creative Cloud on a Mac: the latest version of Creative Cloud has a bug that deletes unrelated data from your root directory without warning.The bug in Adobe Creative Cloud version 3.5.0.206 was discovered by the cloud backup service Backblaze, whose customers were having their data deleted by Adobe’s app.
This is yet another in a long line of issues with apps in Adobe’s Creative Cloud and it may be the most destructive one yet. I was forced to use CC but I don’t do any of the updates as they pop up. I know Adobe screws this stuff up on a regular basis so I keep myself one update behind.
Rogue Amoeba:
While the App Store has many shortcomings, it’s the onerous rules and restrictions Apple has for selling through the Mac App Store which pose the biggest problem. The type of software we make is precluded from being sold through the store, particularly now that sandboxing is a requirement, and Apple has shown no signs of relaxing those restrictions. Fortunately, unlike iOS, the Mac platform is still open. We’re able to distribute and sell direct to our customers, right from our site. We’ve got almost 15 years of experience and success doing just that, and we have no plans to stop.
I get why Apple does sandboxing and, in broad terms, it’s great for users. But we are seeing more and more developers unable to create the products they want because of sandboxing. The good news is that companies like Rogue Amoeba make products for more experienced users and those users will always be able to find and buy stuff directly from Rogue Amoeba. Buying direct is my preferred method, too. It may be less convenient but it puts more money directly in the hands of a developer in know and trust.
Fstoppers:
When I heard the iPhone 6s was coming out on September 25, I decided now was the best time to create a new video to prove once and for all that quality photography can be taken with any budget.Instead of using a fancy studio (which was actually just my garage in the last video) I decided to do the shoot around my house and then outside at the beach. Instead of seamless paper I decided to use backgrounds that anyone could easily find. Most importantly, I limited my lighting budget to about $40 maximum per shot.
I love this post because it shows you don’t need a ton of gear to get great shots. With your iPhone, some stuff you can buy at Home Depot and a little ingenuity, you can create your very own fashion shoot. Thanks to iheartapple2 for the link.
Vox:
“The bottom line here with the industrial tomatoes is that tomatoes have been bred for yield, production, disease resistance,” Klee told me. “The growers are not paid for flavor — they are paid for yield. So the breeders have given them this stuff that produces a lot of fruit but that doesn’t have any flavor.”“We are raising a whole generation of people who don’t know what a tomato is supposed to taste like.” That’s why you see gigantic strawberries and fist-size apples on the store shelves. Since Americans like their produce big, and big fruit is more efficient to grow, growers do everything they can to supersize their fruit, even at the expense of flavor.
Anyone else noticed this? I did especially when I was in Italy. In particular, the tomatoes tasted amazing and completely different from the blandness of what we get in supermarkets here in North America.
The Daily Dot:
To shoot the video, the band hopped aboard a special fixed-wing airplane, lovingly dubbed the “vomit comet” by astronauts in training thanks to its ability to induce, well, vomiting. The plane, provided and operated by the company S7, climbs higher than a commercial jet and then the pilot begins to take it on a parabolic flight pattern. In other words, the plane goes up at a steep angle, then back down again, creating 25 seconds of weightlessness for the cargo (i.e. OK Go and crew).
Dave posted this morning about the video. Here are some details about how they accomplished it.
This is a podcast you really need to listen to today. According to Gruber:
It’s a wide-ranging discussion, and includes a bunch of interesting scoops: the weekly number of iTunes and App Store transactions, an updated Apple Music subscriber count, peak iMessage traffic per second, the number of iCloud account holders, and more.
The New Yorker:
Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth.Marco Drago, a thirty-two-year-old Italian postdoctoral student and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was the first person to notice them. He was sitting in front of his computer at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Hannover, Germany, viewing the LIGO data remotely. The waves appeared on his screen as a compressed squiggle, but the most exquisite ears in the universe, attuned to vibrations of less than a trillionth of an inch, would have heard what astronomers call a chirp—a faint whooping from low to high.
This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves.
The science involved in this is mindbending. Can you imagine the excitement of the scientists on hearing that first chirp?
A great story from a Reddit thread entitled, What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?
I think Kirk is really on to something here. Terrific discovery opportunity for Twitter. Hope someone there reads Kirk’s writeup.
Immersion, a company that develops and licenses haptic touch feedback technology, today filed a lawsuit against Apple and AT&T accusing the two companies of patent infringement. Citing technologies like 3D Touch, Force Touch, the Apple Watch Taptic Engine, and vibration patterns for ringtones and notifications, Immersion says multiple Apple devices use its intellectual property.
Another interesting case.
Pandora has the largest number of users for music streaming, but the competition is encroaching. Spotify is said to be arming itself with another $500 million in capital, and Apple Music recently surpassed 10 million paying users. Pandora’s users peaked at 81.5 million at the end of 2014, declining to 78.1 million in the third quarter.
Pandora has the best algorithmic stations around. I’m surprised they’re shopping themselves around after taking over the Rdio assets last year, but I guess we’ll see what happens.
I’ve used parallel processing on drums in my mix before, but this is another interesting usage.
How Darwin Award candidates are made.
Samsung already warned it was going to be a rough year—news like this is going to hurt them even more.
The ENCRYPT Act, sponsored by Democratic Representative Ted Lieu and Republican Blake Farenthold, would prevent any state or locality from mandating that a “manufacturer, developer, seller, or provider” design or alter the security of a product so it can be decrypted or surveilled by authorities, according to bill text viewed by Reuters.
Very smart, I hope this passes. Governments have to understand that any weakness will be exploited—there is no backdoor just for law enforcement.
I am suspicious of any for-profit company arguing its good intentions and its free gifts. Nothing — and I do mean nothing — in this life is free. You always pay a price.
Om Malik makes some valid points here.
Macstories:
I just returned from a two week vacation in which I used my iPhone 6s to take hundreds of photos and videos, find places to eat, and get public transit directions to and from various places in unfamiliar cities. It was also the first time I had no concerns about my iPhone battery running out of juice before I returned to my accommodation at night, and it is all thanks to Low Power Mode.
I use LPM whenever I’m out riding my motorcycle. I don’t want to take a chance of running out of juice but also don’t want to carry around a backup battery. I really like the tip of how to quickly turn LPM on and off.
Observer:
Think about it: Every driver makes hundreds of daily driving decisions that, strictly speaking, break driving laws (for example, crossing the yellow line to pull around a double-parked vehicle). It all works out fine because of something called “human judgment.” But what company is going to program its driverless cars to break the law? And what regulators will approve that product, knowing that it has been programmed to break the law?Will insurance policies for driverless cars cover the car itself? Or will they cover the owner of the vehicle? Or perhaps the technology company that controls the car’s routes? Who will be responsible if there is an accident? The individual owner or the vehicle manufacturer? Or the company that designed the navigation system? To cut through this conundrum, some have proposed the creation of the legal fiction of “virtual drivers” who will purchase “virtual insurance.” But this gobbledygook is just vaporware for the fact that nobody knows how to move through this morass.
I disagree that driverless cars won’t happen but the writer brings forward several points that are glossed over by driverless car advocates. The legal, ethical and even employment related issues are massive and aren’t being discussed nearly enough.