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CBC:

A recent report by the non-profit group MediaSmarts says nearly a quarter of Canadian children in Grade 4 — some as young as eight years old — own their own cellphone.

That number jumps to more than 50 per cent for students in Grade 7.

Interestingly (or frighteningly for some parents), of those Grade 4s with phones, the report says about one-fifth are on social networks, even though Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat (and others) all have policies that require users to be at least 13 years old.

Not having kids of my own, I’m always interested in how parents with young ones deal with this. At what age did/will you give your kid a cell phone? Do iOS and Android have “enough” parental controls to make you comfortable that your child can use the phone the way you want them to?

The Verge:

On the surface (and even under the hood), these top living room contenders share a lot of the same features, with the exception of 4K video support. Which means the best experience really comes down to the interface, the app ecosystem, and available content.

It was a tough call this year, but one new streaming-video device nudged its way past the others.

The answer will likely not surprise you but, what was interesting to me was how close the three runner-ups came in the scoring.

Outside:

Ian McIntosh was maybe five turns into a first descent of a jagged Alaskan peak when things went wrong. The 34-year-old Canadian pro skier was filming a segment for Teton Gravity Research and carving down a face the film crew dubbed “Daybreak Spines.” The light was playing tricks on him, and early-morning shadows made a long spine look easy to cross over. It wasn’t. McIntosh hit it hard and dropped five feet into a trough he didn’t know existed. Then he started rolling.

McIntosh says he was immediately certain of one thing: “I knew I was going to the bottom,” he says. “I knew I was going for a ride.” Then all he could think was, Am I going to get traumatically injured by tomahawking down this mountain? and Please be over.

The video of this is almost painful to watch. The audio makes it even more so.

Vox:

Jessica Jones is a terrible superhero by superhero industry standards. Her name is forgettable; she sounds like a girl from your third-grade class. She’s just another brick — a term assigned to the plethora of superhumans with super strength as their primary power. It’s easy to see why she isn’t popular or why many people, even some comic book fans, were puzzled by Marvel and Netflix’s decision to give the character her own TV show.

But even though Jessica Jones is a terrible superhero — something she would be the first to admit — that doesn’t mean she’s unworthy of her own show or that her story stinks.

Jones’s origin story is actually one of the more daring arcs Marvel has published in the past decade.

I know nothing about this Marvel character so I don’t know if Vox’s description is accurate but I assume it is. Regardless, the trailers I’ve seen make me really interesting in this series. All episodes are set to premiere November 20, 2015, on Netflix

IFLScience:

Perception is a fickle thing. As good as our senses are at keeping us alive, they can often mislead and deceive us. Here’s a great example of that which you can try at home, featured in the new BBC Four series, Colour: The Spectrum of Science.

Check out the video below, follow the instructions and see a black and white image turn into a full-color image of a landscape.

This is really cool. It illustrates an idea I teach in my photography classes about perception and being able to “force” the viewer into seeing what you want them to see.

MIC:

The Oxford Dictionary’s 2015 word of the year was awarded to something that isn’t necessarily a word, though it definitely paints a picture worth, perhaps, a thousand or so of them. The “tears of joy” emoji face — featured, among other places, in a keyboard on Apple’s iOS platform — is just one of the many cartoon facial reactions used since the late 1990’s being honored with this year’s distinction.

The emoji beat out several words and phrases, including “refugee,” “lumbersexual,” “on fleek,” “Dark Web” and “sharing economy.”

But it’s not a word.

A sleepy Jim talks to Merlin talk all about the iPad Pro: Jim’s review and Merlin’s impulse purchase of it.

Subscribe to this podcast

Links:

• Review: iPad Pro
• iPad Pro Review: A New Canvas
• Daring Fireball: The iPad Pro
• Logitech’s iPad Pro keyboard case is relatively affordable
• The Martian Audiobook | Andy Weir | Audible.com
• The Outfield – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Black Label Society – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• The Move – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• #HeyTDR – Twitter Search

Austin Mann:

We’ve gotten a ton of questions about gear and the trip behind this project so we cut together this BTS piece for you — it’s 17 minutes so grab a coffee/snack and enjoy!

In early October, Mann posted his review of the iPhone 6s. Now he’s giving us a behind the scenes look. These BTS videos always fascinate me.

Macworld:

The streaming music industry is about to lose a player and gain a platform. On Monday, Pandora announced plans to acquire “key assets” from on-demand streaming service Rdio, which is seeking bankruptcy protection and will wind down its current business.

The deal, for $75 million in cash, covers Rdio’s technology and intellecutal property, and Pandora says it will be offering jobs to many members of Rdio’s team. Pandora isn’t buying Rdio’s entire business for a couple of reasons.

First, to launch an on-demand streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music, Pandora will have to make its own licensing deals with the record labels, because Rdio’s deals aren’t transferable. Second, Pandora executives explained in a Monday conference call that Rdio is financially “challenged,” and would have been a drain on Pandora.

I wouldn’t take bets on Rdio relaunching. It’s also likely the first of a few more consolidations in the next 12 months.

Dangerous Business:

Alexander Graham Bell once said, “I have travelled around the globe. I have seen the Canadian and American Rockies, the Andes, the Alps and the Highlands of Scotland, but for simple beauty, Cape Breton outrivals them all.”

I’ll admit that I was a bit skeptical of this quote upon first reading it. I mean, the Rockies, the Alps, the Scottish Highlands… those are all pretty impressive and beautiful things. Could a sparsely-populated island in the Canadian Maritimes really compare?

Well, the truth is that it kind of can.

If you’re looking for a vacation full of utterly lovely scenery, wonderful people and great seafood, you can’t go wrong visiting my home province of Nova Scotia. I promise it will surprise and delight you.

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• USA made leather strap for Apple Watch
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• 3 beautiful color options
• 25 Year Leather Warranty
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Stuff:

Perhaps I’m now just an old social media git yelling at a heart-shaped cloud. Maybe Twitter isn’t misunderstanding the user experience at all, and it’s just a few long-term users who are grumbling. For all I know, Twitter newcomers worldwide are now sighing with relief because that difficult favorites button (three whole syllables!) has gone, replaced by clickable hearts. But a quick glance at replies to Twitter’s own tweets about the change suggests otherwise, and it really does feel like a mis-step that reduces the flexibility of a previously versatile feature.

As a maniacal Twitter user, I completely agree. While “Faves” may not have been great, “Hearts” seems infinitely worse. What if I wanted to bookmark someone’s outrageous or offensive tweet to refer to it later? Twitter seems to think it’s OK for me to use the universal symbol of love to do that. Worse, Twitter’s reasoning, as laid out in this piece, is either mindless marketing speak or quite literally idiotic.

Techcrunch:

Never has the cry of ‘it’s just a bigger Apple thing’ been more applicable than it has with iPad Pro – this is literally a bigger iPad. But that approach to thinking about it is also reductive. The Microsoft Surface has blazed a sort of hybrid path – for people that don’t want to compromise having a laptop experience. The iPad pro, on the other hand, is unapologetically tablety. The keyboard feels solid but it’s no substitute for a MacBook. The muti-app experience, on the other hand, is far and away better than on any competing system — and the way that it enables creatives to alternate between the various ‘modes’ is unique to this platform.

There are a lot of ways to slice iPad Pro. But one of the biggest and hardest to quantify is the way that it will end the debate about whether the tablet is a tool for creation once and for all.

Sprinkled throughout this review, Panzarino asks some interesting questions and makes some very good points. Bottom line is, who cares if the iPad Pro is an “enterprise play” or “just for designers” or “a laptop replacement”? It’s not going to be all things to all people but the tech media often seems to want to make it that.

Independent:

For American companies, doing business in Europe is getting to be a tricky thing these days. American tech companies, in particular, are finding themselves in regulatory crosshairs more and more.

But there are some things that Europe doest best, according to Cook. One of them is privacy.

He says that he feels more comfortable in Europe when it comes to privacy issues than in other parts of the world, including the US.

I love these long interviews with the press outside of the typical North American outlets. The (sometimes) different viewpoint is interesting.

Daring Fireball:

Arguing that Apple is in trouble because the iPhone is so popular is like arguing that the ’90s-era Chicago Bulls were in trouble because Michael Jordan was so good. It’s true Jordan couldn’t play forever — and the iPhone won’t be the most profitable product in the world forever. But in the meantime, the Bulls were well-nigh unbeatable, and Apple, for now at least, is unfathomably profitable.

Just like how it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, it’s better to have tremendous success for some period of time than never to have had tremendous success in the first place. Right?

This is a typically well written and thought out piece by Gruber, taking down the ridiculousness of the Apple doomsayers. They have zero basis for their prognostications and yet, rather than being spiked by their editors as posts that have no basis in fact or shouted down by the media in general, they are lauded for their “prescience”.

The Wirecutter:

After 76 hours of research and side-by-side testing with four different models, we found the $800 Epson SureColor P600 is the best photo inkjet printer for most people.

It delivers professional-quality color prints, as well as black-and-white photographs that are as close to traditional darkroom prints as you’ll see from any digital printer around. Its prints also last longer than anything you’d get from a typical online photo service. The P600 can print on a wider variety of media than the competition, and its LCD touchscreen control panel makes setup and maintenance easy.

I’m a big proponent of printing some of your photos. There’s nothing like holding a physical representation of a memory. I have an Epson R2000 and I love taking some of my better photos and printing them out and putting them on my own walls or giving them to friends.

Ars Technica:

Privacy advocates are warning federal authorities of a new threat that uses inaudible, high-frequency sounds to surreptitiously track a person’s online behavior across a range of devices, including phones, TVs, tablets, and computers.

The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can’t be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.

And the ad industry wonders why we hate them and happily use ad blockers.

Intego:

Did you know that you can set up something called a “Medical ID” on your iPhone?

This can be accessed even while the phone is locked by clicking on the emergency options, and it can display things like name, date of birth (DOB), emergency contacts, medical conditions, and even blood type!

It can be managed by clicking on the little “Health” app that comes default on the iPhone.

The Medical ID is important because, in case of an emergency, medical responders can look at your phone and know any allergies or medical conditions you have and know who to contact for you without unlocking your phone.

This only takes a few seconds to set up but if the EMTs on scene know about it, they can quickly access important medical information or your emergency contact.

Fast Company:

Once upon a time, Apple was known for its ease of use, for computers and applications that were understandable, powerful, and could be used without reference to any manuals. All the operations were discoverable (the power of menus), all could be undone or redone, and there was considerable feedback so you always knew what had just taken place.

However, when Apple moved to gestural-based interfaces with the first iPhone, followed by its tablets, it deliberately and consciously threw out many of the key Apple principles. No more discoverability, no more recoverability, just the barest remnants of feedback.

Why? Not because this was to be a gestural interface, but because Apple simultaneously made a radical move toward visual simplicity and elegance at the expense of learnability, usability, and productivity. They began shipping systems that people have difficulty learning and using, getting away with it because people don’t recognize such problems until it is too late, and money has already changed hands. Even then, people tend to blame themselves for the shortcomings of their devices: “If I weren’t so stupid . . . !”

While I wouldn’t personally paint so broad a brush, this (long) article by a former Apple Human Interface Guideline guru does make some good points and should be read, particularly by those in charge at Apple. I know I’ve often had more trouble than I expect trying to assist new iOS and Mac users in “figuring out” the interface. Maybe I’m (we) are just getting older but it seems as if the User Interface, while more powerful, is much more confusing, especially for people new to the paradigms. I’m not saying we need to go back to OS 7 but a greater focus on the issues Tog brings up might alleviate that “If I weren’t so stupid . . . !” attitude I hear from far too many users.

Discovery:

Besides having one of the best names in the museum business, San Francisco’s Exploratorium is widely considered to be among the most beautiful and well-designed educational institutions on the planet.

Its oddball, hands-on exhibits are considered a model for the modern participatory museum. The Exploratorium has famously been termed a “mad scientist’s penny arcade.”

It turns out the Exploratorium makes apps, too. The latest from the museum team is called How Many Saturdays? and it’s a lot of fun.

San Francisco’s Exploratorium, a wonderful “participatory museum”, was always one of my favorite places to go when we had any extra time at a Macworld Expo. This app typifies the Exploratorium – quirky and weird but in the best possible way.

Buzzfeed:

Earlier this week, a video surfaced of three black teenagers from Sudan and Somalia being barred from entering an Apple store in Melbourne, Australia, because an employee thought “they might steal something.” The company subsequently apologized.

In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, Tim Cook weighed in on the situation, calling it “unacceptable.”

“What people have seen and heard from watching the video on the web does not represent our values. It is not a message we would ever want to deliver to a customer or hear ourselves,” Cook wrote in the companywide email. “None of us are happy with the way this was handled.”

It is unclear if any disciplinary measures were taken against the manager involved in the incident, but multiple sources familiar with the situation say the employee hasn’t been at the store since.

Nor should they be. While this is yet another embarrassment for Apple this week, I think we can all agree that, as Cook says in the email, this doesn’t represent the company’s values.

iMore:

Earlier this week Mac App Store (MAS) apps, on launch, were showing up as “damaged” and couldn’t be opened. The old MAS security certificate seemed to have expired and a new one, at first, didn’t seem to be showing up. Here’s my current understanding of what happened.

Some consider this just a minor mistake on Apple’s part while others see it as endemic to the Mac App Store situation. Regardless, I’m told Apple is working hard on a fix and will have something “soon”.

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Michael Tsai:

I woke up to an inbox full of e-mails from customers reporting that my apps wouldn’t launch. This included new customers who had just purchased from the Mac App Store as well as people who had purchased long ago, hadn’t made any changes, and expected that things would just keep working.

The Mac App Store is supposed to make things easier, but it’s also a single point of failure. Not only is it neglected, but sometimes even the existing functionality stops working.

In short, the system is broken on multiple levels, and there is no evidence to suggest that things will get better.

Tsai is the developer of SpamSieve, among other apps, and he reflects the frustration many developers feel towards Apple and the way the App Store works – or, as in the case a few days ago, catastrophically doesn’t work. This is a huge embarrassment to Apple (and one they haven’t explained or apologized for) as well as being a giant pain point for developers. After all, when your app stops working, who do you contact? The developer or Apple?

NPR:

Stan Lee is a legend. Along with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Lee helped populate the Marvel Comics universe with heroes like the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man.

The man who dreamed up lots of backstories for Marvel characters has now put out his own origin story: A memoir, Amazing Fantastic Incredible, in comic book form.

Even if you’re like me and have only a passing familiarity with comic books, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Stan Lee. I think it’s entirely appropriate that his memoir is in the format he is so well known for.

The Verge:

The reviews are out on iPad Pro, and they address how big it is, whether it’s worth the price, and whether it can or can’t replace a laptop for average consumers. But as a design director at Vox Media, I was more interested in whether I could run all of the apps I normally use on it.

In a lot of ways, the computing devices I use have to feel like extensions of me. I’m always sketching, creating, and ideating on my MacBook Pro. And I don’t regularly use an iPad for work, so the promise of iPad Pro as a device for creatives was particularly intriguing.

I had high hopes that this new iPad would transform me into a rockstar designer. I mean, something this big should be life-changing… right?

There’s lots of discussion of the iPad Pro and where it fits into various workflows. This is an interesting take from the point of view of that group of people a lot of us think will be big buyers of the iPad Pro.

Apple:

The person on your list is a music lover. Gamer. Photographer. Whiz. Workout devotee. Nomad, even. No matter who you’re shopping for this holiday, you’re sure to find a great gift.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always loved gift guides and dreaming about the things I’d like to get for myself and now, as an adult, what I’d like to buy for others. Apple’s Gift Guide is the first in a long line of lists I’ll be perusing over the holidays. Do you plan on getting anything from this list?

I’ve been using the iPad Pro for just over a week now and I’ll tell you, I’m more impressed than what I thought I would be. The first question I set out to solve was “who is the target market for iPad Pro?” While I thought that would be a difficult question to answer, it turned out to be quite simple. More on that later. […]

The Guardian:

Apple’s chief executive has sharply criticised surveillance powers proposed by the British government, warning that allowing spies a backdoor route into citizens’ communications could have “very dire consequences”.

“You can just look around and see all the data breaches that are going on. These things are becoming more frequent,” Cook told the Daily Telegraph. “They can not only result in privacy breaches but also security issues. We believe very strongly in end-to-end encryption and no back doors. We don’t think people want us to read their messages. We don’t feel we have the right to read their emails.

“Any back door is a back door for everyone. Everybody wants to crack down on terrorists. Everybody wants to be secure. The question is how. Opening a back door can have very dire consequences.”

The proposed UK law would require ISPs and phone companies to keep records that would track every website visited for a year. The authorities would not need a warrant to access the data.

Fast Company:

At Fast Company’s Innovation Festival in New York, Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president for retail and online stores, discussed the customer experience beyond selling products, uniting Apple’s online and offline stores, and her experience as one of the top executives at the world’s most valuable company.

I love these talks Apple execs give that allow us a little bit of insight into their thinking. And maybe these kinds of events can put to rest the meme that Ahrendts isn’t “involved” or “public” enough.