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Petapixel:

Personal videos have long been an integral part of our lives, allowing us to share and cherish memories with our friends and family. Apple’s recent release of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s+ have introduced ultra high-definition 4K video recording to a massive new audience. With such a powerful device, you may want to tweak your footage before you share it. Today, we are taking a quick look at five different editing solutions for your iOS device.

As a photographer, I don’t mess around with video on my iPhone very much but when I do, I use a couple of these free apps to quickly bang out something I can post online.

Mother Jones:

Every photo ever taken by Apollo astronauts on moon missions is now available online, on the Project Apollo Archive’s Flickr account. That’s about 8,400 images, grouped by the roll of film they were shot on. You can finally see all the blurry images, mistakes, and unrecognized gems for yourself. The unprocessed Hasseblad photos (basically raw scans of the negatives) uploaded by the Project Apollo Archive offer a fascinating behind-the-scenes peek at the various moon missions as well as lots and lots (and lots) of photos detailing the surface of the moon.

This is one of those Flickr pages you don’t want to go to unless you have a lot of free time this afternoon.

This looks really interesting. It combines streaming services like Netflix and includes SkipMode, which completely skips over commercial breaks by pressing one button.

The first project is to build an artificial brain from scratch that can pass a high school science test. It sounds simple enough, but trying to teach a machine not only to respond but also to reason is one of the hardest software-engineering endeavors attempted — far more complex than building his former company’s breakthrough Windows operating system, said to have 50 million lines of code.

The second project aims to understand intelligence by coming at it from the opposite direction — by starting with nature and deconstructing and analyzing the pieces. It’s an attempt to reverse-engineer the human brain by slicing it up — literally — modeling it and running simulations.

Apple has purchased VocalIQ, a startup located in the United Kingdom that has developed a natural language API to allow computers and people to have a more natural dialogue, reports Financial Times. According to VocalIQ’s website, the company has developed a self-learning dialogue API built on 10 years of natural language research, belief tracking, decision making, and message generation.

Siri is becoming an increasingly important part of how people interact with Apple’s devices and operating systems.

Thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Makers of Winclone, the best Mac app for migrating, cloning and backing up your Boot Camp partition. This week Loop readers can use the code “theloop” to get 10% off Winclone 5, just in time to backup Boot Camp before upgrading to El Capitan. If you run Boot Camp in labs or classrooms, Boot Runner 2 from Twocanoes is a time saver for remote scheduling of maintenance reboots and an easy to use OS picker for your users. Check out the video or get the 14-day trial and see how easy Boot Runner makes managing dual boot Macs.

The European Commission is probing whether Samsung televisions’ sensed when they were being tested for energy efficiency and changed their power consumption to get better ratings than they deserved.

Samsung admits that its TVs radically changed their power-consumption during testing, but say that the low-power mode was inadvertently triggered by the tests, and was meant to be an automatic power-saving feature.

Sure it was.

NPR:

Apple has long touted the power and design of its devices, but recently the world’s most valuable company has been emphasizing another feature: privacy. That’s no small matter when many users store important private data on those devices: account numbers, personal messages, photos.

Apple CEO Tim Cook talks to NPR’s Robert Siegel about how the company protects its customers’ data, and how it uses — or doesn’t use — that information.

Yet another fascinating interview with Cook. He is really hammering home the security and privacy angle of Apple’s corporate position.

Bloomberg:

Amazon.com Inc. will stop selling media-streaming devices from Google Inc. and Apple Inc. that aren’t easily compatible with its video service, the latest example of the company using its clout to promote products that fit with its own retailing strategy.

The Seattle-based Web retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers that it will stop selling the Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast since those devices don’t “interact well” with Prime Video. No new listings for the products will be allowed and posting of existing inventory will be removed Oct. 29, Amazon said.

Interesting, if foolhardy, move by Amazon. They want to push sales of their own product so much, they are willing to give up the revenue generated by the more popular competitors products. I bet this means we won’t be seeing Amazon’s Prime Video on the Apple TV anytime soon.

Medium:

Ms. Fiorina’s trainwreck stint at HP has been well documented. But I want to address one tiny but telling aspect of her misbegotten reign: an episode that involved her good friend Steve Jobs. It is the story of the HP iPod.

The iPod, of course, was Apple’s creation, a groundbreaking digital music player that let you have “a music library in your pocket.” Introduced in 2001, it gained steam over the next few years and by the end of 2003, the device was a genuine phenomenon. So it was news that in January 2004, Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina made a deal where HP could slap its name on Apple’s wildly successful product. Nonetheless, HP still managed to botch things. It could not have been otherwise, really, because Steve Jobs totally outsmarted the woman who now claims she can run the United States of America.

I can talk about this with some authority. Not only have I written a book about the iPod, but I interviewed Fiorina face to face when she introduced the HP iPod at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show, and then got Steve Jobs’s side of the story.

Hindsight is 20/20 but many of us saw this deal as a “Huh? WHY!?” kind of move by HP. Many more of us predicted it would be a disaster, but not for Apple.

Good list of some of the top companies and where they stand with compatibility. Obviously, this will continue to change. Personally, I keep my music production machine a version back to ensure all of my music software works.

Google is close to rolling out a tool named “Customer Match” which, it appears, will combine a logged-in Google account with any email address handed by a customer to a retailer to create lists of addresses to target specific users with marketing material.

Creepy bastards.

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Google Inc (GOOGL.O) have agreed to bury all patent infringement litigation against each other, the companies announced on Wednesday, settling 18 cases in the United States and Germany.

Interesting.

Some very interesting changes in how Windows is installed in Boot Camp on OS X 10.11 “El Capitan”. When you open Boot Camp Assistant on a new Mac that supports Windows 8 or later, you’ll get the new Boot Camp interface.

Good information if you use Boot Camp.

Nobody’s home has perfect acoustics, and we don’t want to adapt our lives around our speakers. Your speakers should sound great, wherever you choose to put them. So, we decided to make them adapt to the environment around you. We call this Trueplay. Sonos speakers already sound fantastic, but Trueplay brings you even closer to how music should sound. With Trueplay tuning, your speaker can analyze the acoustic profile of any room and fine-tune itself. Most importantly, tuning with Trueplay is incredibly easy to do.

This sounds really impressive. I love Sonos products and can’t wait to hear this.

Sometimes I just love Gruber.

A few days later, we got an email from Apple informing us that we violated their terms and conditions—and the offending developer account had been banned. Unfortunately, iFixit’s app was tied to that same account, so Apple pulled the app as well. Their justification was that we had taken “actions that may hinder the performance or intended use of the App Store, B2B Program, or the Program.”

Live and learn.

Well yeah, it’s an unreleased product that’s meant for developers to make apps and test on. Nobody is allowed to post information about it. I have a hard time believing they didn’t see this coming.

Jim and Dan talk about today’s release of Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan!), iOS 9.0.2, Dan’s new iPhone 6s, 3D Touch, the awesomeness of Siri, and a new age of computing.

Brought to you by Braintree (To learn more, and for your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go to braintreepayments.com/amplified) and Squarespace (Visit the link and use the code GUITARS for a free trial and 10% off your first purchase).

You can download the update by going to General > Settings > Software Update.

Built on a new, modernized foundation and compatible with Mac OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan,’ TextWrangler 5.0 introduces newly overhauled systems for Find Differences and syntax coloring. In addition, TextWrangler 5.0 introduces new built-in support for EditorConfig and adds dozens of other enhancements and new features.

I love Bare Bones Software. I’ve been using their products for 20 years.

iFixIt:

Over the weekend some brave Apple fans introduced their new iPhones to a life aquatic. The phones didn’t always emerge unscathed, but the overall trend is clear: the 6s and 6s Plus are dramatically less prone to liquid damage than their predecessors.

So, what changed? After disassembling a couple of new iPhones in the name of science, here’s what we found.

Remember, “dramatically less prone to liquid damage” does not mean “waterproof”. You still need to be very careful about getting your expensive electronics wet but it’s good to see Apple is taking baby steps towards helping the clumsy among us not damage our phones.

I love these guys—just straight ahead Rock.

This is pretty cool. I just downloaded it on my Mac and setup was very easy—using the iPhone as a client was simply entering my email address into the app. I wonder if they’ll have an app for the new Apple TV.

Techcrunch:

Privacy is something everyone should care about. But studies continue to indicate that people either aren’t aware of what they’re giving up, or they don’t understand the implications.

Apple is blowing that up a bit today by expanding on its privacy page and presenting its policies in clear language, with extensive supporting data. Whether it’s government information requests (94% of that is trying to find stolen iPhones, and only 6% is law enforcement seeking personal information) or how consumer-facing features like iMessage, Apple Pay, Health and HomeKit are set up to protect user information; the sense is one of confidence in its stance.

This has been a long time coming and no surprise that it’s coming from Apple. I expect Samsung (and other companies) to copy this new stance shortly.

LA Times:

The Los Angeles Unified School District has reached a tentative $6.4-million settlement over curriculum from education software giant Pearson that the school system said its teachers barely used.

The pact is the latest fallout from an aborted $1.3-billion plan to provide an iPad to every student, teacher and campus administrator in the nation’s second-largest school district.

The Board of Education is expected to vote on the settlement in October. The bidding process that led to the original contract is the subject of an FBI investigation.

This has been a long, drawn out embarrassment for Apple, a company that prides itself on its work with schools. While the case isn’t entirely over, this settlement at least paves the way for all parties to move on.

Ars Technica:

The only thing that most people will need to know about Apple’s A9 is that it’s a whole lot faster than last year’s A8. But for those of you who are more interested in chip design, Chipworks has unearthed an interesting tidbit: there are two different versions of the A9 chip, one manufactured by Samsung and another by Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC). Most interestingly, Samsung’s version (the APL0898) has a slightly smaller footprint than the TSMC version (APL1022).

There have long been rumors that Apple was dual-sourcing the A8 from Samsung and TSMC, but this is the first visual proof that we’ve seen of the practice. iPhone and iPad processors up to and including the A7 were all made by Samsung.

This is really “inside baseball” for a lot of folks but it does beg the question of why is Apple doing this? To keep Samsung “honest”? Or are they prepping TSMC to take over chip design?

Nature Geoscience:

Determining whether liquid water exists on the Martian surface is central to understanding the hydrologic cycle and potential for extant life on Mars. Recurring slope lineae, narrow streaks of low reflectance compared to the surrounding terrain, appear and grow incrementally in the downslope direction during warm seasons.

Our findings strongly support the hypothesis that recurring slope lineae form as a result of contemporary water activity on Mars.

I link directly to the research study because I love the language they use. Bottom line? There is not only water on Mars (we knew that already. It’s in the form of ice) but that it actually flows – “liquid water” – in Mars’ summer months.

M.G. Siegler:

Anyone who thinks Apple’s new ‘Live Photos’ element of the iPhone 6s (and 6s Plus) is a gimmick is a fool that doesn’t understand Apple — and may not understand human nature and emotions. I actually think this is one of the more brilliant features Apple has released in a while.

It’s no accident that people with children immediately realize the value in this feature.

I haven’t seen Live Photos in action but it’s been interesting talking to people who have. No one has dismissed it as “just a gimmick” and those with young children echo Siegler – they think it is a brilliant idea.

Petapixel:

GoPro just further expanded its action camera lineup after announcing the HERO+ LCD back in June. The new HERO+ is an even more affordable camera that drops the LCD screen while retaining 1080p60 recording and Wi-Fi connectivity.

The HERO+ can also capture 720p60 video, 8-megapixel photos, time-lapses, and burst mode photos. Other features and specs of the camera include an durable (integrated) housing that’s waterproof down to 131 feet (40m), Bluetooth connectivity, GoPro’s new built-in trimming and sharing, QuikCapture (powering up and starting video recording with one button), and HiLight Tag for selecting key moments while filming.

If you’re looking for a very good and very inexpensive action camera, GoPro is your best bet. This would be a great Christmas gift for a kid who was into BMX or other high motion activities. I’ve been thinking of getting one for my motorcycle until I realized, the video wouldn’t really be all that exciting.

Lisa Bettany:

In the past eight years, each new advancement in iPhone camera technology has made dramatic improvements to image quality. The new 12-megapixel iPhone 6s iSight camera is no exception. With 50% more megapixels than the last four iPhone 8-megapixel models, the iPhone 6s boasts a number of key improvements including: improved auto-focus, local tone-mapping, noise reduction, and colour separation, with that fancy “deep trench isolation” technology Apple is raving about.

In this follow-up post to my previous iPhone comparisons, I present a 9 iPhone comparison from all iPhone versions taken with Camera+ including: the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, and the new iPhone 6s, in a variety of real-life situations to test each iPhone camera’s capabilities.

The results are predictable (after all, it’s expected the camera would get better with each generation) but seeing them on the page is very interesting especially considering how “great” many of us thought the original iPhone was at taking pictures.