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Hope you all have a fantastic Father’s Day. Some corny jokes to share.

Jim and Dan talk about how the Apple Watch has changed Jim’s life for the better.

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Ars Technica:

IMAX’s letter is part of a disturbing trend in which some companies believe that owning a trademark actually allows them to control any speech about their product. Too many examples abound already of trademark owners that believe they’re entitled to control how movies and TV shows portray their brand.

IMAX has taken that to the next level here, believing it is entitled to literally silence someone speaking to a journalist because the name of a corporation happened to slip out of his mouth.

Good to see both Ars Technica pushing back against this kind of corporate bullying and IMAX’s apology after they realize how badly they screwed up.

As someone with an extremely complicated relationship with his three dads, this video had me in tears thinking about all the things I wish I could have said to them and all the things I wish I could have heard them say.

Don’t wait until it’s too late.

My thanks to HelloTalk for sponsoring The Loop this week. Finally, learning and practicing a new language is easier and more intuitive than ever before. Introducing HelloTalk, the language app where your teachers are native language speakers from around the world. You just pick the language you want to learn—there are over 100 from which to select—and almost instantaneously you’ll be in touch with native speakers of that language … and you’ll start learning and practicing immediately.

HelloTalk isn’t a course you strictly follow; rather, you learn and practice at your pace and in the manner that best meets the way you learn. Practice foreign languages with people around the world. Simultaneously speak and type the language you’re learning. Record your voice before speaking to your HelloTalk friends and compare your recording to standard pronunciations. Change your friends’ audio messages to text for better understanding, and receive help to improve your grammar. Easily translate whenever you don’t understand, and so much more.

With HelloTalk, you’ll discover learning a new language is fun … and fast. Download your copy today.

Download HelloTalk for iPhone

Download HelloTalk for Android


The emails and tweets about the weight loss I’ve experienced using HealthKit and Apple Watch have been heartwarming, to say the very least. It was probably the most difficult piece I’ve ever written, just because I was putting myself all out there for everyone to see. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I would even post it. Finally, I looked at the screen, hit publish, and walked away. […]

After winning the 2015 Helen Keller Achievement Award for VoiceOver, Apple has highlighted some of the popular apps using VoiceOver that are available on its App Store.

AFB is recognizing Apple for VoiceOver, a gesture-based screen reader that allows users to hear a description of everything happening on the display, and other features that make iPhone, iPad and other iOS devices accessible to people with vision loss. Apple received an AFB Access Award in 2009 for its trailblazing engineering of accessible products and continues its extraordinary efforts to make their products accessible for everyone.

Congrats to all at Apple for thinking of ever customer.

Petapixel:

If you come across any photograph published in the US before 1923, you’re free to use it for whatever purpose you’d like, with or without permission, and with or without attribution. Why? Because its copyright has expired and it’s public domain.

Strangely enough, sometimes free public domain photos get sold as stock photos, and those who don’t know any better may pay large sums to use something they could have used for free.

Don’t get conned by Corbis or anyone else trying to sell you imagery that is in the public domain.

Red Bull:

Leader Paul Bonhomme and Wingman Steve Jones have been flying together for 17 years, and needed every ounce of that experience to pull off this amazing feat of aviation.

The Red Bull Matadors pilots hurtled straight through a hangar at Llanbedr Airfield, north Wales, at a speed of 160 knots (185mph), just one metre off the ground.

Brings new meaning to the words, “sphincter tightening”. Amazing skill and courage of these two guys. “If we get it wrong, we hit a building”. Indeed.

Apple earns five stars in this year’s Who Has Your Back report. This is Apple’s fifth year in the report, and it has adopted every best practice we’ve identified as part of this report. We commend Apple for its strong stance regarding user rights, transparency, and privacy.

Congrats Apple.

EFF’s evaluation of Google (three stars):

Google should take a stronger position in providing notice to users about government data requests after an emergency has ended or a gag has been lifted. Furthermore, Google should provide transparency into its data retention policies.

Spencer Wynn

The Hello Project was born of a love of story telling and curiosity.

All too often people pass one another, head down and only interacting with their mobile devices. This is an attempt to use the power of social media to reconnect people in the oldest way possible …

by saying Hello.

This is sort of the Canadian version of the famous New York city project and it brings home a thought I’ve always had – most of us have stories to tell but no one to tell them to.

I love the idea of street photography but am often too reserved and shy (too Canadian) to approach people. I think this way of doing it will inspire me to try my own photographic experiment along these lines.

Check out the picture at the top of the post. Great!

Over 600 million Samsung mobile device users may be at risk due to a significant security threat, according to researchers at mobile security specialist NowSecure.

and

“Welton found he could hijack the process of updating one of the virtual keyboards Samsung installs on many Android smartphones. From there, he could eavesdrop on phone conversations, rummage through text messages and contacts, or turn on the microphone to capture audio,”…

Enjoy your phone Samsung people.

Jim and Merlin recap WWDC and talk rock.

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Brought to you by:

Casper — An obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price.

Warby Parker — Premium quality, affordable eyewear.

Priceonomics:

As helium supplies start to dwindle, the prices have already started to rise, and party balloons are taking a back-seat to the more serious applications. A hundred years down the line, a party balloon might be about as precious as a gold ring.

Despite the fact that science has known about the impending helium scarcity for decades, it’s only made the news in the past five years. Why that is has a lot to do with helium’s complicated political history in the United States.

What a fascinating story about an element most of us give no thought to unless we are sucking it in to make funny voices.

I have been reporting on Apple for more than 20 years now, and in all that time no product has had such an impact on my life as this little piece of hardware and software. I don’t say that for dramatic effect, it has had a profound effect on the way I live. As you will read later, this is the most personal review I have ever written. […]

LensProToGo:

As many of you may have heard, LensProToGo suffered a break-in at our Concord, MA location over the weekend of June 13-14 totaling just shy of $600,000 worth of gear stolen. We’ve taken a full inventory and this is the list of items that was taken. While this list is quite large, it does represent only a portion of our inventory, so we’re still able to handle customer orders with virtually no effect.

Please take a look at this list and be wary of any used camera items for sale in the coming months. Always ask to see serial numbers before purchasing.

The nice folks at LensProToGo (who I’ve rented from often) need your help. As with any purchase, always check the serial numbers and, if you are a photographer, be on the look out for “special deals” on eBay, Craigslist and other places on lenses. As you can see by the list, LensProToGo got ripped for a lot of lenses that will soon start showing up for sale.

CBC:

Cook had left his smartphone in a taxi and traced it electronically to an address on Highbury Avenue.

When he and a relative went to the address, he was confronted by three men in a car, London police Const. Ken Steeves told CBC News.

After a discussion about the phone, the men started to drive away and Cook dove onto the hood of the car. He was shot soon afterward.

We hear “heartwarming” stories of people tracking down their iPhones, confronting the bad guys, and getting them back all the time. Here’s the flip side. Please don’t do this. I promise your phone isn’t worth your life. Contact your local police if you’ve lost your phone and can track it to a specific location.

Great appreciation piece on Medium.

Finally, learning and practicing a new language is easier and more intuitive than ever before. Introducing HelloTalk, the language app where your teachers are native language speakers from around the world. You just pick the language you want to learn—there are over 100 from which to select—and almost instantaneously you’ll be in touch with native speakers of that language … and you’ll start learning and practicing immediately.

HelloTalk isn’t a course you strictly follow; rather, you learn and practice at your pace and in the manner that best meets the way you learn. Practice foreign languages with people around the world. Simultaneously speak and type the language you’re learning. Record your voice before speaking to your HelloTalk friends and compare your recording to standard pronunciations. Change your friends’ audio messages to text for better understanding, and receive help to improve your grammar. Easily translate whenever you don’t understand, and so much more.

With HelloTalk, you’ll discover learning a new language is fun … and fast. Download your copy today.

Download HelloTalk for iPhone

Download HelloTalk for Android


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The folksy roots, the founder breakups, the dysfunction — all those things made Twitter a very human and a much beloved service. It was a service everyone (especially those in the media) wanted to love — and yet it is 2015 and the narrative around the company has become negative and toxic. The more I read all these things about the company, the more I wonder — how did Twitter lose the plot, the narrative. Till not too long ago, the press was generally very kind to the company.

It’s very true, there’s been very little positive out of Twitter in a while.

I began using OS X El Capitan shortly after last week’s WWDC keynote when I met with Apple to talk about the latest release of the operating system. […]

iPhone Photography Award:

From intimate, thought-provoking moments to stunning, captivating scenes, this year’s iPhone Photography Award winners are nothing short of impressive.

The three Photographers of the Year Awards go to Michal Koralewski of Poland, David Craik of the United Kingdom and Yvonne Lu of the United States. Their photographs take full advantage of the iPhone to quietly capture their subjects without disturbing the atmosphere.

Always amazing to see what photographers can do with the iPhone. Inspires me to want to shoot more with it.

Re/code:

Here are the real numbers, according to Robert Kondrk, the Apple executive who negotiates music deals along with media boss Eddy Cue: In the U.S., Apple will pay music owners 71.5 percent of Apple Music’s subscription revenue. Outside the U.S., the number will fluctuate, but will average around 73 percent, he told Re/code in an interview. Executives at labels Apple is working with confirmed the figures.

Those totals include payments to the people who own the sound recordings Apple Music will play, as well as the people who own the publishing rights to songs’ underlying compositions. That doesn’t mean the money will necessarily go to the musicians who recorded or wrote the songs, since their payouts are governed by often-byzantine contracts with music labels and publishers.

No surprises here as the 70+% is pretty standard. What I’m curious to know is how much will those “basement musicians” Apple mentioned get? Apple talks of unsigned artists being able to get their music listened to on the service. If those artists get 70% of the revenue, it might generate significant money for them.

Mic:

The Internet has a wealth of concerts, but it can be next to impossible to wade through the options. Places like Netflix and Hulu carry the classics, like The Last Waltz and Gimme Shelter, while random YouTube pages carry snippets of concerts. But somewhere in the middle are hidden gems — complete nights from historic moments in music.

From the Beach Boys to Rage Against the Machine and B.B. King to Nirvana, here are eight historic shows available at your fingertips.

I am so watching the daylights out of that Rage Against The Machine concert right now.

I’d like to thank Microsoft for sponsoring The Loop this week. This year, Microsoft is making major investments in developer and cloud tools to move beyond Windows and bring great support to iOS developers and other popular platforms. As part of this focus, Microsoft is sponsoring Altconf this week and will be there to show you some of the cool new services and free tools to help you take your apps to the next level.

I also want to thank Microsoft for sponsoring the Beard Bash party on Monday June 8th. Life may run on code, but we all know developers run on beer.

If you cannot attend Altconf or the Beardbash, you can learn more about what is possible at http://AnyDevAnyApp.com.

I wonder if the 140 character limit on regular tweets is sacrosanct, or if its days are numbered, too.

Techcrunch:

After years of user-growth struggles, Twitter just announced that its CEO Dick Costolo has chosen to step down July 1, though he’ll remain on the board. Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey will be the interim CEO.

Dorsey will continue to be Square’s CEO, but will fill in for Costolo until Twitter finds a replacement. Dorsey was previously Twitter’s CEO before being forced out and replaced by co-founder Ev Williams in 2008. Dorsey became Twitter’s executive chairman in 2011 when Costolo became CEO.

Chaos is never good for a publicly traded company and Twitter has certainly had many ups and downs during Costolo’s tenure. Many hope the next CEO, who ever he or she may be, will finally give the company a direction both users and Wall St can look forward to.

Design Taxi:

To promote its newly announced music service, Apple has rolled out three new ads showing its product’s ubiquity.

Its first ad—titled ‘Apple Music—Worldwide’—features music as the go-to companion for every situation in life. From the routine daily commute to moments of sadness, Apple Music never fails you. The second spot gives you a glimpse of the past with the ‘History of Sound’, presenting Apple Music as the future of the music industry.

The final commercial delves into the features of Apple Music and how it houses all your favorite sounds.

Apple Music is available to users at the end of this month—let’s see if it is able to live up to its big promises as advertised.

I always love when Apple posts new ads. I especially love all the “ad experts” pontificating about them the next day.