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This is a must see if you’re interested in recording. Bob Clearmountain is the best in the industry.

Great article from Tim Bajarin on the mistakes and lack of understanding Google had with glass.

Uber has submitted a bid for Here, the main competitor to Google Maps, for as much as $3 billion, according to three people with knowledge of the offer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Here is owned by Nokia, the Finnish telecom giant, which announced last month that it was considering selling the business.

Makes sense for Uber, but there’s stiff competition to purchase the mapping service.

Jim and Dan talk about Beats Music’s relaunch might hurt Spotify more than others, the new Apple TV remote’s probable touch pad redesign, Microsoft’s emoji additions, the Reserve Strap, Apple’s launch of the ‘Made for Apple Watch’ third-party band program, and more.

Learn about Applebot, the web crawler for Apple.

Interesting.

Among many other things, David Morgenstern was a long time Mac journalist. He was also a friend. Rest in Peace, David.

Tony made the iPod and worked on several versions of the iPhone before leaving Apple. This is when he founded Nest. I have a ton of respect for Tony and his thoughts on products. Note that this interview was done before the Apple Watch came out.

Wow, just wow.

The New York Times:

Once an indulgence reserved for special occasions, manicures have become a grooming staple for women across the economic spectrum. There are now more than 17,000 nail salons in the United States, according to census data. The number of salons in New York City alone has more than tripled over a decade and a half to nearly 2,000 in 2012.

But largely overlooked is the rampant exploitation of those who toil in the industry. The New York Times interviewed more than 150 nail salon workers and owners, in four languages, and found that a vast majority of workers are paid below minimum wage; sometimes they are not even paid. Workers endure all manner of humiliation, including having their tips docked as punishment for minor transgressions, constant video monitoring by owners, even physical abuse. Employers are rarely punished for labor and other violations.

Awful story of the treatment of these women. Pass this along to anyone you know who is “going to get my nails done”.

Macworld:

Released in 2010, MacKeeper has been dogged by accusations that it exaggerates security threats in order to convince customers to buy. Its aggressive marketing has splashed MacKeeper pop-up ads all over the web.

These days, MacKeeper has gone to a subscription-based pricing model rather than a $39.95 one-off payment. It costs $7.95 a month in the U.S. for the premium, year-long plan. Its latest feature is offering phone support from Apple-certified technicians, which it calls Human Inside.

But many of the tools in the software bundle, which includes an antivirus (AV) scanner and 15 other utilities, are already in OS X or available for free.

Macworld takes a light touch on the tsunami of criticism about the software and the various companies that have and do own it but it’s fairly common knowledge that, at the very least, you really don’t need to waste money on MacKeeper. MacKeeper has been known to be, at minimum, almost useless and, at its worse, to cause actual problems with your Mac.

Developed by Softube — and available exclusively for UAD-2 hardware and Apollo audio interfaces — the Marshall Plexi Super Lead 1959 plug-in is an expert emulation of the 100-watt British classic that defined the sound of rock.

And

The Neve 88 Series is a paragon of large-format analog console design. Introduced in 2001, the 88 Series is renowned for its startling depth, airiness, and clarity — deftly encompassing the best of all Neve designs that came before it.

I love the Marshall amp plug-in. Truly great work from UA, again.

Besides the fact they are malicious, copying, stinking bastards, their customer service sucks balls.

Apple’s iOS reached 20.3 percent share of the market for the first quarter of 2015 in Europe’s big five countries of Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, according to a new report from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

Longreads:

“I must admit that it was intended consciously as a social document. … [but] the storyteller’s first duty is to the story.”

Not a “long read” but a 90 minute documentary on the making of what many, myself included, consider the greatest film of all time. If you get a chance to grab a DVD of it, make sure you get the one with the commentary tracks – one by Roger Ebert and the other with Peter Bogdanovich. It will give you a new and greater appreciation of this magnificent film.

Federico Viticci came up some a list of things he would like to see in the next version of iOS. As you might expect, some of the things on the list are fixes for the current operating system, but it’s an interesting read.

Swedish music streamer Spotify has more to lose from Apple’s anticipated Beats Music revamp than its competition, according to new usage data, as iOS accounts for a majority of Spotify’s active users.

Apple really has to do this right. We’ve seen music services do big, splashy relaunches and users really don’t care—I really don’t care. There are some key points that Apple needs to take care of to beat out Spotify—if they don’t, it’s going to be a tough road ahead for them. Music is very important to Apple, there is no doubt about that, but they have to keep the focus and intensity on this that they’ve shown for their other products.

Vinepair:

In America Cinco de Mayo has evolved to become one of the country’s largest drinking holidays. In 2013, over $600 million dollars worth of beer was sold, according to Nielsen data, which is more beer than is sold for St. Patrick’s Day or the Super Bowl, two holidays where beer consumption is the primary focal point. And most of that beer is Mexican in origin, which has also meant that the Mexican beer sector, thanks to Cinco de Mayo, has continued to grow and thrive north of the border, experiencing the best sector growth in the American market according to EuroMonitor data, second only to the rapid growth of American craft beer.

Suffice it to say, Cinco de Mayo is a behemoth when it comes to selling booze, but how did a holiday that isn’t really even celebrated in Mexico – Mother’s Day, which occurs around the same time, is a much bigger deal – become not only the most powerful U.S. holiday when it comes to selling alcohol, but also the only connection most Americans have to our largest immigrant group? You can thank Texas distributors of Corona in the 1980s.

Yet another completely made up “holiday” created in the service of marketing.

Craig Hockenberry:

I started reporting these issues early in the Yosemite beta release and provided tons of documentation to Apple engineering. It was frustrating to have a Mac that lost its network connection every few days because the network interfaces were disabled while waking from sleep (and there was no way to disable this new “feature”.)

Marco Arment and many others are having similar issues.

They pay for shipping and promise a three-day turnaround. I feel like doing it just to see how it works.

Great performance.

CBC News:

It was a busy weekend in Torbay, as the first iceberg of the season arrived in eastern Newfoundland just off the coastline near Tapper’s Cove.People flocked to the area over the weekend to take advantage of the site.

The Canadian Coast Guard says there’s currently more than 100 icebergs off the province’s coastlines, so it’s just the beginning of iceberg season in Newfoundland and Labrador.

This is how cool Canada is – we have icebergs, baby! By the way, if you ever want a fun vacation, visit Newfoundland. Starkly beautiful province and wonderful people.

CBC News:

To mark Star Wars Day, as May the 4th has come to be known, the carillon bells inside the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill rang out the Imperial March music for Star Wars, among other space-related tunes.

It was part of a 15-minute carillon concert with a space theme that began at noon.

The concert included the Star Wars theme by John Williams, arranged by Janet Dundore; Princess Leia’s Theme, arranged by Janet Dundore and Andrea McCrady; and The Imperial March, arranged by Andrea McCrady.

There’s nerdy and there’s cool. Rarely do the two intersect but this is definitely Nerd Cool.

When an app isn’t responding or working correctly, it might use more of the processor (CPU) than it should, even when the app doesn’t seem to be doing anything. As the CPU gets busier, it uses more energy, which reduces the length of time that your Mac can run on battery power. It also generates heat, which can cause the fans in your Mac to spin faster. 

I’ve used this from time to time to see if an app was dragging the system down.

I’m not a huge Star Wars fan, but obviously the people at Amazon are. They are selling everything from toys to dog outfits in the Star Wars theme.

As you design your Apple Watch app, understand the foundations on which Apple Watch itself was designed:

Some great information posted on Apple’s developer Web site.

A new and exciting website has recently been launched for web designers and developers.

You likely spend hours every morning browsing through hundreds of posts on your RSS feeds, hoping to stumble across relevant stories. Webdesigner News was built to provide web designers and developers with a single location to discover the latest and most significant stories on the Web.

They search through hundreds of posts on blogs, social media, and news channels, to deliver the most essential stories of the day. The content covers quality news, fresh tools and apps, case studies, code demos, inspiration posts, videos and more.

With frequent updates throughout the day, you’ll always find something interesting and fun to read.

Click here to visit the Webdesigner News website and subscribe to the newsletter for the latest stories of the day.

Techcrunch:

The idea behind Dufl is that frequent travelers waste a lot of time trying to clean and prep their clothes for each trip, especially when those trips are pretty much back-to-back. With Dufl, the user never has to pack a bag or clean their travel clothes ever again.

I’d hate to be such a frequent business traveller I’d need this kind of service but it does sound like a pretty cool idea and an example of a business that wouldn’t have been possible ten, maybe even five years ago.

Mapbox:

The Geotaggers’ World Atlas is my long-term project to discover the world’s most interesting places and the routes that people follow between them. Five years ago I first started retrieving photo locations from the Flickr search API and drawing lines between them to make the first version of the Atlas.

Today I’m able to launch the full Geotaggers’ World Atlas covering every city in the world. Thanks to Flickr’s API, it exposes over 10 years of photo locations, and as a web map it lets you explore not just the largest centers of activity but also their context, anywhere on earth.

As an exercise in coding, this is interesting. As a visualization of data, it’s utterly fascinating. The only downside is the interactive map doesn’t have details like street names so it may be hard to find out what is so fascinating about that particular location but look up your own city on the map and see if you can spot “the most interesting places”.

Pictures and videos in this update. The scale of this project is just unreal.

Mathew Ingram:

The idea that someone could monetize Twitter before Twitter itself got around to doing so was what one investor called a “holy shit moment” for the company.

I wonder what would have happened if Twitter embraced the third-parties years ago.