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Rumors have been swirling since late last night that Apple acquired Instrument and effect plug-in maker, Camel Audio. I contacted Apple today to see whether or not the rumors were true. […]

Broadcast television may be now facing a similar, scary phase shift. Netflix has been making inroads among U.S. consumers for years, but its impact on the key 18-to-49-year-old demographic has so far been limited. Old habits die hard and many viewers have remained mostly loyal to habit of gorging on linear television on Thursday nights.

But the most recent numbers have some scary elements that point to a possibly massive disruption in the near term. Broadcast TV consumption among 18-to-34-year-old Americans plunged by 11% in the Christmas quarter. Ominously, audiences of young-skewing cable channels like Nickelodeon and MTV are now sliding by 14 to 17% year-on-year.

I’ll be honest, I’m more excited about a new Netflix series than I am about anything on one of the big networks.

Interesting article from John Cassidy in The New Yorker. If Apple is working on a car, I think they could give the traditional car companies more of a run than Cassidy does.

Tim Cook posted this tweet today. I still miss Steve. He would have been 60 today.

The car was from 1999, but Marc has designed a lot of transportation vehicles. Just another interesting point.

Medium:

(Apple is) in a lot of ways the story of a technology company hanging around, making interesting things, and waiting for the world to actually need what they wanted to build.

But also something to remember: narratives are bullshit. It’s the people who show up and build and keep going who ultimately write the stories that last.

Many don’t remember or know just how bad off Apple was in those days. It’s path has got to be considered the most remarkable story in the history of business.

djay Pro for Mac provides a complete toolkit for performing DJs. Its unique and modern interface is built around a sophisticated integration with iTunes and Spotify, giving you instant access to millions of tracks. Pristine sound quality and a powerful … Continued

A handy bit of info from Apple’s support site, just in case you ever need it.

I’ve been watching this robot tuner for quite some time. I decided to take the plunge this morning and give it a try.

The Money is Mine:

Settlements have been reached in the Canadian DRAM national class actions, totaling over $79 million.

You can get money from the settlements if you bought DRAM or electronic devices containing DRAM between April 1, 1999 and June 30, 2002.

Many of my fellow Candians qualify for this settlement and I’d encourage you to take advantage of it, even if it’s only at the $20 level. Thanks to my friend Greg for the heads up.

Filippo Valsorda:

Turns out Lenovo preloaded their laptops with adware that will intercept all your secure connections, and allow criminals to do it, too.

After investigating the Lenovo incident we found out that many other softwares – like some Parental Controls or security packages – do things even worse for your security. This test attempts to detect them all.

Send this to all your friends. Quick, simple test.

BBC:

On Oscar night the usually car-clogged streets of Hollywood fall silent because everyone is at a viewing party or, if they’re very lucky, sliding into a dress by Dior or slipping on a tuxedo en route to the big show.

The streets aren’t entirely empty: countless limousines are zipping all over town, then making their way to the Dolby Theatre, more than a dozen blocks surrounding Hollywood Boulevard closed to all other traffic as the purring cars patiently wait to drop off their clients.

Parking’s as difficult as a diva at the best of times in Hollywood, so where do hundreds and hundreds of limos – and their suited and booted chauffeurs – go to wait until they have to pick up again?

I never know whether that would be a cool job or not.

But the kicker here is that the Fire TV actually works. My Apple TV has been plagued by poor performance and repeated crashes—sometimes right in the middle of a show. Every time that’s happened, it’s been faster to switch inputs to my Fire TV and resume the video there than it has been to wait for the Apple TV to finish its glacial restarting process.

I found this really interesting. It’s certainly not a good sign that the Apple TV has such poor performance when watching a program. If it was caused by Dan’s Internet, then the Fire TV wouldn’t work either, but it does. I don’t have many problems with my Apple TV, except when watching the NHL station—that usually sucks really bad.

My thanks to Edovia for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Screens is a beautiful, yet powerful VNC client for iOS and Mac that lets you connect back to your computer from the comfort of your living room, the corner coffee shop or anywhere in the world.

Until the end of the month, we’re happy to offer 20% off Screens for Mac to the readers of The Loop. Simply use this link to save!

Jim’s Note: I’ve used Screens for Mac and iOS since they were first released. I love them both.

Top Hat quickly answers the one question that indie developers have every morning: How well did our apps do in the App Store yesterday?

Top Hat lives in the Yosemite menu bar and shows up-to-date daily sales figures for your apps. Revenue from In-App Purchases is aggregated to give you a single total for each app. Weekly figures can be inspected by holding ⌥ as you click the Top Hat icon.

A great new app from Oisin Prendiville, the man behind Castro podcasting app, Unread and Tokens. I’m buying this.

Use the Mac creative tools you know & love, like Photoshop, with the touch experience of your iPad.

Made by some ex-Apple engineers (of course). This is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a while.

Les Paul’s personal 1954 Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty” sold to Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay last night for $335,500. According to the New York Times, Irsay’s guitar curator, Christopher McKinney, placed the bid at the February 19, 2015 auction held by Guernsey’s in New York City.

I would love to have this guitar. If only I had a few hundred grand laying around.

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The Loop Magazine Issue 31:

Jim Dalrymple looks at the key to Apple’s success. Is it design, software, hardware? Maybe none of those things; Matt Gemmell talks about the colors of his various computer bags—It’s okay to skip safe; Darren Murph looks at where the DSLR is now that so many people are using an iPhone; Joe Caiati has a look at the origins of his writing; Steven Aquino has a wonderful story on how music and the iPod helped people with memories; With so many recordings of the same classical piece, Kirk McElhearn is still searching for the perfect recording, but does it exist?; Darren Murph looks at mobile data and how everything is being commoditized in mobile; and Tim Schock talks about the resurgence of the cassette… really.

You can download The Loop Magazine and preview the latest issue on your iPhone and iPad for free. A subscription is only $1.99 per month and you get access to all previous issues.

The Smithsonian:

In 1959, Xerox released the “914”—the first easy-to-use photocopier. The culmination of more than 20 years of experimentation, it was a much cleaner, “dry” process. The copier created an electrostatic image of a document on a rotating metal drum, and used it to transfer toner—ink in a powdered format—to a piece of paper, which would then be sealed in place by heat. It was fast, cranking out a copy in as little as seven seconds. When the first desk-size, 648-pound machines were rolled out to corporate customers—some of whom had to remove doors to install these behemoths—the era of copying began.

Or more accurately, the explosion of copying began. Xerox expected customers would make about 2,000 copies a month—but users easily made 10,000 a month, and some as many as 100,000. Before the 914 machine, Americans made 20 million copies a year, but by 1966 Xerox had boosted the total to 14 billion.

We don’t give much thought to the copier many of us have daily access to but this article makes a good argument for the ways it changed the world and asks if 3D printing might do the same.

Medium:

As the 19th century teetered into the 20th, the clank of typewriter keys went from solo to symphony. They were the weapon of choice for professional writers, the business elite, people with things to say and the need to say them quickly. They unintentionally provided a passageway for women to tread into workplaces from which they had long been banished, and greatly expedited the rate at which human thought could be translated into ink. An 1867 issue of Scientific American marveled at the “machine by which it is assumed that man may print his thoughts twice as fast as he can write them.”

Using a typewriter at times feels more like playing piano than jotting down notes, a percussive exercise in expressing thought that is both tortuous and rewarding.

Great story about a dying technology and the men who still service it. While I am nostalgic about typewriters and love their look and feel, there’s no way I’d ever want to go back to using one on a daily basis.

Apple has determined that a small percentage of MacBook Pro systems may exhibit distorted video, no video, or unexpected system restarts. These MacBook Pro systems were sold between February 2011 and December 2013.

More information is available from Apple’s Web site.

A nice looking bundle of 8 apps for Mac users. The apps purchased separately would cost $469, but they are selling it for $44.99. If you use code ULTRAMAC5, you can get it for $39.99.

Wired:

The Hangzhou store’s ceilings are almost 50 feet high, with no columns to be found. The façade of glass panels reaches from floor to ceiling without interruption, meaning Foster + Partners had to push well beyond their previous feats in glass manufacturing to get 11 seamless panes.

I’ve seen a lot of pics of this new store and it is an absolutely stunning architectural achievement.

Chinese PC maker Lenovo has found itself in the middle of a public relations disaster, following revelations that it sold a number of notebook computers with pre-installed software that hijacks users’ browser sessions to inject customized advertisements and seriously degrades the security of encrypted connections.

No matter what else they may do, everyone knows that Apple would never pull shit like this.

Really nice looking game for iPhone and iPad.

Re/code:

Twenty-five years ago today, a software application called Photoshop arrived, promising photographers and graphic designers a new realm of digital possibilities. But my brother John Knoll and I didn’t realize at the time just how broadly influential our little piece of software would become.

When I began writing the code back in graduate school instead of focusing on my PhD at the University of Michigan, I had no idea what it would become or how it would be used.

Photoshop might be the most complicated software application I’ve ever used. It’s an amazing tool.

I love Border Collies. They are the smartest dogs in the world.

Eric Clapton has been tapped for induction into the Blues Hall of Fame for his many musical achievements as well as for his role as a popularizer of the entire genre. He brought the blues to audiences in his native Britain and throughout the world, illuminating the work of the original blues artists who inspired him.

Well deserved.

Buzzfeed:

The snow in Boston may have been bad, but wait until you see what’s going on in Canada.

The amazing amount of snow in my and The Loop’s Publisher’s home province and other areas of Eastern Canada is reminiscent of what I remember seeing frequently as a kid. When you’re young, this amount of snow is magical. Thanks to Nicole Dalrymple for the link!

Digg:

When you leave a movie theater, you’re probably not thinking, “Man, the sound in that movie was mixed perfectly.”

Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you’re bad at watching movies. The sound mix in a movie – the combination of the dialogue, soundtrack and sound effects – is designed to be unobtrusive. As one sound mixer put it to me, as soon as the audience notices something slightly off in the mix, “you’ve lost them.”

I love this behind the scenes stuff, especially about subjects most of us have heard of but have no clue what actually happens.