Uncategorized

Interesting choices to carry the larger iPhone 6 Plus. Mine fits in my pocket, but I’m a big guy, so I suppose that’s not an option for everyone.

It’s a crime that it took them so long to nominate Stevie.

Om Malik:

The combination of Facebook and anonymity is as awkward as the marriage of Michael Jackson and Lisa Presley — farcical, comic and an act undertaken for the express purpose of deceit. Anonymity and privacy are not part of Facebook’s DNA.

Boom!

Kyle Russell has a nice article about Jony Ive’s panel at the Vanity Fair Summit talking about design. It’s a very interesting process. Then someone asked Jony about Xiaomi:

When a member of the audience came up to ask a question about Xiaomi and their unofficial tagline of “the Apple of China,” Ive was very straightforward with his response: “I’ll stand a little bit harsh, I don’t see it as flattery. When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t know it’s gonna work, you spend 7 or 8 years working on something, and then it’s copied. I think it is really straightforward. It is theft and it is lazy. I don’t think it is ok at all.”

Fucking right!

Much respect bearded ones.

The site, set to open in time for the holiday-shopping season on Manhattan’s busy 34th Street, would mark an experiment by Amazon AMZN, -2.27% to connect with customers in the physical world. Amazon has built its business on competitive pricing and fast shipping. Until now, though, it couldn’t compete with the immediacy of a traditional store.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure this makes sense to me. Amazon has a strong brand, but this doesn’t seem to do anything to strengthen its core business.

New York Times Magazine:

Americans tend to lack imagination when it comes to breakfast. The vast majority of us, surveys say, start our days with cold cereal — and those of us with children are more likely to buy the kinds with the most sugar. Children all over the world eat cornflakes and drink chocolate milk, of course, but in many places they also eat things that would strike the average American palate as strange, or worse.

Really interesting to read about the variety of foods these kids eat and a lot of it is food most of us have never even heard of. But the pictures are even better. The kids are so cute.

It’s very sad. Glenn is a great guy and friend, but I understand the issues of being an independent publisher on Apple’s Newsstand—it’s not fun. Apple should just admit that they don’t give a shit about digital magazines and be done with it.

The Loop has been sold out of weekly sponsorships for the better part of two years, but we have some openings coming up in the next couple of months. There is only one sponsor a week, so you will have the exclusive spot to get your product or service in front of the fine, good looking readers of The Loop. If you would like to talk about a sponsorship or schedule a week, please Email Jim Dalrymple.

Jim and Shawn talk about Samsung, the Apple Watch and teens, Steve Ray Vaughn and “Does the iPhone 6 get lost in The Beard?” Special guest appearance on this Amplified by a crow!

Sponsored by lynda.com (Visit lynda.com/thebeard to get access to all their courses FREE for 7 days).

I did an iTunes Festival wrap-up piece on Fortune today, which includes an exclusive interview with Oliver Schusser, Apple’s head of iTunes Europe.

Racked:

Neiman, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, Barneys New York, and Saks Fifth Avenue all have their own outlets; customers flock to these stores for the brand-name cachet and believe they’re shopping last season’s carefully curated inventory. However, this isn’t exactly the case.

Nordstrom Rack, for example, confirms to Racked that only 20% of what it sells is clearance merchandise coming from their stores and website, while the rest is bought expressly for the outlet.

I’ve gone to dozens of outlet stores and malls, sometimes involuntarily, and I’ve always thought they were a little bit fishy. Turns out, many are.

The Verge:

The first thing you notice about the IBM Model M keyboard, when you finally get your hands on it, is its size. After years of tapping chiclet keys and glass screens on two- and three-pound devices, hefting five pounds of plastic and metal (including a thick steel plate) is slightly intimidating. The second thing is the sound – the solid click that’s turned a standard-issue beige peripheral into one of the computer world’s most prized and useful antiques.

I used this keyboard so much in college, I can still hear that sound and feel that key pressure. Great keyboard.

Medium:

The physically and mentally exhausting nature of the Oktoberfest fortnight requires trust that’s cultivated in familiarity. Each server needs to know she can lean on her fellow team members when she’s endured so many boob ogles, grabby hands, and sawdust-covered blobs on the floor. Worming your way through 10,000 sweaty, beer-swilling revelers 12 hours a day for 16 days straight tests the limits of even the most crowd-loving extrovert.

Attending Oktoberfest in Germany has always been on my bucket list.

Apple on Wednesday sent out an invite for a special event being held on its Cupertino, Calif. campus on October 16. The event will begin at 10:00 am PT. […]

Recode:

“The concept of wearing a watch for teenagers is foreign — and I think that’s part of what is reflected in that response,” said Munster. “The second piece is, it’s still something that people need to hear more about, beyond what Apple has to say about it, before people get interested in it.”

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster responding to a survey of 7,200 teens, calling teen embrace of Apple Watch tepid. Seems to me, anticipating response to a product that has not yet hit people’s wrists is a fool’s errand.

Wired:

Early tomorrow morning, the moon will pass behind the center of Earth’s shadow and turn a rusty red color. Most people probably won’t be able to see this total lunar eclipse, because it will occur mainly over the Pacific Ocean. But don’t worry. You can watch a live broadcast by the Slooh Community Observatory from multiple locations in Australia and North America or NASA’s broadcast of the event.

Always fun to watch these celestial events.

The Province:

Whitey was pictured in the photograph escaping the clutches of his mother Bernice and racing to his father Jack, a rifleman who was leaving for war with the B.C. Regiment (Duke of Connaughts Own Rifles).

The image was captured by Province photographer Claude Dettloff, sent around the world and on Saturday, brought to life again.

A $2 Canadian coin has been minted, postage stamp produced and bronze statue unveiled at Hyack Square, near the original scene.

Not just an iconic Canadian picture but a world famous image made all the more sad when you hear the story of what happened afterwards. Make sure you have a tissue ready if you watch the video.

EVH is one of the all-time greats. It’s nice to just watching him having fun.

So, the next big thing to complain about is here: Hairgate. One of the community articles on 9to5Mac talks about people getting their hair caught in the iPhone 6—I don’t even know what to say about this shit. […]

Floodwatch:

Floodwatch is a Chrome extension that tracks the ads you see as you browse the internet. It offers tools to help you understand both the volume and the types of ads you’re being served during the course of normal browsing, with the goal of increasing awareness of how advertisers track your browsing behavior, build their version of your online identity, and target their ads to you as an individual.

I’m going to install and use this for a month. I bet the data it collects will appall me.

csstyle is a modern approach for crafting beautifully maintainable stylesheets. The csstyle method is implemented using a set of SASS mixins that make your CSS readable and semantic, generate your selectors for you, and automatically handle things like specificity and nesting. csstyle makes your project’s styling refreshingly consistent.

Geohopper Beacons unite Apple’s iBeacon technology and proximity-based notifications in a single easy-to-use bundle. Using Geohopper 2.0 for iOS, a single tap configures the beacon which then sends notifications to your selected contacts when you enter or exit the beacon location. No additional setup or maintenance is required.

Very cool.

Magic Script Creator lets you experiment with creating custom AppleScripts by just answering a few questions. No prior knowledge of AppleScript is needed in order to use this application. Included in Magic Script Creator are 24 different examples that you can configure hundreds of different ways. Most examples contain UNIX command line tools, combining their power with AppleScript’s strengths.

Version 4.0 contains two new major features. First, you can choose to compile your scripts with line by line remarks. This will help you understand what each line of code is executing. Second, for those examples containing UNIX command tools, you can export the MAN (or manual) page in an easy to read PDF. No more trying to read these manuals in a tiny terminal window! To learn more about Magic Script Creator, watch an instructional video, purchase the application, or try a demo version, please visit our homepage.

This is just completely freaky.

The Atlantic:

Turn on the Food Network any night of the week, and this is what you’ll probably see: “a larger-than-life host, a specifically defined challenge, bombastic music, a set time limit, a panel of judges, and a cast of contestants whose back-story and biographical detail serves to heighten the stakes and fan the [program’s] already heated dramatic flame.”

That’s according to a 2013 study of Food Network’s evolution from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee associate professor Tasha Oren. The Food Network may have started as a channel focusing on the dishes themselves—think Emeril Lagasse and “Bam!” But in order to grow, the network has abandoned its food focus in favor of formulaic competition.

I don’t watch any of these shows but I see the commercials for them all the time. I don’t watch because I don’t get why cooking has to be a contest but the article might have a point. Maybe these shows are for those who don’t like sports but still like competition?

The Wirecutter:

After measuring the charging speed of 44 cables, then sending the top 11 to our electrical engineer for teardown analysis, the $14 Monoprice 3ft MFi Certified Lightning to USB Charge/Sync Cable is the one we’d buy. It may be a third-party cable, but the Monoprice stood out among competitors by being the only third-party cable that had as good, if not better, internal build-quality compared to Apple’s own cable. Plus, it’s cheaper than Apple’s by $5.

Always good to have an extra cable or two lying around and the price is right for this one.

Apple:

Over a million people from all over the world have shared their memories, thoughts, and feelings about Steve. One thing they all have in common — from personal friends to colleagues to owners of Apple products — is how they’ve been touched by his passion and creativity. You can view some of these messages below and share your own at [email protected].

Classy move, Apple.

Re/code:

Bose secured a league sponsorship deal that effectively allows it to elbow Beats — and any other rival headphone manufacturer — off the playing field.

Under terms of its agreement with the league, the NFL confirmed, Bose received a broad set of rights that entitle it to prevent players (or coaches) from wearing any other manufacturer’s headphones during televised interviews.

This ban extends to TV interviews conducted during pre-season training camps or practice sessions and on game day — starting before the opening kickoff through the final whistle to post-game interviews conducted in the locker room or on the podium. The restriction remains in place until 90 minutes after the play has ended.

Does Bose really think this will make any difference in their sales or market share? Do they think that potential buyers, seeing the headsets on a bunch of “old guys” on the sidelines will make their target audience think, “Oh! I like that look! Gotta get me some of those!”?

This is unconscionable.