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Every once in a while in my travels, I come across a place I just have to share with people. I spent the last week in Kilkenny, Ireland, much of it at the Zuni Hotel. This is a quaint place in the center of Kilkenny, close to all of the major sites, pubs and restaurants. The rooms were clean and modern, the restaurant superb, but the friendly, helpful staff really made my stay something to write about—they couldn’t do enough to try and make me comfortable and happy. If you ever go to Kilkenny, do yourself a favor and stay at Zuni.

It’s an interesting list, but I agree with their top choice.

Gerry Conway:

This is a very big deal, because it strikes to the heart of what made Comixology’s app a near-perfect venue for discovering and falling in love with new comics, a venue creators and publishers have been searching for since the collapse of mainstream newsstand distribution in the late 1970s-early ’80s: it destroys the casual reader’s easy access to an impulse purchase. And that’s a terrible development for the future of comics.

There are so many good parts of this article I could have quoted.

Marcin Treder:

Design is not principally measured by a product’s visual appeal; its aesthetic qualities.

It’s also measured by how it was planned and articulated, how it was built, how it functions. It’s about the design’s ability to improve upon the current reality.

It seems to me that it’s the function part that many people often leave out. It matters, a lot.

Clear is the revolutionary to-do and reminders app that makes you more productive. It’s as easy to use as pen and paper, and once you start organizing your life with Clear you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.

You can download the iOS and Mac versions today.

The Code Conference takes over where All Things D left off. It’s already sold out.

Fascinating article by Gary Gibson.

At New Relic, we make it super easy to build faster and better performing mobile applications. Is using New Relic really that easy? Yes, yes it is. We know you’re busy coding (and reading The Loop), that’s why in just five minutes you can deploy New Relic and be looking at game-changing data. Our first-of-its-kind SaaS mobile app monitoring solution pinpoints problems quickly in your mobile app. Spend less time troubleshooting, get more positive reviews and focus your time where it matters – on developing new features and growing your user base. Use New Relic to track your app performance across devices and networks and get full end-to-end visibility. The people using your app will thank you for it.

x2y is a beautifully simple aspect ratio calculator for the iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Built for designers and web developers who need to resize images and videos in code, x2y calculates dimensions for you automatically. Just choose the original aspect ratio or size, enter one of the new desired dimensions, and the missing dimension will be calculated instantly.

This is a cool app.

I will rule the world.

In honour of The Publisher’s adventures in Ireland this coming week, I present this list. But I’m not sure where they got their data from. For example, there’s no way Poutine is the “drunk food of choice” in Canada.

. Wired:

Mystery Science Theater 3000 (is) the cult-­stoking comedy series that provided awful films with hilarious, sharp, high-speed detractors’ commentary. MST3K is the story of a sarcastic Earth dweller—played initially by series creator Joel Hodgson and, in later years, by head writer Mike Nelson—who’s exiled to a ramshackle spaceship called the Satellite of Love, where he’s forced to watch an endless supply of crapola movies. Our hero’s response to such torture, naturally, is to unleash a torrent of withering one-­liners, or “riffs,” that he delivers with the help of a couple of robot pals.

I never actually saw the show but have heard many geeks and nerds refer to it lovingly.

In short: the FCC would allow network owners (your Verizons, Comcasts, etc.) to create Internet “fast lanes” for companies (Disney, The Atlantic) that pay them more. For Internet activists, this directly violated the principle of net neutrality, which has been a hot-button issue in Silicon Valley for a long time.

Net neutrality is the idea that any network traffic—movies, web pages, MP3s, pictures—can move from one place (our servers) to any other place (readers’ computers phones) without “discrimination.”

Definitely a hot-button topic.

You have to respect someone with this much talent.

Just two weeks after being purchased by Amazon, digital comic book seller ComiXology has announced that it’ll be retiring its app in favor of a new read-only version that requires users to purchase comic books via their website, much like Amazon does with its Kindle app.

I saw many people call this the day Amazon bought them.

. The Verge:

On July 20th, the five remaining members of famed comedy group Monty Python will reunite for one last show, and you won’t have to fly to the United Kingdom to watch. Due to popular demand, The Last Night of Monty Python will be streamed live to 1,500 theaters around the world.

The performance is expected to include some of the group’s famous sketches, although we’re not yet sure which ones. “I think you can expect a little comedy, a lot of pathos, some music and a tiny bit of ancient sex,” Eric Idle told the UK Press Association.

OMG I am so going to be in a theatre watching this on July 20th.

. Appleinsider:

Virtually everyone who had offered an opinion about Apple’s iPhone mix got everything wrong.

In stark contrast, no drastic measures were recommended for fixing Moto X. Even the Wall Street Journal couldn’t bring itself to describe Google’s price slashing of the Moto X (from $550 to $399) as a desperate measure to move inventory.

Despite all the media pampering for Google, the reality in this case was that Motorola lost over $700 million for Google in just the last six months of Moto X sales.

As a follow along to the previous “iPad is doomed!” story comes this. I truly do not understand how the tech and mainstream media can see the same data points and come up with the exact opposite conclusions. That is, the iPhone 5c is a flop and the Moto X isn’t. Even if you are being intentionally biased for Google, the data doesn’t support you.

. MG Siegler:

iPad sales did disappoint one group of folks immensely: Wall Street.

As a standalone business, just based on the last 12 months of revenue, the iPad would be in the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500. Think about that for a second. The iPad alone is bigger than almost all Fortune 500 companies.

If the iPad is a fad, it’s the greatest fad in the history of American business.

It’s easy to point to “fewer iPads sold” and Chicken Little the story to death – as respected columnist Gassee and Mossberg have done. But it would still be wrong.

Apple on Friday launched a new program to help a small percentage of its iPhone 5 users that may have been affected by a problem with the Sleep/Wake button not functioning properly. […]

This is 2014. This doesn’t seem like a a problem that still needs solving, yet we still don’t have a de-facto platform for private and semi-private photography sharing and backup.

I use Apple’s built-in apps and tools.

Kevin Wild on the Secret app:

It fits into a new paradigm in today’s tech journalism, the act of reporting on one anonymous source. With the ease of sharing secrets, will Secret be the one anonymous source that new outlets use to break future stories?

I hope not.

Dan Counsell, the Founder of Realmac Software, brings up some good points in this article. I’ve never talked to a developer that didn’t want to help customers correct a problem. We all make mistakes and when customers are upset, it’s useful to be able to contact them directly.

. Stratechery:

The future of the iPad is not to be a better Mac. That may happen by accident, just as the Mac eventually superseded the Apple II, but to pursue that explicitly would be to sacrifice what the iPad might become, and, more importantly, what it already is.

Anyone “giving up” on the iPad really has no clue as to what Apple’s long term strategy is and has always been.

The thing is, attribution can also mean responsibility. Putting your name on something (or allowing that to happen) isn’t just an endorsement, but also an admission that the buck stops with you. If there’s a problem with this, it’s my fault.

Mod and I talked about how Hi was developed, how to build tools to encourage a regular writing routine, and where online publishing is heading next. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Craig is a really smart fellow.

That’s one problem with anonymous sources: They often get it wrong because why make sure you have it right when you will not be held accountable for what you say.

I really enjoyed this article.

Sounds like a great gift for someone to give me.

Visitors to Chicago’s Renaissance Society in the winter of 1980 encountered a concise exhibition with a provocative thesis. “Objects and Logotypes: Relationships Between Minimalist Art and Corporate Design” was a polemical juxtaposition of two strands of postwar American culture that, at first blush, could hardly seem more opposed.

Great read.

[Via Khol Vinh]

Certainly a good starting place.

This is very interesting. AppleInsider has some details from a number of sites—definitely worth a read.