Apple, from their press release:

Apple today announced that the App Store welcomed 2017 with its busiest single day ever on New Year’s Day, capping a record-breaking holiday season and a year of unprecedented developer earnings and breakout app hits. In 2016 alone, developers earned over $20 billion, up over 40 percent from 2015. Since the App Store launched in 2008, developers have earned over $60 billion, creating amazing app experiences for App Store customers across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Mac. Those efforts helped kick off 2017 with a remarkable start, making New Year’s Day the highest single day ever for the App Store with nearly $240 million in purchases.

And:

“2016 was a record-shattering year for the App Store, generating $20 billion for developers, and 2017 is off to a great start with January 1 as the single biggest day ever on the App Store,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “We want to thank our entire developer community for the many innovative apps they have created — which together with our products — help to truly enrich people’s lives.”

And:

Customers broke all-time records this holiday season with purchases from the App Store topping $3 billion in December. In the same month, Nintendo’s Super Mario Run made history with more than 40 million downloads in just four days after its release, and was the most downloaded app globally on Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Amazing sales numbers.

LodeRunner was one of my favorite games from the long ago. I’m delighted that it still exists. It is as fun to play as I remember. Old school. Give it a try. Unfortunately, haven’t figured out how to play it on my phone. Keyboard required.

[Via Kottke.org]

Pick a movie, album, TV show, book, etc., and the artwork finder will bring up the associated iTunes artwork.

Play with it, it’s fun.

Pretty much everything you’d ever want to know about iCloud keychain, with lots of links for more detail. Well done, very readable.

Jonny Evans takes a short look at some noteworthy USB-C hubs. Of particular note is the HyperDrive kickstarter:

Announced last year, HyperDrive occupies two of your MacBook Pro’s four USB-C slots. In exchange, it provides you with twin USB 3.1 ports, a microSD and an SD slot, a single USB-C port (at 5Gbps), a Thunderbolt 3 port and HDMI video output. You can power two displays at 4K or a single display at 5K with this.

All this for only $69. Seems like a terrific solution, assuming it ships. Here’s the Kickstarter link.

Ev Williams, CEO of Medium:

As of today, we are reducing our team by about one third — eliminating 50 jobs, mostly in sales, support, and other business functions. We are also changing our business model to more directly drive the mission we set out on originally.

And:

We set out to build a better publishing platform — one that allowed anyone to offer their stories and ideas to the world and that helped the great ones rise to the top. In 2016, we made big investments in teams and technology aimed at attracting and migrating commercial publishers to Medium. And in order to get these publishers paid, we built out and started selling our first ad products. This strategy worked in terms of driving growth, as well as improving the volume and consistency of great content. Some of the web’s best publishers are now on Medium, and we’re happy to work with them every day.

And:

However, in building out this model, we realized we didn’t yet have the right solution to the big question of driving payment for quality content. We had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model, not the transformative model we were aiming for. Perhaps utilizing software such as entrepreneur games would be a game-changer in allowing a business like this to continue to thrive.

Terribly difficult problem to solve. Medium is a terrific platform, but they face the same problem as the models they aim to replace: How do you convert reader interest and attention into cash?

We are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans who want to get smarter about the world every day. It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like.

In a world where fake news pays better than real news, this is a truly daunting challenge.

Great post from Jeff Benjamin about the emerging 8K standard from VESA (They created the DisplayPort standard) and HDMI.

One particular point of interest:

One of the biggest takeaways is that HBR3 enables support of 4K at 60Hz using only two DisplayPort lanes. This means that DisplayPort Alt Mode via the USB-C interface can provide full 4K resolution at 60Hz, and still have two high-speed lanes remaining for SuperSpeed USB operation.

Why is this of note? Take the recently released LG UltraFine 4K Display, for example. That display takes advantage of DisplayPort Alt Mode, but the remaining downstream USB ports are forced to use antiquated USB 2.0 due to the lack of bandwidth. HBR3 would solve such an issue.

And:

To be fair, this isn’t exactly new, as DisplayPort 1.3, which was ratified in September 2014, also includes HBR3. VESA thereafter rolled HBR3 into DisplayPort 1.4. Unfortunately the Thunderbolt 3-enabled MacBook Pros and the 12-inch MacBook still rely on the HBR2-laden DisplayPort 1.2 for external display connectivity.

Fascinating stuff.

Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. headlines a growing list of investors in SoftBank Group Corp.’s $100 billion technology fund, which is expected to include Foxconn Technology Group Ltd. and the family office of Oracle Corp. Chairman Larry Ellison, the Japanese telecommunications giant said Wednesday.

Apple separately said it plans to invest $1 billion in the Japanese telecom giant’s fund. “We believe their new fund will speed the development of technologies which may be strategically important to Apple,” said Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet. She added that Apple has worked with SoftBank for many years.

The trio joins a list of investors that includes Qualcomm Inc. and Saudi Arabia’s government, which plans to invest $45 billion over a five-year period, SoftBank said Wednesday. SoftBank will invest $25 billion in its fund, it added.

Lots of reasons for Apple to do this. They’ll be cementing partnerships with Foxconn, Qualcomm, and others and the fund itself could prove quite lucrative. But can’t help but wonder if this is part of a larger deal with the incoming Trump administration, who’ve long hawked Trump’s agreement with Softbank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son to invest $50B to bring jobs to the US.

Recode:

If you want to do business in China, you have to play by its rules.

In case U.S. companies needed a reminder, China has served up a bold one in requiring Apple to pull down the New York Times app from its Chinese App Store.

Neither Apple nor China publicly specified what local laws the newspaper was breaking, but Apple said it was notified that the app had run afoul of the country’s rules.

“We have been informed that the app is in violation of local regulations,” Apple spokesman Fred Sainz told the Times. “As a result, the app must be taken down off the China App Store. When this situation changes, the App Store will once again offer the New York Times app for download in China.”

Ignoring Recode’s breathless “showing just how much power that country has over tech firms” (that’s been obvious for a very long time), it does shows who is more important to Apple.

Parks Canada:

For all of 2017 this pass gives you unlimited opportunities to enjoy National Parks, National Marine Conservation Areas and National Historic Sites across the country!

Canada is celebrating its 150th Birthday in 2017 and this free pass is a great way to visit some of the most beautiful national parks in the world.

Rolling Stone: >I turned to John Goodwin, the director of the puppy-mills campaign for HSUS, and asked him how many puppies sold in this country – at Petland and Citipups and a thousand other pet stores – come from puppy mills as dire as this one. > >”Most every pup sold in stores in America comes from this kind of suffering – or worse,” he insists. “If you buy a puppy from a pet store, this is what you’re paying for and nothing else: a dog raised in puppy-mill evil.” The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals posts a database of pet shops for consumers to check before they buy. Input any ZIP code and you’ll see the list of stores that sell pups rather than offer them for adoption. That vastly ups the chances that the dogs are from mills, not from reputable breeders. Another click shows you ghastly shots of the mills those stores buy dogs from. Those pictures weren’t taken by animal-rights zealots, but by United States Department of Agriculture agents who inspect breeding kennels.

I hope there’s a special place in hell for people who abuse animals and another for those who willingly buy animals from such places. I’ve had several dogs and cats in my life (I got my latest one a few weeks ago, a 5-year-old cat named Wallace who is “The World’s Clumsiest Cat”) and every one of them has come from the local version of the SPCA. I take care of my pets with the best flea pills for dogs. WARNING: The story includes some disturbing and heartbreaking images of abused animals.

Bloomberg:

He wants to construct a Lucas museum to house and display his art collection—much of it proudly lowbrow, such as works by the sentimentalist Norman Rockwell; original Flash Gordon comic book art; Mad magazine covers; and memorabilia from his own Star Wars films. According to an early plan for the museum, his trove of Star Wars material includes 500,000 artifacts from the prequels alone. Lucas refers to such works as “narrative art,” the kind that “tells a story.” He believes they’ve been unfairly ignored by snooty critics and curators, and he wants his museum to rectify that.

Lucas has offered to build his museum in a major American city for free. Including construction costs, an endowment, and the value of the artwork, his organization says the total value of his gift is $1.5 billion. “It’s an epic act of generosity and altruism,” says Don Bacigalupi, the museum effort’s president. “George Lucas, as with any person of great resources and great success, could choose to do whatever he wants to do with his resources, and he has chosen to give an extraordinary gift to the people of a city and the world.”

But so far, Lucas hasn’t found a permanent home for his museum. The monumental project has brought him almost as much grief as Jar Jar Binks.

I suspect he’d find a taker if he’d be willing to bend a bit more, take some design guidance and help with curation.

The Verge:

The thing that keeps me coming back to cars is how they creep into most every aspect of our lives. The obvious reason is that we spend a good portion of our time inside of them. An overwhelming 91 percent of Americans use their personal vehicles to get to work, the average American spends 55 minutes behind the wheel a day, and Americans make 1.1 billion trips everyday, according to the US Department of Transportation.

Car companies have been right in our face for a long time, but now tech companies are getting involved. The biggest shift in the perception of the automobile in America, is that in 2016 cars became part of the tech industry’s mission.

“Cars at the frontier of technology” is both a good thing and a bad thing. At least for those of us in North America, cars are still an important part of life and not just a way to get from point A to point B. But the increasing reliance on technology, to drive sales if nothing else, may be outstripping both a driver’s and our government’s ability to comprehend the direction we are heading.

BBC News:

An American couple, whose daughter was killed by a driver allegedly using FaceTime on his iPhone, have launched a lawsuit against Apple.

The lawsuit alleges that the firm should have introduced a feature that disabled use of the video-chat application while driving.

It points to a patent for such a feature for drivers filed by Apple in 2008.

And:

The driver involved in the crash – Garrett Wilhelm – drove his SUV into the back of the Modisette family’s vehicle while travelling at high speeds.

The lawsuit documents state that he told police he was using FaceTime at the time of the crash and that the application was still active when police found his phone at the scene.

Mr Wilhelm is facing a jury trial on manslaughter charges in February.

Is Apple responsible for a user using their cell phone while driving? If this lawsuit goes forward, will this be the precedent that triggers a wave of similar lawsuits?

Tricky legal ground. Does the existence of the patent distinguish this case from a more traditional driving when texting crash? Does a patent bring with it responsibility to implement?

Tim Culpan, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. wants to be able to open its own stores in India. India’s government wants Apple to make iPhones locally. And so the horse-trading begins.

And:

To open single-brand stores, foreign companies must buy 30 percent of their components in-country. Round one of the Apple-India tussle ended with victory for the visitor when officials announced a three-year grace period on that stipulation back in June.

Now round two is underway, with Apple seeking tax concessions, including lower import and manufacturing duties.

And:

That puts the ball back in Apple’s court, with the world’s largest company able to trade its three major assemblers — Foxconn Technology Group, Pegatron Corp. and Wistron Corp. — off against each other. Whichever of the Taiwan trio is most eager and able to take one for the team in India would secure itself huge brownie points in Cupertino.

According to the Times of India, Wistron looks set to be that company and will fly the Apple flag when it starts “Make in India” iPhone assembly in April.

All very interesting. Presumably, iPhones built in India will stay in India, with US-destined iPhones continuing to come from China. For the moment.

David Williams, Forbes:

Steve Jobs is a hard act to follow, but thus far, Tim Cook is doing a tremendous job. Rather than attempt to match the consumer-facing innovations that Jobs had been known for, Cook is forging the future with his own new advances. Unlike Jobs, he can be soft-spoken and unassuming. Once misdiagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, he has become much more cognizant of the challenges his employees and others may face and has become highly involved in charitable causes. One of his famous leadership quotes is the simple but highly insightful remark that “you kind of want to manage a technology company like you’re in the dairy business. If it gets past its freshness date, you have a problem.” He has definitely been instrumental in keeping Apple’s outlook and consumer products vibrant and up to date.

Not really a top 10 list, more a personal list for Williams, but the sentiment rings true. Also on the list, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Melinda Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and Warren Buffett. Interesting reading.

Now everyone can get beautiful Portrait Mode photos with their iPhone. Depth Effects gives you the power to apply a striking depth of field to any photo. Get DLSR-quality focus and bokeh with simple controls. Also, Depth Effects is the best app for anamorphic depth of field and cinematic bokeh.

TidBITS:

The first I heard that Sierra’s PDF-related problems might affect more than ScanSnap scanners came in a comment left on one of those articles on 26 October 2016.

I have to recommend that Sierra users avoid using Preview to edit PDF documents until Apple fixes these bugs. If editing a PDF in Preview in unavoidable, be sure to work only on a copy of the file and retain the original in case editing introduces corruption of any sort. In the meantime, we’ll be watching closely to see which of these PDF-related bugs Apple fixes in 10.12.3, which is currently in beta testing.

I don’t use PDFs enough or in this way for this to be an issue but in reading the article, you can see how this will affect many developers.

Objective-See:

Due to sheer volume, Windows malware generally dominates the malicious code and news scene. Of course, Macs are susceptible to malware as well and 2016 saw a handful of new malware targeting Apple computers.

In this blog, I wanted to discuss all Mac malware that appeared this year. While each sample has been reported on before (i.e. by the AV company that discovered it), this blog aims to cumulatively cover all in one place. Moreover, for each, we’ll identify the infection vector, persistence mechanism, features/goals, and describe disinfection.

This is a long and complicated post but might be of interest to those of you who deal with these issues.

Vindu Goel, New York Times:

Founded in 2014 by three former senior managers from Apple’s iPod and iPhone groups, Pearl has tried to replicate what its leaders view as the best parts of Apple’s culture, like its fanatical dedication to quality and beautiful design. But the founders also consciously rejected some of the less appealing aspects of life at Apple, like its legendary secrecy and top-down management style.

This story is about trying to create a new company from the seeds of Apple’s approach and culture, but without the deeply compartmentalized secrecy for which Apple is so famous.

Pearly is best known for a product called RearVision, a backup camera add-on for cars without a factory installed system.

Interesting approach to product (building things for older model and lower-tier cars, a retrofit, aftermarket approach), very different from Apple and, also, very different from Nest, a company with which they are often compared. I am a fan of RearVision and look forward to see what new, first-to-market products emerge from Pearl.

Chuq Von Rospach:

This has been the winter of our discontent. 2016 was the year the tone changed. There’s always been a lot of criticism and griping about anything Apple does (and doesn’t do — it can’t win) but in 2016 I feel like the tone of the chatter about Apple changed and got a lot more negative.

This is worrisome on a number of levels and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m used to watching people kvetch about the company, but this seems — different. One reason: a lot of the criticisms are correct.

Apple, for the first time in over a decade, simply isn’t firing on all cylinders. Please don’t interpret that as “Apple is doomed” because it’s not, but there are things it’s doing a lot less well than it could — and has. Apple’s out of sync with itself.

Here are a few of the things I think indicate Apple has gotten itself out of kilter and is in need of some course correction.

I don’t agree with everything Chuq says but he’s a guy who has been in the trenches at Apple so what he writes is at the very least interesting and worthy of discussion.

Matt Birchler on putting Google Assistant and Siri through their paces:

The tech narrative is that Siri sucks and Google Assistant is the second coming. I have been using Siri for years, and have been going 100% in on Android over the last few weeks and have given Google Assistant a solid effort. My experience has been a little different than the popular narrative.

Watch the video for the details. Bottom line, I recognize this experience. Siri does a lot really well. To maximize your Siri satisfaction, learn the boundaries, get a sense of what Siri does reliably that fits in your day-to-day workflow.

In my experience, Siri does a lot that’s pretty bulletproof. One example is reminders. If I need to remember something, the first thing I do is figure out an ideal time to be reminded, then pull out my iPhone or “Hey, Siri” my Apple Watch and ask Siri to remind me. If there’s failure here, it is always up front and obvious. And that’s easily repaired.

Where Siri is less reliable, I find another path. If I ask Siri a question she can’t answer, I don’t get frustrated. These are early days still, for Google, Amazon, and Apple’s Siri.

Three ways to speed up your Mac, all via Terminal and the defaults write command. Good stuff from Rob Griffiths.

Casey Liss and his AirPods have a lovely little New Year’s Eve moment.