CBC:

This long, nasty, unpredictable election campaign comes to an end on Nov. 8, when Americans choose the next U.S. president. Confused about how it works? Read on.

This is how the Canadian public broadcaster explains the US election process to my fellow Canadians.

Adam Howell, Developer of Phoneys:

Wednesday night of this week, John Gruber wrote, “This is very clever, and I can see how it could be damn funny, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Phoneys gets pulled from the App Store.” Shortly after John’s post — I mean, you can’t buy press better than that, a post from Gruber about $.99 stickers so clever that Apple was sure to pull them? — Phoneys, the stupid little sticker pack I’d launched just a few days before, climbed to #1 Top Paid and #1 Top Grossing in the iMessage app store.

Thursday night, last night, Bill from Apple called me.

The days leading up to that roller coaster span of 24 hours were a surprisingly efficient example of the creative process.

Fascinating story of the behind the scenes process. Good to see Apple taken a more measured approach. Rather than yanking the app, they contacted the developer to request changes be made.

CCTV said a video apology Samsung issued to U.S. consumers, along with various replacement options and compensation, was in stark contrast to its treatment of those in China, where the company issued a brief statement saying most phones didn’t need to be replaced. “Samsung’s discriminatory policy has caused discontent from Chinese consumers,” it said.

Like I said yesterday: Samsung should have issued a total recall of all devices. They would have avoided issues like this and the fading consumer trust.

prolost:

Apple calls their initial two-lens computational photo offering Portrait Mode, and the most recent developer beta of iOS 10.1 includes a beta version of it. Under the right circumstances, this mode enables a so-called “Depth Effect,” where both cameras fire simultaneously, and a depth map is built based on the subtle stereo disparity between the captured images. This nine-level depth map is used to drive a variable-radius blur. The result is a photo with simulated shallow depth of field.

This process can never be perfect, but can it be good enough?

Oh hell yes it can.

It doesn’t work all the time, every time like a DSLR does but, for the vast majority of people who don’t lug around a DSLR every day, Portrait Mode will work just fine for them.

From Mashable:

As other people try to stop him, the guy, believed to be in his thirties, shouts:

“Apple is a company that ‘violated’ European consumers’ rights. They refused to reimburse me, I told them: ‘Give me my money back’. They said no. So you know what’s happening? This is happening!” – before wrecking another iPhone.

Amazing to me that no one tried to stop him.

From the Aetna press release:

Beginning this fall, Aetna will make Apple Watch available to select large employers and individual customers during open enrollment season, and Aetna will be the first major health care company to subsidize a significant portion of the Apple Watch cost, offering monthly payroll deductions to make covering the remaining cost easier.

In addition to the customer program, Aetna will provide Apple Watch at no cost to its own nearly 50,000 employees, who will participate in the company’s wellness reimbursement program, to encourage them to live more productive, healthy lives.

That is a remarkable endorsement and speaks to the future of the Apple Watch.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch (the corporate and investment banking division of Bank of America) ran a survey to get a sense of the public’s AirPod and Apple Watch purchase intentions.

From Business Insider’s writeup of the survey:

12% of U.S. consumers surveyed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch say they intend to purchase AirPods, apparently on the strength of Apple’s marketing, given that few people have actually seen and tried them out.

This is a very bullish sign for Apple, says BAML. “12% of the US installed base could lead to up to an incremental $3bn in revenue,” writes the analysts.

John Gruber, from his analysis:

Not 12 percent of iPhone owners. 12 percent of consumers. For a product that Apple has merely announced, but not yet even started advertising. That’s huge.

As per usual, Gruber’s writeup is worth reading.

Some math:

$3B / $159 = 18.9M

This tells us that it will take 18.9 million AirPod sales to generate $3 billion.

18.9 / 12% = 157M

This tells us that it will take a total population of 157 million for 12% to generate $3B in sales.

There are about 90 million iPhone users in the US (Please ping me if you know a more precise number), so clearly Gruber is right about that. There are about 125 million US households (again, ping me if you have a better number), which dovetails nicely with 157 million total consumers.

With this math in mind, go read Gruber’s take on the survey, including his thoughts on the Apple Watch projections.

Space Weather Prediction Center:

A G2 (Moderate) Geomagnetic Storm Watch has been issued for 28-30 September 2016 due to effects from the anticipated arrival of a recurrent coronal hole high speed stream.

Those are big science-y words. If you live in most of Canada or in the most northerly parts of the contiguous United States, as well as parts of northern Europe, get outside tonight and look north to see this spectacular sky display.

The Guardian:

George RR Martin has hailed “an amazing next step in the world of books” as he announced publication of a new digital edition of A Game of Thrones, featuring “a world of additional content” and an extract from the forthcoming sixth novel in his bestselling Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter.

A Game of Thrones: Enhanced Edition was released on Thursday on Apple’s iBooks to mark the 20th anniversary of the epic fantasy novel’s first publication. It offers “a world of additional content”, said its publisher HarperCollins, ranging from interactive character maps to detailed annotations, character journeys and timelines, family trees and audio clips.

As a guy who loves behind the scenes type stuff, this is really tempting.

Nova Scotia Government:

The storied tall ship has been Nova Scotia’s sailing ambassador since 1963, and is easily recognizable on the horizon and ashore. But it’s a collection of less-visible, hard-working crew that gets the schooner to its many port visits.

As a proud Nova Scotianer, every time I see images of the Bluenose II, I well up a little bit. The first image in the linked story literally caused tears of happiness at seeing two of the most iconic images of Nova Scotia. I was lucky enough to be a deck hand one summer, an experience I’ll never forget. It’s a beautiful ship with a wonderful back story. If you ever get a chance to walk its deck or go sailing on it, you won’t regret it.

Wired:

The rules of the 39th annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship’s “Punslingers” competition are simple: Two people take turns punning on a theme in head-to-head rounds. Failure to make a pun in the five seconds allowed gets you eliminated; make a nonpun or reuse a word three times and you’ve reached the banishing point. Round by round and pair by pair, a field of 32 dwindles until the last of the halved-nots finally gets to claim the mantle of best punster in the world and what most people would agree are some pretty dubious bragging rights.

It’s exactly like a rap battle, if 8 Mile had been about software engineers and podcasters and improv nerds vying for supremacy. (Also just like 8 Mile: My first-round opponent had frozen when his turn came to pun on waterborne vehicles. Seriously, yacht a word came out. Canoe believe it?)

I had a girlfriend in college who would have been really good at these competitions. I hated her.

Facebook:

Bruce Springsteen sat down with Apple executive Eddy Cue for an interview at the SoHo Apple Store in New York City. The interview focused mainly on Springsteen’s new memoir “Born to Run,” which was released earlier this week.

Many people, including my good friend Sly Marton, are incredibly excited to see this interview and to read Springsteen’s new memoir.

National Geographic:

Real-life buccaneer survival narratives were a major literary genre when Daniel Defoe published his hit novel Robinson Crusoe in 1719. Defoe was influenced by these narratives, and his resulting novel about a shipwrecked Englishman both mirrored and transformed the genre. In its first year, the novel went through several printings to meet public demand.

After Defoe’s death in 1731, some readers claimed the novel was inspired by Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish buccaneer who’d spent four and a half years on an island by himself. Today, many writers claim a connection between Selkirk and Crusoe.

But the idea that there’s a single, real Crusoe is a “false premise,” says Andrew Lambert, a naval history professor at King’s College London and author of Crusoe’s Island. That’s because Crusoe’s story is “a complex compound of all the other buccaneer survival stories.”

Like many of you, I read and was enamored of the novel and movie as a kid. I’d heard of Selkirk’s connection but didn’t realize it was mostly false.

The Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc.’s first research center in China will be a $45 million facility located in the capital to develop hardware, the site’s landlord said, announcing some of the first details of the project.

The new center will focus on developing advanced technologies, including computer hardware and communications, audio and video equipment and other devices, state-owned Zhongguancun Science Park Administrative Committee said in a social media post Thursday. It said the center will have 500 employees.

China is extraordinarily important to Apple. This is the first in a series of these kinds of investments.

I write Mac software for a YC company in the pro video space. Our new product started deployments a couple of months back, and a major source of problems has been the Apple platform — both hardware and software. It’s so bad that we’re actively working to move off the Mac completely. (I’ve spent 15 years doing Mac software, so this is a big deal for me.)

I’m so sad to see things like this. I use an iMac right now for music production, but many of the pros I know in the music industry are using older Mac Pros and have them locked into old versions of software.

Juli Clover writing for MacRumors:

Introduced in January by United States Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler, the proposal initially called for content providers to allow cable and satellite subscribers to access and watch cable content on any set-top box of their choosing, including the Apple TV, rather than being forced to lease a set-top box provided by cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

That’s too bad. The pressure from cable companies against this proposal must have been incredible.

Currently, Pro Tools 12.6 is compatible with Mac OS X 10.11.6 (El Capitan), 10.10.5 (Yosemite), 10.9.5 (Mavericks), but has not been qualified for macOS Sierra.

Cook will take the dais following comments from a lineup of Utah’s top tech leaders. The Apple chief will offer a short address before fielding questions from Hatch and members of the public, including those submitted via an online form.

Topics of discussion have not been announced, though the issue of national security versus personal privacy is likely to be broached considering Apple’s recent dustup with the U.S. Department of Defense and the FBI.

It should be a great discussion. Tim is very well versed in privacy, how it relates to Apple, and what the company wants for its customers.

It its favor, it is the one mainstream streaming service in Japan that has a free-tier option for users. That goes some way to explaining why it has taken so long for the Swedish company to secure deals with record labels, but it could be a factor that helps its service gain some momentum in the country among users who are not used to paying for digital music consumption.

I wonder how this free tier on Spotify will affect Apple Music. Overall, Spotify has a solid reputation in the streaming business, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out in terms of subscriptions.

The South Korean firm has said the Note 7 phones that were sold starting on the official Sept. 1 launch date use a different battery than the recalled devices. But a string of reports by users in China, the world’s top smartphone market, that their Note 7s caught fire have dogged Samsung in a country where they have already fallen out of the top five in terms of market share.

It’s like Samsung is doing everything it can to screw up this recall. What they should do is recall all of the devices and replace them—that’s the only way to restore consumer confidence.

Daniela Galarza, writing for Eater:

NYC restaurateur, Shake Shack founder, and millionaire Danny Meyer is having a good week. He’s invested in a home-cooked food delivery start-up, introduced paid parental leave for all of his employees, and today almost single-handedly made the Apple Watch — a very expensive trophy gadget at best — relevant.

Trophy gadget? Um. No. But to continue:

When Meyer’s 30-year-old Union Square Cafe reopens in Manhattan next month, every floor manager and sommelier will be wearing an Apple Watch. And when a VIP walks through the front door, someone orders a bottle of wine, a new table is seated, a guest waits too long to order her or his drink, or a menu item runs out, every manager will get an alert via the tiny computer attached to their wrist.

This is a new use case for Apple Watch, an interesting idea. If it lives up to its potential, no reason this won’t spread to other restaurants and make the Apple Watch a standard element in restaurant systems.