This looks awesome. More pledges needed to make this book a reality. Worth it.

From the Synopsis:

Mac gaming welcomed strange ideas and encouraged experimentation. It fostered passionate and creative communities who inspired and challenged developers to do better and to follow the Mac mantra “think different”.

The Secret History of Mac Gaming is the story of those communities and the game developers who survived and thrived in an ecosystem that was serially ignored by the outside world. It’s a book about people who made games and people who played them — people who, on both counts, followed their hearts first and market trends second. How in spite of everything they had going against them, the people who carried the torch for Mac gaming in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s showed how clever, quirky, and downright wonderful videogames could be.

An amazing list of contributors. Take a look.

New York Times:

Started in 1990 as a spinoff from Acorn Computers, a now-defunct British computer maker, ARM has gone from a small start-up of less than 20 people to a global leader whose technology is used in more than 90 percent of smartphones produced by Apple and Samsung, among others.

And:

Unlike Intel, ARM forgoes the high margins — and equally high production costs — of directly manufacturing microchips. Instead, its engineers design chips, which are then licensed to larger technology companies like Qualcomm that pay ARM fees and royalties for manufacturing the chips.

This is not yet a done deal. Whoever ultimately owns ARM will have control over the chip designs in most of the mobile devices in the world, no small thing. I don’t expect Apple to sit on the sidelines while this plays out.

This wasn’t what I was expecting at all. Very funny.

BoingBoing:

OverType simulates, to an undesirable degree of accuracy, the experience of using a mechanical typewriter. You can have three fonts, one of which is IBM’s classic Courier, set the degree to which you want your typewriter to be broken, and the state of your ribbon ink. You cannot delete—but there is correction paper!

This will make the older readers smile and the younger readers say, “How did you put up with this!?”

James Surowiecki from The New Yorker takes a look at a question that many people have been asking for the last week—Is Pokemon success sustainable? There are a lot of factors that go into answering this question, but I think it’s too soon to know for sure.

Nautilus:

On August 27, 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since.

It was 10:02 a.m. local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It was heard 1,300 miles away in the Andaman and Nicobar islands (“extraordinary sounds were heard, as of guns firing”); 2,000 miles away in New Guinea and Western Australia (“a series of loud reports, resembling those of artillery in a north-westerly direction”); and even 3,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues, near Mauritius (“coming from the eastward, like the distant roar of heavy guns.”)1 In all, it was heard by people in over 50 different geographical locations, together spanning an area covering a thirteenth of the globe.

So what could possibly create such an earth-shatteringly loud bang?

Along with the “Tunguska Event”, this is another of those phenomena that fascinated me as a kid.

Flixtape is a short playlist of Netflix titles based around a theme, a mood, or message. It’s like a mixtape, but for Netflix.

I’m not sure how much use this will actually get, but in a world of constant sharing, why not.

They were called surfers, and they were a collection of mostly 20-somethings — including a yoga lover, an ex-banker, a divinity student, a recent college grad from Ohio hungry for adventure — all hired by a start-up called Yahoo to build a directory of the world’s most interesting websites.

I remember this so well. I can’t imagine building a directory of the most interesting Web sites by hand, but they did it.

Apple’s suggested royalty structure would make accounting simpler and more transparent, but it would also make it more costly to run a free service, since streaming companies would have to pay a minimum rate, rather than a percentage of revenue. The current system arguably benefits Spotify and YouTube, since their free tiers don’t generate much revenue compared to paid services.

A big double hit for Apple here: First they look better to musicians and the industry, and second they get to screw Spotify.

Appleinsider:

Apple’s ambitious Campus 2 project makes extensive use of massive glass panels built by German fabricator sedak, specifically chosen to blur the lines between office space inside and serene landscapes outside, much the same way that the company’s products seek to blur the line between hardware and software.

I don’t know much about construction or architecture but I know, from all I’ve read, that Apple’s new campus is a remarkable feat of engineering and will be an amazing building once it’s completed.

Smart Click brings one of the most accurate metronomes to your iOS handhelds. We have paid special attention to its usability and design by providing an easy and quick way to access the app. Smart Click’s easy-to-use interface lets you focus on practicing effectively and improving your ability to play in time. And to make it even better yet this metronome app allows you to choose different time signatures and four types of accents for each beat, including the well-known Cubase click sound. Stay in time — wherever you are!

Steinberg has been in the music industry for years and years. It’s great to see them releasing apps for iOS and further expanding their reach.

Tattoo artists are making a gradual conversion to digital, and the iPad Pro is proving to be a catalyst for an industry that so far has only reluctantly let go of ink pens and sketch paper. Pen and paper, after all, has been where the art in tattoo art has originated. The iPad Pro, with the help of the Apple Pencil stylus and some advanced image processing software, may be the first affordable technology that feels authentic enough to move artists away from the familiarity of pen and paper.

This makes perfect sense, but I never even thought of these artists as potential iPad Pro users when it was released.

“But ultimately the operator of the vehicle is responsible for having some degree of situational awareness. When it comes to autonomous cars, it’s a system. It’s a machine. It’s not making decisions. It’s not aware of everything. It’s simply sensing its environment and responding as it has been trained.”

Great article from The New Yorker, but I completely agree with the above statement that Brian Lathrop, a senior engineer for Volkswagen’s Electronics Research Laboratory, made in the story.

Smithsonian Magazine:

The idea of planned obsolescence is nothing new. But the use of “repair prevention” as a method of making products obsolete is growing, say right to repair proponents. Many companies that manufacture electronics—anything from laptops to refrigerators to your car’s onboard computer—now have restrictions that prevent consumers from having them fixed anywhere besides a licensed repair shop. Some companies use digital locks or copyrighted software to prevent consumers or independent repair people from making changes. Others simply refuse to share their repair manuals. Some add fine print clauses to their user agreements so customers (often unwittingly) promise not to fix their own products.

And:

Companies have a two-part incentive to make their products difficult to repair. First, if they control repairs, they can make money off of them. This benefit is increased by the fact that a company that monopolizes repairs can set higher prices than the market would otherwise bear. An authorized iPhone battery replacement for an out-of-warranty phone costs $79. The unauthorized iPhone battery replacement I had done in a Hong Kong electronics mall, where there’s plenty of competition, cost me about $30. A DIY iPhone battery repair kit from iFixit costs $34.95.

And:

Earlier this year, many iPhone 6 owners found themselves with nonworking phones after an Apple iOS update detected that they had had repairs done at an unauthorized shop. Without warning, the update put their phones on permanent, unfixable lockdown. (After a public outcry, Apple apologized and offered a fix to the problem, saying it was meant as an in-factory security test and not intended to affect customers.)

Obviously, this problem goes well beyond MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads, well beyond Apple. Everything you own with an embedded chip is fair game. So is everything with custom, difficult to replace parts. The article focuses on the money side, the motivation for companies to make some products difficult or impossible to self-repair. But a more compelling issue is the incredible amount of waste that goes along with replacing instead of fixing or upgrading.

On one side, Apple has stepped up its recycling efforts, funding Liam the recycling robot, for example.

But there are stories like this Washington Post article:

A bill that could make it easier to fix broken phones, computers and tablets was killed in the New York state legislature on Saturday when the session officially ended. Opposed by tech giants such as Apple, Cisco and Xerox, the bill would have forced companies to release electronic parts and design manuals to independent repair shops. If passed, the bill could have been a boon to repair technicians and “right-to-repair” advocates nationwide.

My 2 cents? Companies that make things need to either make them easier to truly recycle (as Apple is doing with Liam) or make it easier for folks to fix themselves.

The CSS-Tricks team share their moments when CSS made sense. It’s funny, we have have these types of moments, whether it’s design, coding, music or whatever—sometimes it just clicks.

From Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors:

The latest numbers from market research firm IDC reveal that Mac sales experienced a slight year-over-year decline in the second quarter, dropping to 4.4 million from 4.8 million during the year-ago period.

Nick Heer, writing for Pixel Envy:

Apple’s sales decline is an 8.3% reduction compared to the year-ago quarter. Given that the most recent Macintosh news — the discontinuation of the Thunderbolt Display notwithstanding — was a spec bump of the MacBook, this is completely unsurprising. MacRumors’ own buyers’ guide shows a “Don’t Buy” indicator below every Mac except the MacBook.

And:

I look at models like the iMac and the MacBook and I see investment in the Macintosh. They’re beautiful and capable machines. But then I gaze over the rest of the lineup, and I’m disheartened.

I get the sense, from the last six months of rumors, that a new MacBook Pro is coming soon. But that coming soon has been the case for a while now. And I have not heard anything about a new Mac Pro.

Nick Heer again:

The pro Macintosh situation is so dire that some designers and developers, like Mike Rundle and Sebastiaan de With, have opted to deal with the moderate hassle of building a “hackintosh” in order to get the performance they need for their work.

What is the story here? Is the Mac space too small, revenue-wise, for Apple to go to the trouble of a new product launch? Is something else causing this lack of new models?

This is a 50 question, multiple choice test that measures your vocabulary. If you love words, this is fun. If you think you have a great vocabulary, you might still find this test a challenge. Your score will be presented at the end, both as a raw number and as a percentage of the population.

Enjoy!

Wired:

O’Leary developed a handy, handheld tool she calls Spector that captures typefaces and colors in the real world, and then transfers them directly to InDesign.

Full disclosure: Spector is a prototype. A working prototype, but a prototype, nonetheless. You can’t buy it, and while O’Leary is interested in commercializing it, she’s in no rush.

And:

Place Spector over a piece of media and depress the button on top. A camera inside photographs the sample, and an algorithm translates the image into information about the shape of the typeface, or the color’s CMYK/RGB values. Spector beams that information to a font or color database, which IDs the sample. If your computer is nearby, a custom plugin ports the font or color information to InDesign, where highlighted text or projects will automatically change to the typeface or color of your real-world sample. No computer? No problem. Spector can store up to 20 font samples, so you can transfer them to your computer later.

Smart idea. I hope that Fiona O’Leary gets some good advice here. Mine would be to see a patent attorney, do a basic search to see if this idea can be protected by a patent. Even a pending patent will greatly increase the value of this invention.

Two men fell off a cliff Wednesday in San Diego’s North County while playing “Pokemon Go,” the Encinitas Fire Department confirmed.

Holy shit people are stupid.

I have a love/hate relationship with capos because they often screw up the sound or don’t press evenly on the strings, which also screws up the sound. I recently picked this one up and it works great every time.

Fraser Speirs:

One of my goals for the next deployment is to, well, do it faster. The holy grail of iOS deployment is to “never touch the glass”. That is, to engineer a system whereby the most you ever do to a device is put it in a case and plug it into a cable.

We’re not totally there yet, but Fraser put together a great article on what can be done.

More than 90 percent of the world’s online population use emoji. But while there’s a huge range of emoji, there aren’t a lot that highlight the diversity of women’s careers, or empower young girls.

A driver in New York state ran his car off the road and into a tree last night as a result of playing “Pokémon Go.”

I couldn’t care less if they hurt themselves, but an innocent person is going to get hurt by these morons.

I’m glad to see Nest released an outdoor camera—it was definitely something missing from their product lineup.

This is a fantastic interview with Eddy. Go read it.

“Google has come up with many innovative products that have made a difference to our lives. But that doesn’t give Google the right to deny other companies the chance to compete and innovate,” European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager told a news conference in Brussels.

This is in addition to the existing charge that search results favor Google’s shopping service.

Chance Miller, for 9to5Mac:

Apple has slowly been adding apps to its universal search feature since the fourth-gen Apple TV was introduced, and over the past week 3 more apps have gained support. As noted on Apple’s support page for universal search, VH1, MTV, and Comedy Central now appear in search results.

For those unfamiliar, universal search allows users to perform a single search using Siri or the Search app and see content across multiple channels. With the addition of VH1, MTV, and Comedy Central, content from those channels will now appear in search results.

For instance, when users say “Siri, show me Jersey Shore,” MTV will now be listed as a source on the results page. The same goes for saying, “Siri, show me Love & Hip Hop,” as VH1 will now appear in the search results.

Here’s a link to Apple’s Apple TV universal search page.

Reggie Ugwu, at Buzzfeed, pulled together a fantastic feature, bringing you behind the scenes at Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play.

When he’s choosing your music for you, Carl Chery, 37, is in Culver City, California, sitting at his desk in an office with no signage, trying to decide whether Drake and Future’s “Jumpman” (jumpman, jumpman, jumpman) has jumped the shark. Or sometimes he’s at home in his one-bedroom apartment on the border of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, walking around in his living room with new Gucci Mane blasting from a Beats Pill. Or at the gym going for a morning run on the treadmill, thinking about your gym and your treadmill, listening through headphones for changes in tempo and tone: Will this song push you through the pain? Is that one too long on the buildup?

I’ve always wondered how they pull these playlists together. This piece answers a lot of questions.