My thanks to MacScan for sponsoring The Loop this week.
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MacGameStore.com today announced the release of an exciting “Pay What You Want” bundle to celebrate great Indie games. We’re also thrilled to announce that 10% of the proceeds from the sale of the bundle will go to “Stand Up To Cancer”, a groundbreaking initiative created to accelerate innovative cancer research that will get new therapies to patients quickly and save lives now.
If you beat the average price, you get even more games. The average price right now is just over $5.00.
The company that helped the FBI unlock a San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone to get data has sole legal ownership of the method, making it highly unlikely the technique will be disclosed by the government to Apple or any other entity, Obama administration sources said this week.
Not a big surprise. The government doesn’t want Apple to fix the exploit, but there is no doubt Apple is working very hard to close it.
Ben Thompson, writing for Stratechery, pulled together an excellent look at what Facebook was and what it has become. A bit of a long read, but full of insight.
This quote from a 2004 op-ed in the Harvard Crimson:
The thefacebook.com scene includes reams of carefully coiffed, immaculately manicured, evening-garbed Harvard students grinning eagerly on page after page as we present our own ideal image of selfhood to fellow browsers…
“You have one identity,” [Zuckerberg] says emphatically three times in a single minute during a 2009 interview. He recalls that in Facebook’s early days some argued the service ought to offer adult users both a work profile and a “fun social profile.” Zuckerberg was always opposed to that. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.”
This is a core value.
Then, as Facebook grows and your friend list expands over time (this quote from a Bloomberg article):
People have been less willing to post updates about their lives as their lists of friends grow…Instead, Facebook’s 1.6 billion users are posting more news and information from other websites. As Facebook ages, users may have more than a decade’s worth of acquaintances added as friends. People may not always feel comfortable checking into a local bar or sharing an anecdote from their lives, knowing these updates may not be relevant to all their connections.
According to one of the people familiar with the situation, Facebook employees working on the problem have a term for this decline in intimacy: “context collapse.” Personal sharing has shifted to smaller audiences on Snapchat, Facebook’s Instagram and other messaging services.
A fascinating read, all down the line. Nice job, Ben.
Stephen Hackett, writing for iMore, takes a walk down memory lane, with a long, lingering look at some great Apple laptops of yore.
Two things come to mind. One, this article really brought back a lot of memories, especially of the PowerBook Duos, one of my all-time favorite laptop designs.
And two, though this wasn’t an Apple product, this did remind me of the Outbound laptop, a Mac compatible laptop produced by some outfit in Colorado that preceded the original PowerBook by a couple of years. This was my first laptop ever. It sported a racy 15-MHz Motorola 68000 processor. Wow!
From the Apple’s Environmental Responsibility Report, released yesterday:
As of January 2016, we’re sourcing or generating enough renewable energy to cover 93 percent of the electricity we use at our facilities worldwide. In fact, Apple is now 100 percent renewable in 23 countries, including China, Germany, Singapore, and the United States. We’re also 100 percent renewable at every one of our data centers.
That’s remarkable.
In 2015, we diverted more than 89 million pounds of e-waste from landfills.
And:
Last year, over 99 percent of our product packaging came from paper that was recycled or sourced from sustainably managed forests.
And:
We discovered that changing how we make the aluminum enclosure could lower our carbon footprint. We prioritized aluminum that was smelted using hydroelectricity rather than fossil fuels. And we reengineered our manufacturing process to reincorporate the scrap aluminum. As a result, we cut the carbon footprint associated with the aluminum enclosure of iPhone 6s in half compared with the previous generation.
There are a ton of these nuggets. Amazing priorities for any company, let alone one of the largest on the planet. Great leadership.
We believe that with rare exceptions consumers and businesses have a right to know when the government accesses their emails or records. Yet it’s becoming routine for the U.S. government to issue orders that require email providers to keep these types of legal demands secret. We believe that this goes too far and we are asking the courts to address the situation.
To be clear, we appreciate that there are times when secrecy around a government warrant is needed. This is the case, for example, when disclosure of the government’s warrant would create a real risk of harm to another individual or when disclosure would allow people to destroy evidence and thwart an investigation. But based on the many secrecy orders we have received, we question whether these orders are grounded in specific facts that truly demand secrecy. To the contrary, it appears that the issuance of secrecy orders has become too routine.
Beyond the issue of the incredible number of secrecy orders is the volume of them that have no fixed end date:
Over the past 18 months, the U.S. government has required that we maintain secrecy regarding 2,576 legal demands, effectively silencing Microsoft from speaking to customers about warrants or other legal process seeking their data. Notably and even surprisingly, 1,752 of these secrecy orders, or 68 percent of the total, contained no fixed end date at all. This means that we effectively are prohibited forever from telling our customers that the government has obtained their data.
Forever is a long time. Brave of Apple to stand up for privacy. Brave of Microsoft to stand up to government overreach. Both equally important, equally chilling issues.
Apple Inc. has constructed a secret team to explore changes to the App Store, including a new strategy for charging developers to have their apps more prominently displayed, according to people familiar with the plans.
Among the ideas being pursued, Apple is considering paid search, a Google-like model in which companies would pay to have their app shown at the top of search results based on what a customer is seeking. For instance, a game developer could pay to have its program shown when somebody looks for “football game,” “word puzzle” or “blackjack.”
I’ll be honest, this seems like a very un-Apple thing to do. This will only widen the gap of small developers having any chance of being fairly featured on the App Store, and that gap is pretty large already.
U.S. federal, state and local government agencies rank in last place in cyber security when compared against 17 major private industries, including transportation, retail and healthcare, according to a new report released Thursday.
Apple Inc and the FBI will return to Congress next week to testify before lawmakers about their heated disagreement over law enforcement access to encrypted devices, a congressional committee announced on Thursday.
The story of America and Cuba — their decades of hostility, why it lasted so long, why it’s now finally ending — is often misunderstood in the US as a story about the Cold War. But in truth, it’s a story a full century older about slavery, clashing empires, and a long-running struggle within America to decide what kind of country we were going to be. When you see that, what’s happening today between Cuba and the US starts to make a lot more sense.
This is a really well done video that does a great job of showing the issues that are only now being slowly resolved go back much farther than most Americans realize.
Motor Trend wanted you to believe that they exclusively uncovered Apple’s mysterious car. They did not. Instead, what they have is an in-house render, a long and boring video, and a bad, desperate publicity stunt.
It turns out the magazine merely gathered several designers and tech people and had them create renders of a possible Apple Car. It’s a bronze-and-black, autonomous-capable pod-looking thing.
This was pretty obviously what was going to happen when Motor Trend started pimping this on Twitter yesterday. But many ClickWhores expectedly left their common sense at the door and happily “reported” the “Exclusive”. Sure enough, today’s “news” showed Motor Trend knows nothing about the mythical Apple Car. But many in the tech media won’t say that – they’ll just re-report uncritically because that’s so much easier than actually thinking.
Yesterday, I wrote about Kirk McElhearn’s new “Hey Apple, fix this!” column, with a description of a bug I’d like to see fixed:
Every so often (perhaps one in five calls), my phone rings and iOS refuses to recognize my slide to answer. The slider appears, but does not recognize my touch. I’ve tried everything I can think of, but once it goes in this mode, there’s no way for me to answer the call. But once the call goes to voice mail, my phone returns to normal.
Rene Ritchie also does a bug raising column, this for iMore, called Bug Fix. Here’s a link to the collection, worth checking out.
One column in particular struck me, as I have this problem all the time:
There’s a bug in iOS 9 affecting some people using its pasteboard: The gist is, when you go to copy and paste something on your iPhone or iPad, instead of pasting what you just copied, it pastes whatever you copied previously instead. So, if you copied some text yesterday, then copy a web link today, you’ll paste the text instead of the link. It doesn’t happen all the time, but does happen often enough that we’ve gotten several requests for help troubleshooting it.
I’m on the latest release of iOS and this still happens to me fairly frequently. I’m glad to see Rene and Kirk daylighting these issues. Hopefully, someone at Apple will put some effort into getting these things fixed. And good for Rene for filing radars on the each bug, offering workarounds, too.
Downloading and saving files or documents to a computer is something we don’t think about. Click, click, done. It’s saved on the hard drive and ready to be accessed when needed. On iOS though, it’s a little more complicated than that. The lack of a user file system can be confusing, and something as simple as downloading a file can all the sudden become a daunting task.
How do I download a file to my iPhone? Where do I download it to? These are questions I’ve recently been asked, but also problems I have faced myself. In this post, I’ll try to share different options for downloading files to an iPhone or iPad.
Over the years the headphone plug or connector on Bose’s headphones has changed, going from L-shaped to straight. In the headphone world, the conventional wisdom once was that a L-shaped plug was typically more durable. Also, the stubbier L-shaped design took a blow or tug better, putting less stress on a device’s headphone jack.
So why did Bose move to a straight connector?
Garrett: We started with a straight plug, then switched to a 90-degree [L-shaped] plug, thinking that it would provide a more robust and durable solution for customers because it wouldn’t have the lever arm on the jack so you wouldn’t break the phone or the plug.
Turns out we don’t get to dictate the geometry of the connector that goes into the phone. So we’re not making design decisions so the connector will fit in cases better; we’re making design decisions so they’ll meet the specifications that Apple gives us so we can be part of the MFi [Made for iPhone/iPod/iPad] ecosystem just like everybody else.
What we’ve discovered is that when you go to a 90-degree plug they’re getting so small there’s not enough room to make all the electrical connections you need — robustly. And that was always the weak point of our cable; it was always breaking there [at the plug]. We went to a 45-degree plug thinking we’d have more space but instead it’s just aggravating because it spins and is never really lined up and gives a bad customer experience.
We’ve also discovered that most phone manufacturers have jacks at the top and mostly at the bottom of the phones so the straight connector is a much better customer experience when the phone’s in your pocket. You naturally slide your phone into your pocket so the cable comes straight out of your pocket first.
Interesting insight into how Apple design decisions throughout the industry.
Have you ever had trouble getting Touch ID to recognize your fingerprint? Happens to me when I am sweaty from working out. My guess is, the moisture plays havoc with the sensors.
The video embedded below talks about two separate solutions. One is to add a wet fingerprint, that is, one that is created under the same conditions that make your fingerprint hard to read.
And the second is to continue to train existing fingerprints, to improve the detail, make your fingers easier to recognize.
Apple has given its seal of approval by placing WebRTC into development for WebKit, the engine that powers its Safari browser.
And:
WebRTC as a technology, in simple terms, gives you the ability to add live audio and video streaming into your Web and mobile applications essentially for free and without forcing a user to download a plugin or install an application — just a little bit of tech magic makes it all possible via HTML5 and JavaScript. It comes chock-full of other capabilities, too, such as the ability to make phone calls directly from your browser, share documents and contextual data securely, and do screen sharing.
Note that this adoption was announced back in February, but did not get a lot of press.
WebRTC started as a Google project, then gained steam. Microsoft is adding it to Edge, Apple is adding it to WebKit, we’ll see it in a future version of Safari.
TextExpander might be the most popular expansion service, but it’s certainly not the only one. If you’re looking for a cheaper alternative or just one without such a long-term commitment, check out these apps.
With Smile Software making significant changes to its shortcut utility, lots of folks have been looking at and for alternatives. I was a big fan of TypeIt4me long before I ever used TextExpander.
Sure, your browser can download. But does it let you easily accelerate downloads, limit bandwidth, download on a schedule, or execute rules to sort incoming downloaded files? Doubt it. And clearly, you’re not going to be able to quit that RAM-consuming monster of a browser until all your downloads are done.
I like the folks at Many Tricks. I think they make good software.
A core member of Apple’s elite industrial design team for more than 20 years, Mr. Coster is credited for his contributions to a wide range of now iconic consumer electronics ranging from the iPhone 4 to the iPad wireless keyboard. He holds more than 500 design patents and several utility patents, and has been recognized by several international design organizations for his work.
I’m always interested to see how Apple designers do outside the Apple ecosystem.
At least two dozen primary suppliers on three continents and two islands (Japan and Taiwan) provide these parts.
The transportation complexity is magnified further because many components do not move in a simple path from supplier to final assembly. Some go on a hopscotching world tour from one country to the next and back again as one piece is joined to another to create an assembly, which is then moved elsewhere in the world for another part to be inserted or attached.
The phone’s innards are put together much as a cook assembles ingredients for a dish that becomes, in turn, a component of another chef’s course, which is then incorporated by someone else into a larger meal.
Few of us give much thought to the innards of our electronics but the supply chain process of getting all that stuff into your hands is remarkable. It’s also why we see so many rumors of individual components. The devices have become far too complex for Apple to keep a lid on everything.
Two older brothers pulled an epic prank on their little sister after she had her wisdom teeth taken out and was still feeling the effects of the dentist’s drugs.
After their younger sister Millicent had her wisdom teeth removed by an expert just like the ones you find at the local dentist westminster ca, brothers Cabot, Hudson and Barrett Phillips convinced her that a zombie outbreak had hit their city. And, of course, they captured it all on video.
Researchers believe that wisdom teeth were necessary for our ancestors, as their diet mostly consisted of hard nuts, crunchy leaves and uncooked meat. Today, however, we eat more cooked food and use forks and knives to cut our food up into smaller pieces. As a result, wisdom teeth are widely regarded as vestigial structures (parts of the human body that have become unnecessary). Most people are comfortable in three to four days, but it can take a couple of weeks for your gums to completely heal. Your oral surgeon will provide you with detailed post-surgical instructions to keep you comfortable.
Most people can go back to work or school in two to three days after wisdom teeth extraction. However, if your job requires physical labor or heavy lifting, you may need to take a few extra days off of work.
As an older brother (to eight), I can definitely understand and appreciate playing this kind of prank on a younger sibling.
Amazon says it’s the thinnest and lightest Kindle ever. They also say it has the longest Kindle battery life–the included leather charging cover boosts battery to last months.
The game, propelled by featuring by both Apple and Google, quickly rocketed to the top of the charts. Every day last week, the game was downloaded an average of 370,000 times. Roughly two-thirds of the app’s downloads are on iOS, with the remainder on Android.
and:
Monetization has also increased steadily and we estimate that the game is now making $40,000 combined per day across iOS and Android. Roughly 80% of the revenue is from iOS with Android only contributing 20%.
Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” has faced a lot of accusations in the 45 years since it was released. It’s overplayed, some say, particularly at high volumes by dudes trying to impress other dudes at guitar shops. It’s overlong, say others. And, for years, people have said “Stairway” sounds a lot like “Taurus” — a song by a much less famous band called Spirit who performed it allegedly while sharing bills with Zeppelin in the late 1960s.
and:
But after decades of gossip, members of Led Zeppelin — specifically, singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page, the writers of “Stairway” — will face a jury trial on May 10. The question: Did they copy at least some parts of their most famous song?
There’s a fine line between similar/influenced by and plagiarism.
I think the style is certainly similar, but there are many songs that use that descending root note pattern: Michelle by The Beatles, My Funny Valentine, lots of classical pieces.
Did Jimmy Page lift this opening and change it? Possibly. But the rest of the song is so different, so unique, I just don’t see this as Zep riding on the Spirit guitarist’s coattails.
In the hand the body feels sharp and hard, with unforgiving edges which are only acceptable because of the phone’s diminutive size. The hard edges are easier to grip than the slippery rounded sides of the iPhone 6S, and particularly the large 6S Plus, but they hurt my palms after clutching it for an hour or two.
I don’t remember a single comment about the edges of the iPhone 4 or 5 being too sharp and hard. It’s purely when compared to the iPhone 6. So the SE is too hard and small, and the 6 is too slippery. Hmm.
Using a 4in screen in 2016 is a compromise. Websites feel very cramped, apps often leave only a small amount of screen to the content they’re trying to display and buttons can end up very small making tapping them a bit of a challenge.
If the 4 inch screen is too small, no one will buy them and the iPhone SE will quickly die. But people are buying them, and there seems to be plenty of love for the smaller screen.
To be fair, I love my iPhone 6s Plus. I wouldn’t go back to the smaller screen. But my kids (with their youthful eyes) have no issue with the smaller screen and love the smaller footprint.
I think my central point of disagreement with this review is the generalization that a small screen has no place in 2016. Apple did their homework. They would not have sent the iPhone SE to manufacturing unless they dead certain knew that there were folks out there who would buy a smaller, cheaper iPhone.
