Cyrus Farivar, writing for Ars Technica:

A second state lawmaker has now introduced a bill that would prohibit the sale of smartphones with unbreakable encryption. Except this time, despite very similar language to a pending New York bill, the stated rationale is to fight human trafficking, rather than terrorism.

Specifically, California Assemblymember Jim Cooper’s (D-Elk Grove) new bill, which was introduced Wednesday, would “require a smartphone that is manufactured on or after January 1, 2017, and sold in California, to be capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider.”

The dominos are falling.

Here’s a link to the bill. Interestingly, the wording is almost identical to the New York bill, including the $2,500 fine for each smartphone sold or leased.

From the Dormant Commerce Clause Wikipedia page:

The idea behind the dormant Commerce Clause is that this grant of power implies a negative converse—a restriction prohibiting a state from passing legislation that improperly burdens or discriminates against interstate commerce. The restriction is self-executing and applies even in the absence of a conflict between state and federal statutes, but Congress may allow states to pass legislation that would otherwise be forbidden by the dormant Commerce Clause.

Keep your eyes on this one.

You may be familiar with a handful of these tips. But my bet is that many of these will be new to you.

My favorite:

OS X actually contains two clipboards, although the second is much more primitive than the main one and will cut and paste only text. You won’t find it on any menus, either, and it is available only via two keyboard shortcuts. You can use it in the usual way by highlighting some text, using Control+K to cut the text, and pressing Control+Y to paste the content in the new position. (Note that’s Control and not Command; longtime Unix/Linux users will, of course, recognize this secondary clipboard as an implementation of the kill and yank tools found in the likes of Emacs.)

There’s no “copy” option, unfortunately, although you can emulate this by cutting the text with Control+K and then immediately pasting it back in with Control+Y, before moving to the new position where you’d like the text to be inserted and again pasting with Control+Y.

Only plain text is copied—any formatting such as bold or italics is lost. Additionally, although it should work fine within most OS X applications (but not the latest version of Microsoft Word, natch), it probably will not work if you cut text from one app to paste into another app—in my testing, each app seemed to have its own private secondary clipboard.

Have you ever found the need to scrub the styles from some styled text? This is a great way to do that. Select the styled text, then control-k and control-y. In all the applications I’ve tested, Undo appears to work, in case you change your mind.

[Via IHeartApple2.com]

Janko Roettgers, writing for Variety:

Amazon’s Prime members just got a new perk: Showtime and Starz, unbundled and cheap. The internet company launched a new initiative called “Streaming Partners Program” Tuesday that allows Prime members to add subscription programming from close to 20 partners for an added fee to their Prime video service.

Want to add unbundled Showtime to your Apple TV? That’ll be $10.99 a month. Same service on Amazon Prime? $8.99 a month. And Amazon Prime still has not delivered the promised Apple TV app.

Chess moves.

J.M. Porup, writing for Ars Technica:

Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), recently launched a new section that lets users easily browse vulnerable webcams.

The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores.

This is the wild, wild west. Enter the Internet of Things at your peril.

Chris DeVille, writing for The Verge:

In the music industry, which is also dealing with an influx of infinite streaming options, there’s been a lot of talk about curation. Everyone wants the ability to be the cool friend who filters out the garbage and points people to the good stuff — and to find ways to monetize that ability. It’s how Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal are striving to differentiate themselves.

TV channels are already adopting that strategy in their own way. The few networks that survive outside the comfort of a bundle will be the ones that mean something to people, that have built up a recognizable point of view. HBO did it first and best. Through a combination of quality programming and savvy branding (“It’s not TV, it’s HBO”), the network built up such fervent loyalty that when it finally launched its own subscription service, its customers followed in droves.

There are clear parallels between the networks and the web. Just as some sites are pure curation, so too are cable bundles. TV networks continue to rely on advertising as a significant source of revenue. As viewers migrate to alternatives like Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, etc., that advertising revenue shrinks in direct proportion. Web sites built on similar advertising models are feeling a similar pinch, as alternatives spring up on a regular basis. More competition, and much of it free. Advertising revenue plummets.

Is this decline inevitable? Irreversible? Will we hit a point of critical mass when unbundled content is both plentiful enough and cheap enough to take the major networks out of the picture entirely? That critical point will occur when a network’s ad revenue no longer supports the budget for original programming.

OS X Daily:

More services and features rely on location to function properly on Mac OS X, but whereas iOS will default to showing you a little compass arrow icon when location is accessed and used, OS X doesn’t show comparable location usage by default in the latest versions.

For users who want to know when Mac OS is requesting access and using location data, you can toggle an optional setting that, much like iOS, will display a compass location icon in the menu bar of OS X.

Follow the link to see how to turn that compass icon on.

The Concert 88 Camera system features the camera mountable CR88V Micro Wireless Receiver with a removable shoe mount adapter, as well as a belt clip for strap mounting. For maximum convenience, the CR88V offers 12 hours of battery life from a single removable rechargeable lithium ion battery (two included). A battery level indicator lets you know when to swap in the backup. The receiver also offers a 1/8″ headphone monitor output with dedicated level control.

I’m heading over to see this later today, but it looks like a cool product if you’re doing reporting on the go.

Across the board, the Z Series Headphones feature lightweight components with a low-profile, over-ear fit and a stylish look. The entire line features ample cushioning for maximum comfort, highlighted by the genuine lambskin ear pads on the Z55 and Z45 models. Sonically, the headphones achieve wide, yet balanced and detailed sound fields ideal for critical studio monitoring. Their closed-back design provides effective sound isolation for recording by limiting unwanted background noise and signal bleed.

I used these during the last Dalrymple Report podcast and loved them. The sound was crisp and clear, and they were really comfortable.

Daisuke Wakabayashi, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

Steve Zadesky, a 16-year Apple veteran who has been overseeing its electric-car project for the last two years, has told people he is leaving the company. The timing of his departure isn’t clear. He is still at Apple for now.

And:

Mr. Zadesky, who worked on the iPod and the iPhone during his career, was given permission in 2014 to start investigating Apple’s entry into the electric car market. Last year, Apple designated the initiative—code-named “Titan”— a committed project and set a ship date of 2019.

And:

An engineer at Ford Motor Co. before joining Apple in 1999, Mr. Zadesky was in charge of tripling the size of the automotive team—already at around 600 employees in September—while coming up with a vision for the product.

The team has encountered some problems, according to people familiar with the matter, in laying out clear goals for the project. Apple has urged the team to push ahead with ambitious deadlines even though some on the team felt that those targets weren’t attainable, these people said.

For more than 40 years, Yamaha has developed industry-leading synthesizers, from the revolutionary DX7 in the 1980s to the renowned Motif series – one of the best-selling synthesizers of all time. Now, Yamaha raises the bar again with Montage. Montage, available in 61-, 76- and 88-key configurations, features the Motion Control Synthesizer Engine, a powerful and intuitive way to interact with and control sound.

I never thought I’d see Motif get replaced, but Yamaha did quite a job with the Montage. This is an impressive synth.

Inspired by raw power and performance, Revstar’s sound is as unique and bold as its aesthetic. Working to evoke a visceral, unbridled power and an individual, organic tone that is made possible only by considering every detail, Yamaha’s engineers chose materials carefully and designed custom pickups to make sure Revstar sounds as stunning as it looks.

I had a demo of these guitars today and I must say, I was impressed. They have a presence in look and feel that many guitars are missing these days. They aren’t heavy, but they are solid when you play them. I wouldn’t hesitate adding one of these to my collection.

With the TouchFlow Operation interface optimized for touch panel control, experienced engineers as well as newcomers to the field will find it easier than ever to achieve the ideal mix. Recallable D-PRE™ preamplifiers support sound quality that will satisfy the most discerning professional ears, while advanced live recording features and seamless operation with high-performance I/O racks give these compact digital mixers capabilities that make them outstanding choices for a wide range of applications. Experience the intuitive control and creative freedom that a truly evolved digital console can provide.

Yamaha made these mixers as foolproof as possible. They have a touchscreen display and a ton of presets preconfigured for each instrument in the band. You can also use an iPad to configure settings away from the mixer, so you can go onstage or anywhere in the room and check your sound. If I was going to buy a mixer today, I’d take a serious look at the TF series.

Record and compose music in studio quality on your laptop or iPad with the UR22mkII. With outstanding audio and build quality for its price class, the UR22mkII combines choice components with advanced connectivity and flexible I/O options to offer a full-on mobile production platform.

I love what Yamaha does with their new interfaces, making them compatible with iOS and Mac. I had a look at this today and it was impressive.

Anandtech:

Overall, the iPad Pro has proven to be a very different experience for me than previous iPads. The design is definitely familiar, with the same industrial design and general feel as previous iPads scaled up to a 12.9” form factor.

On the SoC side, we’re finally seeing a major player in ARM SoCs directly competing with Intel on their home ground of sorts, and the results are at least somewhat shocking. Despite a handicap on process node, the CPU of the A9X isn’t all that far off from Skylake Core M. And while A9X can’t go toe-to-toe, Apple is for the first time capable of reaching Intel’s level for some workloads. Otherwise on the GPU side, Apple arguably bests Intel.

Here is the incredibly detailed iPad Pro review you’ve been waiting for.

Appleinsider:

A peek at the schedule of Pope Francis has revealed that the head of the Catholic Church met with Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook on Friday, though what the two discussed remains a mystery.

Carol Glatz of the National Catholic Reporter snapped a picture of the Pope’s schedule on Friday, revealing that the pontiff had a meeting scheduled with Cook at 11:30 a.m. local time. Tom Cheshire of Sky News later confirmed that the meeting took place, as highlighted by Business Insider.

Cook’s meeting with His Holiness comes one week after Pope Francis met with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Apple rival Alphabet.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that meeting.

Bloomberg:

Apple received $1 billion from its rival in 2014, according to a transcript of court proceedings from Oracle Corp.’s copyright lawsuit against Google. The search engine giant has an agreement with Apple that gives the iPhone maker a percentage of the revenue Google generates through the Apple device, an attorney for Oracle said at a Jan. 14 hearing in federal court.

Considering how valuable that piece of virtual property is, I bet Google thinks they got a bargain in the deal.

Apple:

Apple’s conference call to discuss fourth fiscal quarter results is scheduled for Tuesday, January 26, 2016 at 2:00 pm PT/5:00 pm ET.

As always, this call is open to the public via the webcast. Only analysts are allowed to call in and ask questions. It promises to be yet more record numbers for Apple.

Today at NAMM, Apogee Electronics and Waves Audio announced a partnership that will connect the world’s most advanced multi-channel audio recording interface to the world’s most powerful DSP enabled audio network. Symphony I/O Mk II, Apogee’s new flagship converter, will offer optional SoundGrid connectivity, enabling it to connect to the Waves SoundGrid System for studio, live and post production audio networking with real-time digital signal processing of Waves and SoundGrid compatible third-party plugins.

This is a very interesting partnership. Apogee makes some terrific products—some of the best.

the Marshall JMP 2203 plug-in is an expert emulation of the legendary ultra-flexible 100-watt amplifier used by everyone from Iron Maiden and Slayer, to Jeff Beck and My Bloody Valentine.

I can’t wait to get home and try this plug-in. I love everything that UA does, but a rocking Marshall could be the best yet. UA also released the Sonnox Oxford Envolution and the Brainworx bx_digital V3 EQ Collection.

Either engaged automatically by just hitting a switch on the Profiler Remote or dynamically by using an expression pedal, all continuous parameters can be changed smoothly to take the tone from ultra dry clean rhythm to utmost distorted, FX soaked lead tones.

Kemper made a big splash a few years back with its amp profiling and while I haven’t had extensive experience with it, others I know have said they really like it.

Among the new shapes are 12-fret Grand Concerts (552ce 12-Fret, 562ce 12-Fret), Grand Orchestra guitar models (458e, 858e), along with a new 12-string Dreadnought (360e). Powers’ design philosophy is focused on giving players a broader spectrum of 12-string voices to enable them to find the right fit.

I’m heading up to Taylor’s booth to check these out today. Taylor is my favorite acoustic, but I don’t have a lot of experience with 12-strings, so it should be interesting.

The Washington Post:

Q-tips are one of the most perplexing things for sale in America. Plenty of consumer products are widely used in ways other than their core function — books for leveling tables, newspapers for keeping fires aflame, seltzer for removing stains, coffee tables for resting legs — but these cotton swabs are distinct. Q-tips are one of the only, if not the only, major consumer products whose main purpose is precisely the one the manufacturer explicitly warns against.

I’m sure I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to using Q-tips in a way that can be harmful but at least I’m not my mother. She’d use bobby pins (kids, ask your grandmother) to “clean” her ears.

From ClickHole:

According to his publicist, Harrison Ford was involved in a skydiving accident earlier today when he jumped out of an airplane with a backpack that turned out to contain a large steel ship’s anchor instead of a parachute. The alarmed Star Wars actor responded by frantically tugging his ripcord several times in hopes that a parachute was still hidden in the bag somewhere, but was only able to release a tractor, a 500-pound barbell, and a full-grown elephant.

Keep reading. It just gets better. So funny.

Producer Greg Kurstin on working with Adele and Logic Pro, straight from Apple’s site:

When Kurstin needed a sound he couldn’t create, he’d find it in a Logic Pro project containing a select set of sampled vintage synth and keyboard sounds. “I was working on my MacBook Pro away from my own studio,” he says. “And playing a rented guitar with none of my favorite pedals. So I didn’t have all my trippy effects there. But I was able to pull out everything I needed from my plug-ins, channel strips, and effects.”

On finishing “Hello”:

The chords were promising, and Kurstin and Adele were able to write most of the song that day. But they couldn’t finish it. “We tried different choruses, but we didn’t quite nail it,” he says. “And I didn’t know if we ever would. I thought maybe this one was going to end up on the shelf.” But Kurstin was called back six months later to finish the song. He used Logic Pro X instruments and plug-ins to enhance the bass line and drums. More radically, he lowered the entire song a half step at Adele’s request. “We tried really hard with a bunch of different ideas,” he says. “And we finally got it right.”

For Kurstin, the song didn’t feel finished until they recorded Adele singing the chorus. “When Adele gets on the mic, she blows your mind. I was moved when I first heard her sing ‘Hello,’ and I’m still moved every time I hear it.”

Dave Winer, with his thoughts on the dominance of Medium and his efforts to keep blogging/Tumblr posting alive and well:

Medium is on its way to becoming the consensus platform for writing on the web. if you’re not sure you’re going to be blogging regularly, the default place to put your writing is Medium, rather than starting a blog on Tumblr or WordPress.com, for example. I guess the thought is that it’s wasteful to start a blog if you’re not sure you’re going to post that often. It’s something of a paradox, because blogs are not large things on the storage devices of the hosting companies. If they’re doing it right, a blog is smaller than the PNG image in the right margin of this post. They’re tiny little things in a world filled with videos and podcasts and even humble images. Text is very very very small in comparison.

And:

Because I cross-post my stories to Medium through RSS, you will be able to read this there. I guess they won’t recommend it. It probably won’t appear on the front page of Medium. See there’s the other problem with ceding a whole content type to a single company. Since you’re counting on them not just to store your writing, but also build flow for it, the inclination is to praise them, to withhold criticism. To try to guess what they like, and parrot it. If Medium becomes much stronger, this will be what SEO becomes.

Does Medium control the flow? Is there an algorithm that controls how much exposure your Medium post gets, or is it all hand-picked by an editorial team? If the latter, is there a policy regarding posts like Dave Winer’s, posts that are critical to Medium?

If anyone on the Medium team wants to respond, please send a tweet here.

The TIOBE Index uses this methodology to gauge the popularity of software languages. According to the latest measure:

• Java has swapped places with C, moving from number 2 in January 2015 to number 1 this month.
• Objective-C has moved from number 3 all the way down to number 18, one year later.
• Swift has risen from number 25 to number 14.
• C++ has moved from 4 to 3.
• Python has moved from 8 to 5.

An interesting comment from the article:

Java’s rise goes hand in hand with Objective-C’s decline (-5.88%). Apple’s announcement to replace Objective-C by Swift some time ago was the main cause of this fall. It was expected that Swift would gain as much popularity as Objective-C left behind, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. This is also observed in practice: TIOBE’s customers are not eagerly migrating to Swift yet.

I would have expected Swift plus Objective-C usage to be a near constant. Any fall in Objective-C would see a corresponding rise in Swift. That doesn’t appear to be the case.

Interesting.

UPDATE: You might also want to take a look at the annual Stack Overflow developer survey, found here. [H/T Eric Jacobson]

Donald Trump said:

“we’re gonna get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country, instead of in other countries”

John Gruber digs in to the logic:

The U.S. can’t compete with China on wages. It can’t compete on the size of the labor force. China has had a decades-long push in its education system to train these workers; the U.S. has not. And the U.S. doesn’t have the facilities or the proximity to the Asian component manufacturers.

The only way these jobs are coming back to the US is via legally mandated means (a government tariff or trade restriction of some kind). Economically, it just doesn’t make sense, or the jobs would never have left.

This is a terrific piece from Rich Mogull, writing for TidBITS, that looks at why Apple stands alone in defending encryption. But the article goes further. It lays out the history of government monitoring of communications, as well as the arguments that drive both sides.

If you haven’t already, take a minute to read this post about the proposed law in New York state banning the sale of devices that support encryption without offering matching decryption. Then read Rich’s post.

From Apple’s press release:

The iOS App Development Center, to be located at a partner institution in Naples, will support teachers and provide a specialized curriculum preparing thousands of future developers to be part of Apple’s thriving developer community. In addition, Apple will work with partners around Italy who deliver developer training to complement this curriculum and create additional opportunities for students. Apple expects to expand this program to other countries around the world.

And:

In Italy, over 75,000 jobs are attributable to the App Store and the developer community is vibrant. IK Multimedia launched its first app in 2009 and since then has had over 25 million downloads. Musement, launched in 2013, is now available in seven languages and 300 cities across 50 countries, making it easy for people to book travel and excursions on the go.

Roberto Macina, CEO and founder of Qurami, said: “Apple’s continued innovation inspires us to create the best mobile experiences and make our customers’ lives just a little bit easier. Apple’s app ecosystem is the anchor for our business, and developing across Apple’s operating systems has enabled us to easily and quickly bring the Qurami experience to iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch users.”

Thousands of companies are expanding because of their work with Apple, which supports hundreds of thousands of jobs in communities large and small across Europe. Milan-based Laboratorio Elettrofisico makes some of the most sophisticated magnetization equipment in the world and their technology enables some of the industry-leading magnetic features found in Apple products. Apple also works with Europe’s leading manufacturers of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, which create tiny components that power some of the incredible sensor and audio technologies found in iOS devices.

This looks to be the same program that started in Brazil (Brazilian Education Program for iOS Development, or BEPiD) and was previously announced by the Indonesian embassy:

In a visit to Apple headquarters hosted by Apple Senior Vice President of Operations Jeff Williams, Apple announced a new commitment to build an iOS App Development Center in Indonesia. This development center will be the first of its kind in Asia. The Indonesian government and Apple also discussed continued efforts to promote sustainable tin mining in Indonesia. The Indonesian government intends to improve social and environmental conditions for tin miners in Bangka Belitung. Indonesia is the world’s second largest tin producer after China.