The streaming music industry is about to lose a player and gain a platform. On Monday, Pandora announced plans to acquire “key assets” from on-demand streaming service Rdio, which is seeking bankruptcy protection and will wind down its current business.
The deal, for $75 million in cash, covers Rdio’s technology and intellecutal property, and Pandora says it will be offering jobs to many members of Rdio’s team. Pandora isn’t buying Rdio’s entire business for a couple of reasons.
First, to launch an on-demand streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music, Pandora will have to make its own licensing deals with the record labels, because Rdio’s deals aren’t transferable. Second, Pandora executives explained in a Monday conference call that Rdio is financially “challenged,” and would have been a drain on Pandora.
I wouldn’t take bets on Rdio relaunching. It’s also likely the first of a few more consolidations in the next 12 months.
Alexander Graham Bell once said, “I have travelled around the globe. I have seen the Canadian and American Rockies, the Andes, the Alps and the Highlands of Scotland, but for simple beauty, Cape Breton outrivals them all.”
I’ll admit that I was a bit skeptical of this quote upon first reading it. I mean, the Rockies, the Alps, the Scottish Highlands… those are all pretty impressive and beautiful things. Could a sparsely-populated island in the Canadian Maritimes really compare?
Well, the truth is that it kind of can.
If you’re looking for a vacation full of utterly lovely scenery, wonderful people and great seafood, you can’t go wrong visiting my home province of Nova Scotia. I promise it will surprise and delight you.
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Adrian Weckler, technology editor for The Irish Independent, interviews Tim Cook about privacy, diversity, Chinese factories, the future of cars and why Tim is giving all his money away.
Some highlights:
Cook says that Apple is expecting “huge” sales this Christmas.
“I don’t even look at what the analysts say,” Cook says with a grin. “But I think it’s going to be a huge holiday season. We’re extremely optimistic. We shipped the Watch first in the June quarter and we sold a lot. We sold even more than that in the September quarter. And we’re looking for a big holiday season.”
And:
“We’ve recognised that the user interface with a car is not up to the expectations of our customer. And so we wanted to help the automobile manufacturers remedy that and have our customers have a seamless experience between in the car and out of the car.”
On privacy:
He says that he feels more comfortable in Europe when it comes to privacy issues than in other parts of the world, including the US.
“I do,” he says. “I think Europe is leading the world on that topic and it’s great. I feel right at home when I come to Europe and talk about privacy.”
What is it he approves of in particular? Is it the recently introduced ‘right to be forgotten’, allowing individuals to have personal information removed from search engines?
“I wouldn’t want to comment on that specific one. But I think, on a macro basis, it’s the concept that all of us should have the right to our data, how it’s used and where it’s used. I think these concepts are powerful and have never been more important as the advancements in technology have enabled many things beyond what should occur.”
And:
“I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services,” he wrote. “We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.”
And:
“The UK government has been clear publicly that they are not seeking to weaken encryption,” says Cook. “And so I take them at their word that they would not do that. And at the moment as you know, we encrypt iMessage end-to-end and we have no backdoor. And we have no intention of changing that. Any change made would contradict the UK government’s view that they would not weaken encryption.
“And so I think that we’ll work closely with them. And I have every faith that through this process of the next year, give or take a year, that the bill will become very clear.”
Speaking to Independent.ie , Cook denied that the death of computers such as the Mac was imminent and said that there would be a market for such traditional personal computers for the foreseeable future.
“We feel strongly that customers are not really looking for a converged Mac and iPad,” said Cook. “Because what that would wind up doing, or what we’re worried would happen, is that neither experience would be as good as the customer wants. So we want to make the best tablet in the world and the best Mac in the world. And putting those two together would not achieve either. You’d begin to compromise in different ways.”
This is clever. QPAU embedded a pair of buttons at the base of a tempered glass screen protector, one on either side of the iPhone home button. A tap on one of the buttons triggers a tap on the corresponding nav button towards the top of the screen.
This works on any app with a nav bar. As an example, if you fire up the Contacts app, you’ll see a nav bar at the top of the screen, with the word “All Contacts” in the middle of the nav bar, a “Groups” button to the left, and a “+” button to the right. With the screen protector installed, a tap on the button to the left of the home button taps “Groups” and a tap on the right button taps “+”. Sort of a remote control, making it easier to tap the top of the screen with one hand.
The first half of the video is the installation process. Jump to about 4:10 in for the demo itself. In the demo, he launches Tweetbot, then taps to the right of the home button to create a new tweet (new tweet is the button on the right side of the Tweetbot nav bar). Pretty cool.
Before you plunk down your $9.99, be sure to read the comments on the Amazon page. I haven’t used this myself, so I’m not sure how well it works. But I do love the idea behind this product.
The Pencil is just plain fun. It is indeed Apple white, and there are Apple-y things about it — for example, the fact that it is weighted, and won’t roll away on a table top, and always stops rolling with the word “Pencil” facing upward on its metal band (seriously, I’ve tried this at least a dozen times).
Got to love the attention to detail here.
The Pencil’s greatest feature, then, is its precision. In my experience there was almost no latency between the Pencil and the screen; it really felt like I was using a pencil or pen. Unlike styluses that rely on Bluetooth connectivity, the iPad Pro senses when a stylus is near the display and scans for a “tip signal” 240 times per second, Apple says.
The vast majority of Apple Pencil reviews I’ve read have been extremely positive. Unfortunately, the shipping dates are still 4-5 weeks out. Is what it is.
Note that there is a steady stream of Apple Pencils for sale on eBay. If you have to have one soon, and are willing to pay the premium, it’s an option.
For digital artists and tablet note takers, the iPad Pro’s palm rejection software is nearly as important as the stylus, if not more so. I pressed and dragged my palm along the iPad Pro’s display while using four different apps — Apple Notes, Adobe Sketch, FiftyThree Paper, and Notability — and I couldn’t leave a palm mark no matter how hard I tried. I was also able to switch between using my finger and using the stylus without any lags.
Same with palm rejection, extremely positive reviews all around. The iPad Pro is a remarkable achievement.
Apple announced on Sunday that it has struck a deal to power all of its Singapore operations with renewable energy, the latest in a series of steps from the company to turn its operations worldwide green.
Starting in January, solar energy developer Sunseap Group will provide Apple with 100 percent renewable electricity from its portfolio of solar energy systems built atop more than 800 buildings in Singapore.
The deal will make Apple the first company in Singapore to run exclusively on renewable energy and marks a significant step in its bid to power 100 percent of its facilities and operations worldwide with clean fuel.
Perhaps I’m now just an old social media git yelling at a heart-shaped cloud. Maybe Twitter isn’t misunderstanding the user experience at all, and it’s just a few long-term users who are grumbling. For all I know, Twitter newcomers worldwide are now sighing with relief because that difficult favorites button (three whole syllables!) has gone, replaced by clickable hearts. But a quick glance at replies to Twitter’s own tweets about the change suggests otherwise, and it really does feel like a mis-step that reduces the flexibility of a previously versatile feature.
As a maniacal Twitter user, I completely agree. While “Faves” may not have been great, “Hearts” seems infinitely worse. What if I wanted to bookmark someone’s outrageous or offensive tweet to refer to it later? Twitter seems to think it’s OK for me to use the universal symbol of love to do that. Worse, Twitter’s reasoning, as laid out in this piece, is either mindless marketing speak or quite literally idiotic.
Never has the cry of ‘it’s just a bigger Apple thing’ been more applicable than it has with iPad Pro – this is literally a bigger iPad. But that approach to thinking about it is also reductive. The Microsoft Surface has blazed a sort of hybrid path – for people that don’t want to compromise having a laptop experience. The iPad pro, on the other hand, is unapologetically tablety. The keyboard feels solid but it’s no substitute for a MacBook. The muti-app experience, on the other hand, is far and away better than on any competing system — and the way that it enables creatives to alternate between the various ‘modes’ is unique to this platform.
There are a lot of ways to slice iPad Pro. But one of the biggest and hardest to quantify is the way that it will end the debate about whether the tablet is a tool for creation once and for all.
Sprinkled throughout this review, Panzarino asks some interesting questions and makes some very good points. Bottom line is, who cares if the iPad Pro is an “enterprise play” or “just for designers” or “a laptop replacement”? It’s not going to be all things to all people but the tech media often seems to want to make it that.
For American companies, doing business in Europe is getting to be a tricky thing these days. American tech companies, in particular, are finding themselves in regulatory crosshairs more and more.
But there are some things that Europe doest best, according to Cook. One of them is privacy.
He says that he feels more comfortable in Europe when it comes to privacy issues than in other parts of the world, including the US.
I love these long interviews with the press outside of the typical North American outlets. The (sometimes) different viewpoint is interesting.
Arguing that Apple is in trouble because the iPhone is so popular is like arguing that the ’90s-era Chicago Bulls were in trouble because Michael Jordan was so good. It’s true Jordan couldn’t play forever — and the iPhone won’t be the most profitable product in the world forever. But in the meantime, the Bulls were well-nigh unbeatable, and Apple, for now at least, is unfathomably profitable.
Just like how it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, it’s better to have tremendous success for some period of time than never to have had tremendous success in the first place. Right?
This is a typically well written and thought out piece by Gruber, taking down the ridiculousness of the Apple doomsayers. They have zero basis for their prognostications and yet, rather than being spiked by their editors as posts that have no basis in fact or shouted down by the media in general, they are lauded for their “prescience”.
After 76 hours of research and side-by-side testing with four different models, we found the $800 Epson SureColor P600 is the best photo inkjet printer for most people.
It delivers professional-quality color prints, as well as black-and-white photographs that are as close to traditional darkroom prints as you’ll see from any digital printer around. Its prints also last longer than anything you’d get from a typical online photo service. The P600 can print on a wider variety of media than the competition, and its LCD touchscreen control panel makes setup and maintenance easy.
I’m a big proponent of printing some of your photos. There’s nothing like holding a physical representation of a memory. I have an Epson R2000 and I love taking some of my better photos and printing them out and putting them on my own walls or giving them to friends.
Privacy advocates are warning federal authorities of a new threat that uses inaudible, high-frequency sounds to surreptitiously track a person’s online behavior across a range of devices, including phones, TVs, tablets, and computers.
The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can’t be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.
And the ad industry wonders why we hate them and happily use ad blockers.
Did you know that you can set up something called a “Medical ID” on your iPhone?
This can be accessed even while the phone is locked by clicking on the emergency options, and it can display things like name, date of birth (DOB), emergency contacts, medical conditions, and even blood type!
It can be managed by clicking on the little “Health” app that comes default on the iPhone.
The Medical ID is important because, in case of an emergency, medical responders can look at your phone and know any allergies or medical conditions you have and know who to contact for you without unlocking your phone.
This only takes a few seconds to set up but if the EMTs on scene know about it, they can quickly access important medical information or your emergency contact.
Once upon a time, Apple was known for its ease of use, for computers and applications that were understandable, powerful, and could be used without reference to any manuals. All the operations were discoverable (the power of menus), all could be undone or redone, and there was considerable feedback so you always knew what had just taken place.
However, when Apple moved to gestural-based interfaces with the first iPhone, followed by its tablets, it deliberately and consciously threw out many of the key Apple principles. No more discoverability, no more recoverability, just the barest remnants of feedback.
Why? Not because this was to be a gestural interface, but because Apple simultaneously made a radical move toward visual simplicity and elegance at the expense of learnability, usability, and productivity. They began shipping systems that people have difficulty learning and using, getting away with it because people don’t recognize such problems until it is too late, and money has already changed hands. Even then, people tend to blame themselves for the shortcomings of their devices: “If I weren’t so stupid . . . !”
While I wouldn’t personally paint so broad a brush, this (long) article by a former Apple Human Interface Guideline guru does make some good points and should be read, particularly by those in charge at Apple. I know I’ve often had more trouble than I expect trying to assist new iOS and Mac users in “figuring out” the interface. Maybe I’m (we) are just getting older but it seems as if the User Interface, while more powerful, is much more confusing, especially for people new to the paradigms. I’m not saying we need to go back to OS 7 but a greater focus on the issues Tog brings up might alleviate that “If I weren’t so stupid . . . !” attitude I hear from far too many users.
Besides having one of the best names in the museum business, San Francisco’s Exploratorium is widely considered to be among the most beautiful and well-designed educational institutions on the planet.
Its oddball, hands-on exhibits are considered a model for the modern participatory museum. The Exploratorium has famously been termed a “mad scientist’s penny arcade.”
It turns out the Exploratorium makes apps, too. The latest from the museum team is called How Many Saturdays? and it’s a lot of fun.
San Francisco’s Exploratorium, a wonderful “participatory museum”, was always one of my favorite places to go when we had any extra time at a Macworld Expo. This app typifies the Exploratorium – quirky and weird but in the best possible way.
Earlier this week, a video surfaced of three black teenagers from Sudan and Somalia being barred from entering an Apple store in Melbourne, Australia, because an employee thought “they might steal something.” The company subsequently apologized.
In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, Tim Cook weighed in on the situation, calling it “unacceptable.”
“What people have seen and heard from watching the video on the web does not represent our values. It is not a message we would ever want to deliver to a customer or hear ourselves,” Cook wrote in the companywide email. “None of us are happy with the way this was handled.”
It is unclear if any disciplinary measures were taken against the manager involved in the incident, but multiple sources familiar with the situation say the employee hasn’t been at the store since.
Nor should they be. While this is yet another embarrassment for Apple this week, I think we can all agree that, as Cook says in the email, this doesn’t represent the company’s values.
Earlier this week Mac App Store (MAS) apps, on launch, were showing up as “damaged” and couldn’t be opened. The old MAS security certificate seemed to have expired and a new one, at first, didn’t seem to be showing up. Here’s my current understanding of what happened.
Some consider this just a minor mistake on Apple’s part while others see it as endemic to the Mac App Store situation. Regardless, I’m told Apple is working hard on a fix and will have something “soon”.
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I woke up to an inbox full of e-mails from customers reporting that my apps wouldn’t launch. This included new customers who had just purchased from the Mac App Store as well as people who had purchased long ago, hadn’t made any changes, and expected that things would just keep working.
The Mac App Store is supposed to make things easier, but it’s also a single point of failure. Not only is it neglected, but sometimes even the existing functionality stops working.
In short, the system is broken on multiple levels, and there is no evidence to suggest that things will get better.
Tsai is the developer of SpamSieve, among other apps, and he reflects the frustration many developers feel towards Apple and the way the App Store works – or, as in the case a few days ago, catastrophically doesn’t work. This is a huge embarrassment to Apple (and one they haven’t explained or apologized for) as well as being a giant pain point for developers. After all, when your app stops working, who do you contact? The developer or Apple?
Stan Lee is a legend. Along with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Lee helped populate the Marvel Comics universe with heroes like the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man.
The man who dreamed up lots of backstories for Marvel characters has now put out his own origin story: A memoir, Amazing Fantastic Incredible, in comic book form.
Even if you’re like me and have only a passing familiarity with comic books, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Stan Lee. I think it’s entirely appropriate that his memoir is in the format he is so well known for.
The reviews are out on iPad Pro, and they address how big it is, whether it’s worth the price, and whether it can or can’t replace a laptop for average consumers. But as a design director at Vox Media, I was more interested in whether I could run all of the apps I normally use on it.
In a lot of ways, the computing devices I use have to feel like extensions of me. I’m always sketching, creating, and ideating on my MacBook Pro. And I don’t regularly use an iPad for work, so the promise of iPad Pro as a device for creatives was particularly intriguing.
I had high hopes that this new iPad would transform me into a rockstar designer. I mean, something this big should be life-changing… right?
There’s lots of discussion of the iPad Pro and where it fits into various workflows. This is an interesting take from the point of view of that group of people a lot of us think will be big buyers of the iPad Pro.
The person on your list is a music lover. Gamer. Photographer. Whiz. Workout devotee. Nomad, even. No matter who you’re shopping for this holiday, you’re sure to find a great gift.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always loved gift guides and dreaming about the things I’d like to get for myself and now, as an adult, what I’d like to buy for others. Apple’s Gift Guide is the first in a long line of lists I’ll be perusing over the holidays. Do you plan on getting anything from this list?
A growing number of MacRumors readers and Twitter users have been experiencing an issue with some Mac App Store apps displaying a “damaged” error when opened since late Wednesday. The issue appears to be rather widespread, affecting popular apps such as 1Password, Acorn, Byword, Call of Duty 2, DaisyDisk and Tweetbot.
I’ve experienced this first-hand, albeit without the “damaged” dialog. Tweetbot was running fine on my El Capitan Mac. But when I quit it and relaunched, I was prompted to re-enter my AppleID password. Hopefully, this gets resolved quickly.
The f.lux team has built an iOS version of the app – unfortunately, they can’t release it publicly due to App Store restrictions. So, they’ve come up with a beta version that anyone can install with a free developer account and Xcode on the Mac.
This is interesting, but obviously presents certain dangers, since you’ll be running code that has not been vetted by Apple.
Imagine if, like on the Mac, Apple provided a framework to distribute and install iOS apps outside of the App Store with some security in place and a UI to manage sideloaded apps. Until a couple of years ago, it seemed obvious that it would eventually happen on iOS too.
For apps that are downloaded from places other than the Mac App Store, developers can get a unique Developer ID from Apple and use it to digitally sign their apps. The Developer ID allows Gatekeeper to block apps created by malware developers and verify that apps haven’t been tampered with since they were signed. If an app was developed by an unknown developer—one with no Developer ID—or tampered with, Gatekeeper can block the app from being installed.
Not sure why this approach couldn’t work on iOS. Perhaps it’s a level of control that Apple is unwilling to relinquish.
