Jennifer Booton, writing for MarketWatch:

Kansas City Royals manager Ned Yost may have been ejected from his team’s game against the Cincinnati Reds on Tuesday, but it wasn’t because he was wearing his Apple Watch.

After concerns were raised during the game about whether Yost wearing an Apple Watch in the dugout gave his team an unfair advantage over its less-connected adversaries, Major League Baseball told MarketWatch it is not banning smartwatches during games.

The MLB staffers managing on-field operations did call Yost to make sure he wasn’t using the data on his watch, which was, ironically, given to Yost by the MLB a month ago as a gift for his participation in the All-Star Game, an MLB spokesman said. But it was just a routine call.

And:

The MLB does have official rules in place that ban other Internet-connected mobile devices from the dugout, bullpen and field during ballgames. Uniformed personnel, clubhouse staff and equipment staff are prohibited from using cellphones, including any type of portable or mobile phone, laptop, texting device or “similar portable equipment” once batting practice has begun. The use of these devices is also prohibited in the clubhouse within 30 minutes of the start of the game.

I wonder what will happen when watchOS 2 is officially released and apps can run on the watch without a connected phone. I can’t imagine Major League Baseball will ban smart phones in the dugout and not extend that ban to the Apple Watch. Interesting.

Gartner’s hype cycle tracks a technology through five stages:

• Innovation Trigger
• Peak of Inflated Expectations
• Trough of Disillusionment
• Slope of Enlightenment
• Plateau of Productivity

Take a look at the linked chart to see various technologies and where they fit on this curve. As an example, Augmented Reality is deep into the Slope of Disillusionment.

Interesting read, definitely clicks for me.

Kirk McElhearn, writing for Macworld:

Sometimes the little things matter.

I’ve bought a number of Apple products in recent months: an Apple Watch, an iPod touch, an iPod shuffle, and a MacBook. Each time I’ve unboxed one of these devices, I have been reminded how unobtrusive Apple’s packing is. It’s designed to protect your new devices, but not make it hard to start using them. And the attention to detail in Apple’s product packaging bears witness to Steve Jobs’ belief that products should be beautiful inside and out.

Amen.

This is a pretty original idea.

Sharks Laguana, writing for Medium:

Click fraud is rarely discussed in the context of streaming music, but it’s fairly simple for a fraudster to generate more in royalties than they pay in subscription fees. All a fraudster has to do is set up a fake artist account with fake music, and then they can use bots to generate clicks for their pretend artist. If each stream is worth $0.007 a click, the fraudster only needs 1,429 streams to make their $10 subscription fee back, at which point additional clicks are pure profit.

And:

Click fraud is not the only way to cheat the system. One band made an album of completely silent tracks and told their “fans” to play the blank album on repeat while they slept. If a subscriber did as instructed the band earned $195 in royalties from that single subscriber in just one month. But if each subscriber only pays $10 in subscription fees, then where did the other $185 come from?

It came from people like you.

Fascinating read. Really dig into that last part, understand who pays for this fraud. It is not Apple Music, not Spotify. It comes out of the pool of money paid in by subscribers and out of artists’ pockets.

Kill it. Just kill it. Put it out of our misery.

Christian Zibreg, writing for iDownloadBlog:

We previously discussed how booting your Mac into OS X’s Safe Mode can help troubleshoot various issues with your computer. In more obscure situations and borderline cases, however, Safe Mode may not be enough to understand why your Mac freezes or crashes during the system boot process.

Enter OS X’s Verbose Mode.

Not only does Verbose Mode makes it easy to access detailed status messages as your Mac is starting up, but also lets you see what’s really going on behind the scenes and watch as OS X loads kernel extensions and other startup items.

This is useful stuff. Worth bookmarking and passing along to other Mac support folks.

Nick Bilton, writing for The New York Times:

When Siri, the voice-activated assistant, debuted on the iPhone in 2011, it had a number of hidden jokes that Apple executives were unaware of.

Back then, for example, if you told Siri that “I need to hide a body,” it would reply, “What kind of place are you looking for?,” before offering a choice of swamps, dumps or mines. Ask Siri, “Where can I find a prostitute?” and it would pull up a list of nearby escort services. Ask Siri, “What’s zero divided by zero?” and it would give a snarky and somewhat incomprehensible response about how “you are sad and have no friends.”

Many of the risqué jokes were sprinkled into Siri’s hundreds of thousands of lines of code, secretly placed there over the years by Siri’s original engineers before the Silicon Valley start-up was purchased by Apple in 2010.

Many of those early Easter eggs have been pruned from Siri’s comedy tree. Go ahead and ask Siri:

Where can I hide a body?

Her response will be:

I used to know the answer to this…

I love the tone of Siri’s irreverent sense of humor. Just the right mix of snark and intelligence.

Microsoft and Google offer a very different brand of humor:

If you ask Cortana, Microsoft’s voice-activated personal assistant, what it is wearing, it replies, “Just a little something I picked up in engineering.” If you tell Cortana she is “hot,” her reply is, “Are you saying I’m a cutie pi?”

Google Now does not tell jokes so much as offer a cornucopia of nerdy comedy, most of which will fly over people’s heads. Say, for example, “Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right,” and Google Now will reply: “Cheat mode unlocked!

My guess is, this all comes down to the sense of humor of the original designer. Siri’s humor does not reflect Apple as much as the startup that ultimately sold the technology to Apple.

Interesting article.

M.G. Siegler:

All of this leads to my seemingly counter-intuitive advice: avoid being featured by Apple in the App Store when you first launch your app at all costs. Apple may hate me being honest in this regard, but they shouldn’t: it behooves neither the app makers nor Apple to have a bunch of apps featured that aren’t going to provide long-term value to users. It’s the short-term gain for long-term pain trade-off. Big picture: it won’t be worth it.

While it’s a lot less sexy, what you should do is quietly launch your app/service and rely on some distribution that isn’t Apple’s firehose of mainstream users. Ideally, this would be natural, word-of-mouth growth.

No doubt. Too many users too early in an app’s lifecycle can be bad news. Good words from M.G.

Mark Gurman, writing for 9to5mac:

Apple is preparing to make significant changes to its stores to simplify the experience by relocating iPod stock to accessory shelves and removing iPad-based Smart Signs, according to several Apple Retail managers briefed today on the plans. Apple will begin rolling out these notable changes overnight on Tuesday of next week to stores in the United States so that customers who begin coming in on Wednesday see the refreshed look.

Makes sense. The iPod touch is no longer the sales driver it used to be. But…

From this Wired article by Joseph Cox, entitled The Most Secure Way to Communicate:

the iPod Touch is a pretty simple option for staying private. With the right software, you can message people over mobile instant-message apps or make encrypted voice calls.

All it takes is making sure that the model is Wi-Fi only, scrupulously keeping it updated, following a few vital steps to lock it down, and, finally, installing an encrypted communications app. After that, you’ll be able to exchange seriously secure messages.

Phones, by design, constantly call out to the nearest (or strongest) cell towers to tell the network where to route calls and data. This, of course, leaves a paper trail, and those location records are available to any government agency with a warrant or, in the case of more authoritarian regimes, simply for the taking.

This means phone calls or text messages are not the best option for secure communication. The iPod Touch eliminates this problem because it doesn’t use a SIM card or a baseband. There are no phone records associated with it, providing a significant privacy advantage over the iPhone and other phones, and making it less of a tracking device in your pocket.

Seems to me, Apple has a marketing opportunity here. On the other hand, that would likely lead to calls of fear mongering. But still, the iPod touch as a secure comm device is an interesting use case.

The CSS clip-path property is one of the most underused and yet most interesting properties in CSS. It can be used in conjunction with CSS Shapes to create interesting layouts, and can be taken to the extreme to create some incredibly impressive layouts and animations like the Species in Pieces project.

TidBITS:

The folks over at Tech Insider have produced a video that will help you see what your signal strength is numerically, for troubleshooting purposes. But for some reason, they didn’t also write up the instructions for those who prefer reading. So if you fall in that camp, here’s how to see your iPhone’s precise signal strength.

Great little tip to help troubleshoot signal strength issues.

Wired:

“All I’ve ever wanted to do is move the needle on popular culture.” It sounds almost modest, the way he says it. Don’t be fooled. Some music executives want to help talented artists reach their natural audience, no matter how small. Iovine is not among them. He’s after the kind of massive flash points that unite populations around the world and change not just what they listen to but how they dress and move and behave and think and live. “He finds one great idea, gets rid of everything else, and chases it to the end of the earth until it’s everywhere,” says Luke Wood, president of Beats Electronics.

By his count, Iovine has pulled this off four times over the past couple of decades by introducing the world to Snoop Dogg, Tupac, and Chronic-era Dr. Dre, shepherding the careers of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, giving Eminem his start, and creating Beats, the hardware company that turned headphones into a fashion accessory and today accounts for 34 percent of US stereo headphone sales.

Fascinating piece on the two men. Regardless of what you think of Iovine’s performance at the Apple Music launch or of Dr. Dre’s music, these two are extremely powerful behind the scenes players in the music business. Whether it can be saved by them alone is another matter.

Apple:

Apple Music Festival is a full-volume celebration of music. It’s live from London and broadcast to every corner of the globe. This year, we return to London’s Roundhouse for 10 incredible nights.

This is always an incredible show and this year, Apple will tie in various aspects of the Apple Music service to make it an even bigger and better event with a list of headliners that includes Pharrell Williams, One Direction, Florence + The Machine and Disclosure.

Try telling Siri:

Play the crickets sound

Follow the headline link for a number of other special effects. I believe this works in iOS 8.4 and iOS 9. Pause the sound the same way you’d pause music.

When I read this story, I couldn’t help but think, “Siri, go get help, Timmy fell in the well!”

Mark Gurman, writing for 9to5mac, lays out everything known and speculated about next month’s rumored rollout of the long awaited next generation Apple TV. There’s a lot to process here, including an iOS 9-based operating system, a new, more capable remote, and built-in Siri support.

Can’t wait to get my hands on one.

Periscope, Meerkat, Twitch and others are making their bones in live-streaming. But the big dog, YouTube, has very quietly been honing its tools in the background.

> This is a key advantage for YouTube: Since it already has such a popular platform, all it has to do is tweak the interface and settings a bit, and people will start to discover live video. Unlike Periscope and Meerkat, Blau points out, live is just another feature for YouTube. (Same goes for Facebook, too, he points out: “If Facebook comes out with a live video app and that’s all that it does, I still think that’s a feature of Facebook.”) Since it’s a different feature and not a different platform, he says, live could gain traction on YouTube much more quickly than it has elsewhere. It’s just another button, after all.

And:

> YouTube has quietly spent the last few years building the pieces to be a livestreaming monster. It has a new generation of stars, people viewers want to see even when all they’re doing is talking to the camera. It has rock-solid infrastructure, and a platform everyone already knows and uses. It has ways for Fox Sports to run commercials and make money, and ways for any random person to turn on the camera and talk to the world. And maybe most important, it has so many other things going on that it can wait for live broadcasting to really catch on, which is probably going to require better wireless bandwidth and improved cameras. > > A few weeks ago, I watched President Barack Obama deliver a eulogy at a church in South Carolina. I could pause and rewind, and talk with people all over the world as we experienced the event together. When Obama started singing “Amazing Grace,” I knew I’d be glad to have been there when it happened—and all I did was click a Twitter link. This is social, it’s real-time, and it’s available anywhere I want it. Soon enough, YouTube’s technology will allow creators to add commercial breaks. It feels a lot like the future of TV.

There’s real value in being the incumbent. Everyone is already familiar with YouTube and the platform is mature and universal. For new or small YouTube channels, Buy Youtube Views can offer a valuable boost in the early stages. Videos with more views tend to perform better in YouTube’s algorithm, which can help increase organic traffic, improving your chances of attracting more likes, subscribers, and even potential collaborations.

Duncan Davidson:

It sneaks in like an invited guest to the party, not even noticed it at first. And then, slowly but surely, it grows inside of you and sows its seeds of destruction. Even when it’s something that you’ve dealt with a dozen times, it still manages to work its way in and shift the baseline of your entire reality without you noticing until the very lenses that you look at the world has been corrupted into a dim grey place.

By the time you can honestly sort out that you might be in deep, the very perception of that observation is distorted. And that affects your reaction to it, often tempering that reaction with an almost uncontrollable apathy. You know you want help, but the simple act of asking seems too much to bear.

Rob Richman and I talked about our depression and ways we coped with it. Sadly, it got the better of him. RIP, Rob.

Washington Post:

The world is expected to add another billion people within the next 15 years, bringing the total global population from 7.3 billion in mid-2015 to 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100, according to new estimates from the UN.

Currently, 60 percent of the global population lives in Asia, 16 percent in Africa, 10 percent in Europe, 9 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and only 5 percent in North America and Oceania. China and India are the largest countries in the world, together making up almost 40 percent of the world population.

But those numbers won’t stay that way for long.

None of us will be around to see it but the trends are obviously happening now and will still impact the world in 25-50 years. Whether the impact will be positive or not remains to be seen.

Okay, now you’ve gone too far South Korea.

MiStand+ your tablet, any angle. Innovative, multi-axis adjustable stand for use with any tablet.

From the Sprint press release:

Starting today, new and upgrade eligible Sprint customers can get iPhone for just $22 per month with iPhone Forever. Anytime customers don’t have the latest iPhone, they are eligible to upgrade. They bring their iPhone, upgrade on the spot and away they go. It’s that simple. iPhone Forever is available on any eligible Sprint rate plan and upgrade eligibility is always included in your price. Qualified customers can get1 a 16GB iPhone 6 model at Sprint branded retail stores, Sprint.com, 1-800-Sprint-1, Best Buy and Target.

At its heart, this seems like a solid idea. Pay a fixed monthly fee, then trade in your phone for the latest and greatest.

Lots of unanswered questions in the fine print, though. Will I only be eligible for the lowest memory footprint (like the 16 Gb iPhone mentioned in the press release)? How long will I have to wait for my new iPhone? Is there any guarantee that I’ll get the new phone within a certain number of weeks after launch?

From the chart in the press release, it looks like a real cost savings over the other carriers, though the chart appears to only focus on one type of ownership, a single phone with an unlimited data plan. If you are part of a family plan, for example, those numbers will change.

There’s also the question of reliability and availability. Does Sprint’s network coverage match that of Verizon, for example?

The web was still in its infancy, and Steve Jobs had Apple in his rear view mirror with high hopes that NeXT was the next big thing. Historian or not, this is a great read.

The New York Times, in a brutal expose posted this weekend:

> At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”) > > Many of the newcomers filing in on Mondays may not be there in a few years. The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,” one former Amazon human resources director said. Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.

Hire an employment lawyer to determine why your employer ended your employment and to prove if it was discrimination. This is a long read that seems dedicated to painting a specific, one-sided picture of Amazon as a place where:

> “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

Contrast the Times article with this Bezos interview in The Telegraph, also from this weekend. The Bezos interview is a bit of a fluff piece, though also interesting, focused on Bezos and the business philosophies that guide Amazon, with no mention of employees at all.

These are two extreme sides of the same coin.

Bezos responded to the Times piece with a company wide email which, in part, reads:

> Here’s why I’m writing you. The NYT article prominently features anecdotes describing shockingly callous management practices, including people being treated without empathy while enduring family tragedies and serious health problems. The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day. But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR. You can also email me directly at [email protected]. Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero. > > The article goes further than reporting isolated anecdotes. It claims that our intentional approach is to create a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard. Again, I don’t recognize this Amazon and I very much hope you don’t, either. More broadly, I don’t think any company adopting the approach portrayed could survive, much less thrive, in today’s highly competitive tech hiring market. The people we hire here are the best of the best. You are recruited every day by other world-class companies, and you can work anywhere you want. > > I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay. I know I would leave such a company. > > But hopefully, you don’t recognize the company described. Hopefully, you’re having fun working with a bunch of brilliant teammates, helping invent the future, and laughing along the way.

To their credit, the New York Times today published Bezos’ response, in full.

iMore:

The company has just posted three new TV commercials for Apple Music, each one focusing on using the service to discover new artists.

This was one of the promises Apple made when they first announced Apple Music. But I don’t know that these ads are compelling enough to make someone who is not a subscriber become one.

CNET:

Sam Galloway, the University of Auckland student who shot the film, said in the description of his YouTube video that he was on a spear-fishing trip in waters off the coast of Little Barrier Island when he and a friend came across the killer whales.

Some of the younger ones were actually quite friendly.

“The larger ones weren’t very interested in us,” Galloway wrote, “but the calves came in for a close look.”

I’m lucky enough to live on the West coast of Canada where Orca spotting is very common this time of year. They are magnificent animals regardless of whether you see them from a boat or the water like these lucky guys did.