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.

Billboard:

The station is a fusion of old-school and futurism that reminds some of college radio, some of the BBC and some of the halcyon early days of FM. At its helm stands Zane Lowe, 41, the effusive, hyper-verbal, New Zealand-born former tastemaker-in-chief for the BBC’s Radio 1, who, as Beats 1’s “special creative and lead anchor,” is charged with programming the station, which so far has been exciting, chaotic, attention-grabbing and unpredictable… apparently just the way his bosses (low-key, retiring people with surnames like Iovine, Reznor and Cue) want it — and so far, so do listeners.

I don’t think it goes as far as reminding me of college radio (after all, my college radio was a freaky mess) but it certainly has opened my ears to artists I hadn’t considered listening to. For all of the problems I and many others have with Apple Music overall, Beats 1 remains a daily listen for me.

Benedict Evans:

None of these are killer apps or ‘use cases’. All of them could be done with your phone. They’re just better with a watch.

This really sums up how I feel about the watch’s UI.

Six additional stainless steel links for wrists that exceed 205mm.

I can say from experience that it’s very easy to add or remove links to the Link Bracelet.

Apple has introduced a new feature for iCloud on the web that allows you to restore deleted items. Not only can you recover files that you’ve deleted, but also restore contacts, calendars, and reminders. This new feature also shows you how long it will be until those items are permanently deleted if you choose not to restore them.

Great feature.

For example, even with Cortana and searching the Web from the Start menu disabled, opening Start and typing will send a request to www.bing.com to request a file called threshold.appcache which appears to contain some Cortana information, even though Cortana is disabled. The request for this file appears to contain a random machine ID that persists across reboots.

As the article notes, it appears to be harmless traffic, but it still shouldn’t happen.

LA Times:

The world’s most popular streaming service revealed on Friday that the world’s most powerful man, President Obama, and his administration have launched an official channel on Spotify, and will be contributing playlists to the service. The president released the contents of his first two playlists on Friday through his @potus Twitter account.

I’ve been listening to these playlists all day. I’d like to think POTUS himself picked these songs but, regardless, there’s some great tunes on them.

Realmac Software’s Daniel Counsell revisits a topic that’s been discussed for years, but still not addressed by Apple: Paid upgrades in the Mac App Store.

Thanks to Pad & Quill for sponsoring The Loop this week. I own a number of their products and they are all top quality.

From Kari (Mrs PQ):

Pad & Quill is passionate about designing and crafting unique leather bags, accessories and cases for Apple products. We employ the best leathers, canvas and various materials to make products that are beautiful, functional, durable and ageless. Our craftsmen exemplify the heart and soul of our company and we celebrate their skill by inviting each artisan to sign each Leather Bag or Apple Watch Bands as it is completed for you, our customer.

I love this interview. Marc talks about some of his favorite, and not so favorite, things in life.

Without comment, the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Samsung’s bid to reconsider a previous ruling largely backing Apple — leaving the U.S. Supreme Court as the only legal option left for Samsung to try to overturn hundreds of millions of dollars in damages it now owes Apple in their ongoing patent feud.

Good. Make the scumbags pay already.

In May, engineers from Apple’s secretive Special Project group met with officials from GoMentum Station, a 2,100-acre former naval base near San Francisco that is being turned into a high-security testing ground for autonomous vehicles.

Very interesting.