This is just terrific. A detailed list of things, both small and large, announced at last month’s WWDC.

[Via iOS Dev Weekly]

From the New York Times:

A sense of perspective is unavoidable from 22,000 miles out. Looking down at Earth from that distance — almost three times farther than the diameter of the planet itself — allows a view of the globe as a massive organic system, pulsing with continuous movement. Below, images from the Himawari-8 weather satellite’s first official day paint a living portrait of the western Pacific, with Typhoons Chan-hom and Nangka spinning slowly westward.

Locked into a stationary orbit above New Guinea, the satellite takes 144 photographs of the entire planet a day, three times as many as its predecessor. The images show how weather systems evolve and help forecasters develop more nuanced models of Earth’s atmosphere.

This vivid, moving imagery is riveting, breathtaking.

Kirk McElhearn, on Apple Music and your listening history:

If you listen to music on your Mac – music that you’ve added to My Music, and that shows up in your iTunes library – then it shows up in a Recently Played playlist, if you have one. (iTunes creates this by default, but you may have deleted it. See below for instructions on how to create it again.) However, if you stream music through iTunes, or on an iOS device, it doesn’t get added to this playlist.

There are two issues here, both important.

First, there’s the lack of access to your listening history. This is valuable, both for the convenience of going back a few songs to remind yourself of a song you like, and for the value as social currency (sharing your music history/likes/experience with others). Apple is missing something basic here.

Second, there’s a huge divide between the Apple Music experience on your Mac and your iOS device. The first time you like a piece of music on your iOS device, you’ll get a “first love” alert. Smart. Apple is making sure you see the value of clicking on the heart next to a track.

But if you then hop onto your Mac and click your first heart, you’ll get that same notice. This is just a small example that illustrates that your left hand (Mac) and right hand (iOS) are not connected when it comes to Apple Music.

Dan Frommer, writing for Quartz:

One of the most interesting things I’ve experienced while using the Apple Watch over the past two and a half months is the growing consciousness that I am now wearing several machines that are capable of talking to each other.

This was illustrated one morning when I was in the New York City subway, deep underground. There—far from any cellular signal or internet connection—I used my Apple Watch to wirelessly change the podcast that was playing on my iPhone, which was being wirelessly transmitted to a pair of Bluetooth earphones. I had my own invisible, personal network, off the grid.

This phenomenon—some are calling it the “personal cloud” or “personal mesh”—is one of the most important changes that will come out of the rise of wearable devices, such as the Apple Watch.

Will the idea of portable clouds evolve? Imagine traveling with a group of friends with a local cloud of shared maps, links, photos, texts, etc., all accessed as part of a local, perhaps temporary cloud.

Great food for thought.

Macstories:

Earlier this week, Apple released the first public betas of iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan, and, knowing that would be the case, I cautioned MacStories readers against leaving negative reviews on the App Store for third-party apps that developers can’t update with new features and fixes yet.

Unfortunately, since yesterday I’ve already seen tweets from the developers of two excellent iOS apps – Screens and Day One – post screenshots of negative reviews they’ve received by users who are unsurprisingly running into problems when using their apps on the iOS 9 beta.

People posting negative reviews on the Apple Store because apps broke while they were running a beta fundamentally misunderstand what the point of a public beta is.

All I had to do to turn my phone into a stealth Google Photos uploader was to turn on the backup sync, then uninstall the app. Whereas one might reasonably believe uninstalling the app from the phone would stop photos from uploading automatically to Google Photos, the device still does it even in the app’s absence. Since making this discovery, I have re-created the issue multiple times in multiple settings on my Galaxy S5.

So, you delete Google Photos and it continues to upload your photos without your consent. Perfect.

Peter Cohen, writing for iMore, lays out a nice tip for disconnecting from your current network without toggling WiFi off and back on. More importantly, he talks about launching Apple’s Wireless Diagnostics, a built in utility to help you diagnose a troublesome network issue.

Good stuff.

Thanks to Hullo for sponsoring The Loop this week. Have you ever slept on a buckwheat pillow? It’s kind of like a beanbag for your head. The hull fill supports your head and neck in a way that can’t be matched by traditional pillows.

Hullo’s features include:

• Quality construction & organic materials
• Breathable fill that provides cool comfort all night long. No more flipping to the cool side in the middle of the night!
• American-made craftsmanship
• Free shipping
• 60-night money-back guarantee

Drop what you’re doing—go and check out Hullo. Try it for 60 nights. If it’s not your favorite pillow, return it for a refund. You can’t lose!

Jeremy Horwitz, in an insightful op-ed piece for 9to5mac:

Advertising is an easy target: it’s an eyesore, slows down web pages, and — in the wrong hands — compromises your privacy. But whether you accept it or hate it, advertising is also the reason you don’t have to pay for your news. As Ben Lovejoy noted last month, “without ad revenue, 9to5Mac wouldn’t exist; it’s that simple.” And he’s right: surveys suggest that the vast majority of people do not want to pay for the news they consume, and the few who do can’t pay enough to keep their favorite publications afloat for the long term. Ads keep publications alive.

Thanks to the introduction of ad-blocking technology in iOS 9, some people think Apple wants to help users get rid of ads. But that’s not Apple’s goal. Yesterday’s debut of Apple News shows that it’s actually angling to replace the ads you know, build upon them, and take a cut of their revenue…

Hard to argue this logic. Advertising is the necessary evil that keeps the news afloat. As they’ve done time and time again, Apple is building a revenue bottleneck, a path that funnels ad money into Apple, while doing their best to eliminate paths that allow ad money to flow elsewhere.

This type of business model organization is something that Apple does very well. They take something chaotic (like the music business) and build a simpler model with very well defined rules. And as part of the reorganization, they get a steady slice of the pie.

Have you heard about HTC lately? 2015 is shaping up to be an awful year for the company. In March the company had a market cap of $4.06 billion, and today—only a few months later—it’s worth less than half of that. The stock price, at about two bucks a share, is at a 10-year low. HTC just wrapped up the second quarter of 2015, where it posted a net loss of $258 million. And the trend is downwards—year over year, HTC’s monthly revenue was down 38% in April, 48% in May, and 60% in June.

I feel bad for HTC. They have tried to make some good products, but Samsung’s tactics have pushed them down.

Some good advice here from Apple, especially heading into summer for much of the world.

Due as a part of El Capitan this fall, and available right now as a public beta is the first major update to Photos for Mac, the replacement for iPhoto and Aperture that Apple launched earlier this year.

Here are the major additions you can expect to see in Photos when 1.1 arrives this fall (or when you install the public beta, depending on your enthusiasm):

I always enjoy reading Jason’s look at software.

The new version for the Mac is here. I haven’t tried the Mac version, but I’m really impressed with what they’ve done with the iOS version of the apps.

Bad ads on the Internet are a real problem, even on some of our favorite sites. Rene Ritchie has been very open about addressing this issue with iMore, and I commend him for that.

A great compressor plug-in from Universal Audio. I always like watching the videos they publish for little tips and tricks on how to use them.

Clearly this isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you love your Les Paul, you may want to have a look at these.

Dan and Jim talk about Apple Music, changing tastes in music, and the future of radio.

Brought to you by lynda (Visit the link to get free 10 day trial access to their 3,000+ courses).

There are some nice looking guitars here.

Techcrunch:

Many companies have best practices and the Hacking Team, the “computer security experts” who sold hacking tools to various federal and state agencies around the world, are no exception. Their database of information includes a number of interesting hacking tips, including mention of a 0-day, unpatched hole in Adobe Flash that the company is currently closing.

It’s long past time that Adobe should do the right thing and stop developing Flash and web site creators should stop using it.

Jacob Kastrenakes, writing for The Verge:

Apple’s smart home platform is gaining another member: the Ecobee3 smart thermostat, the first connected thermostat to work with HomeKit. The Ecobee3 goes on sale today through Apple Stores across North America. It costs $249 and is essentially an alternative to Nest’s thermostat: it detects a home’s temperature and whether anyone is actually around and then adjusts heating and cooling accordingly, with the goal of saving homeowners some money. The thermostat can even be made a bit smarter by buying additional sensors (a pack of two costs $79) that can allow it to detect temperature and presence in other rooms of a house — one sensor is included with the thermostat itself.

The Ecobee3 is a big step for HomeKit. It features remote sensors and is controllable by Siri. To me, this is a product that brings HomeKit into the mainstream.

There’s also an iOS 9 angle here. Writing on Dot Info, Joe Caiati paints this picture of what Apple HomeKit might bring:

Siri finds out that you like to make French press coffee every morning. It doesn’t actually know that detail specifically, but since you ask Siri to set a timer for five minutes every morning in the kitchen, it proactively asks you when you get in the kitchen if you want it to start “your timer” and that it will wait for your go ahead.

It’s all about context. The world is changing. Apple is investing on proactive intelligence in iOS 9, creating a more intelligent context, one that will not only start the coffee, and let you adjust your thermostat remotely, but one that will learn your likes and dislikes, understand your habits and tweak the ecosystem accordingly.

Interesting times a’coming.

Who makes these? Who buys these? And, especially, who thinks it’s a good idea to have the butt-end of the case sticking out of their pocket, indistinguishable from a real gun?

Ay-yi-yi.

Ben Lovejoy, writing for 9to5mac, uses iTunes on his Mac to dig into Apple Music.

The bad:

iTunes knows more about my musical tastes than my girlfriend. More than my neighbours, who have sometimes been more familiar with my musical tastes than they might wish. More than any of my friends – even the one who kindly ripped all my CDs for me on his high-end PC with multiple DVD drives.

Think about that for a moment. iTunes knows every single artist, album and track I own. Not only that, but it knows which ones I have put into what playlists. It even knows the exact number of times I have played every single track! And Apple uses none of that data in guiding its Apple Music suggestions. That really is a huge fail, given what could have been.

And the good:

Spotify has proven very, very good at learning which artists I like. It plays those artists a lot. A lot of a lot. Which is great for putting on a playlist and not having to touch it until complete. But not actually great for music discovery, as it only introduces me to a handful of new artists.

Apple Music, in contrast, has already introduced me to more than a dozen new artists that I really, really like. For someone whose tastes are decidedly non-mainstream, and very far removed from the Beats 1 fare that we have to assume represents Apple’s view of its primary target, that’s an impressive achievement.

The price of that has been a fair bit of skipping of artists I don’t like, but that’s the flipside of playing safe. If you don’t yet share my views of its ability to find great new artists, I highly recommend doing what I did and intensively schooling it, offering positive feedback on every single track you like.

Solid read.