The Sweet Setup:

In the read-it-later space, the two dominant players have long been Instapaper and Pocket. Each app has its own strengths and weaknesses, and Pocket has some features that could make it the ideal app for some use cases, but Instapaper is our favorite app for actually reading the best writing on the web … later.

I was an original user of Instapaper but switched to Pocket (when it was still named Read It Later). After reading this article, I’m going to at least give Instapaper another shot.

The linked images are graphic and really give a sense of the risks of riding a bike at high speed as part of a tightly packed group of competitors. All it takes is one small mistake.

Daniel Dilger, writing for Apple Insider, captures an essential difference between Apple, Microsoft, and Google’s music efforts. The difference is the need for music to be a profit center.

On Google’s approach:

In 2012, Google executives were reported to be upset with the lack of interest in Google Music, and particularly dismayed its inability to bring in revenue. One aspect that hurt its adoption was the lack of a mobile app for iOS.

That means Google Music is a lot like Google Wallet: years ahead of Apple, but so poorly planned and implemented that it completely squandered its vast head start.

Google apparently expected its paid on-demand streaming music service to be quite popular among Android users, but instead got a taste of what its Android developers had already been eating: the platform does not attract people who want to pay for things, particularly not anything that can be pirated. Google Music mostly demonstrated the weakness of Android as a platform for supporting commercial apps and services.

And on Microsoft’s approach:

Microsoft’s very different approach to music and video also failed, for reasons that are useful to contrast against Apple Music and iTunes. When iTunes first appeared, Windows Media Player had been leveraging Microsoft’s near monopoly market position for a decade.

Initially a rough competitor to QuickTime for playback, by the late 90s WMP became part of Microsoft’s strategy to deploy global, proprietary DRM that could earn the company licensing revenue not just from PCs but from emerging formats ranging from HD-DVD to streaming content and portable media devices.

Instead of “opening” things up like Google—using inferior formats to sell content from hostile media companies it didn’t respect to its Android demographic of customers who don’t pay for things—Microsoft developed state of the art media formats with difficult to crack DRM and cozied up to media companies with promises of locking up their content so customers couldn’t even rip songs they bought to their own CDs as personal mixtapes.

Microsoft’s customers might have paid for this, had it not been so draconian in its restrictions and flatly tone-deaf of the desires of real people. Microsoft also suffered from the fact that Apple was offering a much less restrictive alternative in iTunes.

The whole piece is much longer and well worth reading.

Bryan Jones is a retinal neuroscientist and photographer. Fortunately for us, he likes to share his images. Writing for his blog:

I started peeping at iPhone pixels under the microscope when Steve Jobs introduced the Retina Display. Why? Because then the concept of a retina display was new and I wanted to see if it was hype. It was decidedly, and scientifically not hype which delighted me to no end. Now, I’m just interested in some of the things on the small side of life and as display technology changes, its an interesting comparison to stick the latest gadgets underneath the microscope from time to time.

This evening, it was the Apple Watch display’s time to go under the scope. That and I promised Craig Hockenberry that I’d get these images for him, so here goes…

All these images were made on an Olympus stereomicroscope with an old Canon 1D Mk III camera used for imaging. Its also important to note that these images were made from the 42mm Apple Watch which has a resolution of 312 x 390 pixels, at approximately 326 pixels per inch which is at a slightly different resolution and pixel size than the smaller Apple Watch model.

I love these images. Just beautiful.

I love stories like this. Stephen Hackett talks about that moment when his decision crystalized, a decision to leave his 9 to 5 gig to become a full time writer and podcaster.

Inspirational. Go get ’em Stephen!

Kirk McElhearn takes you through the Apple Music sharing interface.

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5mac digs into Apple Music. Good review, from someone who obviously loves both Apple and music.

The For You tab is arguably the most useful in the app on iOS and the desktop. When you first launch Music in iOS 8.4, you’ll be presented with an interface that allows you to choose your favorite genres then your favorite artists within those genres. Apple will then use that data to customize the For You tab with suggestions as to what it believes you would enjoy. The tab gets more accurate the more you use the Music app and tap the “heart” option on radio and streaming content. The For You tab also takes into account what you listen to and what you already have in your music library.

I’ve found that the curation aspect of Apple Music is unrivaled by any other streaming music service. Spotify would often try to tell me what artists and songs it thought I should listen to, but often to little or no avail. With Apple Music, however, I’ve already discovered several new artists worth listening to, as well as several playlists that are great from start to finish.

Amen.

One major playlist feature that is missing from Apple Music, however, is collaboration. You can’t start a playlist and invite other users to add content to it. Only one user or source can have master control over the content. It’s a feature that rival services like Spotify offer, …so it’s disappointing that Apple neglected to include it, but it’s nothing that can’t be added at a future date.

Agreed. I’d also like to see a more sophisticated For You interface. As is, when I click on the For You tab, all I see is the tip of a very large iceberg. I’d love an interface that allowed me to winnow the list, perhaps by genre, perhaps by era, etc. My musical tastes run wide. Some days I’m in the mood for jazz, other days electronic, r&b, soul, or driving metal.

As large as it is, the iPhone 6 screen still offers limited real estate. I’d love an interface that respected that. How about an option that presented all my For You options in a tight scrolling list, then let me filter that list by genre/date/etc., select any number of matches, then randomly shuffle them together. Maybe let me fold in the top 20 from the New list to keep things fresh.

In other words, a smart, extensible playlist, that lets me intelligently include everything I can touch with Apple Music.

All this said, it’s important to keep in mind that Apple Music is truly a 1.0 product. I can only imagine that Apple Music 5.0 will be a far different/better product than this version. For a 1.0 product, Apple Music is an amazing achievement.

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!

NASA:

If you go outside at (a particular) time on a clear day, the world around you will be as bright as the surface of Pluto at noon.

It’s always Pluto Time somewhere, and NASA wants to see your view. New Horizons will become the first spacecraft to have a close encounter with Pluto. After the historic flyby on July 14, 2015, we’ll combine as many submitted images as we can into a mosaic image of Pluto and its moons.

Here in Chilliwack, BC, my “Pluto Time” is tonight at 9:20 PM PDT. I’ll definitely be outside taking a picture for NASA.

Susan Bennett, the original voice of Siri, talks about voicing Siri and the fact that her real voice sounds so much different than what comes out of your phone:

“A Siri-like voice is still, at this point in time, very robotic,” she says. “The pitch is a little bit lower…it’s not as evenly paced as if you were speaking naturally.” She told me that few people recognize her on the street, since her speaking voice is different.

Watch the video. Absolutely love this.

[H/T Brandon Cosby]

Salon ran an excerpt from the new book Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations. One of the chapters focuses on Steve Jobs and Apple.

One of the greatest examples in business history of a large organization’s maneuverability took place right before our eyes: Apple Inc. In September 2002, Apple’s future was thought to be so bleak you could buy shares in Apple Computer at a price that valued its operating enterprise at less than zero. What you were buying, if you had been so bold, was Apple’s cash reserves of $5 billion. Beyond that, you were buying a prayer that Apple could do something with that cash.

Remember, this was five years after the return of Steve Jobs. Contrary to myth, Jobs did not immediately turn around Apple’s dismal fortunes. Yet just one decade later, Apple would drop the “Computer” from its name but win the world. It would become the richest company on earth in September 2012, valued at $656 billion.

Meanwhile, during that decade of Apple’s extraordinary ascent, other great American companies, stalwarts of reliable business success, fared poorly. Among them were Pacific Gas & Electric, Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia Communications, US Airways, Trump Entertainment Resorts, Northwest Airlines, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Chrysler, and General Motors. Thus, even while Apple prospered, a greater number of American companies went bankrupt or out of business altogether than in any decade in the country’s history, including during the Great Depression.

The book offers an interesting analysis. I think the authors get much of this right, but miss a core element of Apple’s success: The birth and evolution of Apple’s walled ecosystem. And a big reason for the success of that ecosystem was the quality of the operating system on which it was based.

The ideas behind NeXTSTEP, the operating system that came on board with the return of Steve Jobs in 1997, evolved into OS X and, eventually iOS. All of the software on every device Apple makes is either based on or is designed to connect to those operating systems. Obviously, Apple is much more than software, but the consistency of the software interface is a big part of what makes Apple devices feel so familiar, makes them so easy to use. Those underpinnings were a critical part of Apple’s success.

Rene Ritchie, writing for iMore, tells you how to set a timer that turns off your music (whether it be a playlist or Beats 1) after a specific amount of time. Excellent if you like to fall asleep listening to music.

Pretty sure this has been around a while, but the ability to fall asleep to Beats 1 is definitely a new angle here.

Fascinating look at the age group demographics of each of the major social networks. Pay attention to the numbers that show where the major growth is for each.

Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note, discusses the difference between algorithm and human curation. In order to be scalable, most problems are solved via algorithm. For example, in order to work on a world-wide basis and still be cost efficient, Google Translate must depend on algorithmic translation. Imagine the costs involved in having each request translated by hand.

On the other hand, Apple Music employs human curation in a number of ways. The tracks played on Beats 1 are selected by hand. The very first track played, City, was by a relatively unknown artist. No algorithm would ever have made that choice.

As you make your way through the various areas that make up Apple Music, you can’t help but notice all the handwork. Though the For You section depends on algorithm at some level (an algorithm helps build the picture of your personal musical tastes, for example), the playlists are clearly hand crafted by humans.

With Apple Music’s human curation in mind, Jean-Louis observes:

If it’s a good idea to use human curators to navigate 30 million “songs”, how about applying human curation to help the customer find his or her way through the 1.5M apps in the Apple App Store? Apple bought Beats for $3B and spent a good chunk more to build its Music product. Why not take another look at the App Store jungle and make customers and developers even happier?

Jean-Louis’ Open Letter to Tim Cook from last August does an excellent job making this point.

From the good folks at Playing for Change and with the support of The Jerry Garcia Foundation and others, a new, world-wide version of The Grateful Dead classic, Ripple, in honor of the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary.

Some familiar faces in there.

[H/T, Barbara Roseman]

Rene Ritchie, writing for iMore, walks you through everything you could ever want to do with Up Next, the Music app’s list of songs queued up to play next. Add songs to the queue (even while tracks are playing), delete from the queue, rearrange the queue, it’s all there.

Dave Wiskus is a self professed content creator and musician. You might know him as part of the team that built Vesper (a notes/ideas/to do collecting app) or as the vocalist and guitarist for an emerging band called Airplane Mode.

Creating music is hard. Promoting that music is even harder. Writing for his blog, Better Elevation, Dave lays out the difficulties in being an independent artist and his hopes for Connect, Apple’s second cut (remember Ping?) at a social network for artists and fans.

As Dave explains, the interface is rough, the Mac side feels like an afterthought, and the social side feels broken. All that said:

These are early days, and there’s hope. I don’t like complain-y posts where designers pick something apart and either offer no meaningful ideas or, worse, presumptuously redesign someone else’s work. So instead I’m going to break the fourth wall and make a simple suggestion to Apple: consult with independent musicians. Talk to bands who have succeeded on social media and see what worked for them. Talk to bands who have made great YouTube videos and find out how they get their audience to share stuff. Talk to bands who haven’t made it yet and ask what tools they might need to get there.

Or, maybe talk to a rock band from New York that happens to be made entirely out of iOS designers. We’d love to help.

And that’s exactly what happened. Dave’s post appeared yesterday, and by last night, he added this update:

I got an email from Trent Reznor this afternoon. Apple is aware of the growing pains and is working to address them.

I’d like to add in this suggestion. I’ve been working with an iOS developer named Matt Abras who makes a social music app called SoundShare. Matt is from Brazil, and SoundShare has a phenomenal following there. SoundShare gets social right. You can follow a musician, see what they are listening to, follow your friends, see what they are into. You can listen along with musicians you love, or with your friends.

To Trent, I’d say: Follow every move Dave Wiskus makes, learn from his pain, figure out what works for him. At the same time, download a copy of SoundShare, talk to Matt, get his take on social.

The potential for Connect is huge. But only if you get it right.

As I continue on my weight loss journey with Apple Watch, one thing people kept telling me is to stay hydrated. I thought I was, but when a friend recommended I try “AddWater”, I saw how much more I needed to drink. This is now part of my daily logging. It’s really simple and tracks all of your drinks, not just water.

Future Sonics are the absolute best in the industry. They are the first and original Ear Monitor (and own the trademark) and I company I trust with my hearing—and to deliver quality sound. I’ll have more details later, but I’m heading out for my first walk with these.

Many thanks to Designer News for sponsoring The Loop this week. A new and exciting website has recently been launched for web designers and developers.

You likely spend hours every morning browsing through hundreds of posts on your RSS feeds, hoping to stumble across relevant stories. Designer News was built to provide web designers and developers with a single location to discover the latest and most significant stories on the Web.

They search through hundreds of posts on blogs, social media, and news channels, to deliver the most essential stories of the day. The content covers quality news, fresh tools and apps, case studies, code demos, inspiration posts, videos and more.

With frequent updates throughout the day, you’ll always find something interesting and fun to read.

Click here to visit Webdesignernews website and subscribe to the newsletter for the latest stories of the day.

Digg:

This Saturday, July 4, The Tour de France starts. And you should watch it.

Granted, out of all the sports, professional cycling is, by far, the most impenetrable to outsiders. There are so many questions: Why do they all ride together in a group? Why doesn’t just one guy jump ahead and leave everyone behind? If there’s only one winner, why are there teams? What’s with the different jersey colors? Aren’t all of these guys on steroids? All understandable!

But read this humble primer to cycling’s most prestigious — and most grueling — race, and we promise that you will relish waking up at 8 am to watch a bunch of men in spandex ride bikes through the French countryside.

I love this race. The spectacle, the scenery, the drama, the controversies, all add up to a month of great viewing. I wouldn’t ride a bicycle if you paid me and the sport is, like boxing and The World Cup, tarnished (almost) beyond redemption but I’ll still watch every second of it.

Politico:

“The hot-dog contest is a physical manifestation of the concept of freedom,” said George Shea, the mastermind behind the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island. “The contest has come to represent the spirit of July 4th itself. That is why people go to the event. It is kind of a pilgrimage to the center of July 4th and the center of freedom.”

More than 30,000 fans of the absurd will pack the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues to watch the annual feeding frenzy—the Super Bowl of eating contests.

I love America but I don’t understand the fascination with competitive eating in general and certainly not with this particular event. It’s actually been broadcast on ESPN. If this is the “spirit of July 4th”, I fear for that spirit.

Serenity Caldwell, writing for iMore.com, addressing the FUD flying around the internet on Apple Music and DRM:

Yes, Apple Music has a DRM component. Yes, it sucks, but it’s similar to every other streaming service. No, it does not overwrite the files on your Mac to make all your music DRM-laden. For those Googling in a panic, here’s the deal.

Great post. At the heart of this issue is the thought (incorrect) that Apple somehow adds DRM to any of your music files. Back up your music collection before you get started and you’ll still have all your music/video files, in their original state.

Damien McFerran, writing for Nintendo Life:

Before Sony entered the home console arena it worked with Nintendo on a CD-ROM drive for the SNES. The aim was to eventually release a combined console – called the PlayStation – which would play SNES carts and SNES CD-ROM games.

Of course, this never came to pass – at the 1991 CES Sony officially announced the system, only to discover that at the same event Nintendo confirmed that it was working with rival Philips instead. It was one of the most infamous double-crosses in video game history, but Sony would have its revenge by creating the stand-alone PlayStation system, a best-selling console which would end Nintendo’s dominance of the industry and establish the brand for years to come.

Great story. Click here for images of the prototype. So cool. Bizarre to see the Sony and Nintendo branding together like this.

Go to Bing, search for the term Pong. Click to start.

I’ve tested this (purely for scientific purposes) on my iPad and iPhone. Fun was had.

Apple Watch owner Dmitri built up this list of things he’s done with his Apple Watch.

I’ve done some of these things, certainly, but there are other things I hadn’t even thought of. All of these things are doable, all good to know, and this list is worth passing along to anyone who asks you, “What can you do with an Apple Watch?”

P.S. In case you were wondering, here’s how to use your Apple Watch as a remote to take a selfie.