Wait. What?

Yes, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is now a tech reviewer for Mashable. Read the review here and watch the video below. A solid job, Newt.

Jeremy Horwitz, writing for 9to5mac:

Apple’s discontinuation of the iPad mini leaves the remaining iPads as a completely 64-bit family, all using either A7 or A8X processors rather than the iPad mini’s aging A5. It also means that all remaining iPads have Retina displays and unified Wi-Fi + Cellular models.

This ought to help Apple’s supply chain management. If you can get a good deal on an original iPad mini, it continues to make an excellent book reader.

Update: Benjamin Mayo points out that the iPod touch is still 32-bit and several people point out that the iPhone 5c is also 32-bit. True enough. Remind me not to post before I’ve had my coffee.

Jim and Dan talk about how the Apple Watch has changed Jim’s life for the better.

Sponsored by lynda (Visit the link to get free 10 day trial access to their 3,000+ courses), MetaCDN (Visit the link and use the code ‘5by5’ for a 10% discount for life), and Hover (Visit the link to get the domain of your dreams).

Ars Technica:

IMAX’s letter is part of a disturbing trend in which some companies believe that owning a trademark actually allows them to control any speech about their product. Too many examples abound already of trademark owners that believe they’re entitled to control how movies and TV shows portray their brand.

IMAX has taken that to the next level here, believing it is entitled to literally silence someone speaking to a journalist because the name of a corporation happened to slip out of his mouth.

Good to see both Ars Technica pushing back against this kind of corporate bullying and IMAX’s apology after they realize how badly they screwed up.

My thanks to HelloTalk for sponsoring The Loop this week. Finally, learning and practicing a new language is easier and more intuitive than ever before. Introducing HelloTalk, the language app where your teachers are native language speakers from around the world. You just pick the language you want to learn—there are over 100 from which to select—and almost instantaneously you’ll be in touch with native speakers of that language … and you’ll start learning and practicing immediately.

HelloTalk isn’t a course you strictly follow; rather, you learn and practice at your pace and in the manner that best meets the way you learn. Practice foreign languages with people around the world. Simultaneously speak and type the language you’re learning. Record your voice before speaking to your HelloTalk friends and compare your recording to standard pronunciations. Change your friends’ audio messages to text for better understanding, and receive help to improve your grammar. Easily translate whenever you don’t understand, and so much more.

With HelloTalk, you’ll discover learning a new language is fun … and fast. Download your copy today.

Download HelloTalk for iPhone

Download HelloTalk for Android


Josh Constine, writing for Tech Crunch, asked Edward Snowden this question:

“CEO Tim Cook recently took a stand on privacy and Apple’s business, saying “some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”

Do you think Cook’s perspective genuine and honest, and how do you think it will play out long-term with regards to it hurting or helping Apple’s business, or whether Apple will keep this promise to privacy?”

Snowden’s response:

“I think in the current situation, it doesn’t matter if he’s being honest or dishonest. What really matters is that he’s obviously got a commercial incentive to differentiate himself from competitors like Google. But if he does that, if he directs Apple’s business model to be different, to say “we’re not in the business of collecting and selling information. We’re in the business of creating and selling devices that are superior”, then that’s a good thing for privacy. That’s a good thing for customers.

Interesting quote and article. Follow the headline link for more.

One of the many new features announced in the WWDC keynote was the availability of keyboard shortcuts for iPad external keyboards in iOS 9.

The linked article offers a quick look at some of the shortcuts discovered so far.

Over the past few days, a lot has been written about this report from Indiana University. Researchers dig into what they call a cross application resource attack (XARA).

From the paper:

Our research leads to the discovery of a series of high-impact security weaknesses, which enable a sandboxed malicious app, approved by the Apple Stores, to gain unauthorized access to other apps’ sensitive data.

The paper goes into great detail on some pretty serious vulnerabilities. You can learn the basics about these forms of attack in Rene Ritchie’s What you need to know post.

From the What should we do? section:

No one needs to panic, but anyone using a Mac, iPhone, or iPad should be informed. Until Apple hardens OS X and iOS against the range of XARA exploits, the best practices for avoiding attack are the same as they’ve always been — don’t download software from developers you don’t know and trust.

Frustrating, but true. To learn more, you can start by reading this article by Nick Arnott, which digs into more detail on the exploits. And, of course, you can read the original paper.

Stay careful and know the source of any application you run, same as always.

After winning the 2015 Helen Keller Achievement Award for VoiceOver, Apple has highlighted some of the popular apps using VoiceOver that are available on its App Store.

AFB is recognizing Apple for VoiceOver, a gesture-based screen reader that allows users to hear a description of everything happening on the display, and other features that make iPhone, iPad and other iOS devices accessible to people with vision loss. Apple received an AFB Access Award in 2009 for its trailblazing engineering of accessible products and continues its extraordinary efforts to make their products accessible for everyone.

Congrats to all at Apple for thinking of every customer.

Petapixel:

If you come across any photograph published in the US before 1923, you’re free to use it for whatever purpose you’d like, with or without permission, and with or without attribution. Why? Because its copyright has expired and it’s public domain.

Strangely enough, sometimes free public domain photos get sold as stock photos, and those who don’t know any better may pay large sums to use something they could have used for free.

Don’t get conned by Corbis or anyone else trying to sell you imagery that is in the public domain.

Red Bull:

Leader Paul Bonhomme and Wingman Steve Jones have been flying together for 17 years, and needed every ounce of that experience to pull off this amazing feat of aviation.

The Red Bull Matadors pilots hurtled straight through a hangar at Llanbedr Airfield, north Wales, at a speed of 160 knots (185mph), just one metre off the ground.

Brings new meaning to the words, “sphincter tightening”. Amazing skill and courage of these two guys. “If we get it wrong, we hit a building”. Indeed.

Apple earns five stars in this year’s Who Has Your Back report. This is Apple’s fifth year in the report, and it has adopted every best practice we’ve identified as part of this report. We commend Apple for its strong stance regarding user rights, transparency, and privacy.

Congrats Apple.

EFF’s evaluation of Google (three stars):

Google should take a stronger position in providing notice to users about government data requests after an emergency has ended or a gag has been lifted. Furthermore, Google should provide transparency into its data retention policies.

Spencer Wynn

The Hello Project was born of a love of story telling and curiosity.

All too often people pass one another, head down and only interacting with their mobile devices. This is an attempt to use the power of social media to reconnect people in the oldest way possible …

by saying Hello.

This is sort of the Canadian version of the famous New York city project and it brings home a thought I’ve always had – most of us have stories to tell but no one to tell them to.

I love the idea of street photography but am often too reserved and shy (too Canadian) to approach people. I think this way of doing it will inspire me to try my own photographic experiment along these lines.

Way more people have never seen an Apple Watch than actually own one. WAY more.

Folks with an Apple Watch on their wrist are often asked a question like, “What does it do?”

Here’s one anecdote from David Chartier, writing for Finer Things in Tech:

“Ooh, what can you do with it.” I showed her my current watch face and four complications—date, next appointment time, temperature, and activity. I mentioned those are all customizable. That alone got her really excited.

“Does it have Siri?” I said yep, with the caveat you still need your phone somewhere on or near you for a lot of stuff like that. She didn’t seem to mind. “Ask her something!” So I asked Siri to “find Northwestern Hospital,” and it displayed a tiny map swatch, along with the phone number “wait, you can make a call ON YOUR WATCH??” and options for walking and driving directions.

Her head damn nearly exploded.

Yeah. Apple Watch is pretty cool.

Andy Faust, writing for WatchAware, explores the differences between Apple’s square watch face and the Android Wear round design. In a nutshell, Apple got it right. A square display is perfect for scrolling data. No way around it.

But:

Round Android Wear (or other) smartwatches are at an almost complete feature disadvantage to Apple Watch. Except one. Yet if they continue to position their circular screen approach as predicated on traditional analog watch design cues, they’ll never be able to play their sole trump card upon Apple’s (overflowingly) green table. They must get their bearings right and move forward. They must forget the timepiece, and they must embrace the compass.

To understand what I mean, just put on a wristwatch. Now glance down at your wrist, as if checking the time. Don’t exaggerate things — just twist your arm towards yourself in that standard, natural motion you’re used to. More likely than not, you’ll notice that your watch probably isn’t oriented in the easiest-to-read manner. For analog or basic digital affairs, this is hardly a problem, as you’ve long been conditioned to read simple watch displays even when viewed from various off-center positions.

Here’s the kicker:

But the benefit to a circular display is that the entire display can rotate without any data loss — just like the inside of a compass. This means that, once calibrated with your head-level as “north” (you are a star, after all!), the UI will always know where your smartwatch is in relation to your eyeballs. And exactly as a compass always points north, your smartwatch display will always balance itself for maximal viewing, allowing for centered, left-to-right (or right-to-left) reading no matter how off-center your wrist happens to be. No more turning and twisting your head like a chump! (The calibration shouldn’t be complex, either. You’d simply hold the device up to your face in a vertical manner, follow a few prompts to move your arm here and there, and manually make minor adjustments to the amount of display “spin” as needed.)

This is an interesting read, good food for thought.

Ridiculous. And awesome.

Jason Snell writes about using Apple tech to troubleshoot for remote family members. If you are the go to tech support person in your extended family, this is definitely worth a read.

The headline link jumps to iMore’s post of Jim’s Apple Watch review.

The value add is the incredible picture at the top of the iMore post. Aside from the pic of Jim and his magical guitar, this is my favorite picture of my famous well bearded friend.

This interview happened a month ago, but re/code just released the complete video and transcript. I actually enjoy reading a transcript. Let’s me focus, undistracted, on the words.

Speaking of transcripts, here’s a link to Serenity Caldwell’s transcript of Gruber’s interview with Phil Schiller.

The people who create these transcripts are doing a real service to the community. Thank you all.

Over 600 million Samsung mobile device users may be at risk due to a significant security threat, according to researchers at mobile security specialist NowSecure.

and

“Welton found he could hijack the process of updating one of the virtual keyboards Samsung installs on many Android smartphones. From there, he could eavesdrop on phone conversations, rummage through text messages and contacts, or turn on the microphone to capture audio,”…

Enjoy your phone Samsung people.

Priceonomics:

As helium supplies start to dwindle, the prices have already started to rise, and party balloons are taking a back-seat to the more serious applications. A hundred years down the line, a party balloon might be about as precious as a gold ring.

Despite the fact that science has known about the impending helium scarcity for decades, it’s only made the news in the past five years. Why that is has a lot to do with helium’s complicated political history in the United States.

What a fascinating story about an element most of us give no thought to unless we are sucking it in to make funny voices.

How Craig Tanimoto’s simple sketch turned in to an advertising campaign that helped turn Apple’s fortunes around. Nice little story.

Om Malik, writing for the New Yorker:

Even their products sound remarkably the same. Apple Pay. Android Pay. Apple Photos. Google Photos. Apple Wallet. Google Wallet. Google announced its “Internet of things” efforts, such as Weave and Brillo. Apple came back with HomeKit. Android in the car. Apple in the car. At the Google I/O conference, Google announced app-focussed search and an invisible interface that allows us to get vital information without opening an application. There was an improved Google Now (a.k.a. Now On Tap). Apple announced a new, improved Siri. It also announced Proactive Assistant. Google launched Photos, which can magically sort, categorize, and even search thousands of photos using voice commands. Apple improved its Photos app—you can search them using Siri.

But when it comes to privacy, there’s a major difference.

On Google’s approach to your personal data:

the company must put all of your information inside Google’s gigantic server farms. Google then uses all of this data to make Google Now more personal and perceptive. If you’re texting a friend about dinner, Google will give you restaurant reviews and directions automatically. In the future, it might make a reservation and call a driverless car. The more repetitive you are in your behavior, the more the algorithms learn to automate things for you. Google’s approach has its benefits—the company’s products are free, and you can be fairly confident they won’t break. The cost is in your data, privacy, and lack of control. Someday, Google will want to make money from all these experiences, either through advertising or through transactions that are hyper-tailored to you.

And on Apple’s approach:

Apple’s approach is entirely different. For them, future personalization will be done by using information already on a device. When you search your iPhone, the company’s new Proactive Agent will quickly find content inside the apps on the device and bring it to the forefront. Imagine that you’ve organized a trip on an app such as TripIt, booked flights on United Airlines, and made hotel reservations. The travel plans will be synchronized with your calendar, but you will also get alerts on when to leave for the airport (depending on traffic conditions) and what route to take. When you arrive, your phone will show you your boarding pass. Any flight delays should automatically show up as well. If you like to read certain magazines on the plane, maybe the phone will download them for you in advance. It learns your habits. Plug in your headphones and you’ll get music recommendations based on your location.

Bottom line, Google’s approach is holistic, global. They take all your data, build a big personalized picture of you, your likes/dislikes, preferences, habits, then unapologetically use that data wherever there’s a need. Some of that need is for advertising (to pay the bills), some of that need is to make their services more closely tailored to your needs.

Apple has drawn the line at keeping your data on your device and, if it leaves the device, anonymizing that data. Craig Federighi, speaking about gathering user intelligence during last week’s WWDC keynote, said:

We do it in a way that does not compromise your privacy. We don’t mine your email, your photos, or your contacts in the cloud to learn things about you. We honestly just don’t want to know. All of this is done on-device, and it stays on-device, under your control.

Om compares Apple and Google to the Klitschko twins, two brothers who became great boxing champions. I thought this was a great analogy. The brothers were identical twins, incredibly alike in many ways, but also unique. And so it is with Apple and Google. One went into product design, one went into advertising.