If you ever find yourself in the iOS app icon design business, even temporarily, this is a helpful read, especially if you are an Illustrator user.

Michael deAgonia, writing for ComputerWorld, lays out his reaction to the newest MacBook. On the controversial scissor-mechanism keyboard:

It’s also surprising how quickly I became accustomed to the MacBook’s edge-to-edge keyboard, which had to be redesigned to fit the device’s profile. Instead of going with a traditional scissor mechanism for the keys, a new butterfly method was invented that resulted in a shorter throw without the wobbly key travel that usually happens if you press the edge of a key while typing. Apple also enlarged the keys by 17%, leaving much smaller gaps between each.

The combination of short key travel, larger keys and the rigid behavior of key presses due to the new design really changes the feel of typing — something not everyone will like. Some reviewers have panned the new keyboard: For example, one blogger stated that pressing the keys feels like pressing an iPhone’s home button. And that’s actually a pretty accurate comparison. As for me — after a while, I grew accustomed to it, and now I prefer it.

On the Force Touch trackpad:

The new trackpad definitely has a different feel — a feel that some long-time users might not like. I took to it right away, and the more I used it, the more I appreciated it. I love the multitouch trackpad on Apple devices, and while haptic feedback has been around in game controllers for a long time now, the way the Force Touch tech is implemented just makes Apple’s notebook lineup better.

The whole review is positive, but not blindly so. He just likes the new MacBook.

The Economist walks through the basics of integrated circuit design and construction, digging into the factors that limit future miniaturization and speed increases.

As a relative newbie when it comes to chip design, I found the whole article to be very readable. One central point:

Unfortunately, as transistors get smaller, more defects creep in. There is thus a trade-off between complexity and cost. And, while the cost per transistor is almost inversely proportional to the number of transistors crammed in a chip, there comes a point where the decrease in yield (percentage of good chips on a wafer) begins to outweigh the benefits of the chip’s increasing complexity. In short, a minimum transistor cost exists for each particular node of processing technology.

And here’s the crunch: that minimum cost per transistor has been rising since 28nm chips hit the market several years ago, says Henry Samueli, co-founder and chairman of Broadcom, a fabless semiconductor firm based in Irvine, California. That is partly a result of decreasing yields, but also because of the escalating cost of the photo-lithography equipment needed to fabricate ever-smaller integrated circuits. “The cost-effectiveness seems to have hit a sweet spot at about 28nm,” says Dr Samueli.

We passed that sweet spot some time ago. So what’s next? According to the article, something called Planar Opto-Electronic Technology (POET):

As it is, a technology known at POET, developed over the past 20 years by a team at the University of Connecticut, promises to power the next wave of innovation in integrated circuits—by using gallium arsenide to combine optics and electronics in a single chip.

From 9to5mac:

A newly found bug surrounding iOS and Messages has emerged this evening that causes the app to continuously crash when a certain text is received. If the text is received while the phone is on the lock screen, it also causes your iPhone to reboot without any notice or explanation.

And:

Since the characters strand is so specific, most people should never accidentally experience the crashing. Anyone who does experience the crashing was likely singled out on purpose as a target.

If someone does send you that offending string, just send yourself a new text. You can tell Siri:

Send text to xxxx

Replace xxxx with your name, then respond to Siri with specifics when prompted for the phone number to use and the content of the text.

Hopefully, the Messages team is hard at work on a fix.

Atlas Obscura:

The hunt for treasure on Oak Island has been going on for over two hundred years.

Without a single return, and conflicting theories of what hunters are actually looking for, the so-called Money Pit in Nova Scotia is one of the most incredible self-perpetuating goose chases in the world. Errol Flynn, John Wayne, and Franklin Roosevelt were at one point each involved in the hunt and held their own theories as to the pit’s contents.

Some believed pirate treasure lay just below the next layer of soil. Others believed Marie Antoinette’s lost jewels were surely buried there right after the French Revolution. Another theory even posited that Francis Bacon had stored documents in the pit proving himself as the author of Shakespeare’s plays. There are many other theories one big one is that “The Arc Of the Covenant” lies at the bottom.

Having grown up in the area, we were regaled with ghost stories about the island as kids. It’s a fascinating story, not of treasure found, but of man’s desire to find it. The best legend of the treasure is that seven men must die before it will be found. Six already have while searching for whatever is in that pit.

Re/code:

We are thrilled to announce that Re/code’s parent company, Revere Digital, is being wholly acquired by the highly respected digital-native media company Vox Media. This is the next big step in our mission to bring you quality tech journalism, because our work will now be amplified and enhanced by Vox Media’s deep and broad skill set.

This doesn’t feel like a good thing. It certainly won’t be the last merger or acquisition in the “new media journalism” space, either.

FuzzMeasure is an audio and acoustic measurement tool to produce, analyze, and publish beautiful graphs. It delivers a comprehensive suite of features for professionals in research, acoustics, live sound, room design, and pro audio. By combining sophisticated technology with an elegant user interface, FuzzMeasure offers an unparalleled experience.

I’ve talked to the developer about FuzzMeasure quite a bit over the years. Great to see this update.

There was nothing unique about these items—they were puny in size and yet they arrived in a giant box bursting with air-filled packaging material. And I looked at that box with absolute and complete disgust, wondering, Is Amazon Prime actually an EcoCrime? Others on Twitter agreed with that take, which only reaffirmed my guilt for using Prime—for being an unwitting enabler of waste.

I’m not a member of Amazon Prime, but I know a lot of people, like Om, that are. I can’t wait to hear the explanation for the oversized packaging from Amazon.

Marco Arment:

I’m traveling this weekend, and I’ve been doing something I’ve never done: I’ve been using the hotel’s gym. Any Apple Watch owners can probably guess why: I have a good run going on my daily Activity circles, and I want to keep it going.

Apple knows a tremendous amount about user psychology, about what drives people. The fact that Marco feels compelled to keep his exercise streak going, even when he’s on the road, says a lot about the Apple Watch as a health driver and about the genius of those circles, just waiting to be filled.

Ever since getting the Apple Watch, not only have I been getting more consistent exercise, but I’m pushing myself further. I take more walks, and I walk faster and further than ever before. I’ve been walking Hops around the same streets for four years, but now I’ve been discovering new streets and paths just to extend our walking distance and try to beat my previous walks.

I’ve never cared before, but now, I care.

Well said.

Take a look at these shoes. True, they are more sandals than shoes, but they are US$12 (in bulk) and are designed to last through many years of foot growth.

M.G. Siegler, writing for Medium:

As you undoubtedly know by now, one of the core bits of funtionality of Apple Watch revolves around Force Touch. That is, pushing the screen a bit harder than a regular tap in order to bring up a new set of options. Of all the unique features of Apple Watch, this is probably the most profound. It’s not exactly obvious at first, but once you get it, it’s a natural gesture.

And:

Force Touch also just came to the MacBook line as well. It’s interesting on the trackpads here (I’m typing on one right now), but I believe the technology will have a far greater impact on iOS devices because it’s such a natural way to extend the use of restricted touch-sensitive space.

And:

It’s interesting that Apple previewed the technology on the Apple Watch first. It also makes you wonder: if there was no Apple Watch, would Apple have come up with Force Touch at all? Sometimes form births new function.

Thoughtful piece, though I am not sure that the Apple Watch was the originally intended use case.

From the original force touch patent:

Electronic devices such as portable computers and other equipment may be provided with touch pads that include force sensors. Tactile feedback may also be provided.

As I read through the patent, the sense I get is that the original push for the Force Touch mechanism was to improve the existing track pad experience. Also, note that the filing date of the patent was December 10th, 2009. I suspect the idea of using Force Touch in the Apple Watch design evolved from the original idea of using force touch on a computer and, perhaps, on the iPhone.

That said, I still like M.G.’s take on this and agree: Force Touch is poised to rule all Apple devices.

Seth Weintraub, writing for 9to5mac, digs into the Jony Ive’s promotion to Chief Design Officer over the Memorial Day Weekend.

Seth makes some interesting and well-reasoned points. This announcement was made via the press (in this Telegraph article written by Stephen Fry) and not yet announced on Apple’s press release page. Add to that the fact that a big holiday weekend in the US is traditionally a hidden news cycle, a time when stories are released to blunt their impact.

As an example, it’s unlikely that Apple would announce a new product on Memorial Day weekend. Is it possible this was an unintentional leak, that Apple had a PR plan in place for a later date? Or was this hidden news cycle approach an intentional part of the plan, perhaps designed to ease the stock shock?

Bottom line, Seth makes the case that Jony is one foot out the door, that this promotion is the start of succession planning at Apple. Good read.

Until now, Ive’s job title has been Senior Vice President of Design. But I can reveal that he has just been promoted and is now Apple’s Chief Design Officer. It is therefore an especially exciting time for him.

Inside the fabled design studio (cloths over the long tables hiding the exciting new prototypes from prying eyes like mine) Jony has two people with him. They too have been promoted as part of Ive’s new role.

One is Richard Howarth, English as Vimto. “Richard is going to be our new head of Industrial Design,” says Jony. “And this is Alan Dye, the new head of User Interface.” Dye is a tall, amiable American.

Mapbox lets iOS developers add beautiful maps to their applications. Our building blocks make it easy to swap out Apple maps with our open source SDK. Choose the map design that fits your app and feels good in your hand.

Wired:

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, founded in 1909, is the world’s oldest permanent motorsport facility. It’s changed a lot since the early days—pavement instead of bricks for a racing surface, new stands and administration buildings—but the track is essentially the same. It still has corners banked at 9 degrees, 12 minutes, and those corners are the same radius they were a century ago.

More than that, the track is still a magical, ghostly place, eerily alive with death and life. Stand on the front straight and stare into Turn 1—it looks like a tunnel, or maybe a wall of asphalt—and you feel the echo of death and time in your bones.

I’ve watched this race every year since I was eight years old and I was lucky enough to drive my motorcycle on it for a charity event. It really is a amazing place.

MY thanks to WALTR for sponsoring The Loop this week. WALTR is the first Mac app in the world to allow users transfer and playback unsupported formats such as MKV, AVI, FLAC & more – directly from the native Videos/Music app.

iTunes is the only option Apple gives us for loading media onto our iPhone, iPad or iPod touch from our Macs, and it limits the audio and video file formats we can upload. That’s a thing of the past thanks to WALTR from Softorino. This awesome Mac app lets you upload a long list of file formats — such as MKV, AVI, MP4, CUE, FLAC, APE, ALAC, OGG, AAC, AIFF and WAV — to your iOS device without ever touching iTunes. Just fire up WALTR, connect your iPhone or iPad to your Mac via USB, and drag files to convert and upload them so you can watch or listen on the go. It really is drag-and-drop simple, and file transfers are surprisingly fast.
 
No iTunes required; No jailbreak required; No need to worry about 3rd party converters;

• the awesomely cool app name is inspired by Walter White from Breaking Bad.

• this is the same app that discovered 4K video playback on iPhone 6

You can try out WALTR for free and a license costs US$29.95 but you can use the Loop exclusive coupon ‘HEINEKENSPECIAL’ for a 33% discount.

Weaknesses in the factory reset function within Google’s Android mobile operating system mean data from more than 500 million phones can be discovered despite being wiped, researchers have found.

And

Recovering data was even possible with full-disk encryption switched on, the researchers discovered.

Good luck Android people. Here is a sure way to fix the security issues you’re having.

In the month since the phone’s launch, however, the response has been lacklustre. The Korean news outlet Yonhap News Agency reports that the device has seen 10 million shipments so far. For comparison, Samsung’s previous model, the S5, shipped 11 million units in the same time frame a year ago — the year in which Samsung’s sales collapsed. These are shipments, not sales, so the number of devices sold could be even lower.

I guess you can’t copy and be successful forever.

Mashable:

There’s a building in China that looks almost exactly like the USS Enterprise from Star Trek. Drone footage shows how a relatively conventional-looking building from the ground dramatically transforms into a regal starship when viewed from the air.

Lest you think this is visual trickery done via Holodeck or CGI, the starship/building is clearly visible on Google Maps.

Don’t lie – a bunch of you saw that video and thought to yourself how much you’d like to work there, didn’t you? It looks like Nerd Valhalla.

CNET:

There’s no doubt that the Apple Watch can do a lot of things. It can be used to communicate with others, view notifications from an iPhone and even pay for items with Apple Pay. It’s also a dedicated activity tracker that can measure active calories burned, active minutes, the number of times you stand throughout the day, your daily step count and distance traveled.

We’ve been testing the Apple Watch over the past few weeks, and focused on those final two metrics — steps taken and distance traveled — to see how it stacks up against the competition.

This is an important question for those who want or need to have accurate tracking. Good to see the Apple Watch scored so highly and that Apple has done a good job in making sure the Watch works as advertised.

Not sure how long this has been part of iOS, but I just stumbled on this yesterday. A fantastic tip.

Go into Messages and tap on a recipient. Now press and hold on the camera icon (to the left of the text entry field). Don’t lift your finger. After a brief pause, a quarter circle control will pop up under your finger with an x, a camera icon, and a video record icon. Your camera will become active at the same time.

If you lift your finger, the control will stay in place and you can cancel (tap the x), or compose your picture, then tap the camera (for a still image) or the record button (for a video).

Alternatively, you can keep your finger down and slide it over the control you want. For example, press and hold to bring up the control and the camera, then slide over the camera icon and lift your finger to take the picture.

The only downside here is that once you take a picture, it will immediately be sent. I do love the convenience, but I wish there was a gesture that would let me retry if the picture wasn’t quite in focus.

When notifications appear on your Mac, do they disappear too quickly? Want to make them hang around just a bit longer?

Here’s how.

The Internet Health Test site runs a series of upload and download tests to check for consistency and degradation in the connection through your ISP.

Large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have degraded the performance of their customer’s traffic as a tactic to convince content and application providers to pay added “tolls” to deliver content that Internet users have already requested and paid for. The battleground — where this degradation takes place — is at ISP interconnection points. These are the places where traffic requested by ISP customers crosses between the ISP’s network and another network on which content and application providers host their services.

This test measures whether interconnection points are experiencing problems. It runs speed measurements from your (the test user’s) ISP, across multiple interconnection points, thus detecting degraded performance.

The data that results when you run the test on your connection is passed back to the site and used to build a crowd-sourced picture of ISP behavior.

Clarks is no small operation. They’ve got more than 1,000 stores throughout the world and they also manufacture their own shoes which they sell in their own shops, as well as via third party retailers.

The new system embeds an iPad in a traditional plastic foot gauge:

A plastic bar touches the tip of the toes, but the precise measurement is recorded by the tablet’s touchscreen, rather than the human eye.

The team has also developed a new kind of digital tape measure as part of the system. The Digitape looks like a plastic claw, and measures the width of the foot by gently clamping around it, before communicating the data by bluetooth to the iPad.

The child is enticed through the whole procedure by animated cartoon characters, who hop around telling the youngster what to do next.

Behind all this is the goal of gathering data to aid their shoe manufacturing operation. That data is the real gold here, allowing Clarks’ shoe manufacturing operation to get ahead of the curve on trends in foot size changes and buying habits.

Smart, smart, smart. [HT to Rob Richman]

John Gruber digs into the digital crown interface, explaining how it works and why it’s not as complicated as it first seems. This is helpful if you are confused or, perhaps, intimidated by the Apple Watch interface.

Mark Gurman, writing for 9to5mac:

Facing slowing growth for the first time since the iPad’s 2010 debut, Apple is working on several significant software and hardware updates to reinvigorate the tablet over the next year. Apple is developing a dual-app viewing mode, 12-inch iPads codenamed “J98″ and “J99,” as well as support for multi-user logins, according to sources briefed on the plans.

And:

Sources now say that Apple plans to show off the side-by-side feature for iOS 9 using currently available iPad models. The latest plans suggest that the split-screen mode will support 1/2, 1/3, and 2/3 views depending on the apps. When split, the screen can either display two different apps side-by-side, or multiple views of the same app. This would enable iPad users to see two separate Safari tabs, or compare a pair of Pages documents at the same time. Sources are quick to warn, however, that the feature could still be pulled before next month’s conference, as additional polish would be needed to bring it to the same level as other features that will be making their way into the first iOS 9 beta next month.

I can’t help but be reminded of the evolution of the original Mac, which went from supporting a single application at a time, to a primitive multi-app Switcher, then to basic multiple app support with MultiFinder.

That original evolution was constrained by limited memory and the lack of a built-in windowing system. Not exactly the same, but certainly similar to what the iPad is going through.

Apple had originally intended to debut side-by-side app support with iOS 8 on the iPad Air in 2014, matching the cornerstone feature of Microsoft’s Surface and Surface Pro tablets. In the lead up to WWDC 2014, the feature was deemed too unpolished for public consumption and pulled from iOS 8.0, with tentative plans to appear in iOS 8.1. However, Apple reprioritized its software engineering resources to finish up the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, and Apple Watch, opting to cut the split-screen app feature for the time being, and reassign the majority of the engineers who were working on it.

Kudos to Apple for not releasing this before it’s rock solid and ready for prime time.

Accessibility is not just an additional feature, but a best-practice.

Another great article on app accessibility.