TechCrunch:

Today as expected, Microsoft announced that developers will be able to more easily bring their Android applications to Windows devices. The company said developers will be able to “reuse nearly all the Java and C++ code from an Android phone app to create apps for phones running Windows 10.” Developers will also be able to recycle their Objective-C apps for iOS using new tools in Visual Studio.

Smart move on Microsoft’s part. Note that Android is included in this strategy. No mention of Swift.

Given how similar the Windows 10 desktop is to Windows’ Phone os, I wonder if there will be a path for Objective-C apps to run on the Windows desktop.

Can’t help being reminded of all those many years of Apple finding ways to run Windows apps on a Mac.

The times have indeed changed, the tables turned.

According to Apple, iOS 8 is at 81 percent, iOS 7 has 17 percent, and earlier OSes are at 2 percent.

Samsung Electronics Co. said its first-quarter net income has plunged 39 percent as the smartphone business saw its profit shrink to less than half from a year earlier.

And

Sales fell 12 percent from a year earlier to 47.12 trillion won while operating income dropped 30 percent to 5.98 trillion won, in line with Samsung’s earnings preview earlier this month.

The wider-than-expected drop in net profit was due to a big profit plunge in Samsung’s mobile business. The maker of Galaxy smartphones said its mobile division generated 2.74 trillion won in quarterly profit, compared with 6.43 trillion won a year earlier.

Ouch, sucks to be Samsung. This may look like the smartphone market is falling, but it’s not. Apple sold 61.1 million iPhones, up 40 percent over last year.

Pixelmator 3.3.2 is out, featuring lots of new stuff — Photos app support, Force Touch trackpad support, jaw-dropping Repair Tool enhancements, and much more.

This is just great software. I use it everyday.

Matthew Miller, writing for ZDNet, takes you from unboxing, through learning, through three days of living with his brand new Apple Watch. If you are still on the fence about buying one, this will give you a sense of the experience.

Cult of Mac, nicely summarizing this Reddit thread:

With a variety of bands, and price tags ranging all the way from $349 – $17,000, there’s an Apple Watch for everyone. Except, possibly, the heavily tattooed.

That’s according to a new thread on Reddit which claims that several tattoo-sporting Apple Watch customers are having trouble using the device, because the wearable’s wrist-detection feature gets confused by the way in which tattoos reflect the green and infrared light emitted by the Watch.

The result? People with tattoos don’t get notifications, unless they move the Watch to an un-tattooed area, or turn off wrist detection.

Here’s the science, from further down the Reddit thread:

Oxyhemoglobin has several local peaks of absorbance which can be used for pulse oximetry: one green, one yellow, one infrared, etc. Apple uses the ones at infrared and green parts of the spectrum. Now, here’s some key facts. Melanin and ink are both equally good at absorbing frequencies over 500nm, which sadly includes the green. But, melanin’s absorbance falls down so rapidly that by the infrared end of the spectrum its hardly absorbing anything at all. That, combined with the fact that Apple adjusts the sensitivity/light level dynamically means infrared is probably black people friendly. Ink has a much more gradual fall off in absorbance, so even infrared might not work for them.

Apple’s response:

I spoke with Apple and informed them of my situation. the applecare specialist was really good, walked me through a bunch of steps to try and alleviate another issue I’m having (making calls from the watch). they are reporting to engineering and i should hear back from him this week regarding my call issue and the detection issue.

Interesting problem, good response.

Variety:

In another sign that Hulu is stepping up its game, the digital video giant has landed the SVOD rights to “Seinfeld,” cutting a deal with Sony Pictures TV for all 180 episodes of the enduring NBC comedy.

The deal is said to be valued at just under $1 million an episode, which translates to a nearly $180 million windfall to be split by distributor Sony TV, Time Warner’s Castle Rock and “Seinfeld” profit participants, including star/co-creator Jerry Seinfeld and co-creator Larry David. The pact is expected to be announced at Hulu’s upfront presentation on Wednesday.

Amazing to me how much money was generated by a show about nothing.

San Jose Mercury News:

An iPad “test model” was one of the items taken during a robbery and kidnapping at a Cupertino house earlier this month, according to the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office.

The sheriff’s office, which would not disclose more details about the stolen device, but said it has not been recovered.

It’s unclear whether the Apple item was related to an upcoming product release or was an outdated model or test device.

And:

The robbers took the device, along with electronics, prescription drugs and cash valued at $7,500, from a Cupertino home during an incident in which a 20-year-old man was kidnapped and robbed after answering a woman’s online advertisement.

Bizarre.

Update: Rereading the iMore post, I get the sense this was old kit, more a part of a random robbery than a targeted theft.

[Via iMore]

From Quartz:

American Airlines flights experienced significant delays this evening after pilots’ iPads—which the airline uses to distribute flight plans and other information to the crew—abruptly crashed. “Several dozen” flights were affected by the outage, according to a spokesperson for the airline.

The Quartz headline reads:

An iPad glitch grounded several dozen American Airlines planes

I added the word “app” because I find it hard to believe this issue was caused by an iPad, especially when it happened to a number of different iPads. Seems to me this is a bug in an app, as opposed to a hardware fault.

Serious, no doubt, but the reporting on this seemed to point to Apple and the iPad, as opposed to the American Airlines team that built, tested, and accepted the app. My 2 cents.

Read the tweets in the article. The first one uses the words “issue with a software application”, but the rest use words like “iPad crashed”, “iPad shutdown glitch”, and “iPad crash”.

Sébastien Page, writing for iDownloadBlog, walks you through the process of getting a podcast from your Mac to your Apple Watch.

While you can sync music from your iPhone library to your Apple Watch, there is currently no way to sync podcasts, which is something Apple will likely address in a future update. In the meanwhile, podcast listeners must still be tethered to their iPhones to enjoy podcasts on the go with the help of Overcast, which apparently is the only podcast app with support for Apple Watch at this time. But again, it’s not really a solution as you have to have your iPhone nearby to listen to podcasts via Overcast on Apple Watch.

However, there is a workaround that allows you to sync podcasts with Apple Watch. Like all workarounds, it’s not very straightforward, and to be honest, a bit cumbersome, but if you want to listen to podcasts on your Apple Watch without an iPhone, this is currently your only option. In this post, we’ll show you how to sync podcasts with your Apple Watch.

I didn’t find the process that cumbersome, and I definitely learned something about iTunes along the way, so I’d call this a worthwhile read.

UltraTuner is the most precise digital tuner available for iOS, providing precision down to .01 (yes, that’s 1/100th) of a cent. UltraTuner is 10x more precise than mechanical strobe tuners, which are generally considered the “gold standard” of precision tuners, and they typically don’t fit into your shirt pocket.

This looks very cool. The screenshots of it on the Apple Watch are just great.

BIAS FX turns your iPad into a world-class, guitar amp-and-effects processor. It gives you an endless collection of insanely great-sounding guitar pedalboards, ultra-high definition stereo rack effects, dual amps and dual signal chain. You can share and download users and artists signature guitar pedalboards from the cloud.

Yes. Download!

Alex Vollmer is a very talented guitar player and he’s come up with an explanation and video of how to play Eddie Van Halen’s “Little Guitars.” It’s great.

Stephen Witt, writing a long form piece for the New Yorker, captures a moment in time, when compact discs were the de facto currency of the music industry and the MP3 was just starting its disruptive reign.

You might think this piece was about Shawn Fanning and Napster, but it is not. This is about the first crack in the industry, when the bootlegs that would become Napster fodder first leaked their way out of the CD duplicating plant.

So, on the way from the conveyor belt to the grinder, an employee could take off his surgical glove while holding a disk. He could wrap the glove around the disk and tie it off. He could then hide the disk, leaving everything else to be destroyed. At the end of his shift, he could return and grab the disk.

That still left the security guards. But here, too, there were options. One involved belt buckles. They were the signature fashion accessories of small-town North Carolina. Many people at the plant wore them—big oval medallions with the Stars and Bars on them. Gilt-leaf plates embroidered with fake diamonds that spelled out the word “BOSS.” Western-themed cowboy buckles with longhorn skulls and gold trim. The buckles always set off the wand, but the guards wouldn’t ask anyone to take them off.

Hide the disk inside the glove; hide the glove inside a machine; retrieve the glove and tuck it into your waistband; cinch your belt so tight it hurts your bladder; position your oversized belt buckle in front of the disk; cross your fingers as you shuffle toward the turnstile; and, if you get flagged, play it very cool when you set off the wand.

I found this whole article a non-stop, riveting read.

Ben Bajarin, writing for TechPinions, homes in on the value of hands free computing and the Apple Watch.

What has stood out to me the most about this experience is how the Apple Watch allows me to be “hands free” but still get value from the digital world.

On this point, I believe an important framework is worth establishing. To get value from the digital computing world with devices like a PC, tablet, or smartphone, you have to be looking at and engaged with the device. In the case of the smartphone and tablet, you are likely to be holding the device in at least one hand but frequently both. This means your hands and full attention are on that screen. There are absolutely times for these experiences. But if the average person spends about 2 hours using their smartphone daily, how does one get value from the digital world in all the other hours of the day? This is where I think a wearable screen begins to establish its value proposition.

This is all about efficiency, about reducing interface friction, the time cost of having to pull out your phone to check for a progress notification or seek some reportable data.

It is also about freeing up your hands. Imagine doing the dishes, with your hands full of suds. Or in the middle of some messy cooking, where you have sauce or some other cooking concoction on your hands. If you get a text, or some other notification, the best you can do is either interrupt the process, clean up, get out your phone, then get back to your hand-messing activity. The Apple Watch is like a remote signal tower for your iPhone (and for the Apple ecosystem).

Another use case is for people who have to silence their iPhone at work and don’t keep their phone in their pockets (or don’t have pockets), so they don’t have access to the notification vibrations. The Apple Watch is a boon to those folks, as well as to the people trying to reach them.

Taking full advantage of her transcription super power (I’ve heard this is one of many), Serenity Caldwell put together a living, breathing transcript of today’s Apple earnings call. The living and breathing part means that she’s still typing.

Thanks for doing this, Serenity!

Jim and Dan talk all about the Apple Watch.

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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 for iPhone or Android today.

Some people might not care. Like painting the back of the fence or finishing the underside of the cabinet, it’s a detail that only people who take tremendous pride in craft really care about. And, of course, people who look for just exactly that kind of quality.

Quality matters. Lining up ports matter. The details matter.

Unread is a really nice RSS reader for iPhone and iPad. I have it on my devices.

You need more than technical chops to succeed as an independent developer. You need business sense as well. So this October, join some of the most experienced entrepreneurs and leaders in our community as they gather to talk about the business of iOS and Mac development.

This is going to be a great conference. I’ll be speaking, but I’m also looking forward to hearing the other speakers and meeting some new people.

Mesosphere:

Apple announced during a Wednesday night meetup at its Cupertino, California, headquarters that the company’s popular Siri application is powered by Apache Mesos.

We at Mesosphere are obviously thrilled about Apple’s public validation of the technology on which our Datacenter Operating System is based. If Apple trusts Mesos to underpin Siri — a complex application that handles Apple-only-knows-how-many voice queries per day from hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users — that says a lot about how mature Mesos is and how ready it is to make a big impact in companies of all stripes.

This might be a little too “inside baseball” for most people but it’s interesting if only for fact Apple “opened the Kimono” to a segment of the developer community. I think it’s yet another sign of Apple being a little less closed off and secretive and acknowledging that others need and want to know their future plans.

Interesting piece from the New York Times.

Apple’s market capitalization — the value of all of the shares of its stock — is more than $758 billion, greater than any other company’s. Yet the Wall Street consensus is that Apple is still having a growth spurt. In fact, if Apple’s watches, phones, laptops and other gadgets and services keep generating favorable publicity — and if its quarterly earnings report on Monday is as strong as the market expects it to be — there’s a reasonable chance that Apple’s value will keep swelling. Not far down the road, it might even reach the $1 trillion level that some hedge funds predict.

But even if Apple still has some room to run, there are some early warning signs. After all, the company has already crossed a significant threshold. In February, it grew to twice the size of the next biggest company in the S.&P. 500, a rare feat of financial dominance, and one that hasn’t happened since Ronald Reagan was president.

And the last company to achieve that?

I checked the numbers with Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S.&P. Dow Jones Indices. He found that the last market colossus to tower over its competitors by a two-to-one ratio was IBM, which did it in three successive years: 1983, 1984 and 1985. “That was when PCs were new,” he said, “and just about everyone thought IBM would rule the world.”

Good read. Cue the “Apple is doomed” theme song. Hasn’t anyone written that yet?

Looking for a Mac app? Use to the App Store application on your Mac.

Looking for an iPhone or iPad app? Jump into iTunes, click the iTunes Store button at the top of the window, then select App Store from the popup menu on the top of the right-hand nav bar. You can click the iPad or iPhone tab at the top of the window to further filter results. You can also bypass the clicking by just entering a search term in the search field, though your results can include music, apps, movies, etc.

To find an Apple Watch-specific app, things get a little more complex. If you know the name of your app, use the search field and, if there’s an Apple Watch app that matches that query, it’ll appear in the search results.

If you want to explore, you can type Watch in the search field, then click the “Apps for Apple Watch” link that appears in the right-hand nav bar. This will produce a long list, made up strictly of Apple Watch apps, but it’s a list that is painfully slow to scroll through. Clearly, this is a work in progress.

Another option is to search using your iPhone’s Apple Watch app. A solid search experience, but exploring is limited to the “Featured” tab.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Watch Aware Apple Watch app tracker purports to show all currently approved Apple Watch apps. The interface is nicely done, responsive, and there’s a nav bar at the top that lets you explore the database in a variety of ways.

There’s also that number at the top of the page that tells you how many Apple Watch apps have been approved. Unless Apple is providing this info, which I have a hard time believing, I expect this is more of an iTunes data scrape than an official list. No matter, they did a great job and this is my current go-to Apple Watch app searching option.

Anything I’ve missed (certainly the case)? Please weigh in in the comments.