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.

Frederic Filloux, writing for Monday Note, tells the story of Parisian developer Stupeflix and what they went through to get from a mysterious phone call from Apple to being featured a month later in Tim Cook’s October 2014 iPad Air keynote. Terrific read.

The call is today at 2p PDT. Here’s a link to the live webcast.

Apple:

Aid Nepal earthquake relief efforts by making a donation to the Red Cross.

As I have recently discovered, every little bit helps. Even if you only have $5 to spare, it adds up.

The lines for the Apple Watch were similar to the lines for every other Apple product, with one main difference:

While the atmosphere outside the store was generally similar to previous launches, a glaring difference was the fact that I wasn’t waiting outside of an Apple Store. I was sitting on the sidewalk outside of the upscale fashion boutique Maxfield, on trendy Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.

And:

Some things, though, were still off. Gone was the infamous clapping and cheering that comes with an Apple launch, replaced by the Maxfield employees monkishly ushering customers in one at a time. It almost seemed like Apple and Maxfield had somehow divided up responsibilities, and each applied their signature “culture” to the process.

There’s an irony in all of this. Apple’s previous Retail Chief, Ron Johnson, spent the better part of a decade building out Apple’s presence to almost 500 stores, so customers could line up around the world to be the first to get new Apple products.

Now, in the first big launch under the Ahrendts regime, the company decided to forgo the entire Apple retail system, forcing Apple fans make a pilgrimage to a store they most likely will never visit again. Unless Apple decides that the Apple Watch 2 is also too fashionable to be launched in an Apple store near you.

I find the logic of this outside the Apple Store rollout fascinating. The sense I get is that Apple is trying to extend the tendrils of the iPhone ecosystem. The iPhone itself is sold in a number of different retail outlets, but there was never a time you couldn’t buy one in the Apple Store.

One thought is that these luxury retailers are familiar (Angela Ahrendts was a longtime CEO of Burberry and knows luxury retail like the back of her hand) as well as properly equipped to handle this sort of luxury item.

Apple clearly intends to sell the Apple Watch in the Apple Store. Were the stores just not equipped to sell the Apple Watch on launch day? Or was this more a chance to give these other luxury retailers a head start to build a market? Or maybe a bit of both?

This post was written for developers, but if you are interested in the design side of Apple Watch, you might find this interesting. No programming required.

The goal of the article is to lay out the different icons used on Apple Watch and to give you a sense of which icons are used in each unique part of the Apple Watch interface.

[Via iOS Dev Weekly]

If you are a developer with an app in progress or already in the App Store, the iTunes Affiliate Program is an absolute no-brainer. But this logic also applies for any other iTunes content, even free content.

The commissions are 7% on sales that result from your affliate traffic. In the case where a customer clicks on your link, to your app, from your website, and buys your app, that effectively means you have reduced Apple’s cut from 30% to 23%.

But it gets even better:

The affliate links carry over to other purchases made by the user that followed your link as well. If they browse more and decide to buy a competing product, you also win.

If your app is free, and they follow your link, then buy something totally different within 24 hours, you win.

This is not new, but this article just came out and I thought it was worth sharing for folks who might not be aware of the math. This program is a huge win for app developers and anyone with content they place in the App Store, even free content.

And, as pointed out by Anthony Waller, there’s no better way to manage affiliate links than with the excellent Blink app, written by John Voorhees.

[Via iOS State of the Union]

Eric Alba:

Checked my watch for the time, noticed my battery is at 43%, either that or it’s 43F degrees out, I’m drunk.

Looks like the Apple Watch is quite versatile.

Vox:

In April 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope — which was launched into orbit exactly 25 years ago — took its most iconic image: the Pillars of Creation. These gigantic towers of dust and gas, 7,000 light years away, are named because the immense force of gravity causes them to condense into clumps of matter that will become new star systems.

In fact, billions of years ago our own solar system may have been born through the same process — so when you look at this upgraded 2014 version of the image, you’re also looking back at the very distant history of Earth.

We’ve all seen this image a hundred times but the details in this story are really fascinating.

My thanks to Bushel for sponsoring The Loop this week. For some people, IT is a task and not a career. Bushel is a simple-to-use cloud-based tool that anyone can leverage to manage the Apple devices in their workplace. Bushel allows you to easily set-up and protect all of the Apple devices that you distribute to your team, or those that your team already has. Provide access to company email accounts, automatically install work apps to every device all at once, and separate and protect your team’s personal data from company data. And if a device is ever lost or stolen, you can even remotely lock it or wipe company data completely. Do all of this and much more, without any help from IT. All wrapped into one seamless interface so you can manage those Apple devices when you want, wherever you are. Bushel makes the complex simple, so you can focus on what matters most, all while taking back your nights and weekends. Your first three devices are free forever, and each additional device is just $2 per month with no contracts or commitments. Learn more at Bushel.com.

There are a ton of apps coming out for Apple Watch, but if you’re a business user, you might want to take a look at Billings Pro.

Read this post by John Gruber, then consider following this link to give Shawn a helping hand.

CBC News:

Canadians are a relatively happy bunch — the fifth happiest in the world, according to new data from the 2015 World Happiness Report released Thursday.

The report issues a score on a scale of zero to 10 based on Gallup World Poll data collected from people in more than 150 countries between 2012 and 2014.

Researchers then analyze the “life evaluation” data to rank countries, ostensibly providing a comparative overview of people’s “subjective well-being” in each.

For all of our myriad problems and issues, Canada is still a great country. Read the story for the list of the top five and where the US placed in the report – both very interesting.

Greg Koenig, writing for iMore, digs into the durability of the various Apple Watch finishes.

One bit in particular I found fascinating was this discussion of the space black finish, something very difficult to pull off well in traditional watch case finishes:

Enter two technologies: The Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) plating process and Diamond Like Carbon (DLC) materials.

In the basic PVD process, a part is cleaned thoroughly and placed in a vacuum chamber, along with a consumable sample of plating material. Once the air is evacuated from the chamber, the material sample is vaporized by a heater and eventually condenses on the target part. PVD is a highly competitive, advancing technology with applications across many fields — anti-reflective, UV blocking, scratch resistant sunglass coatings? PVD — and the process is often heavily modified. The gist remains the same.

The PVD process is used to create a vast array of coatings, but the current gold standard for hardness and wear resistance is DLC. Essentially, a DLC coating is a 1-3 micron layer of carbon that self arranges into a structure similar to that found in a diamond, thus imparting some of a diamond’s surface hardness properties. In fact, many of the attempts to create synthetic diamonds revolve around modifying the basic PVD DLC process in order to “grow” a stone. The term “DLC” itself isn’t just one kind of coating, there are 7-8 different basic chemistries, and each manufacturer of equipment and service provider often creates their own proprietary recipe and processes. (Tungsten DLC, for example, deposits a layer of tungsten on the part before the DLC layer is applied, promoting better adhesion).

So just how tough is DLC? The best way to put it is that the watch industry is a second or third tier user of DLC coatings. The vast majority of research and application of DLCs goes into highly engineered components that depend on DLC’s hardness, friction reduction, corrosion resistance, and tribology advantages. (That’s the study of how one material interacts with another during contact and sliding.) You’ll find DLC coatings on shock absorbers and engine pistons in F1 cars, across the leading edges of fan blades in jet engines, coating critical medical implants, and the cutting tools inside the CNC mills and lathes that made the Apple Watch itself. (DLC extends cutter tool life, improves cut quality and allows for dramatic feed/speed increases.)

I find this fascinating. Apple has gotten really good at creating durable finishes for their products. I’ve noticed that every generation of iPhone I’ve owned has shown less and less wear on the case and screen. I suspect the Apple Watch is a beneficiary of all that durability R&D.

The whole auction page is a fascinating read. As of this writing, the current bid is $79,100. A bargain!

The auction ends at 7:09 pm ET today, so if you want in, you’ll need to register as a bidder.