Good list of apps here from Lee Peterson. I use all of those and a couple more.

Each month, Foremost releases a limited-edition collection of clothing — three-to-five items per gender — alongside an interview series with some of the world’s most prominent, interesting, and creative personalities.

Good luck to my friend, Matt Alexander, on his new project.

Jim, Shawn and Special Guest Dave Mark talk Tim Cook, The Loop Magazine, The Grammys and Kanye West!

IFO Apple Store:

An original and significant element of Apple’s retail stores is disappearing. Over the past month workers have been removing the “atom” symbol that has pinpointed the Genius Bars since the first store opened in 2001, and they are replacing it with wall graphics to match those recently installed in back-lit wall displays.

I’ll be sorry to see them go. One of my favourite photos I ever took was of Steve Jobs at the opening of the first New York Store. He was leaning forward on the Genius Bar and I framed a perfect shot of him with the word “Genius” right about his head.

The number of stolen iPhones dropped by 40 percent in San Francisco and 25 percent in New York in the 12 months after Apple Inc added a kill switch to its devices in September 2013. In London, smartphone theft dropped by half, according to an announcement by officials in the three cities.

This was a real concern for cities around the world. The drop shows how powerful the kill switch has been as a deterrent.

Serenity Caldwell is a miracle worker. She put together a transcript of Tim Cook’s talk at the Goldman Sachs conference. Given the casual, conversational nature of his talk, that was no easy feat.

You can read the transcript here.

Tim Cook talks Apple accomplishments, Law of Large Numbers, Mac market share gains, Swift, HealthKit, HomeKit, CarPlay, Apple Store growth, emerging markets, global partnerships, climate change and the First Solar solar farm investment, Apple Watch, and a lot more.

My favorite quote from his talk:

We’re actually not focused on the numbers, we’re focused on the things that produce the numbers.

Also, re the First Solar investment:

It’s enough power for almost 60,000 California homes, and it’s enough to provide renewable energy for all of our new campus…every other office that we have in California, all 52 retail stores we have in California, and our data center in Newark.

You can listen to a webcast of Tim’s talk here.

Did you know there is a preference pane in your Mac’s System Preferences called Internet Accounts? Internet Accounts acts as a central repository for your major internet service accounts. Though you can set up accounts for your email services inside Mail, and set up Twitter and Facebook logins on the web, you can do all those things within Internet Accounts and the services will become much more globally available.

To get a sense of why you’d want to do that, spend a few minutes reading the linked article.

Yesterday, I had an issue with my trackpad. I started down the road to making a Genius Bar appointment, resigned to living without my computer for a few days while Apple has a swing at repairing the problem.

As it turns out, Apple called me, was able to talk me through the repair so I didn’t have to so much as get out of my chair. Here’s that post, in case you are interested.

Point being, the best repairs are the ones you do yourself. To that end, spend a few minutes reading Joe Caiati’s Mac troubleshooting guide, posted on 512 Pixels.

Joe is a former Apple Genius and writes from hard-won experience. He walks you through a very logical sequence, starting here:

When you’re tackling an issue on your Mac, there are three overall troubleshooting categories you must keep in mind. Is the issue software, hardware or environmental? It sounds very basic, but figuring out which category your problem fits into will get you far when diagnosing it.

Great place to start if you are having trouble with your Mac.

GigaOM:

A number of owners of Samsung’s smart TVs are reporting this week that their TV sets started to interrupt their movie viewing with Pepsi ads, which seem to be dynamically inserted into third-party content.

“Every movie I play 20-30 minutes in it plays the pepsi ad, no audio but crisp clear ad. It has happened on 6 movies today,” a user reported on Reddit, where a number of others were struggling with the same problem.

The sense I get is that this may be an error (though that is still not clear), but the presence of the ad on the TV’s media storage does seem to point to the emergence of advertising originating on the TV itself, as opposed to the traditional ads that come embedded in the stream from the cable company or network.

Consumers rarely ever get to know about these deals — unless something goes wrong, which seems to be exactly what happened in the case of that Pepsi ad that popped up on Samsung TVs this week. That’s bad, because there are other issues at hand than interruptions from unwelcome ads. Who, for example, gets what kind of data when TV manufacturers strike deals with advertisers? And how can consumers opt out of data collection altogether?

Excellent questions.

Jon Stewart is stepping down as the host of The Daily Show. A sad day for journalism. Love him or hate him, he leaves impossibly big shoes to fill.

Here’s his announcement.

The project in Monterey County, California will provide enough energy for 60,000 homes as well as Apple’s future head office in nearby Cupertino, Cook said at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco.

“We know in Apple that climate change is real. The time for talk is passed,” he said. “The time for action is now.”

Great move.

As his body weakened from a muscle disease, Ethan Och knew the time had come.

He told his music teacher he’d have to give up his favorite school activity.

His teacher wouldn’t let him just quit. They had another idea.

Today Ethan is back in the percussion section, drumming on an iPad hooked to an amplifier.

What a wonderful story.

The Guardian:

Three volunteers are on the shortlist to be among four people on the Mars One programme, the first manned space flight to Mars – a one-way trip that’s effectively a suicide mission. Why do they want to leave Earth, and who are they leaving behind? As the list of potential Mars explorers is whittled down further on 16 February, meet those competing to be the first to land on the Red Planet.

I’d go.

The Verge:

The company is stepping in to tell everyone to calm down and that those 1984 references are way off base. In a blog post plainly titled “Samsung Smart TVs Do Not Monitor Living Room Conversations,” the company does acknowledge that its clumsy, broad-strokes privacy policy could’ve used some clearer language.

The problem for Samsung is that, even if their TVs don’t work the way they are accused of working, many of us have no problem believing they’d be sleazy enough to do that.

Quartz:

Unlike the transistor, the lithium-ion battery has not won a Nobel Prize. But many people think it should. The lithium-ion battery gave the transistor reach. Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. There would be no Apple. No Samsung. No Tesla.

In 1980, Goodenough, a whip-smart physicist then aged 57, invented lithium-ion’s nervous system.

He says, “I’m only 92. I still have time to go.” What a great attitude.

Monday Note:

I have no trouble with the Law of Large Numbers, it only underlines Apple’s truly stupendous growth and, in the end, it always wins. No business can grow by 20%, or even 10% for ever.

But, for the other three, Market Share, Commoditization, and Modularity, how can we ignore the sea of contradicting facts?

Part of the reason why it seems Wall St doesn’t understand Apple is because the company’s operations don’t conform to so many commonly held beliefs about economics and business.

USA Today:

Starting next week, passengers on select JetBlue Airways flights can use Apple Pay on their iPhone 6 and 6 Plus handsets to buy food, drinks and certain onboard amenities when the plane reaches cruising altitude. You’ll be able to upgrade to available premium seats, too.

JetBlue is the first airline to accept Apple Pay at 35,000 feet. It almost certainly won’t be the last.

One more Apple Pay domino falling.

Huffington Post:

Canadians have a reputation for being some of the world’s kindest people. This video proves that to be true.

In order to test how Canadians would react, a blindfolded Muslim man stood at Dundas Square in downtown Toronto, with signs that read “I am a Muslim. I am labelled as a terrorist,” and “I trust you. Do you trust me? Give me a hug.”

To be fair, it doesn’t prove that – Canadians can be as racist as anyone else – but the video does make me very proud of my fellow country men and women.

Austin Mann is a professional photographer and videographer who has put all the recent iPhone cameras through their paces. His most recent post is about Instagram’s Hyperlapse app.

If you aren’t familiar, this app is designed to create extremely stable handheld time-lapses. The stabilization technology is really fascinating (it uses the gyroscope in your iPhone to stabilize any shaky video).

Austin’s page shows off his favorite Hyperlapse video and he offers some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of the app.

You can read about the technology behind Hyperlapse here.

The Hill:

Apple CEO Tim Cook will speak at the White House cybersecurity summit Friday at Stanford University, according to an event invitation.

The White House is expected to reveal its next executive action on cybersecurity at the summit, which will bring together tech executives, leading academics and government officials to discuss ways in which the government can better collaborate with the private sector on cybersecurity initiatives.

Cook’s remarks will come amid a debate between tech companies and law enforcement officials over encryption.

Encryption and security is becoming more and more important to everyone on the internet – business, consumers, and governments. It will be interesting to see if anything concrete comes out of this summit.

Good luck to Steve, Dave, and Kelly.

We all snap pictures like crazy these days and post them to a number of sharing sites. But there was a time when you would be so excited to get your roll of film back to see what pics you shot. Mari and Linda Johannessen are bringing that experience back with a new app for iPhone. You can take 24 pics, but you can’t review them. When the “film roll” is full, you send it away and get back 24 developed prints, delivered to your physical mailbox, within a week.

Personally, I love the idea.

Slashing prices on tablets all over the place. I thought they were selling so good.

Buy a phone, get a tablet for $0.99. And they still can’t beat the iPad. It makes you wonder why people are so worried about iPad sales.