Pacific Standard:

It’s no secret in the jewelry industry that retail demand for fine jewelry is slipping. As Forbes reports, the demand for gold jewelry has dropped 30 percent since last year, and continues to fall. Even diamond behemoth De Beers had to admit in their 2014 Insight Report that “retailers have faced pressures from a weak economic environment and strong competition from branded luxury goods and experiential categories, as well as the low-price models of e-commerce companies.”

Simply put: There are better things to spend money on, often at better prices, than jewelry.

Interesting premise. While I’m sure there are many contributing factors, I wonder how much the “rise of the machine” has contributed to this decline.

Fast Company:

In the last 10 years, Lego has grown into nothing less than the Apple of toys: a profit-generating, design-driven miracle built around premium, intuitive, highly covetable hardware that fans can’t get enough of. Last year, fueled in part by The Lego Movie’s Pixar-size popularity, the privately held company briefly surged ahead of rival Mattel to become the biggest toy manufacturer in the world, reporting first-half profits of $273 million on revenue of $2.03 billion.

An interesting read. Three things I see that changed the arc of Lego’s fortunes: First, there was the Star Wars marketing deal that allowed Lego to create an incredibly popular series of Star Wars-themed kits.

Second, there was the move into video games with Lego Star Wars, Lego Harry Potter, Lego Batman, etc. These games also saw the emergence of Lego’s sense of humor.

Finally, all of these marketing deals came together (along with that tongue in cheek sense of humor) to create the “Everything is Awesome” Lego Movie.

Fans adore the brand. Just like Apple.

Jim and Shawn talk about Apple’s 2014, Amplitube and guitars!

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Sounds great, but…

You have to hate it when the first words of something you expect to be good end in “but.”

Waterstones has admitted that sales of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader had “disappeared” after seeing higher demand for physical books.

The UK’s largest book retailing chain, which teamed up with Amazon in 2012 to sell the Kindle in its stores, saw sales of physical books rise 5pc in December, at the expense of the popular e-reader.

Kindle sales had “disappeared to all intents and purposes”, Waterstones said.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know how to explain this shift in sales. While I think it’s good that people are buying physical books, I think it’s way too early to say that e-books are dead.

With seventeen of the most amazing people in the Apple community—some developers, but most not—Yosemite is a conference for the Apple community. Our speakers are some of the best and most-loved writers, designers, philosophers, and developers working in the Apple ecosystem.

I’ll be speaking at CocoaConf’s Yosemite Conference this year. I’m really excited about the line-up of speakers and meeting the attendees. I hope to see you there!

Fast Company:

Introduced with grand ambitions last summer, the Fire Phone is widely seen as a fiasco. Originally priced at $199 and intended as an iPhone competitor, it now sells for 99 cents, and Amazon has taken a $170 million write-down largely attributable to unsold Fire Phone inventory.

Yet Bezos finally answers the question with the kind of reasoning that investors, customers, and pundits have come to expect from him: Amazon is going to pour more resources into its phone. Defending the Fire Phone as a “bold bet,” Bezos argues that it’s “going to take many iterations” and “some number of years” to get it right.

I don’t think the Fire Phone will be around in two years.

Gruber summed up my feelings on the MacBook Air.

Whatever, the reasons, my mind keeps going back to the number — approximately $20 billion dollars of iPhones — roughly 34 percent of Apple’s total sales for the three months ending December 31, 2014. It explains everything about the company, its priorities and why it is starting to show signs of wear and tear across its other product lines.

Om brings up a good point—Apple’s focus is, and has been, on the iPhone for quite a while. Let’s not forget the record Mac sales over that period of time, though. Perhaps it’s the halo effect, but the Mac is doing better than ever.

Update: Om’s original article stated $20 billion, but it’s actually $43 billion.

Marco Arment was the voice behind the Apple has lost the functional high ground blog post that has gone viral over the past few days.

With the benefit of hindsight, Marco updated his post with a link to What it’s like to be popular for a day:

You might think this is a dream come true for a blogger, but it’s horrible.

Instead, I looked back at what I wrote with regret, guilt, and embarrassment. The sensationalism was my fault — I started it with the headline and many poor word choices, which were overly harsh and extreme. I was being much nastier and more alarmist than I intended. I edited some words to be more fair and accurate, but it was too late. I can’t blame the opportunists for taking the bait that I hastily left for them.

Whether you agree with Marco’s post or not, there’s no doubt it started a lot of good conversation about the state of Apple software and, hopefully, it raised awareness within Apple of the growing perception that there are fit and finish issues.

I continue to feel the same love for Apple products. My sense is that the world came rushing to Apple’s door (when they had relegated Apple as a niche player for such a long time) and pushed them into a new role, that of a world leader. As the requirements, demand, and pipeline grew, Apple had to grow rapidly to fill this new role. A tough adjustment for anyone to make.

At the same time, Apple was in a brand new kind of horse race, with Android and Samsung. The kind of horse race that rewards quick reactions and short term thinking and brings about feature cram. Tough to resist. Feature cram places incredible stress on testing and QA, especially when the calendar drives the release schedule (as opposed to, “we’ll ship when it passes all its tests”).

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, one of the first things he did was simplify the product line. Whatever his intent, this ended up reducing the demands on QA and testing, giving them more bandwidth to do their jobs right.

Not sure if simplifying is the right answer here, but I can only imagine that the best minds at Apple are working on this problem.

Apple updated their iOS adoption pie chart on Monday. iOS 8 adoption is at 68%, iOS 7 is at 29%, pre-iOS 7 at 4%. Obviously, these numbers include some slight rounding up.

Beautiful Pixels posted their annual look at the best user interface animations from apps and the web. My favorite, from Lush for iPhone, is below. So very delicious.

[Hat tip, iOS Dev Weekly]

Wall Street Journal:

In a complaint filed in Superior Court in San Mateo County, Calif., Monster said Beats “fraudulently acquired” the Beats by Dr. Dre line of headphones through a “sham transaction” with HTC, which agreed to purchase a 51% stake in Beats for $300 million in 2011.

This is a complex tale. You might start by reading this article from February 2013, which lays out the history of the Beats, Monster deal.

It starts with Noel and Kevin Lee, the father and son team behind Monster. To hear the story told, the Lees were astute when it came to music, speakers, and headphones, but were in way over their head when it came to negotiating with the team of lawyers at Interscope.

There can’t be two winners. Monster solidified an agreement that got Beats Electronics alive and shipping headphones, but not without gigantic forfeit: Jimmy and Dre’s side of Beats would retain permanent ownership of everything that Monster developed. Every headphone, every headband, every cup, every driver, every remote control—if there was a piece of metal or plastic associated with Beats By Dre, Noel and Kevin Lee surrendered it to Jimmy and Dre. Monster would also be entirely responsible for manufacturing the products—a hugely expensive corner of the deal—as well as distributing them. The heavy lifting.

Back to the Wall Street Journal article:

The complaint asserts that Beats repurchased 25.5% of its own shares from HTC less than a month after the deal closed, allowing Beats to end its relationship with Monster due to a change-of-ownership clause.

Noel Lee ultimately sold his Beats shares:

In September 2013, eight months before Apple agreed to buy Beats in May 2014, Mr. Lee sold his remaining shares. In the suit, Mr. Lee alleges he sold the shares after being misled by a board member that no “liquidity event” was on the horizon for the next year or two.

But Monster’s suit said Mr. Iovine and Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue later told a technology conference that the deal was several years in the making.

The question is, does Lee have a piece of paper or an email specifically stating no “liquidity event” was on the horizon, or is this his word against someone else’s? Like it or not, this sounds more like business hardball, where the best prepared team wins.

Note that Apple was not named in the suit.

NASA:

The largest NASA Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, this sweeping bird’s-eye view of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is the sharpest large composite image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbor. Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, the Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disk. It’s like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. And there are lots of stars in this sweeping view — over 100 million, with some of them in thousands of star clusters seen embedded in the disk.

This ambitious photographic cartography of the Andromeda galaxy represents a new benchmark for precision studies of large spiral galaxies that dominate the universe’s population of over 100 billion galaxies. Never before have astronomers been able to see individual stars inside an external spiral galaxy over such a large contiguous area. Most of the stars in the universe live inside such majestic star cities, and this is the first data that reveal populations of stars in context to their home galaxy.

Two million light years is a huge distance, almost unfathomably far away. If you are traveling 186,000 miles per second, think how far you could go in a year (186,000 * 60 * 60 * 24 *365 miles), then multiply that by two million. Now imagine how you’d go about taking a picture of something that far away.

Here’s a link to the picture itself.

Swiss watch makers like TAG Heuer, the biggest brand in luxury goods group LVMH’s watch portfolio, had until recently largely dismissed the threat of “smart” gadgets, but LVMH watch chief Jean-Claude Biver says he had changed his mind on the subject.

Not a big surprise.

Matt Richman’s thoughts on the news:

In order to have even a chance of being as feature-rich as Apple Watch, then, TAG’s smartwatch will have to pair with an Android phone. However, TAG wearers aren’t Android users. Rich people buy TAG watches, but rich people don’t buy Android phones.

I agree.

An 86-year-old woman wrote this to her bank manager. Priceless.

Stephen Hackett has a look at a dozen RSS readers for OS X and while the winner is no surprise, it’s a great read.

Huffington Post:

From the great ancient capitals to the modern cities of Asia, the Americas, and beyond, here are the 50 cities you must see during your lifetime.

Out of the 50, I really only want to visit 23 of the listed cities. I’ve been to 11 so far.

One gripe I have about Netflix is the lack of any sort of sophisticated search mechanism. FlickSurfer is a web site that lets you search the Netflix database, guided by movie rankings on Netflix itself, IMDB, and RottenTomatoes.

You can order your results based on the date they were added to Netflix, their individual scores, or an average of the Netflix, IMDB and RT scores. You can select a combination of genres (such as Crime, Drama, Comedy, Horror) to further filter your results.

Looking for something to watch? FlickSurfer is genius.

Last May, Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Panic, announced that the team was pulling Coda, their highly regarded web development tool, from the Mac App Store, primarily due to sandboxing issues.

As we continued to work on Coda 2.5—a significant update that we’re really excited about—we continued to discover new corners of the app that presented challenges under sandboxing. Coda, to be fair, is a very complex developer tool and is something of a sandboxing worst-case scenario.

Apple, to their considerable credit, spent a lot of energy assisting us with ideas, workarounds, and temporary exemptions we might be able to use to get around some of the issues. Apple genuinely went above and beyond the call of duty, and we’re really thankful for their help. We got extremely close and jumped over a lot of tricky hurdles thanks to them.

Unfortunately, though, we’ve run out of time.

Yesterday, in a Panic state-of-the-union, Cabel published the results of this experiment.

So, how’d it go? After running the numbers, it looks like Coda’s sales have not suffered significantly since leaving the Mac App Store.

Coda was removed from the Mac App Store in mid-October, at the same time version 2.5 was released. Since new releases always generate a short-term sales spike and we wanted the numbers to be fairly representative of “typical sales”, we looked at one month on either side — September and November.

The results were interesting. We sold a couple hundred fewer units of Coda post-App Store removal, but revenue from it went up by about 44%.

Now, two explanations for that: in addition to keeping the 30% that would have normally gone to Apple, we also returned Coda from its sale price ($79) to its regular price ($99) alongside the release of 2.5. Even if those factors hadn’t been in play, though, I don’t think the decline in Coda revenue would have been as dramatic as we originally feared it might be.

Of course we have it easy — it’s an established app with a dedicated customer base. If Coda did not already exist or Panic was not well-known, ignoring the Mac App Store would’ve been a much harder decision with possibly larger ramifications.

Back in October, Rich Siegel announced that BBEdit was leaving the Mac App Store as well. BBEdit is also widely used by developers, has a strong brand and a rabid following. It would be interesting to see how BBEdit is faring.

Side note: You can release a Mac App on your own, without going through the App Store, but your options are extremely limited for iOS. You can build a web app targeted at iOS, but there’s no way to deliver something truly native without going through the iOS App Store.

There’s no technical reason for the two platforms to be treated differently. Apple could certainly tighten the screws on the Mac side to prevent unsigned apps from running natively on OS X. This is an inheritance issue. People have always had the right to self-publish on OS X. But iOS set its exclusivity rules from the get-go.

Different rules for such intimately tied platforms is a small force pushing iOS and OS X apart when Apple is trying to bring them together. A small example of dissonance.

Vox:

We’re getting closer to the point where you can cancel your cable subscription and still continue to enjoy all your favorite cable TV shows. Today at the Consumer Electronic Show, the satellite TV company Dish announced the next step in that direction. Sling TV is a service that lets you watch cable TV channels over the internet.

Crucially, the Sling TV lineup includes ESPN, the nation’s most popular cable channel and a must-have for sports fans. And unlike some other streaming services, you can sign up for it without getting a conventional cable subscription.

Is this of interest to you cordcutters?

Reuters:

At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, mobile-marketing firm TapSense plans to release an Apple Watch ad-buying service. The service will provide a first glimpse of how businesses can serve up ads on the watch, even though the gadget will not be available until later this year.

At issue: the same qualities that render the watch exciting to Madison Avenue, such as the ability to detect customers approaching a store and to zap an ad directly to their wrists, also risk alienating those customers.

Before any one panics and screams about ads on the Apple Watch (oh, too late – they already are), keep in mind this is a “service” being offered to developers to include in their apps and there is no indication that Apple will allow such functionality. And, even if Apple does, I can promise you it will be an entirely opt-in process. Apple is not going to allow developers to push ads at you without your permission.

The history of the PBS NewsHour can be traced back to the Watergate hearings.

Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer covered the 1973 hearings for PBS. In 1975 MacNeil began anchoring The Robert MacNeil Report which soon evolved into the 30-minute MacNeil/Lehrer Report.

Om Malik:

How to find originality in a “networked society” is on my mind, because I have recently come across three individuals who have been original for such a long time. During a conversation for my new art project, Pi.co, Frank Clegg, a US-based bag maker put it best when he said, “If I make something different, then I don’t really have any competition. Either people like what I do, or they don’t like what I do.” Such a simple statement, but so hard to implement, because many find such comfort from hiding in the herd.

This is exactly how I see Apple. They make products that we don’t always know we need—people are going to like them or they won’t. Either way, it’s going to be different.

Jacob Gube covers the six ways to declare colors in CSS.