This is a very interesting update from Rogue Amoeba if you’re using iOS 8.1 and Yosemite.

Terrific review of the Retina 5K iMac, both in text and in a well crafted video. Trying hard to resist the urge to order one right this second.

Yesterday’s opening day of the Wall Street Journal’s WSJDLive conference featured separate interviews of Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma and Apple CEO Tim Cook. Alibaba operates a series of consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer and business-to-business web portals, generating $120 billion+ in annual revenue. Clearly a terrific opportunity for Apple Pay.

During Jack Ma’s interview, he was asked about Apple Pay:

“I’m very interested in that,” Ma, founder of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (BABA:US), said when asked if it made sense for his company’s Alipay Wallet mobile system to team with Apple Pay. “As always, a good marriage needs both sides hard working. I respect Apple and respect Tim very, very much.”

And during Tim Cook’s interview:

“We’re going to talk about getting married later this week,” said Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc. “I love what he’s done, I think he’s a brilliant guy. I think he has brilliant people at the company so if we can find some areas of common space, I love it. I love partnering with people like that.”

Long way from a deal, but still, interesting.

Back in October of 1994, the two founders of Wired magazine, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, found themselves in a unique situation. One of their biggest advertisers, AT&T, was interested in expanding their presence from print to the web. Now all Louis and Jane had to do was figure out how to make that happen.

Terrific read.

Business Insider asked a Walmart PR representative why Walmart does not support Apple Pay. Here’s the response:

There are certainly a lot of compelling technologies being developed, which is great for the mobile-commerce industry as a whole. Ultimately, what matters is that consumers have a payment option that is widely accepted, secure, and developed with their best interests in mind. MCX member merchants already collectively serve a majority of Americans every day. MCX’s members believe merchants are in the best position to provide a mobile solution because of their deep insights into their customers’ shopping and buying experiences.

Deep insights? Yeesh. If you care so much about consumers, give them every possible payment option. Instead, the MCX approach is simply a bald-faced attempt to eliminate credit card fees. This response simply makes me angry.

I’m truly surprised to see CVS and Rite-Aid side with Walmart and Hobby Lobby on this one. A black eye for both chains, as far as I’m concerned.

Vimeo:

Paris & NY, like many large cities, have a lot in common ; transport, infrastructure, national monuments. I wanted to explore not only these comparisons but also the differences, in order to expose the beauty and individuality of each. What you cannot deny is the vibrancy and explosion of character each city has and I thought split-screen with timelapse would be a good way to help convey this.

Turns out, it’s an ad for British Airways but it’s still a fun thing to watch especially when you consider the effort that had to go into pre- and post-production.

But does he cheat a little bit at the end with the “LOVE” sculpture? Isn’t that in Philadelphia?

On this week’s Amplified, Jim and Shawn talk about the new iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3 and does Apple offer too many iPads for sale?

Sponsored by lynda.com (Start learning something new by visiting lynda.com/thebeard and get a FREE 7-day trial where you can access all of their 2,400+ courses).

Pixelmator for iPad is a powerful image editor that gives you everything you need to create, edit, and enhance your images. It lets you work seamlessly between Mac and iPad and even work effortlessly with Photoshop images. Packed with powerful creative tools and engineered to harness the full iOS and 64-bit architecture power, Pixelmator for iPad is a real image editor right at your fingertips.

This is Colossal:

Hikers exploring England’s Derbyshire Peak District earlier this week stumbled onto a rare phenomenon caused by extreme winds.

Really wild looking video but, if it’s that windy, maybe you should be careful about walking on the slippery rocks.

Ars Technica:

Sometimes the end of funding is the beginning of a slide into radio silence, which ultimately turns into few or no backer orders fulfilled, and no satisfactory explanation for why the project didn’t pan out according to the orderly delivery schedule the creators promised.

A project can go off the rails and fail even after its funding succeeds for a number of reasons. There can be unforeseen costs, or design problems, or a team member quits or fails to deliver their part of the project. Often, when a project skids to a halt, the final updates are obscured from the public and sent only to backers, which may be part of the reason failures are often not well-publicized. Occasionally, backers who receive them pass them on or post them publicly on forums, which is as good as it gets in terms of letting the outside world know a project did not ultimately pan out.

I’ve been burned by a few Kickstarter-type campaigns. Rule of thumb is to assume the money you are handing over is a donation – if you get something in return, great but don’t hold out a lot of hope. Granted, the majority of Kickstarters complete successfully but there are still plenty that don’t. Caveat Emptor.

Mosaic Science:

Meet the donors, patients, doctors and scientists involved in the complex global network of rare – and very rare – blood. In 50 years, researchers have turned up only 40 or so other people on the planet with the same precious, life-saving blood in their veins.

Fascinating story of how rare blood develops and the issues involved in having such an incredibly rare blood type.

The Verge:

a significant number of merchants, including heavyweights like Walmart, Kmart, 7-Eleven, and Best Buy, are in outright competition with Apple Pay. The retailers, through a joint venture formed in 2012, are building their own mobile payment app, called CurrentC. It’s expected to launch next year. In the meantime, these retailers have no intention to support Apple Pay.

There may be a lot of good reasons to not support Apple Pay and there may be good alternatives available now and in the future but CurrentC – which needs access to your checking account – and QR codes is not either of those things.

PetaPixel:

Normally Camera+ would set you back $3 in the app store, but right now there’s a lesser-known promotional offering from Apple that lets you download a copy for free. You just need to know where to look.

Well worth jumping through some hoops to get it.

Huffington Post:

Manganese black. Yellow ocher. Vermilion. Ultramarine. These pigments sound delicious. Their names are so sharp and elegant, it’s as if the terms emote more meaning than just color. We can smell logwood, taste cochineal, touch mummy brown. There is just something (quite scientifically) alluring about a perfectly saturated glob of paint or an electric mound of powdered hues, especially when its name is so tantalizing.

The uniqueness of the names undoubtedly prompts those amongst us, who obsess over the various pink, purples and blues, to wonder where the terms come from. We learn the origin stories of famous paintings in art history course after art history course, but it’s rare to read about the birth of Madder red or mauve. How did the colors in Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises” or J.M.W. Turner’s “Modern Rome” come to be?

I never really thought about it but of course it’s true; these artists had to make their own paint and would of course create their own colors too.

Glenn Fleishman talks through the changes Yosemite brings to Wi-Fi. To start off, hold down the option key and click on the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar. More detail, right? Some of that is pre-Yosemite, some new to Yosemite. Now hover over a network name and check out the tooltip that appears.

Lots of great detail here.

If you have a need for vector artwork of all shipping iOS devices, this free collection from Robbie Pearce might be your answer. The files are done in Sketch and come in every color you can buy.

Re/code put together a review team of four people, two on the east coast, two on the west coast, to put Apple Pay through its paces.

Our overall conclusion: Apple Pay worked smoothly and quickly in all but a very few instances. But the number of physical and online stores that accept it at launch is still very small. Plus, some common things slow it down, like the need for signatures and debit-card PINs in some stores, its lack of support for loyalty cards, and cashier confusion. So it’s far from a complete replacement for your wallet and credit card, at least not yet.

This simplistic conclusion is only skin deep. The real value of the review is watching Apple Pay at work, with a separate video for each team member. To get you started, here’s Katie Boehret from Washington, D.C.

Pixelmator for iPad is a powerful image editor that gives you everything you need to create, edit, and enhance your images. It lets you work seamlessly between Mac and iPad and even work effortlessly with Photoshop images. Packed with powerful creative tools and engineered to harness the full iOS and 64-bit architecture power, Pixelmator for iPad is a real image editor right at your fingertips.

That’s a lot of money for a few bits of wood, plastic and metal but it is fair to say that while $905,000 (£563,904) is a lot of money, the Apple 1’s place in the pantheon of IT history, alongside that of its designer Steve Wozniak, should be somewhere very close to the front.

According to the auctioneers the Apple 1 was expected to sell for between $300,000 and $500,000 before the Henry Ford Museum of Dearborn, Michigan, stepped in to buy it.

Fascinating to watch the Apple I become such a collectors item.

When I first read this Uber blog post, I thought it was a joke. Imagine calling a taxi, then having the driver offer to give you a flu shot, sort of a two-for-one deal.

But Uber is serious about this. They’ve teamed up with Vaccine Finder and will either bring a registered nurse to you or bring you to a clinic for a flu shot, all for free. This effort is today only and limited to Boston, New York and DC.

Here’s the details:

• Every component of UberHEALTH is offered at no cost
• All vaccinations (appropriate for ages 4 and up) will be administered by a registered nurse through Passport Health & Pager.
• All consent information and paperwork stays between the recipient and them.
• If you or your friends choose to be vaccinated, please arrange for a suitable indoor environment before your nurse arrive
• Maximum of 1 flu prevention pack & 10 flu shots per request
• We expect demand for UberHEALTH to be high, so your patience is appreciated

I love the idea, hope it works well.

Benjamin Mayo digs in to the Pixelmator image editor, which was shown off by Apple when they rolled out the new iPads. If you are even a little curious about Pixelmator, take a few minutes to read the review. Benjamin does a good job exploring the interface and walking through the image adjustment workflow.

James Dempsey is just a regular guy, a Mac and iOS developer who worked at Apple for about 15 years, toiling away on OS X releases Leopard through Lion, the Cocoa frameworks team, and Aperture.

Dempsey is also a songwriter, writing songs with a focus on development, with titles such as Model View Controller and Gonna Needa Pasteboard. Back in 2001, James got the chance to perform a song at WWDC that was received well enough that a yearly tradition was born. His band, James Dempsey and the Breakpoints has been spooning out these developer novelty songs ever since.

And now the band has hit the big time, debuting at number 5 on the Billboard Comedy Chart. That’s no small thing. That’s one spot below Patton Oswalt but several notches above Sarah Silverman and Louis C. K. Not bad for a Mac and iOS developer.

Here’s a link to the album, called Backtrace. Congratulations all around.

This is just delicious. If you want to jump right to the image, click here. Boy has Apple come a long way.

Last month, Austin Mann took the iPhone 5s, 6 and 6 Plus on a test drive on location in Iceland. Since then, he’s incorporated Yosemite into his workflow. This post is his tips and tricks and lessons learned.

A must read for photographers, but well worth your time, even if the most you do is take the occasional snapshot.

Ben Bradlee was a towering figure on journalism, guiding the Washington Post as it challenged the US federal government over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers and was a driving force in uncovering the Watergate scandal that ultimately unseated US President Richard M Nixon.