There is a lot more to the new icons than just a fresh coat of paint — the visual language extends far beyond just the gradients.

Fascinating article by Nick Keppol as he takes an in-depth look at Apple’s new OS X icons.

[Via Khoi Vinh]

KOMPLETE KONTROL S-Series keyboards unite the world of KOMPLETE software with a perfectly-integrated and luxurious hardware controller. Built to harness the full potential of the brand-new KOMPLETE 10 and KOMPLETE 10 ULTIMATE, these keyboards offer pure creative flow and a whole new way to play KOMPLETE. This is truly the komplete instrument – available October 1, pre-order now.

Native Instruments continues to push digital software and hardware forward.

This is Colossal:

Over the last three months photographer Thomas Herbrich snapped some 100,000 individual photographs of smoke, looking for unexpected anamalies and fortuitous coincidences where familiar shapes emerged.

It’s fascinating to see how the brain tries to create order out of chaos, just like looking up at the clouds, suddenly familiar patterns seem to stand out: faces, hands, or scrolls of paper.

He’s created some absolutely beautiful images.

Re/code:

Apple just issued a statement on the disclosure of celebrity photos said to have come from its iCloud storage service.

“We wanted to provide an update to our investigation into the theft of photos of certain celebrities. When we learned of the theft, we were outraged and immediately mobilized Apple’s engineers to discover the source.”

Apple very specifically pointed out in their statement to media outlets that “None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud or Find my iPhone.”

Gigaom:

An eye doctor says he’s recently seen a few 35-year-old patients whose lenses, which are typically clear all the way up until around age 40, are so cloudy they resemble 75-year-olds’. A sleep doctor says kids as young as toddlers are suffering from chronic insomnia, which in turn affects their behavior and performance at school and daycare. A scientist finds that women who work night shifts are twice as likely to develop breast cancer than those who sleep at night.

What do all these anecdotes have in common? Nighttime exposure to the blue light emanating from our screens.

Considering I’ve spent the last 20 years staring at a computer screen for 10 hours a day, I read this article with great interest and a lot of worry.

BlackBerry’s still in business? That’s so cute.

Robert Morris University in Chicago is now offering a full scholarship, worth $50K, if you make the cut on their League of Legends team. League of Legends is arguably one of the most popular multiplayer online games on the planet.

In October, the League of Legends world championships drew 32 million viewers online. An additional 18,000 fans packed the Staples Center in Los Angeles to watch two teams of five skinny young men click away on their mice—as the game played out on huge screens overhead. When a player died, fans screamed as loudly as if Kobe Bryant had just launched himself from the free-throw line and thrown down a two-handed dunk.

This is no accident. Online gaming is becoming an industry, most recently evidenced by Amazon’s purchase of Twitch for about US$970 million.

While it might seem frivolous for an institution of higher learning to offer a video game scholarship, their job is to prepare kids for the real world. And if the real world rewards a particular skill set, colleges should help give interested students a leg up to that particular ledge.

The reward for Robert Morris is obvious. They are getting attention in the press, certainly, but they are making themselves into a destination school, reshaping themselves to meet a need and to be an integral part of the future of higher ed.

Dan Frommer makes the case that the existing US mobile payment ecosystem is not easy to tame.

Why? The system is still a mess. In the US, for example, no in-store mobile-payments system has reached critical mass—thanks to a complicated set of relationships between merchants, card companies, payment processors, mobile operators, handset makers, and mobile-wallet providers. Companies are so focused on claiming their share of the “value chain” that they’ve lost sight of the needs of the people who are actually supposed to be using these services. Payment providers have done such a lousy job with their early mobile products that Starbucks has emerged as a leader by simply doing its own thing.

If, as rumored, Apple does roll out their own mobile payment system, what’s their edge?

Apple, unlike Google, has absolute control over what goes into its phones, so it can ensure that all new iPhones—and other devices, such as its reportedly forthcoming wearable gadget—support its payment system. With more than 40% of the US smartphone market, Apple can get this service into millions of pockets faster than any other company. And because Apple insists on having the upper hand in its relationships with mobile operators, it shouldn’t have any embarrassing situations like Google had with Verizon Wireless, which effectively blocked Google Wallet in 2011.

The Google Wallet story is a perfect example of the difference between Google/Android and Apple’s position here. Unlike Google, Apple controls their ecosystem, makes their own hardware and, most importantly, has a big head start on account holder signup.

Some 800 million people—iTunes account holders—already trust Apple with their payment information. In an era where retailers’ databases seem to be compromised every week, with the right security features—such as potentially requiring a fingerprint scan to pay—Apple could foster the sense that its payment system is safer than swiping plastic. And also that it’s more private than a similar wallet run by Google, which is known to feast on all available data.

AV Club:

Star Trek is more than pop culture; it’s 20th century mythology with its own complicated mythos. “Beam me up” and “live long and prosper” may have invaded the cultural lexicon, but Star Trek is particularly intimidating for the uninitiated. Where to start and what to skip are up for debate even among the most hardcore Trekkies and Trekkers (the fandom can’t even decide on a name for itself).

I’m sure there’s little in this guide for the Star Trek fans reading this but if you know of someone who has just arrived on our planet, this is a helpful primer.

Vox:

Today is the anniversary of noteworthy event. Exactly 100 years ago — on September 1, 1914 — the passenger pigeon was driven to extinction.

You may not have heard of this species. But there were once incomprehensibly huge numbers of these birds. When Europeans first arrived to North America, there were somewhere between three and five billion of them in existence. (In comparison, there are now around 10.8 million common pigeons on the continent today.) At the time, they were probably the most numerous bird species on the planet.

Kind of scary to think that, if we can kill off a population of this size in a short period of time, what other damage can we do to the other species on our planet?

Re/code:

Apple said it was “actively investigating” the violation of several of its iCloud accounts, in which revealing photos and videos of prominent Hollywood actresses were taken and posted all over the Web.

“We take user privacy very seriously and are actively investigating this report,” said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris.

To quote Penn Jillette, the magician: “Anyone has the right to take all the pictures they want, naked or otherwise and unless they want me to see them, I have no right to see them.”

AnandTech CEO and Editor-in Chief Anand Lal Shimpi is retiring from the tech publishing world and moving on to Apple to rejoin AnandTech colleague Brian Klug, who left for Apple earlier this year.

Anand started AnandTech when he was 14 years old. He’s now 32. That’s a long run. Tough to lose two such key players from what has long been an excellent hardware review site. Best of luck to new Editor-in-Chief, Ryan Smith.

One side note: Check out this post from June called The coming end of Anandtech? – pretty good call.

Twitter user @hackappcom posted a proof of concept, called iBrute, to GitHub on Saturday, that took advantage of an alleged hole in Find My iPhone to access AppleID accounts.

This morning, the post was amended with this line:

The end of fun, Apple have just patched

Though this article is focused on hiring developers, it applies to any technical hire, anyone who needs to be able to grasp a complex topic and become useful in that area relatively quickly.

One of my favorite pieces of advice:

Much more important than what they know is how they learn it, and how quickly. You are looking for somebody with a track record of learning new skills and applying them successfully. Talk about their career path, and look for evidence of increasing responsibility (which is related to, but not the same as, seniority). Remember that anybody you hire will expect raises every year: somebody who isn’t getting better all the time is going to become [a] worse and worse value unless their skills increase in value, too.

Terrific foundational stuff.

From MIT’s Technology Review:

Among other unsolved problems, Google has yet to drive in snow, and Urmson says safety concerns preclude testing during heavy rains. Nor has it tackled big, open parking lots or multilevel garages. The car’s video cameras detect the color of a traffic light; Urmson said his team is still working to prevent them from being blinded when the sun is directly behind a light. Despite progress handling road crews, “I could construct a construction zone that could befuddle the car,” Urmson says.

The deeper Google’s Self Driving Car team digs into the problems associated with driverless cars, the more they realize about the incredible complexity of the space. That said, I still think this tech is coming, albeit with an extremely slow rollout under extremely controlled conditions.

Follow the link. It’s simple, but a great idea. [Hat tip to iOS Dev Weekly]

Testing the Yosemite beta? You might want to read this post by Kirk McElhearn.

Like a lot of people in my profession – and 1 million testers of the public beta – I installed pre-release versions of OS X 10.10 Yosemite to get a head start on it before it ships. I did this in a virtual machine, using VWware Fusion. About ten days ago, I noticed that I wasn’t able to access iCloud documents on some of my devices. I contacted Apple’s support, who escalated this to third-tier support person, who looked into it and found that my documents were “locked” on iCloud. He had never seen this.

Anyone else experiencing this?

BBC:

An American academic is creating a searchable database of 12 million historic copyright-free images.

Kalev Leetaru has already uploaded 2.6 million pictures to Flickr, which are searchable thanks to tags that have been automatically added.

The photos and drawings are sourced from more than 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organisation.

Do not go to the linked Flickr page unless you have a lot of time on your hands. I just lost an hour of my life to it.

The Guardian:

Apple has tightened its privacy rules relating to health apps ahead of next month’s product launch, which is expected to see the unveiling of an updated iPhone and could include new wearable technology.

The technology firm has told developers that their apps, which would use Apple’s “HealthKit” platform on the forthcoming products, must not sell any personal data they gather to advertisers. The move could stave off concerns users might have around privacy as Apple seeks to move into the health data business.

This is one of the ways and reasons why Apple has a leg up on other developers. While I wouldn’t trust them implicitly, I certainly trust them to take care of my data more than any other technology company.

Wired:

When you drop $3 million on a special-edition Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse, you want everything to be perfect. That’s why, before it leaves the factory, Bugatti wraps the car more carefully than royal nurses swaddle the future King George.

Is it just me or does that engine sound awful?

My thanks to Creative Labs for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. The Sound Blaster Roar is the epitome of audio quality, features and great looks combined into one device.

Musicality, accurate timbre, tonality, with deep, tight bass within a portable Bluetooth wireless speaker shouldn’t be a pipe dream. Creative Labs boasts of defying these laws of acoustic engineering with their Sound Blaster Roar.

Through their innovative acoustic chamber design with an impressive 5-driver speaker setup consisting of 2 amplifiers and 1 built-in subwoofer, the Roar proves that it is possible to have powerful, balanced, and well-defined sound with heart-thumping bass from a device no larger than a booklet. All this, without sacrificing battery performance.

Not just a wireless speaker, the Roar also comes integrated with a whole host of useful features:

• NFC-compatible
• Supports aptX and AAC high definition codec
• microSD MP3 Player
• Voice Recorder
• Speakerphone
• Bedtime Listening Mode
• 6000 mAh Li-ion battery with 8 hour battery life also doubles as a portable battery bank

The #1 Amazon bestselling Sound Blaster Roar has received consistent 5-star reviews on Amazon since its launch. Now available, at an attractive price of $149.99 via Creative.com and Amazon.com.

Rich Tozzoli has some great advice on ways to make your acoustic guitars stand out in the mix of a song. He doesn’t just get into panning, but also talks about when to record as well. For instance, he says to record the acoustic part as soon as you’re done with the electric guitar recording. Smart piece of advice simple because you’re going to play it the same way, capturing the little nuances in the strumming.

Polygon:

After 10 minutes of working with Hale, Ernst and Pobst noticeably relax. It’s working. The new character, voiced by the veteran Hale, sounds better than they’d hoped. Stitched together after the fact with the voices recorded by the other actors, it will somehow feel perfectly in place. Even though Hale had never heard those voices, and hadn’t read the script until today.

Ernst and Pobst celebrate with pastries and warm smiles, while Hale continues to rocket through the script, laying down lines, adding life to the game that’s still being made hundreds of miles away, in a completely different state.

This is game development.

I don’t know if voice work can make or break a game but I definitely notice it and it can affect my enjoyment of the play.

An interesting piece from Om Malik on what he thinks Google could do to help the news and media industry.

As mentioned in this post, Android has split into two camps, the Open Handset Alliance version, which includes Google services baked right in, and the version for the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

The other side is the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), a far-freer version that lets device makers tinker with all manner of elements of the software. Often that means ripping out Google services, and customizing the handset to run other software and services. Google apps are still accessible, but are not central to the experience as they are in OHA Android devices.

Samsung’s Tizen is based on their own customized version of Linux and is designed to work with their Galaxy Gear line of watches. Samsung has just inked a deal with Nokia (note that this is Nokia and not Microsoft — h/t to Janne Ojaniemi) to use Nokia’s HERE maps for turn-by-turn and offline directions. Just as Apple has reduced dependence on Google by rolling their own maps, Samsung has done the same by rolling their own OS and allying with Nokia for mapping.

Whether this alliance was forged by strategy or necessity (would Google have to cooperate to get Google Maps ported to Tizen?), this is sure to splinter Android further still.

If Apple does roll out the iWatch on September 9th, it will be interesting to see how the iWatch OS interacts with iOS and whether mapping is part of the picture.

Google’s semi-secret R&D arm, Google X, just took the wraps off its drone delivery program, called Project Wing.

During this initial phase of development, Google landed on an unusual design called a tail sitter, a hybrid of a plane and a helicopter that takes off vertically, then rotates to a horizontal position for flying around. For delivery, it hovers and winches packages down to the ground. At the end of the tether, there’s a little bundle of electronics they call the “egg,” which detects that the package has hit the ground, detaches from the delivery, and is pulled back up into the body of the vehicle.

That last bit is one of two big problems with drone delivery. Even if all the bugs can be worked out in scheduling and crash avoidance, there’s still the human factor. If a drone drops the package, it could hit someone or land in an unexpected location. If the package is lowered via winch (as is done in the video below), what’s to prevent someone from grabbing the line and pulling the drone out of the sky?

My favorite comment from the YouTube page:

It’ll be like skeet shooting, with prizes!

Yup, that’s an issue, too. But I do think this is a worthwhile endeavor. At the very least, this is a solid framework for getting meds or lightweight emergency gear to a rural location. Perhaps food, a cellphone or radio to a climber trapped on a mountain, that sort of thing.

Slate:

The whale that Joe George and Velma Ronquille heard was an anomaly: His sound patterns were recognizable as those of a blue whale, but his frequency was unheard-of. It was absolutely unprecedented. So they paid attention. They kept tracking him for years, every migration season, as he made his way south from Alaska to Mexico. His path wasn’t unusual, only his song—and the fact that they never detected any other whales around him. He always seemed to be alone.

So this whale was calling out high, and he was calling out to no one—or at least, no one seemed to be answering.

What a sad and remarkable story.