Apple released an updated version of their App Store review guidelines in preparation for the release of iOS 8. Whoever wrote the prose for these guidelines deserves a pat on the back. They are clear and written for humans. For example, here are the main bullet points:

• We have lots of kids downloading lots of Apps. Parental controls work great to protect kids, but you have to do your part too. So know that we’re keeping an eye out for the kids.
• We have over a million Apps in the App Store. If your App doesn’t do something useful, unique or provide some form of lasting entertainment, or if your app is plain creepy, it may not be accepted.
• If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you’re trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.
• We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.
• If your App is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.
• If you attempt to cheat the system (for example, by trying to trick the review process, steal data from users, copy another developer’s work, or manipulate the ratings) your Apps will be removed from the store and you will be expelled from the developer program.
• This is a living document, and new Apps presenting new questions may result in new rules at any time. Perhaps your App will trigger this.

If your app is creepy (see “I’ll know it when I see it“), no need to apply.

Brings to mind this quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt [h/t Kyre Lahtinen]:

“Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

There are a number of sections added to the guidelines, including those for Extensions, HomeKit, HealthKit, and TestFlight.

Thinking about getting into the HealthKit business? Be sure to read that section completely, as well as the referenced sections of the iOS Developer Program License Agreement (by the way, Apple, that link is broken). I think it’s a matter of time before the App Store collides with HIPAA, Title II of which concerns itself with “maintaining the privacy and security of individually identifiable health information as well as outlining numerous offenses relating to health care and sets civil and criminal penalties for violations”.

Great explanation of lossless compression from Kirk McElhearn:

“Imagine that you have a text file with, say, the complete works of William Shakespeare. This text file contains 908,774 words, and takes up 5.6 MB on disk. If I compress the file using OS X’s built-in Zip compression, the same file takes up just over 2 MB, or about 36 percent of the original file size.

“Lossless compression for audio works in a similar way. Unlike, say, AAC or MP3 files—where psychoacoustic models are used to determine which parts of the audio can be removed without affecting what you hear—lossless compression formats simply compress all of the data in a file. When played back, these files are decompressed on the fly, so the compressed data becomes audio data again, in a bit-perfect equivalent to the original. Nothing is lost, just as none of Shakespeare’s words are lost when I decompress the zipped file.”

There’s value to storing your music files in a lossless format. Considering it? Read the article.

This is a postmortem, lessons learned from a sequence of attempts to build a promo video for a specific iPhone app. Some terrific insight into the process. My favorite:

I used a chroma keyed hand that I found on YouTube rather than filming my own.

BoingBoing:

Twitter opened its analytics platform to every user on August 27, allowing all of us — not just verified users and those with advertising accounts — to track how many people viewed and acted upon our tweets. But the “Followers” section, revealing demographics, provoked the most discussion. Alongside breakdowns in followers’ interests and location is a gender bar that splits followers into male and female.

How can Twitter offer this information when it doesn’t ask for you to indicate a gender when you sign up for an account?

My Twitter account is 86% male and 14% female. But how does Twitter deal with the (not insignificant) percentage of folks who don’t fall under traditional genera roles?

I spent an hour on Sunday speaking with Matt Dusenbury and Chris Domico about Web publishing and a few other topics.

Whereas the prior album “Apocalyptic Love” was recorded live with virtually no overdubs, “World on Fire” is a layered slab of Marshall riffs, acoustic and electric 12-strings and even a rare slide performance. On songs like the title track, “Stone Blind” and “Too Far Gone,” Slash brings down the hammer with huge guitar riffs while on “Bent to Fly” and “Battleground” he picks clean guitars over the most haunting melodies Kennedy has ever sung.

I love that Slash is willing to try anything to make a great song. He is a phenomenal guitar player, but he’s also an incredible songwriter.

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.