Yesterday Samsung announced that they’d be kicking off a “revolutionary” campaign that would involve them “taking over signage, wayfinding, website, and every digital screen” at Heathrow’s incredibly busy Terminal 5 and “rebranding” it as “Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5”. iMore has since been informed that Samsung’s “take over” is actually a far more reasonable, more standard form of advertising.
Samsung lied? Shocking.
Kyre Lahtinen takes you on a video tour through text expansion, a feature that’s been around OS X and iOS for quite some time, yet still seems to be a big unknown for a lot of people.
Remember that discussion about the hidden (for some) /Users folder that came with the release of OS X 10.9.3? Well, turns out the issue was really with Thursday’s coinciding release of iTunes 11.2.
Check your Mac for an update this morning. The update (to iTunes 11.2.1) restored my /Users folder to its former glorious visibility.
From Apple’s iTunes 11.2.1 support page:
Available for: Mac OS X v10.6.8 or later
Impact: A local user can compromise other local user accounts
Description: Upon each reboot, the permissions for the /Users and /Users/Shared directories would be set to world-writable, allowing modification of these directories. This issue was addressed with improved permission handling. For information on the general content of iTunes 11.2.1, see http://support.apple.com/kb/TS5434.
The text “A local user can compromise other local user accounts” struck me as interesting and at the core of why this change was made in the first place.
“Apple and Google have agreed to dismiss all the current lawsuits that exist directly between the two companies,” the companies said in a joint statement. “Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform. The agreement does not include a cross license.”
Josh Centers found some interesting differences between Beats and its competitors.
My thanks to Betterment for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.
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Samsung is taking over Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and turning it into a giant advertisement. Apple, on the other hand, talks about its customer satisfaction and design—the iPhone sells itself.
I just love the Massey Plug-ins. If you talk to any pro in the business, they will tell you how good they are. I’ve used them for years, but today I got the full versions.
It’s easy to go to someone’s sites and portfolio to get a sense of what they’re about. Product Managers still appear to be stuck in the “Let me tell you how awesome I am” rut, though. This is a generalization, of course, but what I’m mostly seeing right now is resumes that excel at vagueness.
I’ve seen many of those types of resumes over the years. It makes you sit back and say, “what does that even mean?”
An unpublished story flagged last week during our editing process led to an internal investigation that uncovered other examples in about 50 published stories, and our investigation is ongoing.
I guess it happens everywhere, I just don’t expect it from CNN.
My next vehicle will definitely have CarPlay.
It’s amazing the difference in sound the Neve 1073 Preamp plug-in makes.
Nice article from Tim Truby.
This is part of the risk of moving everything into the cloud. If your app/data is installed on a hard drive and your computer fails, you can replace the hardware, restore from backup, get back up and running. If the cloud fails or the company goes under, you lose access to your work.
From the EFF report, Protecting Your Data From Government Requests:
Apple earned credit in all 6 categories in this year’s Who Has Your Back report. Apple’s rating is particularly striking because it had lagged behind industry competitors in prior years, earning just one star in 2011, 2012, and 2013. Apple shows remarkable improvement in its commitments to transparency and privacy.
Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter, among others, also got the same rating as Apple.
[Via 9to5mac]
There has been a lot of misinformation in the blogosphere about the implications of yesterday’s vote. The linked post made the most sense to me, did a good job of laying things out.
When Apple released OS X 10.9.3, many users found that the /Users folder was hidden. In my case, when I click on Dave's Computer in the Finder sidebar, then click on Macintosh HD, I don’t see the usual Users folder at the top level of my hard drive. The folder is there, it’s just hidden.
This is not a big deal for most people, and not everyone’s /Users folder is hidden. If yours is, and you need access to it, open a Finder window and select Go To Folder… from the Go menu. When the dialog appears, type /Users and click the Go button. The /Users folder will become visible, albeit temporarily.
For a more permanent solution, control-click on the /Users folder and select Make Alias from the contextual menu that appears. Though the /Users folder will become hidden again when you close your Finder window, the alias will stick around.
Not sure why Apple made this change, and why some people are seeing it and not others. Whatever the reason and whatever the ultimate resolution, this is an easy thing to deal with and, I suspect, will be resolved in the next release.
UPDATE: Twitter user Jan suggested using this bit of code (which you’d enter using Terminal) to permanently change the /Users folder’s hidden status:
sudo chflags nohidden /Users
Good tip, but personally, I’d advise waiting to give Apple a chance to resolve this in their own way before going under the hood yourself.
[Hat tip to Kirk McElhearn for pointing this out]
When Apple released OS X 10.9.3, they also released a new version of iTunes, iTunes 11.2. In the linked article, Kirk McElhearn walks you through some significant podcast management changes that came with the release.
In this piece, I’d like to share some of the keyboard shortcuts and related functionality that I use every day on the Mac.
It’s amazing how many shortcuts I use everyday and don’t even think about.
All kinds of changes.
The ad, called Intelligent Details, is really nice. At the end they show a behind-the-scenes of how it was shot and put together.
It’s a free download.
I love this song.
Sensible words from Ben Brooks. Not being a good photographer myself, I take pictures with my iPhone and I’m happy that I had it with me.
This isn’t good for Avid—Bobby Lombardi in particular is a huge loss.
CNBC:
The popular mobile app, which was pulled from app stores in February, will return in August, Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen told CNBC on Wednesday. The game will include multi-player capabilities and be less addictive, Nguyen said.
I found this entire episode incredibly bizarre and emblematic of the evolution of the App Store from a garage mentality to what it has become today.
Are you a Mac power-user? Do you use Terminal? Even a little? If so, read the linked article. Good stuff.
If you haven’t seen this video that explains Graphene, take a look.
The linked article is about the brewing patent battle. Very interesting.
When the top European court ruled that users have a right to be forgotten by search engines, they opened the door to a disruptive wave of possibilities.
“It’s just such a mind-bogglingly impossible decision,” said Fred Cate, distinguished professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. “Courts aren’t responsible for the practical implications of rulings but this really staggers the imagination.”
And:
“They’d have to hire an army of compliance officers,” said Justin Brookman, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Project on Consumer Privacy. That may make it difficult for companies to “scalably compete online,” he said.
Also:
At the company’s annual shareholder meeting today, Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said the ruling “went too far.” He added that the EU court “didn’t consider adequately the impact on free expression, which is absolutely a human right.”
I can’t imagine Google, et al, won’t challenge this ruling.
I don’t normally post this sort of thing, but this video is remarkable. A child was riding a tricycle in his driveway when a dog viciously attacked. Enter the cat to save the day. Wow.