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, 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.

It’s a free download.

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.

Coda 2.5 is essentially complete. But, we’re still encountering sandboxing challenges. So, in the interest of finally getting Coda 2.5 out the door and in the hands of you, our very eager and patient customers, we’ve decided it’s time to move on—for now.

In short: Coda 2.5 will not be sandboxed, and therefore will not be available in the Mac App Store.

It’s unfortunate, but the folks at Panic aren’t the only ones running into these issues.

Logic Pro X 10.0.7 was updated with a monster list of changes and improvements.

WSJ:

As more third-party sellers have signed up to offer products through Amazon and use its order-fulfillment services, the Seattle-based giant has allowed many to pool their inventory with supposedly identical items supplied by other sellers—in essence commingling products from third-party merchants with those supplied directly to Amazon by the brands themselves.

In other words, a product ordered from a third-party seller may not have originated from that particular seller. If the bar code matches, any one that is on the shelf will do.

The implication here is that you might order a brand name product and receive a knockoff instead. I can’t imagine that Amazon isn’t working on a fix for this.

MacRumors:

Tim Cook’s second CharityBuzz auction, for a one hour lunch meeting with Cook at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, ended today at $330,001. Bids for this year’s auction were quite a bit more reserved than the coffee charity meeting Cook auctioned last year, which brought in $610,000.

The money earned from the auction will benefit the RFK Center for Justice & Human Rights, a charity that aims to achieve “a just and peaceful world by partnering with human rights leaders, teaching social justice and advancing corporate responsibility.”

The winner of the auction will be able to meet with Tim Cook for approximately one hour at Apple’s Cupertino campus, on a “mutually agreed upon date.” The cost of the meal is included, but travel to Cupertino must be paid by the auction winner.

Obviously, this is about the charity, but lunch with Tim Cook at Apple HQ is something I’d treasure for a lifetime.

Samsung Electronics Co. officially apologized and promised compensation Wednesday over the sufferings and deaths of its semiconductor workers from illnesses that family members claim are work-related.

“Several workers at our production facilities suffered from leukemia and other incurable diseases, which also lead to some deaths,” said Kwon Oh-hyun, the CEO of the electronics giant.

“We should have settled the issue earlier, and we are deeply heartbroken that we failed to do so and express our deep apology,” Kwon said. He added that Samsung will now make efforts to settle the issue in a sincere manner.

Wow.

This is a pretty astonishing trick. From the original paper:

This is accomplished using a novel combination of binary compatibility techniques including two new mechanisms: compile-time code adaptation, and diplomatic functions. Compile-time code adaptation enables existing unmodified foreign source code to be reused in the domestic kernel, reducing implementation effort required to support multiple binary interfaces for executing domestic and foreign applications.

Diplomatic functions leverage per-thread personas, and allow foreign applications to use domestic libraries to access proprietary software and hardware interfaces. We have built a Cider prototype, and demonstrate that it imposes modest performance overhead and runs unmodified iOS and Android applications together on a Google Nexus tablet running the latest version of Android.

Some thoughts on this. First, since the binaries are not converted into Android binaries, there’s a level of interpretation going on. Meaning, at run time decisions are being made to call a different set of functions than the normal functions. This adds overhead, which means the whole experience is slower than a true native app. From the brief glimpse the students have given into the project (a project description, rather than a look at the code), it’s hard to say how efficient this process can get.

This is a proof-of-concept and not a true working solution. There’s no support for things like GPS, camera, phone, etc. Those critical elements might prove impossible to support.

There are the political questions. Will Apple allow such a thing to exist in the wild? Is there a legal path that lets them stop this technology? If this technology did emerge in a useful way, would this help expand the reach of iOS or provide Android with a mechanism to hinder the sale of iOS devices – Why buy an iOS device when you can buy an Android device and run both OSes?

Finally, I have to wonder if Apple has a skunkworks project somewhere that is trying to run Android on an iPad. Now that would be a nightmare to maintain.

TidBITS:

If you already have an Apple TV, I see no reason to rush out and buy a Fire TV, unless you want easier access to Amazon content. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from having both a Fire TV and an Apple TV, if they’re within your budget and you have enough TV/receiver inputs.

In the end, I think the most important thing to realize about the Fire TV, and something that most reviews have missed, is that the Fire TV is merely Amazon’s opening salvo.

Good comparison between the two devices and, more importantly, services.

Sometimes we think too much in terms of how our tech gadgets are designed and not enough about how everything is designed. Om Malik has a few for us to look at.

Castro can now automatically play the next episode in your timeline. You can change the sort order of the timeline and have complete control over whether episodes will be streamed over cellular data or not.

Castro uses a new pitch shift algorithm which makes podcasts sound incredibly good when played at fast or slow speeds. No other podcast app sounds this good.

Nice app.