The company has recently been demonstrating versions of the handset to developers in San Francisco and Seattle. It intends to announce the device in June and ship to stores around the end of September, the newspaper cited the unidentified sources as saying.

This will throw a wrench into the smartphone market. There’s a lot of things we don’t know, like the hardware and which version of Android (I assume) it will use. I have a feeling it will be a low-priced phone, which will put more pressure on other Android handset makers than it will Apple.

I love this app. I’ve been using the beta for maybe a week and it’s solid, although features are still being added.

Be well Android people and make your way to an Apple store.

The Robservatory:

I use a lot of cloud services for file storage, primarily Dropbox, but also Box and (begrudgingly, for certain shared projects) Google Drive.

I also use iCloud, but not in any way that would be considered a true cloud file storage service. I use it strictly as a sync service for contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, Safari; I also use Back to My Mac.

But that’s it; I don’t use iCloud for cloud-based file management at all. Why not? Because iCloud in its current implementation is chock full of the stupid, at least for those of us who still use and rely on OS X.

When people say, “Apple doesn’t get Web Services”, this is a prime example of it.

Fast Company:

Steve Matteson has designed some of the most ubiquitous typefaces in the world, and engineered the original core fonts for Microsoft, adapting Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier, which you’ve probably used for term papers or resumes or anything else you wrote in Word. He has also created some less-classic designs that he’s not too proud of, such as “Curlz,” which falls in the Comic Sans camp of typefaces reserved for high school yearbooks, princess-themed birthday party invitations, and mockery.

But that is the plight of a professional font designer: One day you get to make lasting letter sets, the next you have to pay the bills. “Sometimes you have to do work that you’re not really proud of,” Matteson told Fast Company. “That’s why we call it work instead of play.”

I know literally nothing about fonts – I couldn’t point out Geneva if you put a gun to my head – but the process is endlessly fascinating to me.

Read the linked comic, then take a read of the How it works post from a few days ago. The XKCD comic is basically showing a series of GET requests and what happens when the requested data size doesn’t match the actual data size.

Asking a user for permission to send them push notifications or to access their private data can be a little bit of a minefield.

For many apps, not getting access to a phone’s sensors or data can change the entire user experience. For example, if an app depends on where the user is standing, declining access to location could render the app useless. More subtly, if push notifications play a critical role in getting your user to form a habit of using your app, declined access could lead to you losing them forever.

Making it all worse is that when a user taps “Don’t Allow”, there is no easy way for them to reverse that decision.

If you are interested in user interface/experience, this is some good food for thought. [Via iOS Dev Weekly]

A nasty surprise when the Amazon Web Services send you an email to update your credit card info to handle the charges.

This week we learned, thanks to a February 2012 internal Samsung document marked “top secret” and unearthed by Apple as part of its ongoing patent infringement proceedings, that we were right and those more credulous news outlets were wrong.

When Strategy Analytics was telling the world that Samsung sold 2 million Galaxy Tabs in six weeks, the truth was that it took Samsung all of 2011 to sell half that many.

Lying, cheating, bastards.

An interesting article by Peter Cohen on whether OS X should get more of a flat design. It makes sense to me.

This is one of my favorite apps of all time.

Next Tuesday, April 15th at 6am PDT, we’re opening up some spots in the Glass Explorer Program. Any adult in the US* can become an Explorer by visiting our site and purchasing Glass for $1500 + tax – and it now comes with your favorite shade or frame, thanks to feedback from our current Explorers. The number of spots available is limited, so mark your calendar if you want to get in.

Don’t do it.

“Apple takes security very seriously. IOS and OS X never incorporated the vulnerable software and key Web-based services were not affected,” an Apple spokesperson told Re/code.

Great news.

Amazon.com today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire comiXology, the company that revolutionized the digital comics reading experience with their immersive Guided View technology and makes discovering, buying, and reading comic books and graphic novels easier and more fun than ever before.

Nautilus:

The light that a city emits is like its glowing fingerprint. From the orderly grid of Manhattan, to the sprawling, snaking streets of Milan, to the bright contrast of Kuwait’s ring-roads, each city leaves its own pattern of tiny glowing dots. See if you can ID these cities based on the way they shine.

I got 13 out of 16 right but I definitely guessed on at least three of them.

The Fender Passport EVENT with Bluetooth® connectivity is a self-contained portable audio system that includes everything you need for great sound anywhere you go. Carry your Passport as you would a suitcase, and simply flip open the cabinet release latches when you’re ready to set it up. Inside you’ll discover two full-range speaker cabinets, a powered mixer, a microphone and all the cables you’ll need to get started.

Fender also announced a new Passport Venue.

This guy is an asshole.

[Via BGR]

Slash’s solo albums have been great. I can’t wait to hear the new release.

I really like the tone of Engl amps. I’ll be getting these amp and cabinet models.

I just loved this essay about banning “feigned surprise”, a pretty common response in the programming universe.

“Feigned surprise” (when someone gasps and says something like: “you don’t even know about monads?”) is a method of belittling someone and lording your superiority over them.

As a writer, I try to assume that anything that might be puzzling to me might be puzzling to the reader. A piece of information that I find interesting and, at least at some point in the recent past, was new to me, might be new and interesting to the reader. That new information is a gift to me, one that I absolutely love to share with the reader. Feigned surprise is the enemy of that gift.

Here’s a link to hacker school, mentioned in the linked essay, in case you are interested.

Follow the link to the site, then type in your favorite URL. The site will attempt to send the malformed Heartbeat request to your URL and report on what comes back.

For example, if you enter amazon.com, it will come back and say “All good, amazon.com seems fixed or unaffected!”

I tested a number of sites and found some that were straight-out susceptible and others that responded with messages such as “timeout” or “broken pipe”. To see what these mean, read the FAQ.

Big thanks to Filippo Valsorda for creating the test.

I never thought I’d say this about an ad in the newspaper, but this is cool.

“Greg has been planning to retire later this year after nearly 20 years at Apple,” said a company spokesman. “He has made vital contributions to Apple products across the board, and built a world-class human interface team which has worked closely with Jony for many years.”

The design shakeup at Apple will result in Christie soon leaving the company, with all software designers now working directly under Ive with the rest of his industrial design team instead of within Federighi’s engineering group. Sources say that Christie’s upcoming departure is significant and stems from a falling out with Ive.

Greg Christie is an important figure at Apple and will certainly be a loss for the company, but it makes a lot of sense for all design teams to report to Jony Ive. The news would be much worse if it was Ive leaving.

Soon, you will have to download Facebook’s messaging app in order to chat with people using the service.

Minimal Sudoku is an easy to use, clutter-free classic sudoku game which is designed for iOS 7. It’s ad-free and offers different levels for everybody from casual gamers to addicted masters of sudoku.

I like minimal things. You can also purchase higher levels if you wish through an in-app purchase.

Big day for Dropbox. Mailbox for iOS and Mac:

Mailbox for Mac has been another labor of love for our team. It’s the product of painstaking iteration (over, and over, and over) to build the lightest, fastest, most delightful desktop mail client ever. You can watch a demo of the app during the Dropbox keynote (available on the Dropbox blog later today), and sign up to get early access here. We’ve still got quite a bit of work to do, but we’ll be adding people to the beta as quickly as we can.

Carousel:

We’d like you to meet Carousel: a gallery for all the photos and videos from your life. It combines the photos in your Dropbox with the photos on your phone, and automatically backs up new ones as you take them. Carousel sorts all these memories by event so you can easily travel back in time to any photo from any date. And unlike other mobile galleries, the size of your Carousel isn’t constrained by the space on your phone, which means you can finally have your entire life’s memories in one place.