Pixelmator is one of the apps that I use every day and have for years. It’s very powerful, but yet approachable, allowing new users to instantly manipulate their images. There is no better image editor.

CNBC:

Apple CEO Tim Cook has issued a statement about a new book about the tech giant called, “Haunted Empire,” saying it is “nonsense” and fails to capture Apple or former CEO and Co-Founder Steve Jobs.

Very interesting that Cook released a statement like this.

Minimally Minimal:

The only thing people seem to love to talk about more than Apple’s success are their failures. The iPod Hi-Fi is considered one of the classic Apple failures. Apple discontinued it just a year after its launch and it received universally lukewarm reviews. I’ve always had a crush on it though. It’s a beautiful piece of hardware and I’ve always loved the idea of having a speaker that pairs perfectly with my iPod.

This is one of those products I wish I could sit down with Ive over a beer and ask, “What were you thinking!?”

Tom Conrad has been with Pandora since almost day one. Sad to see him go.

Here’s his email to the team:

Team,

In May of 2004 I met [Pandora founder] Tim for breakfast at a diner in Potrero Hill. I was there to learn about his company Savage Beast and consider the opportunity to join the team of 10 or so he’d assembled. While perhaps I had reservations about the business (music kiosks for book stores!), I knew at once that I wanted to throw my lot in with Tim. Fast forward 10 years and it has truly been the adventure of a lifetime.

The story of Pandora has had many chapters and through most of the twists and turns, I was solely focused on how I could help get the company to the next stage. Rarely did I stop to think about a world where I didn’t make my contribution to the next chapter. I confess though that maybe 18 months ago, I started to think about what I’d need to do to hand over the pen so others could author chapters after my eventual departure.

Then [Pandora’s former CEO] Joe’s decision to leave pushed all of those thoughts to the side. My focus for the last twelve months has been to ensure that the company landed confidently in the hands of an exceptional new leader. We’ve found that leader in [Pandora’s new CEO] Brian. As I look at the revitalized executive leadership team he has put in place, consider the great leaders on my own team, and contemplate the exciting roadmap we’ve set for the future, I’ve decided that all the pieces are in place to allow me to step aside and let others write the next chapters.

So today we’ve announced that in three months I’ll be transitioning to an adviser role.

We’ve also announced that, effective today, [former Pandora VP of Engineering] Chris Martin has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer and will join the executive leadership team representing our engineering efforts. We are also promoting [former Pandora VP of Technical Operations] Steve Ginsberg to Chief Information Officer today and he and his team will now report to [Pandora CFO] Mike Herring. I’m as proud of all the senior leaders on my team — Chris, Steve, [Pandora VP of Design] Tony and [Pandora VP of Product Management] Mike — as I am about anything I’ve ever accomplished here. These promotions are one reflection of that, and they are richly deserved. If there are successes from the last 10 years you credit to me, they’d almost surely more fairly be credited to Chris, Steve, Tony and Mike.

The company is also announcing today that we’re opening a search for a Chief Product Officer who will report to Brian. I’ll be staying on full time for the next three months and then in July, after a bit of a vacation, I’ll transition to a part time role advising the company and offering support as Brian sees fit. A big part of my role in the coming months will be to help the company find a CPO that we’re all really excited about.

Through all these years perhaps the most gratifying thing has been how the whole company has evolved. From the scrappy group that wrote those first lines of code to the dynamic and talented assemblage we have today, through it all we’ve benefitted from a group of men and woman that are without question the most talented, intelligent, thoughtful and hardworking team I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. I’ll miss working with you terribly but I am incredibly confident in the trajectory the company is on, the leadership that Brian and the executive leadership team will bring, and Chris, Steve, Tony and Mike’s ability to do my job better than I ever did.

For those that have been on this journey for a while thanks for the memories and for all I’ve learned from you. Sorry for the moments when you had to suffer while I figured out what I had yet to learn. For those that are newer to the team, I wish nothing more than for you to come away from your years at Pandora as marked and improved as I have.

Take care of Pandora for me. I’ll think about you everyday.

Tom

Best of luck, Tom! [Hat tip to Matt Abras]

Jim Dalrymple and Dan Benjamin talk about Jim’s visit to Austin for SXSW and his interviews at the iTunes Music Festival, buying and listening to albums vs. songs, the new iPads, the 8GB iPhone 5c, Steve Jobs and Apple making televisions, iOS 7.1, CarPlay availability, and more.

Sign outside a Dublin barbershop. I just could not not link to this.

Here’s bit rot in a nutshell:

At The Guardian’s 2013 Activate conference in London, the computer scientist and Internet founder Vint Cerf, when asked about the future of libraries in the digital age, expressed concern. “I am really worried right now about the possibility of saving bits but losing their meaning and ending up with bit rot,” he said. “You have a bag of bits that you saved for a thousand years, but you don’t know what they mean because the software that was needed to interpret them is no longer available or it’s no longer executable … This is a serious, serious problem, and we have to solve that.” He noted that even now, people are producing huge volumes of digital data—spreadsheets, photos, UK betting sites not on GamStop, ephemeral apps—that may outlast the context that gives them meaning.

There are legacy image formats that are no longer supported. Over time, the ability to import those formats will disappear from current software. This same is true for legacy text editing formats.

Just as we search for ways to preserve our ancient video and photographic images, it’s critical that we work out a mechanism for preserving our digital archives. Interesting article.

Marco Arment is a co-founder of Tumblr and the creator of Instapaper. This is a bit of a rant, but there’s logic at the core of Marco’s argument.

Maybe the reason Prime economics have become tricky is because Amazon bundled in a video service nobody wants since 2011, leveraging one business’ extreme success to juice the numbers of one that’s faring poorly against its competitors. Netflix charges $95.88 per year for a similar service. How much of Prime’s price hike was really to help pay for the video service that’s just a tax on Prime members who have never used it and don’t want it?

This is a classic business problem. How do you distinguish a product that is a drag on revenue from a product that has yet to blossom?

Ever consider subscribing to Office 365? Here’s how Microsoft handles things when you let your subscription lapse. Interesting.

Facebook is working on improving face verification software, an alternative to fingerprints for verifying someone’s identity. There are ways to get around both fingerprint scanners and facial recognition systems, using dummy fingers created from lifted fingerprints, or realistic masks created from photographs of someone’s face.

The linked article gets into Facebook’s efforts and their goal to recognize faces as well as you do.

This article, Behind the mask of biometric security, gets into the details of fooling such systems. Don’t miss the video on this one.

This is the story of how Google artist Jennifer Hom went about creating the Google Doodle for St Patricks Day. Good research, but even better artwork. Lovely stuff.

From Ars Technica:

This morning Apple made a couple of new additions to its iOS lineup, where “new” in this case means “old stuff that is nevertheless better than what it is replacing.” It has finally removed the iPad 2 from its lineup and replaced it with 2012’s fourth-generation iPad. For its second tour of duty, the 16GB iPad 4 will set you back $399 for a 16GB Wi-Fi version or $529 for a cellular version, $100 less than the equivalent iPad Air models and equal to the 16GB Retina iPad mini. There’s also a new 8GB model of the iPhone 5C, which as of this writing is only available in certain territories.

Diary of a Mad Man:

My close personal friend, Jim Darlymple, was down in Austin, Texas this past week attending the SXSW iTunes Music Festival. He apparently had a great time.

Except for that time when that guy stole his guitar. I watched the video, fully expecting to see Jim beat the guy to death with his own arm.

The Verge:

The software maker has been inviting members of the media to a special cloud- and mobile-focused event in San Francisco on March 27th. Nadella is expected to discuss Microsoft’s “mobile first, cloud first” strategy, and there will be some major news ahead of the company’s Build conference in early April. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the event will mark the introduction of Office for iPad.

Do you care?

The Push:

A class of apps, christened “ambient apps” by the blogosphere, are endowing mild-mannered smartphone users with what might have passed for superpowers a few years ago. They work by keeping your smartphone’s mic, GPS and even its camera listening, watching and seeking out every signal coming from your surroundings.

In many ways, ambient apps are a logical step in the evolutionary process of mobile devices. For some, however, they press too hard against our personal space, intrude upon our most precious moments and deliver marketers far more about ourselves than we care to divulge.

Some of these apps are really cool, like Flightradar24, but some are disturbing – yet seemingly inevitable.

Yahoo made an incredible investment when it paid $1 billion for 40% of Alibaba Group back in 2005. Times have changed and now Alibaba is the bigger fish. Last year, a subset of Alibaba’s properties, two web portals, together did more business than eBay and Amazon combined.

As of today Yahoo owns about a 24 percent stake of Alibaba, a portion that could be worth as much as $37 billion, according to an average of analyst’s estimates compiled by Bloomberg News. Yahoo will experience its windfall as a mixture of cash and continued equity. Because of agreements between the two companies, Yahoo has to get rid of a significant portion of its holdings the minute Alibaba goes public, selling those shares at the initial price and missing out on the first-day market bump.

Kenneth Goldman, Yahoo’s chief financial officer, recently told investors that Yahoo would likely sell 10 percent of Alibaba and hold on to 14 percent. Such a sale would mean $15.4 billion in cash, added to the $5 billion in cash that Yahoo had as of the end of last year.

This wouldn’t be the first time Yahoo has bolstered its coffers by selling off a portion of Alibaba. Yahoo made $4.6 billion in 2012 by selling shares back to Alibaba itself, valuing the company at a fraction of what it would be today. “Forgive me for using hindsight here, but clearly I wish we hadn’t done that,” said Goldman at a conference earlier this month.

A great investment.

Rene Ritchie presents his take on the latest iOS release.

As I’ve been telling folks, if you own an iPhone 4, this is a must have upgrade:

I installed it iOS 7.1 on my circa January 2011 white GSM iPhone 4 and performance does indeed seem to be markedly improved. Where before it would stutter and stammer and otherwise force me to practice my deep breathing and dude-abiding skills, now it’s noticeably better. It’s not iPhone 5 fast, of course — that old Apple A4 chipset, it ain’t what it used to be — but it’s at least acceptable now.

If you have an iPhone 4, you’ll want iOS 7.1.

Another critical point:

iOS 7.1 fixes that. According to Apple, Touch ID now has improved fingerprint recognition. So, while things like moisture can still throw off the sensor, the record itself should now work the way it’s supposed to for everyone and all of the time.

Touch ID worked well enough for me in iOS 7 but it’s worked flawlessly for over a month with iOS 7.1 (including the betas). What’s more, if you had problems, it should just start working better. Better still, if you have to or want to reset or redo your Touch ID fingerprint registration, Apple has also moved the Touch ID — and Passcode — Settings out of the General basement and onto the top level, making them easier to access.

I couldn’t agree more. I did not do anything special (no re-registering of fingers, no nothing). As soon as I installed iOS 7.1, Touch ID became flawless.

I’ve found something unique and worthwhile in every 7.1 review. This one is no different. Well worth the read.

If you don’t have the Apple Store app on your phone and iPad, they are worth getting. Don’t forget to pick up your free music.

Cardiologist George Diamond had an idea for a piece of software that could help diagnose coronary disease. The Apple II was brand new and, in 1977, represented a huge leap in the accessibility of computing power. This is the story of how Dr. Diamond pitched his idea directly to Steve Jobs and Apple.

“With the Apple II I wrote a reasonably sophisticated program that analyzed multiple diagnostic tests using Bayes’ theorem for the diagnosis of coronary disease. Now I thought it was really great and should be marketed, but it needed to be expanded with people who really knew something more about programming than I did. So I picked up the telephone and called Apple in Cupertino. I told the secretary that I wanted to speak with somebody about a medical application for the Apple II computer. The secretary connected me directly to Steve Jobs. (Of course I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t even recognize the name as being one of the people who had actually invented the thing.)

“He listened to me for a couple of minutes on the phone. I said I’d love to come up and talk with him about my idea. He said sure, any time, just pick a date. and so I did, and I got on a flight to Cupertino.

Follow the headline link to read the rest. Pretty interesting anecdote.

From Billboard:

“This rate is a clear defeat for songwriters,” Sony/ATV Music CEO Martin Bandier says. “This rate is woefully inadequate and further emphasizes the need for reform in the rate court proceedings. Songwriters can’t live in a world where streaming services only pay 1.85% of their revenue. This is a loss, and not something we can live with.”

Also:

Instead of giving ASCAP, the American Society of Composers and the rate increases it asked for the last three years, the court went with the rate Pandora has been paying for the last few years. In a statement, ASCAP noted that while the Judge Cote did not fully adopt the escalating rate structure that ASCAP sought, she also rejected Pandora’s argument that it should get the 1.7% rate that the Radio Music Licensing Committee has negotiated for terrestrial radio’s digital webcasts.

In the past, when music came from the radio or in some physical form, radio represented exposure and revenue came from the sale of records, CDs, etc. In a modern streaming universe, radio and records have been replaced by streaming and DRM-protected music services. Being able to create music directly and get it on iTunes without a major-label in the middle is a real boon to music creators.

The real question is, do the streaming services provide the same level of service to the creators than the radio stations they are replacing. For this entire ecosystem to work, there needs to be balance. At the very foundation, the talent needs to make enough money to be able to afford to continue to make music. A knotty problem.

The iPhone and iPad are revolutionizing medical care in so many ways. There are the obvious benefits of being able to remotely access patient histories (though somewhat constrained by HIPA laws) and diagnostic databases. But more importantly, the devices themselves are being modded, added to, to turn a smart phone into a much more sophisticated piece of medical equipment.

Anyone with glaucoma, or glaucoma in their family, is familiar with the process of having high resolution images taken of the back of their eye to detect changes in the eye’s fluid pressure. The device that takes that picture costs thousands of dollars, at a minimum. Now that has changed.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed two inexpensive adapters that enable a smartphone to capture high-quality images of the front and back of the eye. The adapters make it easy for anyone with minimal training to take a picture of the eye and share it securely with other health practitioners or store it in the patient’s electronic record.

The researchers see this technology as an opportunity to increase access to eye-care services as well as to improve the ability to advise on patient care remotely.

This is a fantastic development. [Via 9To5Mac]

The original interview is behind a paywall, but the entire interview was also carried by Time Magazine (follow the headline link for that version).

Lots has been made of this interview by various Apple blogging sites. I found this comment by CultOfMac’s Leander Kahney, who wrote the recent Jony Ive book, the most telling:

It claims to be the first in-depth interview Ive has given in twenty years at Apple, but breaks absolutely no ground whatsoever. Irritatingly, I can see the fingerprints of my Jony Ive biography all over the piece, but there’s no mention of the book.

The strangest thing is that Ive recycles the same quotes he’s used in the past. Believe me, I’ve read them all. He says that Steve Jobs’ ideas sometimes sucked the air from the room (previously uttered in his tribute to Jobs) and that he wanted to be a car designer, but other students made weird “vroom vroom” noises while they worked (from an Observer interview). There’s absolutely nothing new in the entire piece including the obligatory hint of an amazing new product, which of course, he can’t talk about.

Fair points. This interview is relatively short and no substitute for a book length exploration of someone’s life. That said, I read Kahney’s book and was not put off by this interview at all. I thought the interview felt fresh, was well written, and was a fun read.

On to the interview itself. On love of craft:

A love of making is something he shared with Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive who died three years ago. It helped the two men forge the most creative partnership modern capitalism has seen. In less than two decades, they transformed Apple from a near-bankrupt also-ran into the most valuable corporation on the planet, worth more than $665 billion.

“Steve and I spent months and months working on a part of a product that, often, nobody would ever see, nor realize was there,” Ive grins. Apple is notorious for making the insides of its machines look as good as the outside. “It didn’t make any difference functionally. We did it because we cared, because when you realize how well you can make something, falling short, whether seen or not, feels like failure.”

On pricing and reuse:

Critics complain about the built-in obsolescence of Apple products, its hermetically sealed operating systems, the need to buy new chargers for new products and the prices it charges. Oh, the prices! $20 for a plastic charger that probably costs less than $2 to make! Chargers and iOS are matters for Apple’s software fellas and the firm’s new boss, Tim Cook. When it comes to obsolescence, Ive himself concedes he is carrying the fifth version of a phone that was only invented in 2007, with, yes, a new charger. But, he says: “One of the things that is distinct about our products is that they get reused and passed on.” What do you do with your old iPhones? “Erm. Actually, they’re not mine. They’re the company’s.” What does the company do with them? “We reuse stuff and then we’ll disassemble stuff and recycle stuff. iI understand what’s behind the question, but I think it’s a fundamental — and good — part of the human condition to try to make things better. That’s the role we’re playing.”

On where he works:

His first few years were frustrating. Back then, Apple’s products were dull. Remember the Newton? Thought not. Design didn’t matter much. He almost quit several times. But when Steve Jobs, who had been ousted in 1985, returned to try to save the firm in 1996, he spotted Ive’s talent and the two men set out on their maniacal journey to remake what they saw as the bland, lazy world around them. Or at least the bits of it they thought they could change. Unlike other electronics giants that make everything from computers to cameras to fridges, Apple makes and has only ever made three things: computers, entertainment devices and phones.

Ive works in a design studio in a building on one corner of Apple’s campus at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, the firm’s address. It looks like all the other dull, un-Apple-like glass and beige — yes, beige — concrete blocks. With one really big difference. The glass is opaque and no-one other than Ive, his core team and top Apple executives is allowed in. “The reason is, it’s the one place you can go and see everything we’re working on — all the designs, all the prototypes,” Ive says.

His team, from Britain, America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, “is really much smaller than you’d think — about 15. Most of us have worked together for 15 to 20 years.” That’s useful. “We can be bitterly critical of our work. The personal issues of ego have long since faded.” The large open-plan studio is, like most of Ive’s personal Apple products, all-white. A large wooden bench, like the Genius Bars in Apple Stores, is devoted to new products. At one end are a lot of CNCS — high-tech machines that are used to make prototypes. “Everyone I work with shares the same love of and respect for making,” he says.

On working with Steve Jobs:

Was Jobs as tough as people say? Stories abound of him humiliating underlings and even — perhaps especially — top executives. “So much has been written about Steve, and I don’t recognize my friend in much of it. Yes, he had a surgically precise opinion. Yes, it could sting. Yes, he constantly questioned. ‘Is this good enough? Is this right?’ but he was so clever. His ideas were bold and magnificent. They could suck the air from the room. And when the ideas didn’t come, he decided to believe we would eventually make something great. And, oh, the joy of getting there!”

There’s much more to the interview, as well as an embedded video that looks to have been put together by Time as an add-on to the interview.

I love a good buried treasure story. This one does not disappoint.

Sports Illustrated:

220,000 square feet of exhibition space filled to the gills with Ugly Stiks and Mr. Crappies, and an 18,000-seat arena will host the nightly weigh-in for the 44th annual Bassmaster Classic, the self-described Super Bowl of Fishing – though to the 200,000 angling enthusiasts passing through here in cardboard hats in the shape of bass and weapons of bass destruction T‑shirts, the Classic is a vast improvement on the Super Bowl.

I’m not a fisherman but it was fascinating to live in The South and see how big and important bass fishing was. I knew guys with thousands of dollars in gear and $30K+ custom painted bass boats.