Co.Design:

Something between a black MIDI glissando and a brown note, the THX “Deep Note” is one of the world’s most recognizable audio logos, signaling the highest quality audio standard in films. Yet despite its distinctive crescendo, the THX Deep Note wasn’t actually composed so much as it was programmed, which makes it a fascinating success story of early computer audio design.

I remember the first time I heard that sound. It gave me chills.

Learn all about the author of Ready Player One, a book published less than two years ago that has catapulted the author to stratospheric heights.

Ernest Cline was planning to drive his tricked-out DeLorean to Austin for a talk about his upcoming novel Armada, but Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin called him up and asked for it. Cline said he could borrow the car for as long as he wanted to, but asked for a dragon egg in return. Martin obliged.

You might also know him as the writer of the very awesome Fanboys. Fun, fun read.

Listastic for iOS is hands down the easiest way to create, manage and share lists of any kind!

Striking the right balance between function and simplicity, Listastic makes it a breeze to prioritize and collaborate on important ideas or tasks without the typical complexity.

Easily share a grocery list with your significant other, tasks with a team of colleagues or even gift ideas with friends & family.

Now available for iPad & iPhone, Listastic is free to download, and only $1.99 to ditch the ads and enable some great additional features!

A big thanks to readers of the Loop for checking out Listastic, available now on the App Store!.

Oh they’re coming. Slowly but surely, street lights are going to be replaced by smart LED equivalents. Massive replacement projects are underway in Los Angeles, Paris, Copenhagen and now in Miami. The technology has a relatively large upfront cost, but pays for itself quickly as the yearly power cost to drive LED lighting is significantly less than the cost of running what it replaces.

> Each networked light will serve a dual purpose for the utility, he said — first, to remotely control lighting, detect outages and diagnose what parts are needed to replace them, and second, to extend and strengthen the wireless mesh network they connect to. > > “To them, a street light is just another sensor on the network,” he said. FPL manages about 500,000 streetlights across its service territory, and they run on the same grid infrastructure that powers homes and businesses, making them useful sources of data pertaining to outages and restorations. > > Beyond that, “the lighting serves as a perfect canopy to strengthen the network,” he said. That’s an important consideration for a mesh-based wireless topology, in which each node in the system serves as a link to every other node as they move data from endpoints to the collectors that connect to utility control centers. FPL has been using its Silver Spring network to connect distribution automation systems, detect outages and analyze data streams for grid health insight, and is looking at specific network improvements to come as part of its addition of 75,000 street light nodes, Hughes said. If you are looking for business automation systems, why not visit the NetBrain Technologies homepage to learn more.

To get a sense of this, consider buying an LED floodlight bulb to replace an incandescent bulb in your house. One such bulb, by Philips, uses 10.5W and replaces a 65W bulb. The upfront cost is about $20. The bulb it replaces is about $2-$3. The LED bulb is said to last 20 years. So there is a cost saving there. But the power savings are better for the environment and save you even more money. No surprise that municipalities are trying to find ways to make this happen on a grand scale.

As of today, once an app is installed it will “look” for beacons even if your app is shut down or you’ve rebooted your phone.

We tested the functionality today to verify the new feature.

After opening an iBeacon app we hard closed it: not just putting it into the background tray but swiping it closed entirely. The phone still detected beacons and sent a message through the lock screen, something which in the past was reserved for apps that were at minimum running in the background tray.

The functionality even works if you reboot your device: after you power down your phone and start it up again, it will continue listening for beacons even if you don’t open up the app again.

The only concerns I’ve heard are battery impact and the ability to disable the notifications if they became an annoyance.

Given that this is Bluetooth LE, battery life should not be an issue. And you should be able to use Settings > Notification Center to tell a well behaved app to leave you be. [Via MacStories]

From Rafael’s Forbes bio:

On September 19, 2013, the Board of Directors of Autodesk, Inc. elected Betsy Rafael to the Board. Ms. Rafael, age 52, has over 30 years of executive financial experience in the technology industry. Ms. Rafael served as Principal Accounting Officer of Apple Inc. from January 2008 to October 2012, and as its Vice President and Corporate Controller from August 2007 until October 2012. From April 2002 to September 2006, Ms. Rafael served as Vice President, Corporate Controller and Principal Accounting Officer of Cisco Systems, Inc., and held the position of Vice President, Corporate Finance for Cisco Systems from September 2006 to August 2007.

Solid credentials.

Nested folders — or folders-within-folders — were a long-standing bug that Apple conveniently ignored for some time. It was a fantastic hidden feature that I’ve personally become dependent on. Having a perfectly clean home screen with a single folder used to house all my different app categories was a dream come true, but reality has now smacked me in the face.

Hold on now. If this is a bug, why complain if it gets fixed?

Thoughtful piece from the Wall Street Journal.

How are we supposed to level the playing field for girls and women if we discourage the very traits that get them there?

Social scientists have long studied how language affects society, and they find that even subtle messages can have a big impact on girls’ goals and aspirations. Calling a girl “bossy” not only undermines her ability to see herself as a leader, but it also influences how others treat her. According to data collected by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, parents of seventh-graders place more importance on leadership for their sons than for their daughters. Other studies have determined that teachers interact with and call on boys more frequently and allow them to shout out answers more than girls.

It’s no surprise that by middle school, girls are less interested in leading than boys are. Sixth- and seventh-grade girls rate being popular and well-liked as more important than being perceived as competent or independent, while boys are more likely to rate competence and independence as more important, according to a report by the American Association of University Women. A 2008 survey by the Girl Scouts of nearly 4,000 boys and girls found that girls between the ages of 8 and 17 avoid leadership roles for fear that they will be labeled “bossy” or disliked by their peers.

Ben Thompson makes the case that the Digital Hub is a moving target, starting with the TV, then moving to the iPhone, then, possibly the iWatch, presuming such a thing exists.

The post is thought provoking, absolutely worth reading, though I do disagree with a premise here or there. For example:

My question last week – How Much Will CarPlay Cost – was not an idle one. Most readers – and I include myself in this group – presume that CarPlay is, as I wrote, “a strategy that is based more on propping up the iPhone than on building a separate revenue stream.”

Time will tell, of course, but I think this is not about propping up the iPhone at all. This is about extending the reach of iOS and Apple’s ecosystem. As the reach of the internet becomes continuous rather than a choppy collection of discrete elements, the iPhone might not be needed at all. The center of Apple’s star network is the cloud, not the iPhone. That’s my 2 cents.

Good read, nonetheless. [Via The Rajam Report]

Fantastic interview.

The Apple headquarters you’ve designed for Cupertino, California, will have 12,000 employees in one building.

You could compare that with a typical university of the same size. Traditionally, you’re probably talking at least 16 or 17 buildings. The Apple building will occupy the site much more tightly than what was there. It was the former Hewlett-Packard site, and, just in the last month, we demolished all the buildings that were there. It was a large number of them. [The new Apple construction will cover 13 percent of the site, while the two dozen former HP buildings, in total, covered much more, according to Foster’s office.]

So what made the form of a ring the logical choice for this building?

It’s interesting how it evolved. First of all, there was a smaller site. Then, as the project developed, and the Hewlett-Packard site became available, the scale of the project changed.

Meanwhile, the reference point for Steve [Jobs] was always the large space on the Stanford campus—the Main Quad—which Steve knew intimately. Also, he would reminisce about the time when he was young, and California was still the fruit bowl of the United States. It was still orchards.

We did a continuous series of base planning studies. One idea which came out of it is that you can get high density by building around the perimeter of a site, as in the squares of London. And in the case of a London square, you create a mini-park in the center. So a series of organic segments in the early studies started to form enclosures, all of which were in turn related to the scale of the Stanford campus. These studies finally morphed into a circular building that would enclose the private space in the middle—essentially a park that would replicate the original California landscape, and parts of it would also recapture the orchards of the past. The car would visually be banished, and tarmac would be replaced by greenery, and car parks by jogging and bicycle trails.

Remember, the main building caters to 12,000 people, but the wellness center—the fitness center—is probably responding to the needs of the entire Apple community in Silicon Valley, which is 20,000-something. Also, another building on the site is the presentation center, which will allow Apple to do the kind of things like product launches that otherwise would require space in San Francisco or wherever. And, a bit like the airport, where you have one building—although it is in itself quite large—it is essentially compact.

Just cannot wait until this campus is complete.

It’s a race against time, and the Tomnod web site is pulling together a crowdsourcing effort to help comb through high resolution satellite imagery to find clues to the location of Malaysia Flight 370. The missing Boeing 777 was last seen on March 8th off the southern coast of Vietnam, near the Gulf of Thailand.

Follow the headline link to join the search effort. You can read about the missing flight here.

This might seem a small detail, but I find it fascinating that Comcast customers do not have to go through Netflix to be able to buy access to the excellent House of Cards series that Netflix brought to life.

The cable giant struck a pact with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, giving Comcast rights to sell the Emmy-winning first season of “House of Cards” through the recently launched Xfinity Store service. Netflix currently owns exclusive streaming rights to the Media Rights Capital-produced series, while Sony handles international and homevideo distribution.

This is getting complicated. The lines that distinguish streaming and home video are getting blurred. Interesting stuff.

Mac consultant Adam Rosen talks you through his approach when a client complains about a slow Mac. His list:

• Free up more disk space
• Rebuild the Disk Directory and clear caches
• Remove unnecessary startup items and internet plug-ins
• Install more RAM and manage memory better

If I had to pick one of these, I’d start by adding more RAM. But all of these are excellent suggestions. Read the article for the details.

According to the Statista chart based on data from Edison’s annual radio report, Pandora has a 31 percent share of the music streaming market. This is based on active listeners (tuning in more than once a month) rather than paid listeners, which represents a far smaller group. It is difficult to directly compare Pandora to iTunes because of the different business models: iTunes Radio offers unlimited free listening on all devices, but users can avoid ads by signing up for iTunes Match. Apple has not released any recent reports on the number of active listeners since it announced it had acquired 11 million shortly after the service went live.

Pandora’s percentage would suggest that iTunes Radio and iHeart Radio (third and second place, respectively) have around 20-21 million listeners. While users can hop between services freely (and at least one report has suggested that 92 percent of iTunes Radio listeners also find time for Pandora), that figure would suggest that iTunes Radio is growing at the fastest rate of the top three services, and is likely to overtake iHeartRadio in the next quarter or two — particularly if iTunes Radio expands to more countries (it added Australia last month, and plans to add Canada, the UK and New Zealand in the foreseeable future).

This spells trouble for Spotify, which is already an international service and well-regarded for its $10 per month “millions of songs on demand” streaming option. Nevertheless, it was rated at six percent share, followed by Google Play All Access at three percent. Rhapsody, Slacker and TuneIn Radio all took only two percent share.

First things first, I find this incredibly impressive. Remember, iTunes radio just launched last September. It does have favored nation status (an automatic place in the iTunes infrastructure), but still, well earned.

I also wonder what it is that keeps Pandora so solidly locked in first place. Is it great branding/marketing? The value of being first to market? I wonder what this list will look like in another year.

This is just such a sad story.

In January 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, having succumbed to a digital revolution in photography that it had helped to start. But the company’s managers still hoped to escape from bankruptcy and have another shot at greatness by selling part of a portfolio of patents that experts valued as high as US $4.5 billion.

Eleven months later, those roughly 1700 patents (together with 655 patent applications) sold for just $94 million—less than the licensing fees Kodak had collected in its worst-ever year in recent history. What’s more, the company licensed its remaining 20 000 patents to a dozen leading technology companies for only $433 million, severely restricting future earnings from them.

Without its anticipated multibillion-dollar payoff, the company was forced to hand over its iconic photographic film and paper businesses, as well as potentially lucrative new technologies like digital printing kiosks, to a spin-off owned by its U.K. pension fund. In September 2013, Kodak finally limped out of bankruptcy, a shadow of its former self. The following month, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services assigned the slimmed-down Kodak a B– for corporate credit—a junk-grade rating.

Kodak is a great brand. Hate to see them go down like this.

Lots of little fixes that will make life on an iPhone 4 better. In addition to all the items covered in the linked article, I also found Bluetooth syncing to be much more solid on our test phone. For example, with iOS 7.0.x, the music app in a Bluetooth connection stuttered frequently. With iOS 7.1, things are noticeably better.

From The New York Times:

Ryan Orbuch, 16 years old, rolled a suitcase to the front door of his family’s house in Boulder, Colo., on a Friday morning a year ago. He was headed for the bus stop, then the airport, then Texas.

“I’m going,” he told his mother. “You can’t stop me.”

Stacey Stern, his mother, wondered if he was right. “I briefly thought: Do I have him arrested at the gate?”

But the truth was, she felt conflicted. Should she stop her son from going on his first business trip?

Ryan was headed to South by Southwest Interactive, the technology conference in Austin. There, he planned to talk up an app that he and a friend had built. Called Finish, it aimed to help people stop procrastinating, and was just off its high in the No. 1 spot in the productivity category in the Apple App store. Ryan was also eager to go because, as he put it: “There were really dope people, and I really like smart-people density.”

A great read.

It’s been a slow and steady fall for Windows, for as far back as NetMarketshare has been collecting this data. And for the Mac, the reverse is true. Mac market share was 4.58% back in February 2009 and has steadily climbed to its current share of 8.16%.

Re/code:

Apple on Monday released iOS 7.1, its first major update to the software that powers the iPhone and iPad since it released iOS 7 last year.

The new update, a free 280-megabyte download, adds some new options for Siri, improved fingerprint sensing with Touch ID and aims to fix an irksome bug that caused some users to have their iPhones spontaneously reboot during use.

As always, make sure you have a recent backup before applying the update.

From the New Yorker:

King Digital Entertainment, best known as the makers of Candy Crush, recently filed for a widely publicized IPO.

In its I.P.O. filing, King claims that a “unique and differentiated model” for developing games will enable it to create new hits, and plenty of analysts believe that King has cracked the code of hooking consumers. But that’s unlikely. The world of pop culture contains many more one-hit wonders than hit factories. After all, luck plays a huge role (is there really a good explanation for the hula-hoop frenzy of the fifties?), and, more fundamentally, serial innovation is just tough: studies suggest that most new products fail. In the gaming industry, success has always been highly unpredictable. Parker Brothers, according to a history of the company, found that there was no secret formula: products that tested well often flopped in the marketplace, while “an in-house flop could become the hit of the industry.” It says something that King, which has been making games for a decade, had profits of just $7.8 million in 2012. The company didn’t make eighty times more in 2013 because it had cracked a code; it just caught lightning in a bottle.

Are they a one hit wonder? Interesting article.

It’s a great show. Note that there’s the slightest whiff of a spoiler in the article, so if you are a purist, leave this one be.

The Pono Player has been making noise in the audiophile space for a few years now. Neil Young has campaigned against audio compression and the Pono Player is his vision of what the music listening experience might be.

I love listening to music and I, like most people I imagine, have settled for compressed music as a standard. I hope this succeeds. I’m curious, but I’m also skeptical. Young is using Kickstarter as his funding vehicle. I think he’s going to need much more than that if he’s going to achieve any kind of market penetration.

You can read the press release on the Computer Audiophile forum. Worth reading the comments there, too, to see how that community is reacting to this.

From Symantec:

Darwinism is partly based on the ability for change that increases an individual’s ability to compete and survive. Malware authors are not much different and need to adapt to survive in changing technological landscapes and marketplaces. In a previous blog, we highlighted a free Android remote administration tool (RAT) known as AndroRAT (Android.Dandro) and what was believed to be the first ever malware APK binder. Since then, we have seen imitations and evolutions of such threats in the threat landscape. One such threat that is making waves in underground forums is called Dendroid (Android.Dendoroid), which is also a word meaning something is tree-like or has a branching structure.

Dendroid is a HTTP RAT that is marketed as being transparent to the user and firmware interface, having a sophisticated PHP panel, and an application APK binder package. The APK binder used by Dendroid just so happens to share some links to the author of the original AndroRAT APK binder.

Think about this. The Android malware universe is becoming as sophisticated as, say, the credit card resale black market. This creature is evolving. That’s scary.

China has a real problem on its hands. On a bad day in Beijing, visibility can be measured in tens of yards.

China declared a “war on pollution” this week, and is now fortifying its arsenal with a new weapon: smog-clearing drones. The drones work by shooting chemicals into the air, freezing pollutants and making them fall to the ground, according to state media. The unmanned vehicles currently carry about 176 pounds of haze-scrubbing chemicals, while future versions will hold more than 1,500 pounds.

I’m all for cleaning the air, but this approach seems naive to me. Even if it works, when the pollutants hit the ground, won’t they be scattered, by shuffling feet, bicycles and cars, back into the air again, this time in a layer lower to the ground and denser with hazardous materials?

That said, they’ve got to do something, and maybe this will lead to better long term solutions.

Interesting find.

In 1995, Apple was looking at the world ahead and released a promotional video to educators laying out its vision for how students would be learning one day. It’s been 19 years since this video was produced and some of its predictions have become everyday realities. Here’s what Apple got right about the future, even if they weren’t the company to bring the changes about in some cases.

Watch the video, then read the article.

This is a trademark filing, not a patent. True Tone is the dual LED flash on the back side of the iPhone 5s. One LED is amber, one white. From Apple’s web site:

The new True Tone flash gives the iSight camera capabilities that are the first for any smartphone. It’s made up of two LEDs, one white and one amber. But they don’t simply fire in tandem. When you take a picture with the flash enabled, the iSight camera uses software algorithms to assess the color temperature of the scene. That allows iPhone 5s to determine just the right percentage and intensity of white light versus amber light you need — using over 1000 unique combinations. The result is a beautiful shot with more true-to-life colors. Not too cool. Not too warm. Better highlights. More natural-looking skin tones. And the same goes for the iSight videos you record.

With all the new tech associated with the release of the iPhone 5s and 5c, I somehow missed this. I definitely see the difference in my pictures, though. I love the tone I get when shooting with my 5s.

I have high hopes for this series. This is TV I want my kids to watch.

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is both ambitious and quaint. It attempts to convey humanity’s most expansive ideas in the space of a weekly 44-minute TV series. That’s ambitious. The show is also unabashed in its commitment to truth—it matter-of-factly presents what we know about the universe, what we’re pretty sure about, and what we don’t know yet. Cosmos doesn’t hedge: You won’t hear the narrator, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, neuter any of his statements with a gratuitous “some people believe…” counterpoint. He states the truth as a broad scientific consensus understands it today. In a media environment where truth has to compete with a “balance” designed to prevent hurt feelings, Cosmos’ straightforward tack is quaint—laudably so.

[Via The Rajam Report]