In short, Apple’s focus is the product and what’s best for the consumer. This is a great article with lots of insight from Steve Jobs.

Smart move on Apple’s part. They have opened enrollment for an iBeacon version of its Made for iPad program. If you want to use the iBeacon name, you have to meet the iBeacon criteria. This insures the level of quality stays high.

And what you can see is that on the 16GB model of the Galaxy S5, half of the on-board storage is used up before the owner even turns on the phone.

That’s just awful.

As it turns out, this isn’t a native Windows Phone app — and it wasn’t made by Redfin. It was developed by Microsoft, by packaging up Redfin’s mobile website in the form of an installable app.

In fact, the existence of the Redfin app for Windows Phone was a surprise to Redfin.

So, Microsoft has gone from irrelevant to slimy and irrelevant.

The Verge:

Gravity is a major contender at the Academy Awards this year, carrying a muscular 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, for a sci-fi epic that really raised the bar. While it has stiff competition from the likes of American Hustle in terms of acting and direction, the award for Best Visual Effects (which doesn’t typically hold the same cachet) ought to be a lock.

I don’t think it’s a great movie (even though I enjoyed it immensely) but I left the theatre wanting to buy the DVD just to see how the visual effects were accomplished.

Congrats to everyone at Mariner Software—24 years deserves recognition.

As Om Malik points out, Bitcoin wasn’t the first.

So Bad So Good:

On the final night of the Chinese New Year, the locals of Yanshui District in Tainan City, Taiwan put on a firework display that likes of which you’ve never seen before.

Several thousand bottle rockets are stacked together in a beehive formation and then simultaneously ignited all at once.

Everyone likes fireworks and bottle rockets but these folks are nuts.

NYCAviation:

Airline pilots will use one of three techniques when landing in a crosswind.

While the writer is a pilot who may think these kinds of landings are “not as scary as they seem”, I can tell him that, as a passenger, they can be terrifying. Still, it’s interesting to read about them and know pilots train for them.

Successful indie artist Zoë Keating shared the details of last years income online. Kirk McElhearn walks us through the numbers. Amazing how much she makes from sales via iTunes, etc. vs how little she makes from streaming.

If you own a Mac, this is well worth reading.

My residence was recently broken into (the alarm malfunctioned on entry and only went off as the thieves left) and two Mac laptops were taken. Luckily, I have good insurance and had an up to date Time Machine backup.

Over the past week, I’ve learned some additional things I could have done to prepare for this eventuality. My house had also been broken into ten years ago.

Here’s a summary of what you should do to prepare your Macs right now for the possibility of theft. It won’t eliminate theft but it will greatly reduce the damage from such events and make it more likely that your device will return to you.

One thing that I did not know was how easy Apple has made it to encrypt your external backup drive. Here’s a link to show you how to do that.

Good stuff.

There’s much to enjoy in this profile from Robersdale, Alabama’s Baldwin Register. I think what I liked the most was the sense of incredible pride that clearly came across, pride in their hometown hero. Don’t miss the slide show at the top with pics of Tim Cook in high school.

The FireEye blog announced an iOS proof of concept that was able to run in the background and record a user’s actions:

We have created a proof-of-concept “monitoring” app on non-jailbroken iOS 7.0.x devices. This “monitoring” app can record all the user touch/press events in the background, including, touches on the screen, home button press, volume button press and TouchID press, and then this app can send all user events to any remote server, as shown in Fig.1. Potential attackers can use such information to reconstruct every character the victim inputs.

Note that the demo exploits the latest 7.0.4 version of iOS system on a non-jailbroken iPhone 5s device successfully. We have verified that the same vulnerability also exists in iOS versions 7.0.5, 7.0.6 and 6.1.x. Based on the findings, potential attackers can either use phishing to mislead the victim to install a malicious/vulnerable app or exploit another remote vulnerability of some app, and then conduct background monitoring.

They are working with Apple, so I’d expect this to get patched reasonably quickly. Good to solve these things, though I don’t see much practical danger if you avoid obvious phishing attempts and only install apps from the App Store. [Via MacRumors]

Follow the headline link for another walkthrough of the Samsung Galaxy S5. More importantly, watch the video below to see the fingerprint scanner setup and performance.

As has been widely reported, the scanner only works when you scan your finger straight down, towards the bottom of the phone, making it difficult, if not impossible to unlock the phone with one hand.

A bust of Steve Jobs by famed Serbian sculptor Dragan Radenovic was unveiled in Belgrade today, the result of a competition covering more than 10,000 submitted works that will see the statue placed at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.

The statue unveiled today is a maquette, a sculpture substantially smaller than the final version for demonstration purposes, that features Jobs’ head at the top, with a pair of Cyrillic letters, the Latin letter A, and the binary digits one and zero. According to a report in the Serbian press [Google Translate], sketches of the proposed status were sent to Apple executives, who said they were very interested in the sculpture and liked “the imperfections of his work”.

This is pretty cool.

Gestrument is a powerful tool for the professional musician but also an intuitive app for the beginner. Gestrument lets you delve into the “musical DNA” of a genre, artist or song. With full control over all musical parameters you can play and compose music with just the swipe of your finger.

Visit www.gestrument.com to see Gestrument perform music by Meshuggah, Richard Devine, Claude Debussy or see keyboard wizard Jordan Rudess from Dream Theater demo his own preset.

Apart from our artist we have videos and presets showing how to play for instance Dubstep, Cool Jazz, String Quartet and Indian Raga – all with just the swipe of your finger.

Gestrument is developed by contemporary classical composer Jesper Nordin and software developer Jonatan Liljedahl – Kymatica (the developer behind AudioShare, Sector, AUFX, NordBeat, BitWiz and many more iOS music apps).

If you have any questions at all, read this article on Macworld. Dan Moren, Dan Miller and Serenity Caldwell did a great job answering common questions.

Fantastic article by Daniel Eran Dilger.

The Atlantic:

I want to tell you about the controversy the Bell System’s embrace of numeracy provoked—how resentful some people became when their familiar method of making phone calls was taken from them. I want to tell you about why the change was necessary, and how it still informs our conception of phone calls and text messages. I want to tell you about the future of the phone number.

Interesting article if only for the tidbit about why New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit got their respective area codes.

We shouldn’t really be surprised with any of this, but how are we supposed to move forward when things like this are in place?

Steve Kovach got some time with the S5.

Netflix has agreed to pay one of the largest broadband providers in the United States Comcast Corp for faster speeds, throwing open the possibility that more content companies will have to shell out for better service.

This seems to set a bad precedent. Maybe I don’t see the bigger picture, but I’m uneasy about this going forward.

ReSound LiNX offers a superior sound experience, setting new standards for hearing aid performance.

This Made for iPhone hearing aid provides direct sound streaming, personalized to your every need.

Mic Wright:

The reasons I make these comparisons between me – a writer-turned-CEO who is hoping to upgrade his pot to piss in – and Zuckerberg – one of the visionary founders of his generation – is to ask this question: why do so many pundits presume that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know what he’s doing? This is a guy who persuaded a group of some of the Valley’s most respected investors to back him, a guy who managed to navigate law suits and scaling issues to build a company that is now one of the big four tech companies beside Google, Apple and Microsoft.

This is exactly what pisses me off when people talk about Apple. Analysts and pundits always think they know better than Tim Cook. If that’s true, why aren’t they running a billion dollar company? The answer is simple—they aren’t qualified.

An ebook for iPad and OS X, designed to help you learn CSS transitions and animations through interactive examples.

This is a kickstarter project by Vicki Murley, who spent more than 10 years at Apple working on the Safari web browser and as the Safari Technologies Evangelist.