io9:

Add this to the list of things we never knew existed but now desperately need: The Evolution Door, a “flip-panel” invention by Austrian designer Klemens Torggler.

We’ve all opened a thousand doors but I bet you’ve never opened a door like this.

Many thanks to BiteMyApple.co for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Online retailer BiteMyApple.co has an impressive lineup of more than 60 successful Kickstarter products currently on sale. The retail site offers a wide range of accessories for the iPad, iPhone and other Apple devices.

Vine is now a year old, give or take a few weeks. I’ve never posted a Vine video, and I generally ignore them. But the linked post had me laughing.

Vine collected their best and funniest posts since inception and posted them. Hard to pick a favorite, but if I had to, it’d be the one I embedded below. Click the little speaker in the upper-left corner to turn on sound and let it play its way back to the beginning. Heh.

UPDATE: Deleted the embedded vine video code. It was generating errors for some folks. Follow the headline link. My favorite is the very first one.

I love the Olympics.

There are new high-tech, customized, composite fabrics, precisely engineered bobsled bodies and runners, low-energy impact absorbing helmets, and snowless virtual ski trainers.

It’s amazing to me the subtle advances in technology, all designed to shave a millisecond off an athletes time in an event.

This bill was introduced by George Gascón, San Francisco’s district attorney. Gascón, long a fan of Apple and iPhone, has been pushing for antitheft legislation since last year’s introduction of Find My iPhone and activation lock.

The legislation is being opposed by CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association), the wireless trade association.

Senator Leno’s legislation will almost certainly face resistance from CTIA, the industry trade group that represents the cellphone carriers like AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile US. Last year, CTIA said in a filing to the Federal Communications Commission that “a kill switch isn’t the answer.”

CTIA said that a kill switch would pose risks, because hackers who took control of the feature could disable phones for customers, including the phones used by officials in the Department of Defense and in law enforcement.

Has this ever happened, even once? I think this is a baseless argument.

The group also argues that if a phone were deactivated and the owner later retrieved it, the owner could not reactivate it. But in the case of Apple’s new antitheft feature, Activation Lock, a customer can disable a phone that has been lost as well as reactivate it with the correct user name and password after the device has been found.

I think the CTIA objects to the potential cost and is masking their argument. If it’s cost, say that, and work out a path to solving that problem. This bill is good for consumers and, I believe, has been shown to lower phone theft rates.

I really enjoyed Tim’s interview. What I took from the interview is that Apple still cares about the things it always cared about: Design, building great products, and being the best. I’m glad to see that hasn’t changed. Here are a couple of points I picked out:

There will be new categories and we’re working on some great stuff. We’re not ready to talk about it. We’re really working on some really great stuff. I think no one reasonable would say they’re not a new category.

That seems like a warning that some analysts might consider the new products as being in an existing product category. If that’s the case, I have to think Apple would innovate that existing category similar to what it did with the iPod, iPad and iPhone.

We’re still spending an enormous amount on really great talent and people on the Macs of the future.

That’s great to hear. iPad is an amazing product, but not everyone is ready to make that jump yet.

But what we’re not going to do is we’re not going to make junk. We’re not going to put Apple’s brand on something someone else designed.

This is key for Apple. They aren’t worried about throwing out as many products as they can into the market, but rather, making the best products and releasing them when they are ready.

Some good tips from Peter Cohen.

If you are a fan of app design, spend a few minutes going through this dissection of the interface niceties of Facebook Paper. Some beautiful design going on here. Yum. [Via iosdevweekly]

As the video below shows, there’s a bug in iOS 7.0.4 that allows anyone with access to your iPhone to disable Find My iPhone. Obviously, this disables the ability to track your iPhone if it is stolen.

According to the linked article, looks like Apple has a fix in the works for the next release of iOS. Bugs like this show the importance of keeping up with the latest iOS release.

PetaPixel:

In 50 seconds and one uninterrupted flowing video shot, UK directing duo US and advertising agency Grey pay tribute to six completely unique, culturally iconic images by expertly recreating one after the other.

If that sentence made no sense, it’s because it’s hard to describe what you’re about to see.

Rodin, Forest Gump, Mad Men, Michelangelo, Reservoir Dogs and Daft Punk all in one shot. Make sure you watch the behind the scenes video.

The New York Times has a “firehose” of live stream photos from the Sochi 2014 Olympics. It’s cool to watch but lacks context.

Ever come across an M3U file when downloading music? From the M3U Wikipedia page:

M3U is a computer file format that stores multimedia playlists. It is supported by many applications, including media players such as Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp, Audacious, foobar2000, Totem, JuK and VLC media player on Windows PC’s and Astro Player, N7Player, Cubed on Android OS devices. M3U’s can also point a media player to an online streaming audio source.

Follow the headline link and learn what’s in an M3U file, how to play it in iTunes, and how to get the songs referenced by the M3U file onto your Mac. Good stuff.

Ed Bott uses corporate quarterly reports to build pie charts that show where each company gets its revenue.

The best way to understand the differences between these three publicly traded companies is to look at the detailed reports each is required to file every quarter. I did this two years ago, but since then the landscape has shifted. Google tried to diversify into hardware with its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, and Microsoft announced that its goal was to focus on “devices and services.”

How much have the three companies changed in the past two years? For the answer, I looked at the sources of revenue each one reported in their quarterly reports for the second half of 2013. Here’s the breakdown, using the segments that each company uses to define how its business is organized.

Follow the headline link for three quite easy to read pie charts that lay everything out. Google is accelerating its non-advertising revenue:

Two years ago, Google was a one-trick pony, with its revenues coming almost entirely from advertising. According to its 2011 annual report, “Advertising revenues made up 97 percent of our revenues in 2009 and 96 percent of our revenues in 2010 and 2011.” That picture changed slightly with Google’s attempt to move into hardware manufacturing via its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, as you can see in this chart. But the pending sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo will shift things back to nearly the way they were. The “Other” category, which includes digital content and non-Motorola hardware products, is still a tiny fraction of the company’s revenues. After the Lenovo transaction closes, Google’s advertising revenues will go back to being more than 90 percent of its total.

Most of the world uses an embedded chip, pin based credit card system. The US does not. That is going to change next year.

The Wall Street Journal interviewed MasterCard’s Carolyn Balfany to discuss the particulars.

Interesting reading. Of particular note, on the question of why the rest of world went one way and the US another:

There’s a historical view to this. In the past, other markets migrated for two reasons. First, there were higher fraud rates in some other markets, and they wanted to make this move to combat fraud. Second, this system can operate in offline mode – the card and the terminal can authorize a transaction independent of communication with the bank’s systems. In some other markets they struggled with robust telephony networks, so this offline capacity was attractive.

Both those factors were not driving factors here in America. Fraud was more prominent in some other markets, but what has happened since then is that as other markets migrated to EMV and became more secure, fraudsters migrated their activity to markets with less security. We saw fraudsters move over to the US market – they are looking for the path of least resistance.

There were also some more specific challenges to US migration to the new system. Because the US is one of the largest and most complex markets, the business cases for the costs had to be established. And there were requirements of the Durbin amendment, mandating all us debit transactions are able to go across at least two networks, which took some time for the industry to sort out.

A few weeks ago, we posted about an iPhone doing everything in a 1991 Radio Shack ad.

Follow the headline link for a follow up, “How much would it have cost to have built an iPhone in 1991?”

In 1991, a gigabyte of hard disk storage cost around $10,000, perhaps a touch less. (Today, it costs around four cents ($0.04).) Back in 1991, a gigabyte of flash memory, which is what the iPhone uses, would have cost something like $45,000, or more. (Today, it’s around 55 cents ($0.55).)

The mid-level iPhone 5S has 32 GB of flash memory. Thirty-two GB, multiplied by $45,000, equals $1.44 million.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Fascinating analysis.

Jobs and McKenna had dinner and talked about what the future of Apple could look like, and McKenna signed on. Eventually McKenna drafted an eight-page marketing plan in December 1976. Lo and behold, what was written under “Distribution Channels”? Apple stores.

With the latest purchases, Mr. Cook said Apple had bought back more than $40 billion of its shares over the past 12 months, which Mr. Cook said was a record for any company over a similar span.

“It means that we are betting on Apple. It means that we are really confident on what we are doing and what we plan to do,” said Mr. Cook, speaking in a conference room at the company’s corporate headquarters here. “We’re not just saying that. We’re showing that with our actions.”

The story also notes that Apple purchased 21 companies in the last 15 months. As usual, Apple is being very strategic with every move it makes.

Salon:

I don’t remember any of what I’m about to tell you.

I died, in a way, and was reborn, with the same physical form, but not the same mind. I still to this day sit around with my family and listen to stories about the other Su.

Fascinating and terrifying story.

Great article by James Galbraith, the director of Macworld’s Lab, on what actually helps speed up your Mac and what doesn’t.

I find it interesting to see the workflow and how people start a new project. Cameron Moll shares his thoughts on starting new design projects.

Interesting look into how Jared Sinclair designed his new RSS reader for iPhone, Unread.

You had me at enhanced autocorrect. Huzzah!

As described, the method would afford a smartphone user the opportunity to write a message, press send, then review any autocorrected words before the message is actually transmitted. Compared to current techniques, which only allow users the chance to change autocorrected words prior to hitting send, the system gives a type of second chance if activated.

Gmail on my Mac has an Undo extension that delays all email sends for a configurable number of seconds. I’ve been using this for years. Wonder if the Apple patent precedes Google Undo or if there is some functional difference in the Apple patent that I’m missing (which is likely the case).

That said, enhanced autocorrect and automatic language selection for me, please.

The International Olympic Committee confirmed today that Olympic athletes are free to use any device they wish during the Opening Ceremonies, including iPhones. They are also not required to cover any logos on their devices.

Samsung must be pissed.

I am in awe of designers that can produce work like this. I think the Leica one is my favorite.

This was a series of interviews Robert Cringely did with Steve back in 1995, when Steve was still CEO of NeXT and Pixar. The video is free if you are a member of Amazon Prime. The quality was solid and the interview questions thoughtful. Worth watching.

This is just puzzling. The store sells no merchandise. It seems to exist purely to harvest contact information. It’s a bit of a ghost town. Is Samsung going anywhere with this concept?

[Via BGR]