This is a great idea.

[Via iOS Dev Weekly]

App developers are faced with a difficult choice when it comes to pricing their apps. In the linked article, Dan Counsell explores the three main revenue models available on the App Store, paid, paymium, and freemium.

If you have any interest in the mechanics of the iOS app marketplace, this is definitely a worthwhile read.

From sunrise in Melbourne to nightfall in Los Angeles, they documented people doing amazing things with Apple products. They shot over 70 hours of footage — all with the iPhone 5s. Then it was edited and scored with an original soundtrack. Thanks to the power of the Mac and the innovations it has inspired, an effort that normally takes months was accomplished in a matter of days.

This is a great story and video.

I think this is a brilliant move. For some students, taking a foreign language in school is important. It broadens the mind, exposes people to a culture wider than that in which they were raised. I’ve got no problem with the requirement.

On the flip side, many schools force you to make a choice. You have a limit to the number of elective courses you may take and there are times when a student must choose between taking an elective course like computer programming and a required language class.

For kids who feel the calling, being able to take a computer science course in high school will change their lives. Well done Kentucky.

Scott Knaster worked for Apple back in the early days, even before the Macintosh. Here’s a blog post showing Scott finding his name on the posters Apple created containing every single employee’s name. The posters are organized chronologically and Scott’s name is on the very first poster.

That alone is cool. But Scott turned out to play a very important role in Apple and Mac history. Scott had recorded a video of Steve Jobs’ original unveiling of the Mac. You’ve no doubt seen the video. It shows Steve pulling the Mac out of the case and the Mac speaking for the first time.

The linked post tells the story of how that video came to be and how Scott rescued it from obscurity.

Right away, people were interested in seeing the video. I recorded the video over the air in 1984 from a public TV station that rebroadcast the event. Then it sat on a shelf for awhile – OK, for 20 years – until it apparently became something rare.

Great and important story.

io9:

The 2014 Campbellian Anthology – a DRM-free ebook featuring the work of over 100 authors eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in science fiction and fantasy – is currently available for download. 860,000 words of fiction. For free (for now). Go grab it.

Available as a Mobi file for Amazon Kindle and Kindle Readers apps and as an Epub file for iPad, Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader, and most other e-reader devices and apps.

BuzzFeed:

I have no idea how I exist as an adult human who consumes food and didn’t know most of these, and yet here I am. No shame about not knowing these.

As a city kid, I’ve rarely seen fruits and vegetables in their natural state. Some of these are really fascinating. Bored Panda has a bunch more.

Boing Boing:

Long have I heard tell of the Cockney Rhyming Slang ATM of Hackney Road, but na’er had I chanced upon it…until today! As soon as I stuck my debit card in the machine in front of the Co-Op Grocers in Hackney Road and was asked to make a language-selection between “English” and “Cockney,” I knew I’d found it at last.

We have Chinese language ATM’s here in Vancouver but this is so much cooler.

Many thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

If you run Windows on your Mac with Boot Camp, check out Winclone and Boot Runner. Winclone is an easy and reliable way to make an image of your Boot Camp partition so that you can quickly restore, migrate, and mass deploy Windows in Boot Camp. Boot Runner provides a powerful way for both users and administrators to switch between OS X and Windows on dual boot Macs.

When you get a new Mac or have issues with your Windows installation in Boot Camp, reinstalling Windows is time consuming and difficult. Winclone makes it easy to make a complete clone of the Boot Camp partition, and restore it back to the exact same state on your existing or new Mac. Winclone supports migration of Boot Camp partitions over the network, moving your Boot Camp partition to an external drive and making it bootable, and much more. It also works great for mass deployment so deploying Boot Camp is as easy as deploying a package to a group of Macs.

If you manage lots of dual boot Macs, Boot Runner provides a great way to manage the OS selection. People can decide which OS to use by selecting OS X or Windows prior to logging in. Network administrators can fully customize and manage the selection screen, and can even remotely select the OS through network policy. Boot Runner also includes a scheduling feature to make sure that the Mac is booted into Windows during your maintenance window. Check out the intro video to learn more.

Winclone and Boot Runner are available for purchase and download today at twocanoes.com and have full phone, email and forum support options.

Very sad.

Cycloramic takes a 360 degree panoramic photo, hands-free, using vibration to rotate the phone. The panorama is stitched together using software and Cycloramic is protected via a utility patent. It’s been around for a while and, before the appearance, had 660,000 downloads, made about $175K.

Fantastic story. Very smart for the developer to apply to Shark Tank.

Worth a read if you don’t have access to Fox via traditional means, but do have net access. Not sure if and how this applies outside the US.

When Microsoft first shipped the Metro interface, there was tremendous pushback from desktop users. Metro was designed for a touch screen, not for a keyboard and mouse environment. Windows 8 removed the Start button, arguably the anchor of the Windows desktop interface, but brought it back in Windows 8.1. Now it looks like the upcoming Update 1 to Windows 8.1 will bring the desktop interface back as the default for desktop users.

The update is still in development, and Microsoft could alter this further before it ships, but it’s currently being changed to appease desktop users. It may seem like a minor change, but the move reverses parts of Microsoft’s original vision for Windows 8. While some critics argued Microsoft simply forced the Start Screen interface onto desktop PCs with little regard for keyboard and mouse users, the company pitched its “Metro” environment as the future of Windows. With the interface booting by default, developers had an opportunity to place their apps front and center on millions of PCs.

That last sentence is a big part of the value of Metro for developers. It’s a billboard for pre-installed apps. This was not an easy decision to make, I’m guessing.

The Windows Store continues to grow with applications, but we understand that Microsoft has been paying close attention to telemetry data that shows the majority of Windows 8 users still use a keyboard and mouse and desktop applications.

This puzzled me from day 1. Who owns a desktop machine with a touch screen? Can’t be many people. That’s why the Mac has Mac OS X and the iPad and company have iOS. Metro on desktop just never sat right with me.

I love this app. You can hum a new song into the app, so you can remember it for later. You can also write lyrics in the same window, so your song is kept together.

Equally important in relation to color (chromatics) is “no color” (monochromatics), which is the negative space or nothingness that surrounds an object or subject, something of particular value in publishing, the art industry, and advertising. Recent trends have seen a return to the simple—celebrating crisp and clear designs that demonstrate professionalism and accuracy, thus giving the consumer a sense of reassurance as well as stylistic aesthetic satisfaction.

Color is fascinating. It can make you feel warm, cold, happy or, if there’s too much, confused.

Some very interesting points from Ben Evans about what the future may hold.

Constructed using woods that were seized by the Feds, then returned once there was a resolution and the investigation ended, this radical Government Series II Explorer makes the perfect memento of an infamous time in Gibson history. And it’s a fierce performer in its own right.

Wow, that’s quite a swipe at the government.

Om Malik:

Before he was the front-runner to be the next CEO of Microsoft, I sat down with Satya Nadella in San Francisco. We talked about the cloud, competition and the future of Microsoft. It’s very revealing, the challenges facing whoever is soon-to-be-announced new CEO.

Interesting to see how the (maybe) next Microsoft CEO thinks.

Backstory on the 1984 Apple Super Bowl ad, woven around a conversation with Steve Hayden, the Chiat/Day advertising VP who wrote the spot. My favorite bit:

Like Jobs, Steve Hayden isn’t much of a football fan, so he watched the spot alone at home. He was pleased with how the commercial looked and, especially how it sounded. But he missed seeing the audience reaction, the gobsmacked expressions as fans crammed into sports bars and Super Bowl parties fell into stunned silence as the hammer was hurled through the air. “About 10 minutes after the spot aired, I was doing the dishes. And the phone rang. I’m up to my elbows in turkey grease. It’s Jay Chiat. He says, ‘How does it feel to be a f&$king star?’”

Nice.

Slate:

This Sunday, the eyes of millions of Americans will turn to a fetid marsh in the industrial hinterlands of New York City for the country’s most important sporting event—and some would say the key to understanding its proud but violent culture.

Slate has been running this series for a while and it’s funny to read how American events might be reported through the eyes of others.

Wall Street Journal:

“The Lego Movie” gathers characters who don’t normally hang around together, coming from separately owned franchises and studios. These include Warner movie characters like Batman, Superman, Gandalf, Dumbledore and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle; but also Han Solo, Shaquille O’Neal, and Milhouse from “The Simpsons”.

I’m going to borrow a nine year old and go see this movie.

Confirmed by Founder and CEO Chet Kanojia on Twitter, the Aereo over-the-air TV service is actually out of capacity in New York City.

A few weeks ago, we posted about Aereo’s legal troubles and the pending Supreme Court case.

This is unrelated, but an interesting problem. There is some conjecture that the capacity problem stems from the cost of power needed to run Aereo’s massive antenna farm.

While broadcaster lawyers are seen as Aereo’s biggest impedement to success, a report in the Wall Street Journal last fall claimed that Aereo’s legal strategy, which involves leasing a tiny physical OTA antenna to each and every user in order to skirt broadcaster content licensing demands, is a significant power draw. Each small antenna uses five to six watts of power, the Journal positing that Aereo might find that footing the power bill troublesome as the operations scale.

That said, Aereo assures me that the problems in New York aren’t power related and are “strictly a capacity issue.” “We’ve had strong growth, so we’re working to add more capacity to serve more consumers,” company spokesperson Virginia Lam tells me. An ETA on resolution or more technical specifics on what kind of capacity the company is struggling with remains unclear.

I find the Aereo model both disruptive (obviously) and fascinating. Market disruption is becoming such a regular occurrence, I expect it will become a documented field of study, with associated college degrees and how-to-manuals.

Interesting take on the politics involved in Bill Gates potentially stepping down as Chairman of the Microsoft Board.

Perhaps more significantly, having Gates in the chair seat also maintains some of the dysfunction clearly present in the board, due to his history at Microsoft, his massive wealth from his ownership of the company and — for lack of a better way to say it — the Bill Gates of it all.

That dynamic combined with the continued presence of outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer on the board — who may remain in the short term, but seems set to go when his latest term is up — obviously has to change.

Thus, a new chairman with a power base away from Microsoft’s origins, while moving Gates to a much more productive role seems like a pretty good idea to many.

Add to all this the huge benefit of Gates becoming Nadella’s wingman.

It’s also clear that Nadella will need Gates around to solidify himself with other leaders at Microsoft and to get them on board and into line. And, given Nadella’s nice-guy-but-not-inspiring rep — I have heard him called the “safe bet” and “conventional choice” about 275 times this week — having Gates standing solidly next to him is a must.

Because while some inside say Gates is now out of touch with the fast-moving trends of tech, he still maintains a status among the troops of Microsoft that is, if not god-like, pretty emotionally gripping.

Thoughtful, insightful conjecture. Sounds right to me.

Gayle Allen (MIT, BrightBytes) shares her list of lessons learned working in a startup. Good list.

If you’ve ever wanted to get your head around the basics of typography, follow the headline link for a brilliant set of resources. The navigation is a bit tricky. This is not a single tutorial, but more of a table of contents. Click each picture to take you to a lesson related to that area.

Just love this!

US history buffs, did you know that Lancaster, Pennsylvania was once the capital of the United States? True, it was only for a day, but Lancaster is entitled to call itself the former capital of the US.

Follow the headline link for the whole story.

For baseball fans, the long cold winter is almost over. Pitchers and catchers start reporting for spring training this Thursday (Feb 6th).

While the teams limber up in their spring training homes, the Major League Parks are making some major new additions, deploying thousands of iBeacons (20 parks participating, 100 Qualcomm iBeacons each).

The iBeacons will work with primarily with MLB’s At The Ballpark app, demonstrated at Citi Field last fall. The app should be updated by Opening Day with iBeacon support.

Functionality will vary by ballpark, with individual teams having significant input and control over what users will see. There are a number of potential use cases including point of interest information, concessions, loyalty and rewards programs, shopping, and more. Specific scenarios have yet to be determined for each ballpark and teams will share more information as it gets closer to Opening Day.

The use of iBeacons opens up so many possibilities. They can help a fan find their seat, or point them to the nearest concession stand that sells the specific item they are looking for. Less wandering, more efficiency. This helps streamline the crowds, makes the fan experience better. Though I don’t see being able to get a specific vendor to come to my section in the cheap seats, I do see a day when I can find the hot dog/beer vendor, know when they are going to come to my section. There’s value there.

However, there is a significant revenue opportunity to be found. iBeacons allow fans to signal their intent, whether it’s browsing for merchandise, looking for food or something else. It allows ball clubs to be more proactive at fulfilling fan needs and “it’s better for you as a fan”. At The Ballpark already includes a loyalty and rewards component, but with iBeacons, clubs could proactively send a push notification to fans thanking them for their tenth visit to the ballpark and directing them to a nearby concession stand for a free hot dog.

The article is a great read. Baseball!

I love this.

[Via Brett Terpstra]