Yamaha Corporation and Line 6, Inc. today announced a definitive agreement for Yamaha to acquire Line 6, a leading manufacturer of innovative solutions for musicians. The acquisition expands Yamaha’s portfolio of modeling guitar processing products as well as pro-audio equipment, and offers new and exciting opportunities for accelerated growth for both companies.

Holy shit, that’s big news.

Great idea for a magazine on the iPhone. We are all photographers in some ways these days.

Nice little collection of apps at a discount.

Another fun marketing stunt and some pretty great friends.

Nice little Mac tip. In a nutshell, copy the URL to the clipboard, then click the downloads icon in the upper-right corner of any Safari window. When the download popup window appears, type command-V (or select Edit > Paste). The file to which the URL points will appear in the downloads list and start its merry way to your computer.

Nice. If this seems a bit confusing (or if you don’t see the download icon in your Safari window), follow the headline link for more step-by-step instructions.

David Pierce gives a nice little tour of Apple’s newest superstar.

It cuts a striking figure, despite its relatively small stature. It’s also incredibly dense, far heavier than I expected. Ten inches tall, 6 inches around, and about weighing in at around 11 pounds, it’s definitely meant to be held by its bottom instead of its top lip.

It’s astonishingly reflective — I can see the screen clearly, and anyone who walks by is immediately recognizable — and it picks up fingerprints really easily. But it’s beautiful, understated, and looks great on a desk next to the 4K Sharp monitor we’ve paired it with. It’s particularly good-looking with its case off, exposing the Mac Pro’s machinery, but the case is required to dissipate heat. You can’t even use the Mac Pro with it off.

With pictures and a video.

Universal Audio posted which of its products are compatible with the new Mac Pro. Sadly my UAD-2 Quad will not work even in a chassis.

Well, there’s no typical day, however there is a grab bag of techniques that many UX Designers rely on at various stages of a project.

Like many professionals these days, there are a lot of different things involved.

Lessonator is a tool for creating beautiful music slideshow presentations on your Mac. It’s like a mashup between Apple’s Keynote and Garageband, where each slide is an animated music score. Lessonator creates and plays interactive slideshows containing 3d instruments, audio, video, notation (standard & tabs), images, diagrams and text. These slideshows are interactive because they can animate, ask questions, receive answers and track your musical progress.

Very cool looking app and a great idea.

Charles Arthur talking about how people and businesses are replacing computers with iPads. And then there’s this little nugget:

For instance, the 2012 Greek bailout – the biggest in history, requiring the renegotiation of €146bn of bonds among 135 principal bond owners in just 30 days – was completed using iPads. A specialised visualisation app (written by a British company, Bondholder Communications Group) ran on the encrypted, 3G-connected tablets that banks were happy to allow on their premises – something they’d never have agreed to for Windows laptops, because of security fears about viruses. Because the iPads could be updated in real time, used while on the move, didn’t constantly need charging and the progress could be shown visually, the deal was done.

I wonder how the critics find bad news in that one.

In this issue Jim Dalrymple looks at how Apple is able to capture the essence of our lives and touch us with its TV ads; Darren Murph argues that it’s time for the phone number to die; Alex Vollmer tells us all about tube amps, including a wonderful video; Kirk McElhearn looks at collecting music and how it has changed; and Nathan Snelgrove explains how a $600 guitar means so much.

Chilling.

I truly do not get how Cy Kuckenbaker did this, but I’m sure it took a decent amount of smarts and elbow grease. In a nutshell, he took some raw traffic footage of vehicles going under an overpass and sorted all the vehicles by color, then time compressed the whole thing. It’s mesmerizing. I love the motorcycles tootling by at the very end.

The Atlantic ran this excerpt from Fred Vogelstein’s book, Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. This looks really good.

By January 2007, they’d all worked sixty-to-eighty-hour weeks for fifteen months—some for more than two years—writing and testing code, negotiating soft­ware licenses, and flying all over the world to find the right parts, suppliers, and manufacturers. They had been working with proto­types for six months and had planned a launch by the end of the year . . . until Jobs took the stage to unveil the iPhone.

Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”

And this on Andy Rubin’s reaction:

On the day Jobs announced the iPhone, the director of the Android team, Andy Rubin, was six hundred miles away in Las Vegas, on his way to a meeting with one of the myriad handset makers and carriers that descend on the city for the Consumer Electronics Show. He reacted exactly as DeSalvo predicted. Rubin was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the webcast.

“Holy crap,” he said to one of his colleagues in the car. “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.”

I’ll say!

I think I’m more excited about the Mac Pro than I was about the iPad Air. Both the base and high end models show US shipping dates of December 30th.

On the low end of the scale, the bare-bones base model (3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache, 12GB (3x4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC, 256 GB flash, Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM each) is $2,999.

At the tippy top, a fully loaded high-end model (with 2.7GHz 12-core/30MB of L3 cache, 64GB (4x16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC, 1 TB flash, Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each) will set you back $9,599.

There’s also an option to add a Sharp 32″ 4K LED Monitor for $3,595.

If you’ve shopped at Target between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, chances are good this applies to you. Yeesh.

Investigators believe the data was obtained via software installed on machines that customers use to swipe magnetic strips on their cards when paying for merchandise at Target stores…

I wonder how they got access to the credit card swipers. All somehow programmable remotely? Astonishing.

Pretty impressive group of nominees:

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has officially announced next year’s inductees: Nirvana, Kiss, Peter Gabriel, Hall and Oates, Cat Stevens and Linda Ronstadt will all join the class of 2014. The E Street Band will be given the Award for Musical Excellence and Beatles manager Brian Epstein and original Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham will both receive the Ahmet Ertegun Award for non-performers.

On Nirvana getting nominated this year:

Artists are eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25 years after the release of their first album or single. Nirvana, whose first single “Love Buzz” came out in 1988, are entering the institution their first year of eligibility. “That’s really no surprise to me,” says Rock and Roll Hall of Fame President and CEO Joel Peresman. “People see the relevancy of that band. We’re just getting into the creative of the show, so I don’t know what’s going to happen with that performance. They have to figure it out.”

Jim and Dan talk about the new Mac Pro’s, the Universal Audio Apollo, Nokia’s latest commercial, how to get better at guitar without practicing, and more.

Sponsored by Shutterstock (use code DANSENTME1213 for 25% off), Hover (use code DANSENTME for 10% off), and Squarespace (use code DANSENTME12 for 10% off).

If you’re going to get a lens for your iPhone 5c, it might as well be a cool color. I’ve been meaning to try these lenses out.

ToneCloud is a sharing platform that allows BIAS users to interact with each other and share their custom amps right inside BIAS. Users can now explore popular and latest custom amp models, and can further search by music genres or keywords. Also, sharing is more intuitive than ever: an upload button is always visible in BIAS no matter in what stage of the amp creation process, this makes sharing much easier and faster.

This company is incredible. Good work.

Photos+ can replace the built-in Photos app for viewing, organizing, and sharing your pictures. It looks prettier, it has more sharing options, and it shows you more info about where, when, and how each photo was taken.

Nice looking app.

Hayao Miyazaki is a genius, no doubt. Spirited Away is one of my all-time favorite films, though Ponyo and Princess Mononoke run a close second.

The Wind Rises looks to be Miyazaki’s final film. Very sad. The English-language cast includes Emily Blunt, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Stanley Tucci, John Krasinski and Mandy Patinkin. Fantastic.

Should hit US theaters about 21 Feb, 2014. Can’t wait.

Data stickies is a design concept, but not necessarily a pipe dream. There’s some real science here.

dataSTICKIES are conceptualized to be made in graphene, a ground-breaking new material which is a flat mono-layer of carbon atoms tightly packed into a two dimensional honeycomb lattice with a minimum thickness of one atom. A paper thin sheet of graphene has the capacity to carry huge volumes of data.

The idea would be to have a stack of data stickies behave like a daisy chained set of hard drives. When you stick the sticky on your monitor (or a sticky-ready surface connected to your computer), all the stickies would appear as mounted volumes on your computer.

Love the design, obviously there are many practical hurdles to overcome. But this type of conceptualization is exactly what R&D should be all about. Let the haters hate. I say bravo and keep dreaming and scheming.

Clearly they post production did a great job replacing the igloo with a real house.