A special free issue, celebrating the Loop Magazine’s re-design. Including an exclusive piece by Matthew Modine: “What I learned from Stanley Kubrick”; “Who would buy an iPhone 5c?” asks Daniel Eran Dilger; “Based On A True Story” – Matt Dusenbury is talking about movies; Chris Domico is wondering “Where Is The Music Pendulum Now?”; and Jim Dalrymple’s “Thoughts on Apple’s iPad and Mac event”

Download the app and the issue free for iPhone and iPad.

I feel compelled to add to John Gruber’s take on Frank Shaw’s blog post. I think John is being too charitable.

Frank starts with some twisty little prose, criticizing Apple for giving away iWork with all new iOS devices:

Surface and Surface 2 both include Office, the world’s most popular, most powerful productivity software for free and are priced below both the iPad 2 and iPad Air respectively. Making Apple’s decision to build the price of their less popular and less powerful iWork into their tablets not a very big (or very good) deal.

I am not a fan of snark, and this was snarky. Frank didn’t say, “throw in the iWork apps for free”, which is what happened. Instead, he implies that Apple raised the price of the iPad so that us hapless customers have no choice but to pay for something we don’t want. That might be considered true if the price of the iPad went up, even one penny. But the iPad Air added a bunch of new features, found a way to slim down significantly, and kept the price the same. Oh, and, we’ll throw in our productivity apps, too.

There was no decision to build the price into their tablets. That’s just snark.

And so it’s not surprising that we see other folks now talking about how much “work” you can get done on their devices. Adding watered down productivity apps. Bolting on aftermarket input devices. All in an effort to convince people that their entertainment devices are really work machines.

In that spirit, Apple announced yesterday that they were dropping their fees on their “iWork” suite of apps. Now, since iWork has never gotten much traction, and was already priced like an afterthought, it’s hardly that surprising or significant a move. And it doesn’t change the fact that it’s much harder to get work done on a device that lacks precision input and a desktop for true side-by-side multitasking.

Really Frank? How many tablets in the world have Word on them? How many have Pages? I would wager that any iPad productivity app will have more “traction” than any comparable Surface app.

And I use my iPad every single day, all without a single bolted on aftermarket input device, just the ones I was born with.

As to precision, I would love to see a side by side comparison of the iPad and Surface touch precision. I can’t imagine the Surface even coming close. Yeesh.

As they did with the recent iPhone launch, Apple plans on opening their retail stores at 8 a.m. on launch day, November 1, to begin selling the iPad Air. The iPad mini with Retina display is coming later in the month.

This text is from the Apple iPad retail site:

Buy iPad Air at your favorite Apple Retail Store beginning at 8:00 a.m. on November 1. We’ll set it up just the way you like.* iPad mini with Retina display coming to stores later in November.

* Supplies may be limited and are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Last month, I wrote about LADEE, NASA’s experiment in laser communication from the earth to the moon and back, replacing traditional radio communications.

Though there were a few glitches along the way, the experiment now works flawlessly and it looks like we have a much faster way to communicate with spacecraft near the Earth and, most importantly for potential Mars explorers, far from Earth as well.

“We could send 30 channels of HD video down from the spacecraft,” said Cornwell. “For example, you could do telepresence with this. Future missions to the moon or asteroids will have astronauts. They may need to see a doctor or need instructions on how to fix something and they could do it in HD video.”

A very important step for further space missions.

John Gruber talking about Microsoft’s Frank Shaw:

Betting against the iPad as a device on which people can work, for any meaning of “work”, is a bad bet in the long run. Shaw though, is doubling down on just that bet.

Shaw would do better by getting Microsoft to make a product that people actually want to buy.

For more than four decades, “Beggars Banquet” has remained one of the most acclaimed and popular Rolling Stones albums. Released in 1968, it marked a return to swaggering rock ‘n’ roll, and gave the world enduring classics such as “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man.”

Wow, nice!

Designed for iPhone and iPad.

For science geeks.

I just downloaded this app—it looks great.

John Siracusa dives deep into Mavericks

While I’ve posted on this topic before, the rules and the solutions are evolving. While the NFL remains committed to their deal with DirecTV, the public remains determined to watch the games on line in real time.

The only Americans who are technically allowed to watch NFL’s live streams are those customers who purchase DirecTV’s (DTV) all-access Sunday Ticket package, a deal worth $1 billion to the NFL.

What’s a cord-cutting fan to do? For just a couple of dollars you could digitally pretend to be from somewhere overseas, which would give you access to every single NFL game, live and in high definition, through your Internet connection. And while doing so almost certainly violates the NFL’s terms of service, it might not be otherwise illegal.

That’s the promise of Canadian startup Adfreetime.com, one of a handful of providers to offer what’s called a DNS-switching service.

Federico Viticci has been busy again.

Pixelmator 3.0 FX is the most advanced version of Pixelmator to date, introducing lots of new features and improvements, including the following:

• Layer Styles: Thanks to non-destructive Layer Styles, creating polished and advanced compositions is now so much simpler, faster, and more enjoyable
• Liquify Tools: Shape images in multiple ways—slightly twist an element, add an artistic detail, or completely distort an entire image
• New Image Editing Engine: The new state-of-the-art image editing engine harnesses the full power of the latest OS X technologies making Pixelmator feature rich, yet blistering fast
• OS X Mavericks support: Tags, Multiple-Displays, App Nap support and more.

Another great looking release from the Pixelmator Team. This is easily one of my favorite apps on the Mac. Ever.

Serenity Caldwell

Some users (including yours truly) are reporting issues where the Mac App Store doesn’t recognize their copies; when they click on an iLife or iWork app’s price, they receive the following alert: “[App] is already installed and was not purchased from the Mac App Store. Do you want to buy [app]?” Macworld spoke with an Apple spokesperson who noted that there’s currently an issue with some legacy customers, and the company is working on a fix.

With their revolutionary Voyage-Air patented hinged necks, each guitar folds in half at the neck heel and fits comfortably into a specially designed gig bag.

Cool.

iRig BlueBoard is the first wireless MIDI pedalboard for iOS and Mac that allows you to control your music apps and more from the floor. Now control parameters of your MIDI-compatible apps like AmpliTube wirelessly from the floor. Switch between presets, change patches, turn effects on and off and control effects like volume wah pedals all from the stage floor without worrying about tripping over wires. Setup is as simple as turning the iRig BlueBoard on and telling it what you want to control. iRig BlueBoard features four backlit soft-touch pads housed in a sturdy, stage-worthy chassis, two TRS expansion jacks for connecting additional MIDI controllers like expression pedals, and is powered by four standard AAA batteries.

IK Multimedia’s iRig BlueBoard allows guitarists, vocalists and keyboard players wireless control of Core-MIDI-compatible music-making apps running on an iPhone (4s or later), iPad 4, iPod touch (5th gen) or Mac (models from June 2012). The pedalboard has four backlit pads up top, which can each be assigned controls to switch between presets and banks, tweak parameters or change patches on the fly. Expression, volume or wah pedals can also be connected to the two 0.25-in jacks on the side of the device for control of onscreen dials and knobs.

Lots of good stuff in this update, including a calibration fix for the iPhone 5s accelerometer.

Click the link.

Live Streaming video requires Safari 4 or later on OS X v10.6 or later; Safari on iOS 4.2 or later. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 5.0.2 or later.

Very excited.

Blank on Blank works with journalists to dig up dusty cassette interviews and collaborate with animators and video artists to bring them to life. Here’s a great example:

A configurable world clock, with statistics like births, deaths, each divided into various categories, and lots more.

Not too surprising, considering BBM has an installed base of 60 million users. But still, an interesting datapoint.

Good tutorial. Two takeaways:

1. Never defragment your SSD. You’ll only shorten its lifespan.
2. Defrag your non-SSD hard drive once a year or so. Be sure to back it up first.

Official Travel Guide to Norway:

Rjukan is situated deep in the narrow Vestfjord Valley in Telemark. Due to the high mountains surrounding the valley, among them The Gaustadtoppen Mountain at 1,883 metres above sea level, there is no sunlight six months of the year (from September to March).

This winter, the darkness will finally come to an end.

I live in Vancouver, BC and it can be bad enough here in the winter with all the dreary rain we get but can you imagine six months of no sun?

Grantland:

The Stanley Cup is the most beautiful of sports trophies. It shimmers. It’s big. When ancient peoples returned from the hunt, they held their prize aloft. When players today win a championship, in a timeless gesture of triumph, they throw their hands above their heads. And in sports, nothing fits better between a player’s hands than the Stanley Cup. It is perfect.

It didn’t begin that way.

Ken Dryden was not only a great goaltender (in the Hall of Fame for my beloved Montreal Canadiens) but he is also a great writer. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of his amazing book, “The Game” (Widely acknowledged as the best hockey book ever written and lauded by Sports Illustrated as one of the “Top 10 Sports Books of All Time”), he’s written another chapter. If you’d like to see why Canadians love hockey so much, pay particular attention to the small town aspect of the chapter.

The New York Times:

Men in lifting belts wheel hand trucks stacked high with food from across the globe: 80 pounds of ground beef, 700 pounds of top butt, 175 shoulder tenders, 1 case of New York strips, all from the Midwest; 5 pounds of chicken livers, 6 cases of chicken bones, 120 chicken breast cutlets; 30 pounds of bacon; 300 littleneck clams, 110 pounds of mussels from Prince Edward Island, another 20 pounds from New Zealand, 50 trout, 25 pounds of U10 shrimp (fewer than 10 pieces per pound), 55 whole dorade, 3 cases of escargot, 360 Little Skookum oysters from Washington State, 3 whole tunas, 45 skates, 18 black sea bass, 2 bags of 100 to 120 whelks, 45 lobster culls.

That’s just the fish and meat order.

Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes at a restaurant?