Dear Mr. Watterson is a documentary about one of my favorite comic strips of all time, Calvin & Hobbes. In theaters and available On Demand on November 15, 2013. Can’t wait.

Would this app be allowed if it was boys ranking girls? Aren’t there privacy issues galore here? Remember FaceMash, the ranking web site that eventually morphed into Facebook? Isn’t this the same sort of thing? Hmmm…

How may We Hate You?:

A guest calls from their room.

GUEST: Can you send someone to come get my bags?

CONCIERGE: I can’t do that, but I can connect you to the bellman.

GUEST: No, no. I need you to call them. I’ve been mean to them all week so they’re not going to help me.

This is a hilarious follow up to the “Thomas Cook dissatisfied vacationer complaints” we posted yesterday.

My thanks to AskingPoint for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop. AskingPoint provides Mobile App Analytics, In-App Messaging (great for cross promotion), and SaaS for Mobile Apps. Push messaging and Ap Monetization tools are coming later in October and November.

AskingPoint lets you use your App Analytics to control anything in your Apps, in real-time. Check it out, and learn how to remote control your Mobile Apps!

SNL has been around for about 38 years. The video below shows an appearance Lorne and the gang made on the Tomorrow show, a late night talk show that ran from 1973 to 1982. Follow the headline link for a bit of the background story and some screen tests of the SNL cast.

Apple sent out a $20 iTunes credit to folks who bought a new iOS device after September 1st and then went on to purchase iMovie, iPhoto, Numbers, Pages, or Keynote, effectively making those purchases a true bargain.

Leaving aside the mathematics of $20 versus the regular price of those apps, I wondered if those apps are now free, did a little digging.

Interesting. I launched iTunes on my Mac, went to the App Store in iTunes, and did a search for Pages (I did not own a copy of Pages at this point). As expected, Pages showed up on the iTunes account on my Mac showing the full price of $9.99.

I pulled out my new iPhone (activated in the past week) and searched for Pages in the App Store on my phone. Huzzah! On my phone, Pages was free. Quick, before Apple could change their minds, I downloaded Pages.

Back on my Mac, in iTunes, the price of the app changed from $9.99 to “Download”, showing that I now own the app. Cool!

I repeated the process and now have all 5 of these apps on my iPhone and, soon, will have them on my iPad as well. Way to go Apple.

Photos of the model.

Karyn has brain cancer and is wondering what to leave behind to let her children know how much she loves them. If you have any experience with this, visit her site and leave a comment.

It was mentioned in the Vanity Fair article we linked to this morning, but here are some pictures of the Ive-designed desk.

These people need a punch in the face.

[Via Jim Coudal]

Luisa Pereira is a research fellow at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, a programmer, and a musician. Combining her love of programming and music, Luisa crafted a set of devices to generate music based on 300 year old composition theory.

Fantastic stuff. Follow the headline link for the details. One of her inventions, the Counterpointer, takes a melody set by the user and layers in automatically generated counter-melodies. Watch the Counterpointer video below and you’ll get the idea. Lovely.

Kirk McElhearn talks you through the details of your iCloud backup. Well worth a read.

I knew almost none of this. Fascinating.

In my house, we make a lot of movies. We are always on the lookout for clever techniques we can incorporate into our own projects. Here are two videos I just love and wanted to share.

This first one seems impossible and real. But it can’t be real, can it?

This second video shows you some tricks you can use to make movies like the first one (be sure to follow the headline link for a bit more background). Watching this second one inspires me, makes me think I could make the first one with some clever editing. Great stuff!

3 Tricks For Your Impossibly Small Film Crew from Vimeo Video School on Vimeo.

Jonathan Ive you know. One of his best friends, Marc Newson, might not be quite as familiar a name to you. Newson is also a world-class designer. The two are collaborating for the first time for an auction to benefit Bono’s Product (Red) anti-H.I.V. campaign. Vanity Fair interviewed them both.

In an effort that is part connoisseurship, part creativity, and part curatorship, the two designers have assembled a group of more than 40 objects that will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York on November 23 to benefit Product (Red), the eccentrically punctuated charity set up by Bono and Bobby Shriver in 2006 to support international efforts to fight the H.I.V. epidemic in Africa. Two one-of-a-kind pieces—a metal desk and a special Leica camera—were designed by Ive and Newson in collaboration, specially for the auction. Several others, like a customized Steinway grand piano and a Georg Jensen silver pitcher, are variations on existing objects that Ive and Newson both liked and got the manufacturers to agree to tweak for the sale, generally by adding something red. (The Steinway appears to be entirely white, but when you lift its lid, the underside turns out to be painted an intense, brilliant red, while the pitcher has a red enameled interior.) A few other items, such as a circa-1990 Russian cosmonaut’s space suit and a sketch for one of Elvis Presley’s stage costumes from 1970, are objects Ive and Newson found and decided that they liked well enough to include in the auction as is.

On obsession with detail and commitment to design:

“We are both fanatical in terms of care and attention to things people don’t see immediately,” Ive said. “It’s like finishing the back of a drawer. Nobody’s going to see it, but you do it anyway. Products are a form of communication—they demonstrate your value system, what you care about.”

On the one-of-a-kind Leica camera the pair designed for the auction:

The camera is based on the Leica Digital Rangefinder and was manufactured by that company as a custom item. The overall shape is similar to a conventional camera’s, but the finished object looks altogether different. It is made of brushed aluminum, and the controls are sleek and understated, as on Ive’s products for Apple. It does everything the regular Leica does, with the same lenses and the same functions, but the controls no longer seem intrusive, like silver barnacles on a black metal beast. Instead, every button and every lever is a tiny sensual moment, subsumed into the overall form of the camera. Never a thing of beauty, the Leica has become one by being boiled down to its essence.

“I found it a very odd and unusual thing to put this amount of love and energy into one thing, where you are only going to make one,” Ive said. “But isn’t it beautiful?” The camera’s dollar worth is hard to estimate, since it is an art piece as much as a functioning object, but the value of the time Ive, Newson, and Leica’s own engineers put into it probably totals well into six figures, and possibly seven. The process of designing and making the camera took more than nine months, and involved 947 different prototype parts and 561 different models before the design was completed. According to Apple, 55 engineers assisted at some part in the process, spending a collective total of 2,149 hours on the project. Final assembly of the actual camera took one engineer 50 hours, the equivalent of more than six workdays, all of which makes Ive’s comment to me that he thought the Leica might bring $6 million seem not so far-fetched.

Good read, especially if you are into design.

Comprised of five API modules — including the famed 212L Preamp, 225L Compressor, 235L Gate/Expander, 550L EQ, and 215L Filters — the API Vision is UA’s most colorful channel strip plug-in to date, allowing you to inject your tracks with all of the warmth and personality of API’s flagship analog console.

UA’s plug-ins are the best. Period.

In this issue, Tom Ellis looks at some tools for creating music on iOS; John Moltz looks at being a freelance writer and the need to have health insurance; Charles Perry investigates app localization; Chris Steimel is tired of hearing the same old songs on traditional radio; and David Chartier takes off on a train to get some writing done.

Top Gear:

If the i3’s range fits your life, here’s what you get. A car, a gadget, a suite of furniture, a greener option, a talking point. And a slower heart-rate.

Just when you start to wonder what IK Multimedia is going to come up with next, they deliver a pedalboard to control your Mac and iOS music apps wirelessly.

What a great idea. When you’re traveling, you can communicate with people using symbols.

Uh-oh.

Consider Tommy Palm and Jeff Smith. Palm, who oversees development at smartphone-game maker King.com, and Smith, who runs music-application maker Smule Inc., have long avoided building apps for devices using Microsoft’s Windows Phone software. Closer ties with Nokia haven’t swayed them. Both say even after the acquisition closes, Microsoft still won’t have enough users to make it worth the time and money.

You could see this coming a mile away, but still, uh-oh.

If you travel internationally, this is a game changer. Global roaming charges are outrageous. My hope is that this pushes other carriers to match T-Mobile.

This quiz tests your ability to differentiate Ikea furniture names from the names of death metal bands. Hilarious. I didn’t do very well.

If you are a Nirvana fan, these are a fantastic find.

Here we have three separate Nirvana interviews conducted by Sherry; all together, they add up to nearly an hour. The interviews catch Nirvana at three very different stages of their career. In November of 1990 Nirvana was riding the modest success of Bleach; in the summer of 1991 they were ready to release Nevermind and they knew they had something special on their hands; by 1992 they had already become superstars and were dealing with that. By the time the last interview rolled around, Nirvana had been named Metal Hammer’s “Best New Band,” which was just really amusing. Among other things, they discuss their willingness to pursue an idea that had been floated in 1991 of touring with Guns N’ Roses.

This is pretty cool. Ford is not the first to bring this parking tech to production, but they are definitely the first of the big car makers to do so.

FAPA uses ultrasonic sensors to scan for an open parking space at speeds as high as 19 mph (30 kph). When the car finds a suitable spot it alerts the driver, who can stay in the car or get out and use a remote to finish the parking job. The car then backs itself in to the parking space.

Amazing. The car scans for available parking spaces in real time, as you drive. The car alerts you that it found a space, you get out, and the car parks itself. The future!

Gartner and IDC released their quarterly PC shipment numbers. No tablet data, no phone data, just personal computers. Lots to chew on. Some highlights from Gartner’s US numbers:

To me, there are two big takeaways from this. First, tablets are cannibalizing PC sales. No big news there. Second, I see any decline in Apple sales as a sign of the aging of Apple’s Mac line. The iMac and MacBook Air refreshes are recent and the Mac Pro and Macbook Pro lines are due, hopefully soon. My instinct here is that we’ll see a nice bounce in the numbers, starting with Q4.

I love lists, and this is definitely a fun one. I suspect that you will find fault with this list, have a few inventions that you think should be on it, see some that perhaps should not be. That’s just the way with lists though, no?

My biggest complaint is that the first Apple product listed is the iPod in 2001. What? No Macintosh? No Apple II? Both of these were game changers.

That said, I still enjoyed your article, Ellie Zolfagharifard.

Canadian carriers suck. Bad.

Love the cover photo of the latest issue.

Go buy some guitar picks and support the cause.