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.

Ben Bajarin wrote a great piece on the iPhone and its market share in the U.S. There are so many takeaways, you should just read the whole thing.

I love seeing smart people doing smart things.

The Galaxy Round exists because the Galaxy Round exists. Samsung built and launched it so that it would be the first company in the world to build and launch a smartphone with a curved display. That’s it. The curved shape of the phone adds nothing of value to the user experience and once again, Samsung didn’t even attempt to add any useful new functionality to the device. It’s a gimmick.

That pretty much says it all.

An excerpt from Nick Bilton’s upcoming book on Twitter was posted in The New York Times today. Fascinating read.

Today seems to be live-in-the-past day. Heh.

For you young-‘uns, MacPaint was a bit-mapped drawing program that shipped with the original Macintosh. A lovely bit of code.

iPhone 5s and 5c will be available on Friday, October 25 in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, French West Indies, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macau, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Reunion Island, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and Thailand. iPhone 5s and 5c will also be available on Friday, November 1 in Albania, Armenia, Bahrain, Colombia, El Salvador, Guam, Guatemala, India, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and UAE. Both iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c are currently available in the US, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore and the UK.

When I was a kid, this was common science fiction fodder. To see this on the horizon is amazing.

In a speech to Virgin Galactic customers on September 27, the company’s founder, Sir Richard Branson, outlined these plans and more for the future of his commercial space fleet. “Using small, purpose-built, two-man spaceships based at space hotels our guests will be able to take breathtaking day trips programmed to fly a couple of hundred feet above of the moon’s surface,” Branson said. “They will be able to take in with their own eyes awe-inspiring views of mountains, craters and vast dry seas below.”

Sign me up!

Researchers at MIT wanted to create a robot that could reassemble itself into a variety of shapes. This is the proof of concept, a set of blocks, each of which contains a spinning motor with a break, along with all required electronics. The purpose of the motor is to generate inertia to allow the block to jump from one position to another.

Fascinating.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster just released data from their latest semiannual teen survey. Interesting read. Three things jumped out at me. In the three survey periods (Fall ’12, Spring ’13, Fall ’13):

1. iPhone ownership climbed steadily (40%, 48%, 55%). Shocking numbers for a device Samsung portrays as uncool.
2. Expected next phone purchase: iPhone as next phone increased (62%, 62%, 65%). Android also increased, but with a much smaller share (22%, 23%, 24%).
3. On the tablet side, Android marketshare is growing (plan to buy an Android table: 16%, 24%, 28%), while iPad plus iPad Mini drops (75%, 68%, 64%). Why add iPad and iPad Mini? Seems right, since Android does not break out their numbers by form factor.

My gut reaction to the tablet numbers is that the tablet share change is due to the ongoing maturation of the tablet market. The iPad mini was not around for the first survey and Android tablet use is still finding its level, at the cost of the existing iPad. Looking forward to the next survey.