Very bizarre.

Apple is on the precipice of making real inroads into the gaming market. Certainly, there’s no question that there is a thriving iOS gaming market, but the vast majority of those are casual games at low price points. There are a number of compelling factors that might signal a real change in the balance of power between iOS and the consoles. Between SpriteKit and native iOS support for real gaming controllers, the only real barrier I see is a lack of storage space. Certainly not an issue on the Mac side, but how can a programmer access 50 Gb of cut scenes from an iPad or iPhone, even one connected to a TV. Wonder if some kind of network storage peripheral could solve this problem.

A bit heavy on conjecture, this is a good read nonetheless.

Terrific analysis. Twitter has a big opportunity, especially if it adds a long-form video capability.

In a world with long-form video on Twitter, the next time a video advertiser wants to catch the attention of ABC’s “Scandal” audience, that advertiser will have a plethora of options for its ad buying, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, ABC and more. But think about the benefits that Twitter presents to an advertiser. All it needs to do is to post a tweet with the video, which will reach its followers for free, and then promote that tweet to people watching “Scandal” during its airing (which generates 2,200 tweets per minute and can be targeted via Twitter’s TV targeting). That video tweet will end up being more valuable than pre-roll on YouTube, as it’s targeting users watching “Scandal” across a variety of platforms, such as cable, Web and satellite, and it is ridiculously easy to embed across the Web. What started as a tweet to your followers ends up giving you hyper-targeting that reaches Twitter’s highly engaged audience in real time and has unlimited distribution via the rest of the Internet.

Twitter is already the medium of choice for event interaction.

In addition to its one-up with television, Twitter has a big step ahead of YouTube when it comes to direct engagement. Brands successfully engage with their communities in many different ways on Twitter. Major brands have customer service monitoring Twitter 24/7. They share updates, interact with fans, comment on Super Bowl power outages and more through the social network. Each brand’s account essentially turns into the public persona for that brand on the Internet.

The stakes are huge. Twitter’s next move will have a huge impact on both the cost and implementation of advertising over the foreseeable future.

Some terrific shortcuts here. My favorite:

Typing punctuation can be a drag on an iOS device. Take the humble question mark. First, you must tap 123 key to get to the number and punctuation keyboard, then tap the question-mark (?) key, and then tap the ABC key to get back to the letter keyboard.

Here’s a quicker way to do it. Tap and hold the 123 key. Now, without removing your finger from the keyboard, slide your finger over to the question-mark key (or any other punctuation mark) and then release. The keyboard will insert your symbol and automatically switch back to the ABC keyboard.

This trick is even better if you want to type a special mark, such as the upside-down question mark (¿).

I love this review.

The frequent “First!” cry of the Internet troll declares some strange pride in being the first to comment on an article. The commenter put little to no effort into the post; it added nothing to the conversation, and it was completely devoid of substance. The troll did secure the spot at the top of the thread, though, and every additional commenter will be forced to scroll past the pointless contribution.

The Samsung Galaxy Gear says “First!” in hardware form. Samsung has beaten Google and Apple as the first major manufacturer to market, but much like the Internet commenter, it has sacrificed substance for the sake of timing. The Galaxy Gear is a product (with some impressive internals, no less) that has such limited use and such crippling compatibility requirements that it is currently the equivalent of hardware spam.

Ouch. I wish I had written this.

I love great design.

One afternoon last year, Menn and his business partner, Tivan Amour, headed out to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to invite passersby to walk away with their theft-resistant bike light. The team announced in poster board and Sharpie: “Free bike lights… if you can steal them.” Next to the light, Menn offered an array of bicycle light–busting tools: needle-nose pliers, an Allen wrench, lock wrenches and heavy-duty plumbing wrenches. If strangers could pry the light from the bike in two minutes (“No opportunistic thief will spend more than two minutes,” explains Menn), the light was theirs to keep.

Excellent way to beta-test.

Movie fan? Roger Ebert fan? Definitely read this great story from Chaz (Roger’s wife) Ebert’s blog.

Roger Ebert wrote a book called “Your Movie Sucks”. From the book’s Amazon page:

From Roger’s review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (0 stars): “The movie created a spot of controversy in February 2005. According to a story by Larry Carroll of MTV News, Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed this year’s Best Picture nominees and wrote that they were ‘ignored, unloved, and turned down flat by most of the same studios that . . . bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.’

“Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein in full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. In an open letter to Goldstein, Schneider wrote: ‘Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind. . . . Maybe you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who’s Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers. . . .’

The story I linked to starts with the flame war turned book, but evolves into something surprising. I enjoyed it.

Four months after raising questions about Apple’s foreign earnings and taxes, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has ended its investigation without plans to take any further action.

Apple added an iPhone tips page to their site. Created and named for the iPhone 5s, the page’s tips seem useful for all iOS 7 users.

Tesla founder Elon Musk knows from success. Musk started and sold Zip2, a web software company, pulling $22 million out of that sale. He rolled that into the company that ultimately brought PayPal to market, got about $175 million in stock when eBay bought PayPal. He used that nest egg to create Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002 and to fund Tesla Motors in 2004. Nothing but hits.

A lot has been written over the past few days about a fire in one of Tesla’s cars. A video of a burning Tesla S went viral, creating a large PR problem for the company.

Elon Musk took the wheel on this, so to speak. He wrote a calm narrative that laid out the facts, as he saw them. If you have any interest in electric cars, take a minute to read Musk’s blog post. Here’s how the accident happened:

Earlier this week, a Model S traveling at highway speed struck a large metal object, causing significant damage to the vehicle. A curved section that fell off a semi-trailer was recovered from the roadway near where the accident occurred and, according to the road crew that was on the scene, appears to be the culprit. The geometry of the object caused a powerful lever action as it went under the car, punching upward and impaling the Model S with a peak force on the order of 25 tons. Only a force of this magnitude would be strong enough to punch a 3 inch diameter hole through the quarter inch armor plate protecting the base of the vehicle.

Clearly, this accident was no fault of the car design.

The Model S owner was nonetheless able to exit the highway as instructed by the onboard alert system, bring the car to a stop and depart the vehicle without injury. A fire caused by the impact began in the front battery module – the battery pack has a total of 16 modules – but was contained to the front section of the car by internal firewalls within the pack. Vents built into the battery pack directed the flames down towards the road and away from the vehicle.

Read the rest of the post. The car is designed with safety in mind. Certainly no more dangerous than any of its gasoline-filled brethren.

So how does the market react? From the linked article:

Tesla’s stock had been on a tear after the company announced its first quarterly net profit and began expanding into Asia and Europe this year. But share prices declined 6.2 percent, to 180.95, the day the video was released, and kept falling the next day. (It closed Friday at $180.98.)

To be fair, if you read the article, there were a number of factors that influenced the market reaction. But I think the timing of that stock plummet rests largely on the release of the video showing the burning Tesla S. The market reacts quickly to news, slowly to reason.

Apple shares a common fate with Tesla in this regard. Some of the news that impacts Apple’s stock price appears made up of whole cloth, based purely on an analyst’s misunderstanding of market forces. That is unfortunate. Personally, I want people like Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jony Ive, and Craig Federighi to worry less about analysts and spend their time making great products.

I agree with Rene Ritchie. What passes for tech reporting these days is often no more than misinformed drivel designed to get pageviews. What’s worse, it can cause harm to unsuspecting users.

When you are at or near the top of a market, you become a target. Microsoft lived that life for many years. Now, the emergence of the mobile market has shifted the spotlight, as well as the security risk, over to iOS and Android. Though the rigor of Apple’s app inspection and certification process does keep the iOS app ecosystem significantly safer than Android, iOS devices are just as highly valued a target for hackers.

The point is, these attacks are going to keep coming. Apple’s job is to keep tweaking their processes to keep the bad guys at bay. So far, Apple has done their job well.

This new attack takes advantage of a flaw in the “Find my iPhone” process. The video below does an excellent job laying out the scenario. In a nutshell, the thief steals an iPhone and immediately turns on airplane mode to prevent the iPhone from being remotely wiped. This gives the thief enough time to break into your phone and use your credentials to reset your Apple ID password, take control of your phone, Apple account, and other accounts.

The video also offers 5 suggestions for fixing this problem:

1. Apple should make Airplane Mode inaccessible from the lock screen by default and require a passcode – not just a fingerprint – any time Airplane Mode was activated or the SIM card was removed

2. During Apple ID creation, Apple should warn users not to store credentials to password-reset accounts on their registered devices

3. On Find My iPhone, Apple should differentiate between likely-temporary and likely-permanent loss scenarios, and in the latter, should advise users to immediately revoke the devices’s access to all accounts it has credentials for, e.g. email-, social media-, and telephony accounts

4. The iOS lock screen should not display whether the phone is protected by a simple 4-digit PIN or a more complex passcode, and on devices with Touch ID, it should not display whether fingerprint authentication is being used

5. Upon reconnecting to the Internet, iOS should not allow email retrieval before the device’s wipe- or don’t-wipe status can be retrieved

As with every other legitimate problem of this nature that Apple has faced, the problem has a fix. No doubt, Apple will do their analysis, find the best possible fix, and roll it out quickly so we can all sleep safely again.

The news just continues to get worse for Blackberry. Shareholder Marvin Pearlstein filed this lawsuit in Manhattan federal court:

Pearlstein is seeking to represent a class of “thousands” of shareholders who bought stock between September 27, 2012, when the company touted its strong financial position, and September 20 of this year, when it revealed it would have to write down between $930 million and $960 million related to unsold BlackBerry 10 devices, according to the lawsuit.

Definitely worth a read.

It still bothers me. One day I’ll be able to read the book.

Note that the iPhone 5c is close behind.

Excitement for Twitter’s coming IPO is running pretty high – so much so that some investors on Friday mistook the nearly worthless stock of long-dead electronics retailer Tweeter for the “tweeting” site, sending shares up more than 1,000 percent.

Fuck people are stupid.

Thoughtful read. Important issue.

Direct remake. In Colombia. Wild.

The explosive success of Breaking Bad was bound to generate some copycats shows, but Spanish language media company Univision took it a step further, decided to cut out all those pesky middlemen (I think they’re called “writers”), and do a direct Spanish language remake. The Univision version will be set in Colombia and called Metástasis, the term for the spread of cancer- I assume “breaking bad” doesn’t really translate. The project seems intent on keeping every iconographic piece of the show they can, down to “Walter Blanco” (yes, really) in his famous white briefs. They even named his wife “Cielo Blanco”- “Cielo” being Spanish for “sky.”

Long time fan of Digital Photography Review. It’s my first stop before I buy any new piece of photography gear. Agree with them or not, there is always something to learn from their reviews.

Their final word:

The iPhone 5s, running Apple’s fresh iOS 7, is an excellent phone with a very good camera. Image quality under most conditions is among the top of the class of “conventional” smartphone camera units: you have to look to the Nokia Lumia 1020 to find something that’s hands-down better across the board, though in good light the best 13-megapixel sensors do capture more detail.

The camera app is supremely easy to use, and the 5s’ powerful processing makes for class-leading burst speed and excellent responsiveness. Users looking to upgrade from older iPhones shouldn’t be disappointed. That said, there’s nothing in the 5s that changes the fundamental balance of power in the mobile photography world: users committed to other OSes won’t necessarily see a reason to switch.

About what you’d expect, I think. To really get a sense of the iPhone 5s camera, take a look at the gallery of 78 images at the end of the review. To see a particular image at full size, download the original (click the link at the bottom right of the image). In my opinion, some of these shots are stunning.

Won’t be long now until we see the actual Mavericks release. My hope is that this signifies the imminent announcement of a new retina MacBook Pro alongside the already pre-announced Mac Pro.

I use this app every day.

Apple has informed Mac developers that it is preparing to launch the ability for educational institutions and developers to purchase apps from the Mac App Store in volume for a discount.

This is a big deal.

Our investigation currently indicates that the attackers accessed Adobe customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our systems. We also believe the attackers removed from our systems certain information relating to 2.9 million Adobe customers, including customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders.

Scroll down to see the list.

[Via DF]

I’d like to thank eleMount for sponsoring The Loops RSS feed this week.

eleMount – This universal mount raises the bar, allowing gadgets (smartphone and tablets) to be placed on a premium pedestal that matches their beautiful design and quality. One of the most user friendly mounts ever designed, eleMount sticks to any flat surface and doesn’t care if you prefer Apple or Android or like to keep your case on. eleMount works just as you’d expect. No suction cups, no locks, no instruction manual. You only need one hand to mount your device. This premium, high quality mount is CNC machined, carved from the finest solid aluminum and complements a sleek, minimalistic style. After all, shouldn’t your spectacularly designed device rest on an equally eye-catching pedestal?

The result is a collection of more than 150,000 photos, some 3,500 of which Mr. Zufi displays on a website and more than 650 of which he has curated into a new 326-page coffee-table-sized book. “Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation,” is self-published and available at www.iconicbook.com.

I’m very proud to say that along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, I also contributed a foreword for this book. It is truly an amazing publication. You can also watch a video interview with Zufi on WSJ.