Kyle Vanhemert wrote a great article about Apple’s design choices in iOS 7.

I’m not even going to link to ABC or WSJ. Instead you can read Daniel Eran Dilger’s fine story. Spoiler: ABC and WSJ think Apple’s record iPhone sales are bad news.

Jay Freeman, better known as Saurik, has taken a closer look at what’s happening under the hood with iMessage Chat and he raises the concern that your information might not be secure as it passes through the app maker’s servers in China before it’s sent on to Apple. Fellow developer Adam Bell claims the app is circumventing Apple’s restrictions by spoofing chat requests as a Mac mini.

Scary.

Glad to see this. Apple is definitely doing the right thing here.

This is dark, sad, and powerful. About a year ago, David Hilfiker was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. This past January, he decided to blog about his journey. Here’s his self-written bio:

I am a 68-year-old retired physician and live with my wife in the nation’s capital. I practiced for seven years in an isolated rural area and then for ten years in an inner-city neighborhood. In 1990 we founded Joseph’s House, a home for homeless people with AIDS and cancer. I have continued to write, teach and lecture about poverty, politics and other issues. I am writing this blog to dispel some of the fear and embarrassment that surrounds Alzheimer’s.

And here’s a bit from his first post:

Garrison Keillor said recently, “Nothing bad ever happens to writers; it’s all material.” So, at least for a time, this Alzheimer’s disease will become material for my website and for this blog. I want to write about what Alzheimer’s is like from the inside. What is the experience of losing one’s mind? Do I still experience myself as the same “self”? Obviously, I don’t know how long I can do this, although my good friend Carol Marsh has volunteered to keep it going with interviews when I can no longer write. We’ll have to see.

If you want to follow from the beginning, here’s a link to the start of the blog. Brave man.

This review of the iPhone 5s is about what you’d expect. The author loves his new phone, points out things other reviewers have also raved about. But this bit focused on the difference with apps specifically compiled for the iPhone 5s’ 64-bit processor, vs their 32-bit iPhone 5 counterparts:

For instance, Night Sky 2 — it’s among those apps compiled in 64-bit — clearly gains speed during startup. It launches in 2.7 seconds on the iPhone 5S, compared to 4.6 seconds on an iPhone 5. Although 1.9 seconds may not sound like much, it’s still an indicator of the kinds of speed gains we’re likely to see as more apps are updated.

A better test of the new architecture is the new game Infinity Blade 3. For this quick test, I rebooted both devices and launched the game before running any other apps. From the moment I launched the game until the introduction animation ran, I found the iPhone 5S to be surprisingly faster than its predecessor. On first launch, the iPhone 5S needed 47 seconds to clear the loading screen and begin the animation, 14 seconds faster than the iPhone 5. For the second launch, I rebooted the phones again before launching the game. The iPhone 5S reloaded the game in 17.8 seconds compared to 48 seconds for iPhone 5. On the third attempt, the iPhone 5S needed 19.8 seconds, the iPhone 5, 37.9 seconds.

Those are some pretty significant differences.

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Smile Software makes some great products.

Very thorough review if cameras are your thing.

WANT!

One thing I’ve learned—everyone has different thoughts on what makes a great calendar. Here’s another alternative that looks pretty good.

Interesting, but required a bit of Mission Impossible trickery to make it work.

The CCC started by photographing a fingerprint with 2400 dpi. Next the image was inverted and laser printed at 1200 dpi. To create the fingerprint mask Starbug finally used, latex milk was poured into the pattern, eventually lifted, breathed on (for moisture), and pushed onto the sensor to unlock the phone. In this sense, it’s hard to definitively state the hackers “broke” the TouchID precautions, because they did not circumvent the security measure without access to the fingerprint.

This does raise a fair question, though. How usable are the fingerprints we regularly leave on our phones? How susceptible is the iPhone 5s to this technique?

This should be interesting.

BlackBerry was sold for $4.7 billion or about what Apple made on iPhone sales last weekend.

The chart says it all.

An SEC Form 8K alerting the commission that those 9 million sales represents a material change in the company’s prospects for its fiscal fourth quarter, which ends Saturday. “Apple expects total company revenue for the fourth fiscal quarter to be near the high end of the previously provided range of $34 billion to $37 billion,” the company wrote, “and expects gross margin to be near the high end of the previously provided range of 36% to 37%.”

Sales are so over-the-top great, the company has to tell the SEC.

Microsoft is trying, but I just don’t see it working out for them. The biggest problem isn’t battery life, it’s that customers don’t want the Surface.

New York City’s Police Department is looking to cut back crime by informing iPhone-owning residents that they should update their devices to the latest version of iOS in order to obtain new security features designed to thwart potential thieves.

Apple today announced it has sold a record-breaking nine million new iPhone® 5s and iPhone 5c models, just three days after the launch of the new iPhones on September 20. In addition, more than 200 million iOS devices are now running the completely redesigned iOS 7, making it the fastest software upgrade in history. Both iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c are available in the US, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore and the UK. Demand for iPhone 5s has exceeded the initial supply, and many online orders are scheduled to be shipped in the coming weeks.

“This is our best iPhone launch yet―more than nine million new iPhones sold―a new record for first weekend sales,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The demand for the new iPhones has been incredible, and while we’ve sold out of our initial supply of iPhone 5s, stores continue to receive new iPhone shipments regularly. We appreciate everyone’s patience and are working hard to build enough new iPhones for everyone.”

Wow.

Getting ready to sell or give away your iOS device? Bookmark this page. The instructions are simple enough, but handy to have this page around when the time comes.

I’m a math geek, have been all my life. So I was delighted when I saw this one. Had no idea the Simpsons’ writing staff were so mathematically inclined. Here are a few examples.

The episode climaxes with Tabitha appearing on the Jumbo Vision screen at the Springfield stadium, where she publicly proclaims her love for Buck. More important, just before she appears on the screen, it displays a question that asks the baseball fans in the crowd to guess the attendance.

The screen displays three multiple choice options; 8,128, 8,208 and 8,191. These digits might seem arbitrary and innocuous, but in fact they represent a perfect number, a narcissistic number and a Mersenne prime.

The article goes on to give the details on each class of numbers. What amazes me is how much work they put in to create a short chunk of animation that few, if any, in the audience will notice. That’s craft. Or insanity.

Here’s another example (and my personal favorite). Note that the carat (^) symbol stands for “raised to the power of”, as in 2^5 = 32:

Professor Andrew Wiles (now Sir Andrew Wiles) worked in secrecy for seven years to fulfil a childhood dream and build a proof that confirmed that Fermat was right, inasmuch as the following equation has no solution: x^n + y^n = z^n, for n > 2. It is neither necessary to understand the proof nor to examine the equation in detail, except I should stress again that both Wiles and Fermat claimed, indeed proved, that this equation has no solutions, yet Homer’s blackboard proves the opposite!

3987^12 + 4365^12 = 4472^12.

Check it for yourself on your phone calculator and you will find that the equation balances!

I’ll leave it to you to figure out the fly in the ointment. Or just read the article.

A fantastic free resource. There’s something for everyone in this list. Some of my all-time favorite films alongside a bunch of unknown works (to me, at least) by great directors such as Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch. Yum.

LinkedIn is being sued by customers claiming:

the company appropriated their identities for marketing purposes by hacking into their external e-mail accounts and downloading contacts’ addresses.

That’s a pretty serious charge. Given the process by which LinkedIn grows their user base (an expanding tree of referrals), you might be tempted to see this as true. I’m skeptical. Seems so easy to detect. A foolish move, if the charge is true. I hope this is not the case. We shall see.

Here’s LinkedIn’s public response to the suit.

Samsung sent out a film crew to film the excitement and anticipation of the crowds waiting for their new iPhones. The most telling part of the article was this quote:

“Other companies release new phones, but there’s not as much passion and heat [from buyers],” a Korea-based producer from Samsung Broadcasting Center/Cheil Worldwide, who asked not to be named, told CNET at the iPhone launch. “It’s only Apple. Why? We’re curious.”

Ask us, we’ll tell you.

I find this sort of thing fascinating.

Healthy Choice was having a promotion on their frozen entrées section. The offer was as follows: for every 10 bar codes of their product a person sent in, they’d be awarded 500 Air Miles. However, the company had an early bird stipulation that people who redeemed the offer within the first month of the competition would receive double that, meaning a person could potentially receive 1000 Air Miles for buying just 10 of their entrées.

Upon catching wind of the deal, David scoured his local supermarkets to see which, if any products offered the best potential return. After some legwork, he found what he was looking for- a discount grocery chain that was selling individual chocolate pudding cups for 25 cents each. This meant that for a measly $2.50, he could get 1000 Air Miles.

He spent $3,000 on pudding, donated all the pudding, then turned in the bar codes and got more than a million air miles (about $150K in value). Loophole!

This article has some excellent suggestions for steps you can take to improve your battery life under iOS 7. I’ve played around with these for a few days and can tell you that these have made a huge difference in my battery usage.

The two changes I think made the most difference for me (your mileage may vary) were setting my brightness to 50% (still plenty bright) and reducing the motion of the user interface.

With the latter, I do lose the parallax effect, which I do miss, so I’m going to turn that setting off so I get parallax back, see how that affects my battery life. Note that this is the same setting that addressed Shawn’s motion effects post from yesterday.

There’s a new rule in hockey that mandates a two minute penalty if a player takes off his own helmet prior to engaging in a fight. And then this happened.

Two players, Krys Barch and Brett Gallant, were about to get into a bit of a scrape-up, when they very purposely took each others helmets off. Really happened. I love hockey.