Horace Dediu is getting set to publish a report on iTunes and how the business is doing. He put together an excerpt on his site.

New York Times:

Even as data moves to computers and the cloud, staplers continue to help people keep it together. On the computer, we can file copies in folders and send messages to mailboxes. We can cut, copy and paste text and files. But which computer activity is similar to stapling? Sure, there’s the paper-clip icon that attaches documents to e-mail. But nothing, really, comes close to the satisfying ka-chunk of a stapler: it’s a sound that means work is getting done.

More than you ever thought you could know about the lowly but oddly treasured office stapler.

Wired:

Do you like Android? You should, it’s amazing. iOS? Wow, what a great platform, no wonder it started a revolution. Windows Phone? Seriously, it’s got a remarkable and beautiful interface. BlackBerry? There are plenty of great reasons people love it. And no matter which platform you adore, it’s shockingly possible to both have a preference and respect that other people may prefer an entirely different device. I know. Totally weird. But true.

Nobody cares what kind of smartphone you believe in. It’s not a religion. It’s not your local sports team even. Stop being a soldier. You are not a soldier. You are just wrong. Shut up.

The “Smartphone Wars” reminds us “old timers” of the Mac vs PC wars. And it’s just as pointless.

Poynter:

“Let Me Tweet That For You” is pretty simple — you type in a Twitter username and a message, and it generates a realistic-looking image of a tweet from that person. It even adds fake retweet and favorite counts to lend some more credibility.

That should be a bit scary for journalists and anyone else concerned about potential hoaxes. Of course, it would be pretty easy to debunk one of these fake tweets if you just visit the person’s actual Twitter profile to see if the tweet really exists.

But what if it’s passed off as screenshot evidence of an allegedly deleted tweet?

Poynter says it raises concerns for journalists but it should raise flags for all of us who use Twitter and social media. Such as this fake Tweet:

USA Today:

Two giant rocket engines that launched U.S. astronauts to the moon four decades ago have been recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral by an expedition paid for by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The F-1 engines, which powered the first-stage Saturn V boosters that fell back to Earth after their fuel was depleted, were found at a depth of 14,000 feet, Bezos’ expedition announced Wednesday.

Remarkable use of private funds to do public good.

Jake Savin:

Software should empower you, not distract you. It’s a tool, and like any good tool it should feel like a part of you. Once you know how to use it, the software itself should fade into your subconscious.

Jake makes some good points.

I observed design students who were acting mindlessly, simply doing their assignments as presented. No creativity, no imagination, no questioning. That’s not what design thinking is about. As a result, I have changed my mind: Design Thinking really is special. Alas, it isn’t embraced by all designers, but where it exists, it is powerful.

The two-year-old startup has developed ways for mobile apps to detect a phone user’s location in a building using Wi-Fi signals. It has been offering the technology to application developers for indoor mapping and new types of retail and social networking apps. The company has a handful of employees, and its co-founders include former Google software engineering intern Joseph Huang.

Timothy Pereira does a nice job of cutting through a lot of the Wall Street garbage that we’ve been getting lately.

The only changes players should expect in the iOS game is fewer maps; a result of file size limitations on the iPad, and a revised user interface that makes sense on the iPad. Even with the reduction of map numbers, Solomon says there will still be more maps than what a player would experience in a single playthrough of the game’s PC and console versions.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a turn-based tactical role playing strategy game developed by Firaxis. It’s based on and inspired by the 1990’s classic UFO: Enemy Unknown (also called XCOM: UFO Defense). A Mac version is in the works, as well (coming from Feral Interactive this spring).

Charles Arthur takes a look at 39 shuttered Google products.

I’d like to thank Squarespace for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

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Nick Arnott gives us a walkthrough of how the exploit worked. It’s important to note that Apple has already fixed the security hole, but it’s interesting to see what happened.

I saw this mentioned on App.net the other day and it looks interesting. I pinged its creator Ben Ubois and asked if it was meant to be a Google Reader alternative and he said yes. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I will.

The security hole has been fixed. Nice quick turnaround.

More than two decades later he found out a dark, but compelling secret about the guitar. It had been stolen and once belonged to a well-known artist in the Austin, Texas, music scene.

It had been handmade by Ted Newman of Austin for alternative country artist Joe Ely, who has toured with The Clash, Lyle Lovett and Guy Clark, among others.

What a great story.

A high school principal took a hands-on approach to school safety in San Francisco when he chased down a suspected iPad thief and pulled him off a fence as he tried to escape, school officials and authorities said.

Korean technology giant LG Electronics is developing its own smart wristwatch, effectively joining the competition between Apple and Samsung Electronics who are making theirs as well.

Okay, so now we have LG, Samsung and Google that are making a watch to compete with a product that Apple is supposedly going to make.

Brian Suda for A List Apart:

Now it’s time we embrace the third epoch in performance optimization: symbol fonts.

Embedding a symbol font lets us move some of those tiny icons into a single font file rather than a sprite. This has the same caching and file size benefits as a CSS sprite, as well as some additional benefits we’re only now realizing with high-resolution displays.

Throughout the museum, the iPad offers options for learning about items in the collection. “There is only so much information you can put on a wall, and no one walks around with catalogs anymore,” Mr. Franklin said. One of the app’s simplest features is also one of the most effective: in many cases, it can produce a photo of the artwork’s original setting — seeing a tapestry in a room filled with tapestries, rather than in a white-walled gallery, is revelatory.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the user experience when redesigning The Loop a couple of years ago.

That’s a lot of dead products.

Earlier Friday, The Verge reported on a significant security exploit with Apple’s “reset password” functionality for Apple IDs. Armed with only your email address and date of birth, a hacker could tweak a specific URL to reset the password for your account.

Wow, that is not good. I’m glad to see they took it offline quickly.

Thanks Rush.

Om Malik:

It is hard to trust Google anymore to make rational and consumer centric decisions. I said — nuanced as it might be — that I don’t trust Google to introduce new apps and keep them around, because despite what the company says, these apps are not their main business.

That’s how I feel.

Eric Schmidt uses a BlackBerry. Why? He likes the keyboard, he says.

They deserve each other.

Blizzard Entertainment’s big game reveal at PAX East is Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, a free-to-play collectible card game that’s coming to PC, Mac, and eventually iPad.

You’ll be able to earn or buy additional packs of cards. They’re showing off a playable build of the game at PAX East, which kicks off in Boston, MA today, and Blizzard expects to release the game this year. Mac and PC version first, iPad to follow.

This is the first game Blizzard will make for the iPad.

Looking for some retro gaming fun this weekend? Another World 20th Anniversary Edition is available for $10. It’s a remake of the classic Amiga platformer that came out for iOS in 2011. Cinematic effects, a unique graphical style and cutscenes made it a standout back in its day and it’s held up well over the years.

So, I started over. I fired up a new account and started using Twitter in a way that, honestly, I never had before. As a person interested in what kind of content that it could deliver. Here’s what I found.

It takes a while to get into the meat of Matthew Panzarino’s attempt to look at Twitter with a fresh set of eyes, but it’s interesting. If you’ve been using Twitter for a long time, as I have, it’s easy to forget just how much has changed.