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.
Let me get this out of the way: I don’t like Adria Richards. I think I have good reason to not like Adria Richards. So I should be feeling some major Schadenfreude right now. Instead, though, I think what’s unfolded in the developer community in recent days has been a tragedy. Here’s why.
Adria Richards is at the center of an Internet firestorm this week after she attended during a conference called PyCon. She overheard developers making sexual innuendos during one of the sessions and used Twitter to complain and shame them. One of the developers lost his job over it, and so did Richards.
The incident underscores the pervasive sexism in the tech industry – not to mention the ugly, sociopathic behavior some Internet crazies engage in – and raises questions about how best to handle problems like this in the future.
Blum (who’s a friend of mine) pulled no punches in her observations and looks at both sides of the issue.
Bottom line: This was a lost opportunity – what could have been a “teachable moment” instead went horribly, horribly wrong.
Very well done update to their app. I especially like the transitions.
The rare offering of a VOX guitar played by both John Lennon and George Harrison is what rock n’ roll legends are made of. The striking custom guitar built by Mike Bennett and Dickey Denney was gifted to “Magic Alex” Mardas by John Lennon in 1967. Harrison played the guitar while practicing “I am the Walrus” during The Magical Mystery Tour and by Lennon while recording a video session for “Hello, Goodbye.”
A really well designed user interface is one that goes unnoticed by the user, whereas a poorly designed user interface forces the user to pay attention to it instead of the content.
Absolutely.
Certainly worth a read.
And now Google has confirmed this, with a representative telling us that, “Yes, I can confirm for you: We have not submitted Google Now to Apple’s App Store.”
So there you go. Lying bastards.
Cody Fink wrote a nice article on what two-step verification is and how to enable it.
For the ninth consecutive study, Apple ranks highest among manufacturers of smartphones in customer satisfaction. Apple achieves a score of 855 and performs particularly well in physical design and ease of operation.
The average was 796 points. Nokia scored 795, Samsung 793, Motorola 792 and HTC 790. LG scored 744 and lowest of the manufacturers was BlackBerry with 732.
Basically, the battle is for second place.
Apple has joined the growing list of companies offering two-step verification to secure user accounts. By enabling two-step verification, whenever you attempt to log in on a new device with your Apple ID, you will be asked to enter a 4-digit verification code. This code will be sent to a device that you have registered as a trusted device, such as your iPhone, via a Find My iPhone notification or SMS.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said that Google Now has been submitted to Apple’s App Store and is waiting for approval, but Apple says that’s not true.
Apple told me today Google Now has not been submitted at all.
Why would Schmidt lie about this? Besides the fact he’s Eric Schmidt and works for Google.
Apple’s commitment to the environment is second to none and on Thursday the company released its yearly update detailing the environmental impact its products. I spoke with Apple executive Scott Brodrick about the report and what Apple is doing on the environmental front.
According to Brodrick, many of Apple’s facilities like its Cupertino, Calif. headquarters, offices in Cork Ireland and the Maiden, NC data center are 100 percent powered by renewable energy.
Apple built a solar array and a fuel cell installation in Maiden to power that facility. Broderick said it is the largest privately-held, non-utility installation in the United States. What’s more, Apple is building a second solar array and fuel cell of equal size to meet future energy demands at the Maiden facility.
The mount of energy saved by using these alternate forms of energy is the “equivalent of taking 24,000 cars off the road every year,” said Brodrick.
Apple isn’t just looking at ways to save energy in its existing facilities, they are looking at starting off future facilities by taking advantage of renewable energy from the beginning.
“We are going to continue this strategy in other facilities in Oregon and Nevada,” said Broderick. “Overall, 75% of the power to Apple’s corporate facilities worldwide are met with renewable energy.”
Brodrick said that’s a two-times increase over last year’s environmental report.
Of course, reducing toxic materials used in its products is very important as well. Apple’s entire product line is free from lead, BFR, PVC, Mercury and they use Arsenic-free glass.
The carbon emissions go its products have dropped significantly too. The Apple TV has seen a 90% reduction in carbon emissions since 2007, while the iMac has seen a 67% reduction since 2007. The Mac mini is down 49% since 2007 and the MacBook Pro is down 6% since 2006.
“We are the only company that can claim that all of the products we make meet the Energy star certification,” said Brodrick. “In many cases our products exceed the requirements.”
It’s not only the large things that help reduce a company’s reliance on energy. Apple is working on some smaller, but still important initiatives with its employees.
For instance, Apple’s Cupertino headquarters has reduced its reliance on electricity by 30%. The company is also offering its employees commuting alternatives — a program that has seen a 30% participation increase.
Apple also installed electric car charging stations in Cupertino for employees that want to purchase an environmentally friendly vehicle.
It’s important to note that Apple is the only company that provides this type of environment report. They map everything from manufacturing, transportation, product use, recycling and facilities to give the public a detailed view of the environmental impact it has.
Here is a flyover of the Maiden, NC solar array.
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) continues to shuffle its executive ranks, announcing Senior Vice President of Geo and Commerce Jeff Huber will step down to pursue new projects within the company. The move follows just one day after longtime head of Android Andy Rubin also resigned his post.
This happened almost a week ago, but I missed it at the time.
The chief takeaway from this year’s issue: Apple’s corporate facilities worldwide now get 75% of their power from renewable sources — solar, wind, hydro and geothermal — up from 35% two years ago.
Impressive improvement. Take that, you stinky hippies.
Apple is dominating the cloud storage wars, followed by Dropbox, Amazon and Google according to Strategy Analytics ‘Cloud Media Services’ survey.
In a recent study of almost 2,300 connected Americans, Strategy Analytics found that 27% have used Apple’s iCloud followed by 17% for Dropbox, 15% for Amazon Cloud Drive and 10% for Google Play (see chart).
Earlier this week I asked all of my RSS subscribers to change the link they use because I am moving away from Google’s FeedBurner. The biggest problem I face now is how to count my subscribers, the main feature I used in FeedBurner.
One of my Twitter followers on Wednesday pointed me to a new Web site called URI.LV, a new service dedicated to replacing FeedBurner. Created by Maxime Valette, the new service will count your subscribers, much like FeedBurner does.
With a WordPress plug-in you can choose to hide the fact you are even using the service, so users will continue using the same feed. Unlike FeedBurner, the site feed will not be redirected, unless you want it to.
I put a test feed in the system yesterday and it did count the subscribers and the hits to the overall feed. It’s too early to tell how accurate it is, but there are so many people in the same position I am in that I wanted to share the information. I’m hoping this will work out as a viable replacement.
Please use http://www.loopinsight.com/feed to subscribe to The Loop’s RSS feed.
“Verbal tinctures for the parched and deviant soul.”
A new app featuring quotes, columns and content from Mark Morford, the San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate columnist and culture critic. Free to download, though some content needs to be unlocked through in-app purchases.