Federico Viticci:

A few minutes ago, developer Steve Troughton-Smith tweeted a photo showing a “beta” login page for iCloud.com, Apple’s suite of web applications to access iCloud services like Mail and Calendar. The photo showed Apple’s icon-based navigation for iCloud.com, with the addition of Reminders and Notes icons in what appears to be an internal version of iCloud.com carrying future features.

With iCloud being at the center of Mountain Lion and iOS, this shouldn’t be a big surprise.

You can choose to manage your ringer by time-of-day or your current location. By time-of-day, set the ringer “Off” and ringer “On” times using a selection wheel and press Start. By location, just tap Start and choose the desired “Ringer-Off Zone” size. That’s it. RingMindMe does the rest. No account set-up required. RingMindMe does not override your ringer/silence switch. It just reminds you to change your ringer/silence switch based on the time-of-day or your current location.

I’ve had this happen to me a number of times. Simple, yet intuitive, the way an app should be.

Yoni Heisler writing for NetworkWorld:

On May 1, Apple filed a motion in the Northern District of California alleging that Samsung intentionally destroyed documents it was obligated to hand over as part of the discovery process, an act referred to as “spoilation of evidence” in the legal parlance.

Not good Samsung. Maybe RIM is heading up Samsung’s legal team.

Mark Gurman:

While Apple has always had full control of the actual iOS Maps application design, the backend has belonged to Google. That will change with iOS 6 thanks to their purchases of Placebase, C3 Technologies, and Poly9; acquisitions that Apple has used to create a complete mapping database. Now that the application is fully in-house, it is being renamed to simply “Maps.”

Makes sense.

Thanks to Bare Bones Software and BBEdit for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

BBEdit 10 from Bare Bones Software — The leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac just keeps getting better, with more than one hundred new features. Download the demo and see for yourself!

Robert Wright:

Because at some point over the past year he had clicked a button without reading the fine print and thus had entered the world of “frictionless sharing.” In this world, if you’re on a website that permits frictionless sharing (theatlantic.com doesn’t), every time you click on a headline, the site can report this behavior to your Facebook friends.

Things like this are just creepy.

I laughed at Marco Arment’s response to this commenter.

Paul Kafasis:

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster, a wreck perhaps best known for introducing the phrase “Oh, the humanity” to our lexicon. While chatting with my pal Marco a while back, I realized I knew very little of the real story. Having cured my own ignorance, I now seek to pass on some interesting notes.

Adobe:

We’re pleased to announce that Lightroom 4 is now available via the Mac App Store in North America.The Mac App Store offering is the same product offered on Adobe.com in terms of features and functionality but has been modified to comply with Mac App Store requirements. There are a few important pieces of information you should be aware of.

It’s $149.00, same price as if you buy it at Adobe.com but there’s no upgrade price if you own previous versions of Lightroom (there is if you buy it from Adobe.com). The Mac App Store version is for Mac OS X only – the version you buy from Adobe.com is Mac and Windows. The Mac App Store version can only be updated thru the Mac App Store. Adobe says that means they could update it on their web site but it may not happen at the same time, or at all, on the Mac App Store.

There’s more.

Adobe says there is no guarantee that upgrade pricing will be available to Mac App Store Lightroom 4 customers when Lightroom 5 and future versions of Lightroom are released and that Lightroom 4 is available only on the Mac App Store in North America.

Remind me again what the advantages of the Mac App Store are, Adobe?

Drafts is the quick, easy way to capture and share ideas on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Very clean interface with support for Markdown, TextExpander, Twitter and other services.

My latest article on TechPinions looks at RIMs latest failed marketing campaign, “WAKE UP.”

Jim Kerstetter for CNet:

Tomorrow, I’ll go back to complaining about Facebook’s frictionless sharing and its sneaky assault on user privacy and questions about its long-term revenue potential (and yes, yes, I know Zuckerberg has been less than warm and fuzzy to some people on the way up). But for today, I have to applaud an executive who refuses to bow and scrape before the plutocrats.

I feel the same way.

John Ruwitch for Reuters:

Apple Inc and its key supplier Foxconn Technology Group will share the initial costs of improving labor conditions at the Chinese factories that assemble iPhones and iPads, Foxconn’s top executive said on Thursday.

One of my favorite apps of all time.

Jacqui Cheng for ArsTechnica:

“We went through scores of names, but the one that I hit on early on was the iMac,” Segall said. “Steve didn’t like any of our names, including the iMac, and said, ‘if you can’t beat MacMan, that’s what it’s gonna be.’ We came up with a few more names and came back, but still brought back some of our old favorites. At that point, Steve said, ‘well I don’t hate it this week, but I still don’t like it.”

Fascinating.

These pages describe a personal journey – my attempt to recreate the Marshall 50 watt 1987 head I owned in the early seventies. I was a tube geek even back then, and carefully hand-drew a schematic while I owned it.

If you go the last page, you can hear how it sounds. Very impressive.

Brett Terpstra:

There are a few great Markdown text editors available, and more being worked on right now. I want to put a list of features out there that I think any true Markdown editor should include. Some of these are implemented in one editor or another, but nothing has brought it all together (aside from TextMate with all of my customizations, and even that lacks some of the polish mentioned below).

Om Malik:

Facebook says it is launching an app store that will allow people to get access to social apps on the network, without much heavy lifting. The company made the announcement in a blog post today. The company is hoping that the new app store will make it easy for apps to be discovered on the platform.

Oh great, just what we need.

This Week Myke And Terry Are Joined By Jim Dalrymple and they discuss WWDC and Apple’s upcoming plans as well as Jim’s Mac and iOS Set-Up.

Nilay Patel for the Verge:

Apple just released OS X Lion 10.7.4, which fixes a nasty bug that exposed FileVault passwords in plain text if Snow Leopard users upgraded to Lion but kept using their legacy FileVault settings. (FileVault 2 in Lion never had a problem, so if you bought a new Lion machine you’re in the clear.)

Fire up Software Update and grab it, folks. Other changes afoot too, including improved SMB server compatibility, a fix to the “Reopen windows when logging back in” setting and more.

HP Vice President of Industrial Design Stacy Wolff talking about how they didn’t copy Apple:

I think if you look at the new Spectre XT, there are similarities in a way, not due to Apple but due to the way technologies developed. Apple may like to think that they own silver, but they don’t. In no way did HP try to mimic Apple. In life there are a lot of similarities.”

Yeah Stacy, because this looks nothing like a MacBook Air, nothing at all.

We figure this story got skewed because PandoDaily is going through its own troubles, and looking for a target to project its drama onto; Sometimes not wanting to seem weak makes you seem weak.

Ouch. You can also look at this scathing article about PandoDaily.

Alexis Madrigal:

I’m sympathetic to the business concerns of the media industry. I really am. But this myth that slideshows are the path to salvation has got to be put into a rocket and sent hurtling into the sun. People know when your product is cheap; there is no “trick” of the web.

Please make them go away.

Alex Brooks:

As the fifth month of the year continues to progress the time is nearing for Apple to release a flurry of new Macs. Unlike the days of IBM’s PowerPC CPU architecture it’s now relatively easy to pinpoint when and what Macs are going to get refreshed at what point during the year and that is all down to Apple’s use of Intel’s architecture.

Alex has been doing some great work lately.

However, by my reckoning, in the 22 Bond films to date, there have been at least 4662 shots fired at our hero. A static well-aimed shot would almost certainly have proved lethal, but assuming all 4662 were “on the run”, the probability of a single fatal shot is about 5 per cent.

Those bad guys need some target practice.

USA Today:

Kodak will close its online photo service on July 2 after a federal bankruptcy judge approved selling the business to Shutterfly for $23.8 million. Shutterfly Inc. emerged last month as the sole bidder for Eastman Kodak Co.’s Kodak Gallery. The judge issued an order approving the sale last week.

Kodak has sent out an e-mail to Kodak Gallery account holders advising them of the change. Users have until May 28th to opt out of the transition, which will happen on July 2.

Mark Milian for Bloomberg:

Wearing a hoodie to a meeting in New York on Monday with potential investors is a sign of Zuckerberg’s lack of seriousness, according to Michael Pachter, an analyst for Wedbush Securities.

Some might think that judging someone based on their appearance or the clothes they wear is a sign of immaturity. Just food for thought.