∞ Apprenticeships or College Degrees?

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Chris Martucci: We tell college freshman, “You have plenty of time to figure out what you want to do,” and they major in psychology, religion, or philosophy. Now, it’d be ironic for me to downplay these fields, but the sad … Continued

∞ Occupy Flash

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Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It’s buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It doesn’t work on most mobile devices. It’s a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate … Continued

∞ BlackBerry 7 sales already slowing

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BGR:

Sales of Research In Motion’s new BlackBerry 7 smartphones have slowed in recent weeks as competition from Apple’s iPhone 4S and Android phones heats up. In a note to investors on Friday, Canaccord Genuity analyst Mike Walkley noted that RIM’s new smartphones are not faring well ahead of the holidays. “Our recent checks indicate slowing sell-through trends for the new BlackBerry 7 smartphones the past couple weeks,” the analyst wrote. “Further, with the launch of the iPhone 4S, increasingly price competitive Android smartphones, improving Windows smartphones, and the launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, we anticipate increasing competition across all tiers of RIM’s products in C2012.”

Maybe if they gave away BlackBerrys at McDonald’s drive-thru.

∞ Web Symbols typeface

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There are those points in every interactive designer’s career when he becomes fed up with producing the same set of graphics all over again for every website he designs. It could be the social network icons, gallery arrows or any number of his «signature» butterflies for the footer of each of his projects. Similar for interactive developers that have to slice the same GIFs and PNGs each time art-director asks them to.

∞ VMware Fusion 4.1

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Lots of goodies in the latest release of Fusion including Smart Full Screen, automatic virtual machine power on, improved animations, fast screen resizing and improved startup time, improved Mac OS X Lion guest operating system support, and improved graphics performance.

∞ Pixelmator

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I’d like to thank Pixelmator for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop. Pixelmator is a beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editing app for Mac OS X.

∞ 100 abandoned houses

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The abandoned houses project began innocently enough roughly ten years ago. I actually began photographing abandonment in Detroit in the mid 90’s as a creative outlet, and as a way of satisfying my curiosity with the state of my home town. I had always found it to be amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence.

There are some beautiful house here. Sad.

∞ RIM slashes PlayBook price

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AppleInsider:

Big-box retailer Staples will begin a sale on Friday for RIM’s PlayBook tablet in the BlackBerry maker’s home country of Canada. The 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models of the device will sell for $199, $299 and $399, respectively. According to a photo of an advertisement sent by an AppleInsider reader, the sale will run until Dec. 1.

Apparently the sale is going to happen in the US too. Still, it seems the PlayBook is about $199, $299 and $399 overpriced.

∞ jQuery Mobile 1.0

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When we first launched this site back in the summer of 2010, we had a few concept sketches and some very ambitions goals: to create an elegant HTML5-based user interface library for the jQuery community designed to work on all popular mobile platforms. We are built on the strengths of jQuery core and jQuery UI and strive to make mobile development efficient, accessible and maybe even a bit fun.

Adobe contributed quite a lot to the project over the past year.

∞ PlayBook gets DOS

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Engadget: So, BBM and a native email client for the BlackBerry PlayBook would be nice, but what we have today is a step in a completely different direction. DOSBox, everyone’s favorite open-source x86 emulator, has been successfully ported to RIM’s … Continued

∞ Mac market share hits 15 year high

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Josh Ong:

Analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham & Co. informed investors on Wednesday that Mac shipment growth in the third quarter of calendar 2011 outpaced the PC market for the 22nd straight quarter. Apple’s 24.6 percent growth dwarfed the 5.3 percent growth in total PC shipments.

∞ Fender's Coldplay guitar giveaway

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As part of the contest, one lucky contestant will win a Fender American Vintage series ’72 Telecaster Thinline guitar swathed in a vivid Mylo Xyloto-themed custom graphic finish by noted graffiti artist Paris. Fender ’72 Tele Thinline guitars have long … Continued

∞ Annie Liebovitz recommends iPhone camera

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Daniel Eran Dilger: “I’m still learning how to use mine,” Liebovitz said, pulling her iPhone 4 out to take a picture of her host. “It’s great. It’s a pencil, it’s a pen, it’s a notebook. I can’t tell you how … Continued

∞ Google Music launches

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Google Music helps you spend more time listening to your collection and less time managing it. We automatically sync your entire music library—both purchases and uploads—across all your devices so you don’t have to worry about cables, file transfers or running out of storage space. We’ll keep your playlists in tact, too, so your “Chill” playlist is always your “Chill” playlist, whether you’re on your laptop, tablet or phone. You can even select the specific artists, albums and playlists you want to listen to when you’re offline.

So Google Music is called iCloud?

∞ CIA : Operation Ajax interactive graphic novel for iPad

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The complete edition of Operation Ajax, an interactive graphic novel that tells the true story of the first CIA-backed coup which toppled Iran’s democracy in 1953.The app includes a 210 page comic with full sound and animation, plus tons of bonus content including: 22 character dossiers, 9 historical newsreels, and 3 authentic declassified documents detailing the coup from within the agency.

It’s free for a limited time.

∞ Microsoft's Android patent squeeze

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Alan Shimel:

B&N claims that all of these are “trivial” and “insignificant” in terms of Android’s use. They claim Microsoft is using these patents for minor functionality to hold Android hostage. It is not just licensing fee’s either, though they claim is Microsoft is recieving anywere from $5 dollars to $15 dollars or more per copy of Android sold (which is equal to or more thanwhat they charge for Windows Mobile licenses). Barnes & Nobles claims that along with paying the blood money Microsoft demands, Microsoft also makes license holders sign an “oppressive” agreement which gives Microsoft say over future hardware and software configurations and innovations. This according to B&N is to ensure that they keep Android from advancing too far, too fast for Microsoft to keep up. That is in many ways worse than the licensing fees. Microsoft wants to control future Android development and innovation. Positively evil.

∞ National App Development Month

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Ian Robinson:

I was thinking recently that it would be useful to have a month to focus on doing an app from start to finish. I’ve dabbled with development for ages, without knuckling down and getting something done. I’ve decided to do it in December. Take 31 days and use my spare time to do an iPhone app that I want for myself. I floated the idea on Twitter and a few people seemed interested in doing something themselves. Of course I’m doing an iPhone app, but there is no reason that any other sort of app couldn’t be done. A Macintosh app, a Windows Phone 7 app, an Android app, a web app, or an app for whatever platform you like.

Great idea.

∞ Occupy Wall Street people, stop complaining

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Marcelo Somers:

Occupy Wall Street (and all the associated movements) completely defies what is amazing about today. I hate it because it’s sending young people every wrong message. Instead of inspiring the youth of today to create amazing things that add value to the world, it’s inspiring them to complain.Get out of the park and rethink the finance industry. Instead of protesting their ways, build something so great that society has to listen to what you’re doing, and take them down.

∞ The Insanely Great History of Apple

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The world’s most comprehensive mapping of Apple products, this print shows every computer released by Apple in the last thirty years, from the original Mac through the MacBook Air. Products are sorted according to type, including the connections between various … Continued

∞ The Happy List

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You really have to see this to appreciate it. Ellen tells an entire story of what made her happy using only photos. You can see and feel why each particular image made her feel the way she did.

Much more dramatic than writing 1,000 words explaining your week.