Brent Simmons:

Lately I’ve been trying to learn to play delta blues. I’m not ever going to play like Robert Johnson — nobody ever will — but I’d like to learn it as well as I can. Well enough so that, if you like the blues, and you heard me at a coffee shop, you’d enjoy it.

First, Robert Johnson is the most amazing Bluesman I’ve ever listened to in my life. If you talk to any guitarist, the conversation will eventually make its way back to Johnson and what he did. I can attest to Brent’s difficulties with learning the Delta Blues because I’ve tried it before too. I’ve had the pleasure of strumming a few songs with Brent and he’s a great guitarist, but this type of blues is something really special.

“Due to a sharp decline in tourism and visitors to the area, we have made the difficult decision not to extend our lease,” an Apple spokesman said in a statement. “We are offering all of the store’s employees other jobs within Apple and we look forward to serving our Greater Atlantic City customers through our other southern New Jersey, Delaware Valley, and Greater Philadelphia area stores.”

The realities of retail affect everyone.

A special “Decade Collection” range of Beats Headphones are currently being promoted by online retail merchants ahead of scheduled availability on June 4, suggesting Apple will officially announce the collection during its keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

I’ve never been a big fan of Beats—I just don’t think they sound good.

My thanks to Marketcircle for sponsoring The Loop this week. Are you looking for a better way to manage the relationships you build with customers? What about organizing your workload better? Is closing more deals vital to your business? If any of these sounds like you, then you seriously need to give Daylite a try.

Daylite is the app built for small businesses that want to grow on the Mac, iPhone & iPad. More than just a CRM, Daylite integrates with Apple Mail on the Mac, helps you track all your leads, and share your projects and customers all in one place. Even more, it scales with you as you grow.

Never let anything slip through the cracks again no matter how much you have on your plate. Daylite also allows you to create powerful integrations with your favorite apps through Zapier so you can save time and get more done.

Need a better way to stay on top of your customer relationships, accomplish more, and close more deals?

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Mention you heard about Daylite on The Loop and get 10% off your first month subscription.

According to KIRO 7 News, an Echo Dot recorded the private conversation of a husband and wife in Portland, Oregon and sent it to the husband’s colleague all the way in Seattle. The colleague then called Danielle (the woman involved) … Continued

Samsung must pay Apple $539 million for infringing five patents with Android phones it sold in 2010 and 2011, a jury has found in a legal fight that dates back seven years.

Good, now pay up.

Obscura is designed to make it fast and easy to capture stunning images. Whether you’re shooting in portrait or landscape, the Control Wheel fits into your hand perfectly. You won’t be fumbling around trying to capture a photo when you’re in a hurry – everything is accessible with one thumb. Finely tuned haptic feedback gives the devices a sense of physicality, so you can feel every adjustment.

This is a great app.

Apple has signed a deal with Volkswagen to use Volkswagen vans as self-driving shuttles designed to transport employees around its various campuses and office buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area, reports The New York Times.

Apple has been working on developing the shuttle program, called “PAIL” or Palo Alto to Infinite Loop, since last summer. At the time news of Apple’s work on the program first surfaced, the company was said to be planning to install its own self-driving software in a commercial vehicle from an automaker, which has turned out to be Volkswagen.

I never expected Apple to do this. Despite rumors that the company’s program is having problems, Apple must be very confident about its self-driving technology.

Uber Technologies Inc is not shuttering its entire autonomous vehicle program, a spokeswoman said, adding that it will focus on limited testing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and two cities in California. It aims to resume self-driving operations this summer, likely with smaller routes and fewer cars.

I wonder if Uber was having trouble getting its license back after it was suspended by the governor of the state.

In this video, learn how to add parallel compression to drums, even out a bass performance, and bring presence to acoustic guitars with the dbx 160 Compressor/Limiter.

This is one of my favorite plug-ins from UA. This video will show you why.

Join Jim Dalrymple, MacStadium, Pixelmator, and MacPaw for an incredible night of music from The Houserockers on the first night of WWDC.

The party is being held at The Ritz, San Jose’s top nightclub, which is just one block from WWDC, on Monday, June 4, 2018, from 8:00 pm to 12:00 am.

You must bring your RSVP to the venue in order to get entry into the party. You also must be 21 because we will be serving free beer and wine throughout the night. Other alcoholic beverages will be available to purchase at the venue.

Please arrive early. Having an RSVP does not guarantee entry into the event.

Many thanks to our sponsors, MacStadium, Pixelmator, and MacPaw for making this party a reality!

Go get your tickets!

A 2018 NYCxDESIGN Awards Finalist, the Modern Record Player is sure to remind design-versed minds of Dieter Rams’ iconic Braun SK55, especially in its all-white iteration. Sharing a vented speaker front design with controls filtered of excess ornamentation, Symbol Audio’s modern day version houses a custom-built class AB amplifier powering custom-engineered speakers and crossovers, each developed in partnership with Morel, a company with a storied history of its own. The turntable itself offers an acrylic platter floating upon a three-phase isolation system engineered to prevent unwanted vibration.

I looked at this for a few minutes before deciding if I liked it or not. I do.

There’s now a new way to customize your drive on Google Maps for iOS. Depending on your mood, you can swap out the classic blue navigation arrow for a new icon—a stylish sedan, a timeless pickup truck, or a speedy SUV.

Okay, this isn’t the most productive feature in the world, but it’s cool.

Former President Barack Obama formally announced on Monday a multiyear production deal with Netflix in which he and the former first lady, Michelle Obama, will produce television shows and films for the streaming service.

And

Instead, a release from Netflix said the Obamas will produce “scripted series, unscripted series, docu-series, documentaries and features” that highlight issues and themes the president pursued during his eight years in office.

It will be interesting to see how these shows evolve. I imagine they will be a very popular part of the Netflix catalog.

The information in the exposed database included the email addresses of parents who used TeenSafe, the Apple ID email addresses of their children, and children’s device name and unique identifier. Plaintext passwords for the children’s Apple ID were also among the data set, despite claims on the company’s website that it uses encryption to protect customer data.

It’s incredible to me that companies allow this kind of stuff to happen. It’s inexcusable.

Thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. BBEdit is one of my most used apps over the last 25 years of my career. It was installed first on any new computer I had over the years because it was so crucial to all the work I did.

Back in the 90s, we built our Web sites from scratch, so we used BBEdit to hand-code everything we needed to get the site up-and-running. We didn’t have a CMS at the time, so BBEdit became the default app for actually posting stories as well. It was an all-purpose tool that became indispensable for us.

We didn’t just use BBEdit for building and maintaining the Website, we also used it as our default word processing tool. Every word written for the stories we posted was done in BBEdit.

Now, as BBEdit celebrates its 25th anniversary, I can still say I am a proud user. Congrats to the crew at Bare Bones Software and thanks for making such a great product.

Download BBEdit now and try it for free!

It would be impossible to get a consensus on something like this, but I always enjoy reading opinions on which albums are a band’s best.

Twitter is giving developers more time to adjust to its API platform overhaul, which has affected some apps‘ ability to continue operating in the same fashion. The company clarified this morning, along with news of the general availability of its Account Activity API, that it will be delaying the shutdown of some of its legacy APIs by three months’ time. That is, APIs originally slated for a June 19, 2018 shutdown – including Site Streams, User Streams, and legacy Direct Message Endpoints – will now be deprecated on Wednesday, August 16, 2018.

It’s sad that Twitter continues to treat developers so poorly.

Today, we use policies, human review processes, and machine learning to help us determine how Tweets are organized and presented in communal places like conversations and search. Now, we’re tackling issues of behaviors that distort and detract from the public conversation in those areas by integrating new behavioral signals into how Tweets are presented. By using new tools to address this conduct from a behavioral perspective, we’re able to improve the health of the conversation, and everyone’s experience on Twitter, without waiting for people who use Twitter to report potential issues to us.

I’m glad to see Twitter taking some action on this issue—we’ll have to wait to see how it works out. It’s a shame that a small number of people can have such a huge affect on their experience on the platform.

Yes, that’s right, a shed.

Om Malik:

In my social circles — admittedly a very tech-centric community — it is hard to find anyone who has told me that they love Apple Photos. Usual refrain tends to be – “That’s a mess.” There are no magical aha moments. Photos are Apple and by extension, iPhone’s currency. And yet the software on iPhone and Macs resembles a two-legged dog dragging itself over the rocky ground. Yes, there is assurance that it is not feeding some giant ads-spewing web monster, but by Jove, it isn’t a fun experience, and not magical.

I have more thoughts on Apple Music than photos, but I use the music app much more. When it comes to photos, I use the app to basically store whatever pictures or screenshots I take—that’s it. Om’s comment that Apple Photos wasn’t “magical” rings true to me.

The Environmental Law Institute (ELI) is pleased to announce that it will present its 2018 Environmental Achievement Award to Lisa Jackson, Vice President of Apple’s Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, in recognition of her visionary leadership and outstanding environmental stewardship over a most distinguished career.

According to ELI’s President Scott Fulton, “Lisa has exemplified leadership, innovation, and commitment to sound science and rule of law at each step of her remarkable career. She has been a tireless champion for both sustainability and environmental justice, and has left an enduring mark on both the private sector and the public sector. Her work in greening Apple’s supply chain and in reducing the company’s carbon and natural resource footprint has been exceptional, reflecting the power and reach of business leadership in advancing environmental performance and stewardship.”

Apple’s environmental efforts are amazing.

BBEdit is one of my most used apps over the last 25 years of my career. It was installed first on any new computer I had over the years because it was so crucial to all the work I did.

Back in the 90s, we built our Web sites from scratch, so we used BBEdit to hand-code everything we needed to get the site up-and-running. We didn’t have a CMS at the time, so BBEdit became the default app for actually posting stories as well. It was an all-purpose tool that became indispensable for us.

We didn’t just use BBEdit for building and maintaining the Website, we also used it as our default word processing tool. Every word written for the stories we posted was done in BBEdit.

Now, as BBEdit celebrates its 25th anniversary, I can still say I am a proud user. Congrats to the crew at Bare Bones Software and thanks for making such a great product.

Download BBEdit now and try it for free!

My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Do you sling code or compose with words? Whether you’re an app developer, web developer, systems admin or just want a powerful writing tool that stays out of your way, BBEdit is worth checking out.

BBEdit is crafted in response to the needs of writers, web authors, and software developers, providing an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and the manipulation of text. An intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit’s best-of-class features, including grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Unix scripting support, text and code completion, and of course a set of robust HTML markup tools.

Download BBEdit now and try it for free!

Silicon Valley self-driving startup Drive.ai said on Monday it will launch a pilot program for an autonomous ride-hailing service in July in Frisco, Texas, with safety drivers present.

I honestly don’t know how I feel about this. I know that autonomous vehicles are here to stay and will become more prevalent in the coming years, but sometimes I think it may be too soon. That said, riding in an autonomous vehicle is probably safer than a human driver in a lot of ways. I think it would be fascinating to get in a car and just have it drive away.

My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Do you sling code or compose with words? Whether you’re an app developer, web developer, systems admin or just want a powerful writing tool that stays out of your way, BBEdit is worth checking out.

BBEdit is crafted in response to the needs of writers, web authors, and software developers, providing an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and the manipulation of text. An intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit’s best-of-class features, including grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Unix scripting support, text and code completion, and of course a set of robust HTML markup tools.

Download BBEdit now and try it for free!

This is really cool.