Scan the log in the image:
A crashed advertisement reveals the code of the facial recognition system used by a pizza shop in Oslo… pic.twitter.com/4VJ64j0o1a
— Lee Gamble (@GambleLee) May 10, 2017
Note that the ad picks up that the user was wearing glasses, smiled periodically. Yet another example of why we can’t have nice things anymore.
Lori Dorn, Laughing Squid:
Mario Wienerroither has taken the famous half-animated video for the A-HA song “Take On Me“, strategically stripped the music out and dubbed in appropriate reactive sounds. Without the music, the lighthearted romance of the original video was gone and a more sinister theme took its place.
It’s not exactly a traditional story, but it certainly is interesting. This was the first example of rotoscoping I ever saw. I think it still holds up after all these years.
Lauren Thomas, CNBC:
Fossil Group’s latest financials show the watchmaker is clearly hurting from Apple’s encroachment into the traditional hardware sector.
Shares of Fossil closed down more than 20 percent Wednesday, following the company’s dismal first-quarter earnings report.
“Our results for the first quarter … continue to reflect a challenging retail environment and a watch category undergoing significant change,” Fossil CEO Kosta Kartsotis said on the earnings conference call.
Results like these fly in the face of naysayers, support the notion that Apple Watch is entrenched and is solidifying its hold on this market.
Axios provided a list of highlights from the conference.
BuzzFeed:
To any HGTV fan, Andromeda Dunker has a voice that is instantly recognizable. Her gliding cadence and dulcet tone are as soothing as the comfort-food reality TV shows she narrates.
Since 2009, Dunker has voiced literally thousands of episodes of the House Hunters franchise, becoming an integral part of the HGTV juggernaut, which drew almost 25 million primetime viewers each month last year.
While the buyers and cities may change, the narrator does not. Episode after episode, Dunker introduces us to a new couple and a new location but with the same singsong intonation and honeyed tone. She is the show.
Want to talk about guilty pleasures of trash tv watching? This is mine. I watch every episode of House Hunters International (yes, I know the show is staged), although not such a fan of the other shows.
Macworld:
Between migration and multiple imports and copying for particular purposes, you could have several copies of the same image or scene, and sometimes they aren’t identical: one may be lower resolution, one may have been edited, and some might taken in quick succession but only one is good! Burst mode can lead to a lot of extra pictures, depending on your settings.
Photosweeper 3 is a well-updated version of software designed to solve this problem with a high degree of customization and specificity.
I’ve used Photosweeper 3 to organize and/or delete thousands of photos. Well worth the $10.
No matter your level of interest in the guitar, no matter how well you can play, if at all, this is so worth watching.
Mark Knopfler, best known as the singer, lead guitarist and songwriter for Dire Straits (Sultans of Swing, many others), talks about learning to play the guitar. He starts with the most basic of techniques, then slowly folds in the moves that took him places.
This is a piece from last years excellent Soundbreaking documentary. Take a few minutes to watch a true master sharing his craft.
This quiz from a few years ago has been making the rounds. In a nutshell, take a look at these cropped faces, try to identify the emotion shown. It’s all multiple choice, 36 in all, goes pretty quickly.
I generally found that if a particular face brought up an instinct, that first instinct was the correct answer. Enjoy.
UPDATE: Not sure why, but it appears the quiz comes up fine on the Mac, but not on my iPhone. If you get a broken link on your phone, try it on your computer.
Visual designer and Northwestern University student Jason Yuan:
Earlier this year I applied and interviewed for a graphic design internship at Apple Music (an opportunity of a lifetime), and was turned down with a very kind letter stating that although they liked my work, they wanted to see more growth and training.
Jason’s solution? Redesign Apple Music:
What you’ll find below is a case study offering potential solutions to address some of Apple Music’s problems, as well as ideas for future development. My process was guided by qualitative user research, Apple’s official Design Principles, and my own designer intuition.
To me, there’s always value in a project like this, value in identifying flaws in an existing design, as well as in prototyping fresh design approaches. Feedback like this is a gift to the Apple Music team. Hope someone there takes a look.
Gothamist:
The famed Fifth Avenue glass Apple Cube is no more, at least for the foreseeable future. Though the cube existed just yesterday, this morning tipster Josh Weiner spotted a gaping chasm by the GM Building where the monument to interminable lines for the Genius Bar once stood.
And:
Apple apparently spent $2 million to take down the cube to help facilitate its massive expansion at the 767 Fifth Avenue space—the store plans to swell from 32,000 to 77,000 square feet in order to accommodate more tourists and their unending questions about iPads. Apple has temporarily taken up residence at the former FAO Schwarz space inside the GM Building, so instead of being full of expensive toys for children, it is now full of expensive toys for adults, and also children.
Click to the page, check out the picture of the Apple Cube deconstruction from above. Note the caption. Nice.
CNBC:
Sleep-tracking is an intriguing potential health application for the Apple Watch, as it explores new use-cases in the health and wellness market. An estimated 50 to 70 million US adults have sleep or wakefulness disorders, according to the CDC.
The company brought on sleep researcher Rob Raymann to its health team more than three years ago, according to LinkedIn.
From the Beddit privacy policy page:
Beddit has been acquired by Apple. Your personal data will be collected, used and disclosed in accordance with the Apple Privacy Policy.
Interesting acquisition for Apple. It’ll be interesting to see how they incorporate the device and the data collected into the ecosystem.
9to5Mac:
Apple today started inviting press to its upcoming WWDC 2017 event scheduled for June, confirming that it will host a keynote address as usual on June 5 to kick off the event.
Apple’s keynote event will take place at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California, the venue that will also host the rest of the developer conference as previously announced by Apple. The location is a change from a few venues it has used frequently in San Francisco for the conference in the past.
Let the Zaprudering of the invitation begin.
This is one of the most incredible stories I’ve read in quite some time.
The Verge:
For many institutions, the digital revolution has required a complete rethinking of the museum model and a new digital mindset that filters through the entire operation.
Financing these projects is a crucial challenge, and many of the museums have relied on outside donations to fund their experiments. Support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, for example, facilitated both the Cooper Hewitt renovations and the development of the Museum of Natural History’s Explorer app.
I’ve always thought museums would be perfect places for this kind of technology but only the most well-funded ones can take advantage of it.
There’s a lot going on here. Google, Apple, and Amazon are working on their user lock-in strategies. Keep that in mind as you watch this video.
Solid review. At its core:
Apple’s big iPad problem is that it can’t convince people to upgrade, because an iPad is just a screen you hold in your hands that runs some apps that do some stuff. For users, that’s wonderful. If you already have an iPad you like, you don’t need a new one.
And:
If you are ready to upgrade, though, consider this the tablet for you. It brings the guts of an iPad Air 2—the most popular iPad model—into the body of a first-gen iPad Air. Will you notice the extra thickness and weight? No. (It weighs a pound, barely more than the Air 2. You’ll be fine.) What you might notice is the difference in the screen. This one’s not laminated to the glass the way it is on other new iPad models, which means you’ll see a little more of your own reflection in the display. It’s still high-res, still crisp, and still plenty good.
The Apple 9.7 inch iPad is $329. To me, if you are in the market for a starter iPad, this is a no-brainer.
Jean-Louis Gassée unpacks last month’s Apple Mac Pro confessional, seasoned with Microsoft’s new Surface devices and recent financial results.
Lots to enjoy here, but one particular conjectural question stands out for me:
Apple’s Developer’s Conference (WWDC) will be held in four weeks. We’ll be treated to the usual discussion of whether the iPad is a laptop replacement, of course, but Mac talk could prove to be even more interesting. In particular, will Apple announce an ARM-based Mac?
That seems far-fetched to me, though rolling their own Mac processors certainly seems a logical path for Apple to take in pursuit of owning the entire stack. Given how small (in terms of number of units as well as revenue) a slice the Mac Pro represents, seems to me (and I’m far from an expert) it’d be hard for Apple to recoup their investment on a custom Mac-targeted ARM chip.
That said, read Jean-Louis’ take here. Always thoughtful.
The new Echo Show is available in black or white (the core of the device is black, with a surrounding color bezel), preorders available now at $229.99, free shipping, released on June 28th.
From Amazon’s official Echo Show page:
I’m guessing a bunch of these pre-ordered units will be shipping to Apple folks for study and disassembly.
9to5Mac:
Apple has launched a new extended repair program for its Smart Keyboard for iPad Pro, allowing customers experiencing certain issues with the product to receive repairs or replacements from Apple for three years after the device is purchased. Apple informed its retail staff and authorized service providers of the new policy in an internal memo obtained by 9to5Mac (pictured below).
The program covers the Smart Keyboard for both the 9.7-inch (Early 2016) and 12.9-inch (Late 2015) iPad Pro models, and applies to keyboards experiencing certain Functional Issues, including: sticking/repeating keys, sensor issues, problems with the keyboard’s magnetic connector, connection issues, and unresponsive keys.
Got an iPad Pro Smart Keyboard? Tuck this one away.
From the leaked image:
Is this real? It’s just an image, but very well done. The two dates in the image appear in two different formats, which does make me suspicious.
So far, there’s no mention of the Echo Show on Amazon.com. We shall see.
If the Amazon Echo is real, this will certainly inform any similar product plans from Apple. The bar has clearly been established by Amazon in this category.
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Apple’s stock is currently trading above the $150 mark for the first time ever, after factoring in a 7-for-1 split in 2014, giving the company a record-high market cap of nearly $790 billion. That means Apple is just over $200 billion away from becoming the world’s first trillion dollar company.
It’s mind boggling to think of that much money.
Michael Grothaus, writing for Fast Company:
Competition for internships is intense, particularly at hot companies like Apple, Google, Tesla, and others. So how do you get an internship at these coveted companies? I spoke to Maxime Britto, who is now a software engineer and the founder of Purple Giraffe, a French online school for mobile developers. But before he founded Purple Giraffe, he got his start at Apple working as an intern. In his own words, here’s how he did it and what the experience was like.
Fascinating read, short but on point.
MacRumors:
Apple became the world’s largest wearables vendor in the first quarter of 2017 with an estimated 3.5 million Apple Watch shipments, according to new research data shared this afternoon by Strategy Analytics.
Apple Watch shipments overtook Fitbit shipments during Q1 2017, allowing Apple to capture 15.9 percent global marketshare to become the top wearables vendor.
Crushing it.
If you want to dig through the data, here’s a link to the original Strategy Analytics report.
The Week:
“It seems that the Trump era will basically control-Z everything that happened on Obama’s watch,” Oliver sighed. “I genuinely would not be surprised if one night Trump went on TV just to tell us that he personally killed every turkey that Obama ever pardoned.” Now, ISPs are touting their support for a “free and open internet,” with some regulatory changes, but you should take their “support” with a grain of salt, Oliver said, briefly explaining Title I and II of the Communications Act of 1934 — the entertainment “equivalent of chasing an Ambien with a shot of chloroform.”
ISPs like Verizon want to make net neutrality essentially voluntary, and “they now have a powerful ally,” Trump’s new FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, Oliver said. “The dangerous thing about Pai is that he presents himself as a fun, down-to-earth nerd,” with a Twitter feed full of Big Lebowski quotes and a novelty mug he describes as “infamous.” “But for all of Pai’s doofy, hey-I’m-just-like-you-guys persona, there are some things about him that you should really know,” he explained — like that he’s a former lawyer for Verizon who despises regulation, and that some of his ideas to replace Title II are “almost laughably lax.”
Yeah, he’s done it before but the issue has raised its ugly head once again.
Click the link, take a look at the picture. Imagine this as an Apple Store. That’ll be an amazing store to visit.
MacStories:
Apple has since posted a clarification to the iTunes Affiliate Resources website that says:
“We’d like to clarify some changes being made to the Affiliate Program. Commissions for all iOS in-app purchases will be reduced from 7% to 2.5% globally, and all other content types (including music, movies, books, paid iOS apps and TV) will remain at the current 7%.”
Great news for sites and people that use the program.
My Modern Met:
While the term photography was coined in the early 19th-century, Greek mathematicians had been making pinhole cameras since the 4th century BCE. With such a long history, photography is full of firsts, from the world’s oldest photograph to the first photo uploaded to Instagram.
While most early photos used the daguerreotype process invented by Louis Daguerre, technical inventions have created endless possibilities for photographers. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane to learn some of the famous first photographs that have changed how we view the world.
Without looking, guess who the subject of the “First Digital Photo of a President” was. I bet you’ll be surprised.
Mac Observer:
A popular video conversion app for Mac has suffered a malware infection on one of its mirror servers. If you downloaded HandBrake between 10:30 a.m. EDT on May 2, 2017 and 7:00 p.m. EDT on May 6, 2017, you should follow these instructions to check your Mac for a new variant of the malware OSX.PROTON. Yes, HandBrake was compromised by malware.
If you didn’t download it during the above times, you have nothing to worry about.
Gadgets 360:
The Senior Vice President Worldwide Marketing at Apple was in Bengaluru recently to inaugurate the company’s app accelerator facility in Bengaluru where he a spoke to group of Indian app makers that included CEOs of popular apps like Zomato and Practo, as well as developer of the indie app Avaz.
Gadgets 360 got a chance to sit down with Schiller and pick his brains on a wide variety of topics, both developer- and consumer-focussed.
Always fun to read the tea leaves when Apple executives speak.