This is pretty damn funny.

A thoughtful piece by independent developer Allen Pike on the best way to move the mountain that is Apple. Consider this quote from Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines:

If your App is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.

So what’s an indie developer to do? What’s the best way to affect change? An interesting read.

[via iOS Dev Weekly]

Follow the link, read the text (it’s a quote from Becoming Steve Jobs), then think about the moxy it took for a 22 year old to stand in front of the world of grownups and tell them about the future.

Apple added four Apple Watch guided tour videos to its web site: Welcome to Apple Watch, Messages, Faces, and Digital Touch.

Disabled placeholders for future videos include Phone Calls, Siri, Maps, Music, Apple Pay, Activity, and Workout. [Via iHeartApple2]

According to the Apple Store front page, Apple Watch pre-orders start on April 10th (this Friday) at 12:01 a.m. PDT. Which really means late Thursday night, just after midnight California time.

Reuters:

Apple is not able to launch its new smartwatch in Switzerland until at least the end of this year because of an intellectual property rights issue, Swiss broadcaster RTS reported on its website.

The U.S. tech giant cannot use the image of an apple nor the word “apple” to launch its watch within Switzerland, the home of luxury watches, because of a patent from 1985, RTS reported, citing a document from the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property.

The document, reprinted on the RTS website, was published by trade magazine Business Montres & Joaillerie, RTS said.

The patent is set to finish on Dec. 5 of this year. It currently belongs to William Longe, who owns watch brand Leonard that first filed the patent.

Given the short shelf life of this trademark, I imagine it wouldn’t take much money to make this go away.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, this is a trademark issue, not a patent issue. If you are interested in the details and happen to speak French, here’s a link to the original article which has the legal document embedded within.

This is a lovely bit of analysis on Lionel Messi and Wayne Rooney and their respective approaches to soccer. My favorite bit (on Messi):

One freezing night this January, I was sitting in the Camp Nou with a Barcelona official, watching Barca-Atletico Madrid in the Spanish Cup. When the game kicked off, the official said, “Watch Messi.”

It was a puzzling sight. The little man was wandering around, apparently ignoring the ball. The official explained: “In the first few minutes he just walks across the field. He is looking at each opponent, where the guy positions himself, and how their defense fits together. Only after doing that does he start to play.”

Remarkably, even unbelievably, Messi has never scored in the first two minutes of a match. And that’s why. He’s thinking, plotting, planning.

[Via Kottke.org]

Aaron Douglas, writing for his blog The Dangling Pointer:

Apple introduced the ability to record the screens of iOS 8 devices with QuickTime Player in Mac OS X Yosemite. You may have already been familiar with the ability to do a screen recording with QuickTime but now those screens includes any of the iOS 8 devices you have connected with a cable.

Follow the instructions. It’s pretty straightforward.

One more thing:

Notice that Apple took the time to replace your device’s status bar with one being carrier-free and fixed at 9:41am.

This is a Steve Jobs homage. Brilliant.

This is a pretty amazing image. No spoilers, just follow the link and see what you might miss if you are too immersed in Trivia Crack.

This multimedia piece from the Washington Post takes you on an immersive journey from sea level, up to Kathmandu, to the airport, then through the arduous climb from base camp to base camp to reach the most storied summit on the planet.

And if you enjoy this experience, consider reading Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer’s epic personal recounting of a harrowing quest for the summit and one of my favorite books of all time.

That all changed back in June when Lanier started playing around with an iPad with the help of her tutor Morgan Tyner.

“The first thing she said was “hi, thank you for releasing my voice”, and there was something about the power of being able to express her voice, her thoughts. It’s really priceless” says Morgan and the next thing Lanier typed out was “Tell my mother I love her.”

According to Leslie “I have never heard her say I love you and later that same day she wrote, tell my dad I love him and that he’s my hero.”

If this doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, nothing will.

My thanks to SnapPower for sponsoring The Loop this week. SnapPower’s Charger — the power outlet cover plate that your home should’ve been built with. A no-hassle, wire-free install that takes just seconds. A flush, 1-amp USB charging port for smartphones, phablets, and tablets. An unbridled sense of joy from never having to hunt for a wall wart ever again. Available now on Kickstarter.

If you are building an app, you are going to want to build an app trailer, a video that tells your app’s story, that quickly convinces a potential user to quit stalling and click the Get/Buy link.

Lots of thoughtful advice here. One piece in particular that clicked for me:

You’ve probably seen YouTube pre-roll ads before. At the bottom-right, there’s a “Skip in 5… 4…” button that acts as gatekeeper until the timer hits zero. For mediocre ads, this wait time is excruciating. Every once in a while, you might run across a commercial that’s so interesting, so weird, so mysterious… you just have to keep watching.

The people who made these commercials knew they were battling the 5-second skip countdown, and you should think the same way. The rule of TV and YouTube ads definitely apply to app trailers: whatever you make, it needs a strong hook within the first 5 to 10 seconds.

Your app trailer is your elevator pitch. You have a limited amount of time to convince your potential user, so focus on quickly laying out the benefits of your app, or else make video so compelling that they’ll keep watching through to the end.

Jillian Steinhauer, writing for HyperAllergic:

You may recall that last month, when actor Leonard Nimoy died, Canadians went into a frenzy “spocking” their $5 bills — aka drawing on the banknotes in order to turn former Canadian prime minister Wilfrid Laurier into Spock. When I was editing our story about the phenomenon, I discovered something curious: you can’t Photoshop money.

Fascinating.

Matt Stopera’s iPhone was stolen in a bar in New York City. What follows is a crazy story that ends up with him tracking his iPhone to somewhere in China, then making the trip out there to meet the new “owner”. Along the way, Matt becomes a bit of a celebrity in China. Fun read.

Plenty of ways to transfer files between computers, but thought this approach was worth knowing about: Dan Moren, writing for Six Colors, walks you through the process of direct file transfer using IP via Thunderbolt cable.

Update: An excellent suggestion from reader James McDaniel:

I’ve never bothered with the whole afp://use.this.ip.address thing. I just turn OFF the wifi on my laptop, then plug in the Thunderbolt cable. The laptop shows up in the Shared section on the left of a Finder window as normal, and the file transfer has no choice but to go through Thunderbolt because it’s the only available connection. After the file transfer is done, I eject the laptop, unplug the cable, then turn wifi back on.

As Dan Moren points out, this approach will kill your internet connection, but good to know the option exists. File that one under, “it just works”.

Back in 1983, before the launch of the original Macintosh, Steve Jobs gave an incredibly prescient speech. In part, he said:

Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes … and we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything and you’re in communication with all of these larger databases and other computers.

Five years ago today, that dream came true with the launch of the original iPad. Rene Ritchie, writing for iMore, takes a look back at the iPad launch, first impressions, and impact.

Liz Gannes:

A who’s who of leaders from companies such as Yelp, Square, Twitter, Lyft, Airbnb, eBay, PayPal and others signed their names to a petition today urging legislatures to forbid discrimination or denial of services to anyone, saying, “Discrimination is bad for business.” Petition leader Max Levchin, a PayPal co-founder and currently CEO of finance startup Affirm, told Re/code: “I am asking all CEOs to evaluate their relationships and investments in states that do not specifically protect LGBT people from discrimination.”

That’s great and even admirable, except that here on the home front, Silicon Valley has its own very obvious discrimination problems. Gender is a big one. Race is another.

Good read.

After successfully introducing a vending machine that dispensed MacBooks for 24-hour student use, Drexel University in collaboration with the Free Library of Philadelphia is introducing an iPad vending machine. Located in the University’s Dana and David Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships, the kiosk will make a dozen iPads available to local residents and Drexel students.

I love seeing organizations using iPad in unique ways. This is a great program.

Jim and Dan talk about the MacBook Pro, the legacy of FireWire and Thunderbolt, updated thoughts on the Apple Watch, podcast recording gear, and more. Also Jim is still in his car.

Sponsored by lynda (Visit the link to get a free 10 day trial and access to their 3,000+ courses).

This looks like a great app from Adobe, although it does remind me a lot of Storehouse.

I really like AltConf and everything they do during WWDC.

The Commission is concerned that Apple would use it size, influence and relationships to get music labels to abandon rivals such as Spotify, which rely on licensing with music companies for their catalogue, the FT said.

I don’t understand why regulators are so concerned about Apple, when they are so far behind in the streaming race.

The Verge:

On Thursday, April 4th, 1985, a blast of dystopian satire hit the UK airwaves. Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future was a snarky take on media and corporate greed, told through the eyes of investigative journalist Edison Carter (Matt Frewer) and his computer-generated alter-ego: an artificial intelligence named Max Headroom.

I loved the character in the short snippets we saw. If you ever want to show your kids how weird the 80’s were, you can start by having them watch Max Headroom bits.

An interesting piece by MarkDMill on the strong cultural reaction in China to luxury watches:

The story goes back to August 30th, 2012, when an accident in Yan’an killed 36 people. A Work Safety official was photographed smiling while at the scene. Outraged, internet users searched online about this individual and uncovered pictures of him wearing eleven different luxury wristwatches.

Pictures of him, with his watches, went viral and earned him the nickname “Brother Wristwatch.” Internet users surmised that his salary was not sufficient to purchase these luxury watches and thus must have been obtained through corrupt means. He was arrested on charges of bribery and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

This goes against the practice of luxury gift giving:

Giving of luxury gifts–particularly watches–has long been a means of establishing one’s relationship and currying favor in China, but the anti-corruption drive has hit this market hard. In 2013, Swiss watch exports were down a shocking 26%, even though they had grown every year for the previous ten years. Gift-giving dropped 25% in 2013 and another 5% in 2014. The entire luxury goods market, which had grown at a rate of 43% as recently as 2011, dropped to 18% growth in 2013 and contracted in 2014 for the first since 2000. I have witnessed firsthand how private businesses have ended large parties and bonuses out of fear of appearing to be corrupt. The effect of the corruption crackdown has been dramatic, and it is still underway.

So what does this have to do with Apple Watch pricing? First, the Apple Watch will likely be a big gift in China this year. Given the current pricing model, the Apple Watch Edition will occupy one tier and all other models will occupy a more accessible tier. The Edition will be part of the high end luxury tier, the rest of the models, watches for the rest of us.

This is the political and social environment in which the gold Apple Watch Edition enters China. Luxury watches are worn in China as a display of one’s wealth, but right now displaying wealth on one’s wrist is dangerous and, legitimately or not, is taken as a sign of corruption. The gold Apple Watch will sell, but I would wager an Apple Watch Edition that it won’t be seen on the wrists of government officials or successful business people with political connections (which is most successful business people)–or, if it is seen, that person will quickly be sanctioned or even sacked.

This, then, is why Apple’s positioning of Apple Watch is so brilliant: by releasing Apple Watch Edition at the luxury price of RMB 74,800 ($12,062), the “normal” Apple Watch seems downright frugal at RMB 4,188 ($675). Even the most expensive Apple Watch (RMB 8,288; $1336) looks cheap in comparison to the most expensive Apple Watch Edition (RMB 112,800; $18,190). By pricing one collection so high, Apple has managed to make Apple Watch seem downright moderate–even though it costs 15-30% of the average Chinese annual salary!

Given the importance of the Chinese market to Apple, I can only imagine that this was part of the planning for Apple’s pricing strategy.

Writing for the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo nails the problem with Samsung’s latest and greatest:

Despite improved hardware, the S6 and S6 Edge still lack compelling software.

Unlike Apple, Samsung has never managed to create a built-in suite of software and services to keep people hooked to its own phones. And there are few obvious ways for Samsung to address this glaring flaw.

Therein lies Samsung’s conundrum, the box from which there is no escape.

Great picture.

Happy 39th Birthday, Apple. Today in 1976, the greatest and most successful company in the world was started in a California garage by two men, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs.

From the Future Apple CEO Instagram feed, via iHeartApple2.

Lots to learn about the birth of the Apple Watch from this fascinating Wired piece.

First things first, in case you never made this connection, the person hired to run the skunkworks Apple Watch project at Apple was none other than Kevin Lynch, the Adobe Flash boss, the man who publicly took on Steve Jobs over iPhone’s lack of Flash support.

IN EARLY 2013, Kevin Lynch accepted a job offer from Apple. Funny thing about the offer: It didn’t say what he would be doing. So intense is Apple’s secrecy that all Lynch knew was his vague title, vice president of technology, and that he’d be working on something completely new.

It was odd that Apple even offered him a job. During his eight years at Adobe, most recently as chief technology officer, he was best known as the only person dumb enough to publicly fight Steve Jobs over the iPhone’s lack of support for Flash videos. When Lynch announced his move, the reaction was immediate: They want this guy? Apple blogger John Gruber called Lynch “a bozo, a bad hire.”

To be fair to John Gruber, this was a remarkable hire given the almost universal animosity between the iPhone and Flash camps at the time.

It was either hubris or an entirely justifiable expectation. Or both. After all, over the past 15 years, Apple has upended three major categories of consumer electronics and, in the process, become the most valuable company on Earth. There were MP3 players before the iPod, but Apple made you want one. The iPhone transformed the smartphone from business gear into pop culture. The iPad brought tablets in from the fringes, blowing past years of work by the likes of Nokia and Microsoft. For its fourth act, Apple chose a watch. This was to be the next step in a dynasty—the first without the guidance of Steve Jobs. Expectations and scrutiny would be impossibly high; the watch had to be, in the company’s parlance, insanely great.

No pressure, Kevin.

On the first Apple Watch prototype:

THE GOAL WAS to free people from their phones, so it is perhaps ironic that the first working Watch prototype was an iPhone rigged with a Velcro strap. “A very nicely designed Velcro strap,” Lynch is careful to add.

The team built a simulator that displayed a life-size image of an Apple Watch on the screen. Software was moving much more quickly than hardware, and the team needed a way to test how it worked on your wrist. There was even an onscreen digital crown—a facsimile of a watch’s classic knob—that you could swipe to spin, but it hardly replicated the feeling of twisting a real crown. Swiping, after all, is what the knob was supposed to replace. So they made a custom dongle, an actual watch crown that plugged into the bottom of the phone through the cord jack. In a sense the first true Apple Watch prototype was, like 10,000 Kickstarter projects, just a weird iPhone case with a strange accessory sticking out of it.

This was such a fun read. Worth every second.