Nice tip from Peter Cohen shows you how to bring your volume control to the menu bar and, more importantly, switch between audio inputs with a single click.

Yesterday, Apple was granted a patent for a Digital camera system having remote control. The patent specifically calls out existing products and patents, laying out improvements that are part of this patent.

For example:

It is known to provide rugged digital capture devices that can be secured to various objects, such as a bike helmet or scuba mask, or mounted to the handlebars of a motorcycle or the front of a surfboard. For example, the GoPro HD Hero2 digital cameras, sold by GoPro Inc, Half Moon Bay, Calif. are sold as part of an “Outdoor edition” package which includes various straps, pivot arms, and adhesive mounts to enable the digital camera to capture images while performing activities such as biking, skiing, skating and kayaking. However, the HD Hero2 camera includes only a single image capture system, which captures images using an optical axis directed outward from the “front” of the camera. This can cause excessive wind resistance and presents a high profile that is more susceptible to damage and image artifacts from vibrations in some situations.

It is truly amazing how much power Apple wields over the marketplace, how much scrutiny is placed on every decision Apple makes.

Consider:

This is a reasonably complex patent, with many examples showing features and improvements. The previous example is the only reference that mentions GoPro by name. A granted patent in no way means Apple has such a product in the pipeline. Yet, this single GoPro mention was enough to cause GoPro’s stock to drop about 15%.

Positive Grid, makers of BIAS for iOS and Mac, have started a new beta program targeted to guitar players that want to help shape the future of the company’s hardware products. I love the products this company puts out.

While his treatment for dementia would ultimately pull him from the band he started, AC/DC guitarist Malcolm Young was also treated for cancer and a heart condition after than band’s last tour. So sad.

Mark Gurman has certainly been on a roll lately. If true, this is an incredible amount of integration between the Apple Watch and the iPhone.

Enjoy.

First Amazon scores big with Transparent, their series that picked up a Best Comedy Golden Globe as well as a nod to Jeffrey Tambor for Best Actor. And now they’ve signed Woody Allen to produce an as yet untitled half hour series.

The series, like other Amazon original TV productions, will be available exclusively on the company’s Prime Instant Video service in the United States, Britain and Germany. The service costs $99 for an annual membership and includes free two-day shipping, and serves as a way for Amazon to tie its entertainment offerings to its huge retail operation.

My absolute favorite part of this is Woody’s seeming confusion at the whole thing.

“I don’t know how I got into this,” Mr. Allen, 79, said in a statement. “I have no ideas, and I’m not sure where to begin.”

This should be good.

Like my good friend Peter Cohen, Disk Warrior 5 has always been my go-to utility for fixing my Mac.

The list of features in this app is just incredible. I love the guys at Smile Software and the apps they make.

TidBITS:

To take over a Mac, the attacker needs physical access. He then plugs in Thunderstrike-enabled hardware — a modified Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet dongle in the demo — and reboots the Mac, triggering the process that replaces the firmware with malicious code. That’s it.

While all Macs are technically vulnerable to the Thunderstrike attack, few readers face any immediate risk. The attack is highly targeted — someone needs both physical access to your Mac and time to reboot it and reinstall the firmware.

As always when it comes to Macs and security, Rich Mogull is my go-to guy. He writes well and clearly about the subject and I trust his opinion and advice.

The Sydney Morning Herald:

One student has spoken up against the world leaders with poor human rights records who took it upon themselves to march for free speech following the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks.

In a series of tweets, London School of Economics student Daniel Wickham attacked some of the world leaders for attending the rally despite restricting press freedom in their own countries.

Good for him. When I first saw the photo of the world leaders, I thought it looked like just another photo op. Wickham shows it was also incredibly hypocritical.

Re/code:

The study of Amazon’s pricing uncovered some interesting tactics. First, Amazon doesn’t have the lowest prices across the board, which may not surprise industry insiders but might surprise Amazon shoppers.

Instead, according to Boomerang’s analysis, Amazon identifies the most popular products on its site and consistently prices them under the competition.

A good reminder to not assume Amazon has the best prices and to always shop around.

IDC just released their latest worldwide PC sales tracking report. Bottom line, Apple maintained their relative position at number five, behind Lenovo, HP, Dell, and Acer Group, but showed explosive growth, moving from a 5.8% share of the market in 4Q2013 to 7.1% in 4Q2014.

Growth from 5.8% to 7.1% is no small potatoes. That’s a 22% increase in global market share over a one year period.

In the US, Apple is number three, behind HP and Dell, growing from 11.3% to 12.7% year over year.

There are certainly pros and cons to a completely controlled App Store. This is an excellent demonstration of what happens if you remove all the controls and let the market play out on its own.

Late last year, Apple made a change to its EU-based App Store/iTunes terms and conditions. Here are two excerpts from the UK terms agreement:

Right of cancellation: If you choose to cancel your order, you may do so within 14 days from when you received your receipt without giving any reason, except iTunes Gifts which cannot be refunded once you have redeemed the code.

And:

Exception to the right of cancellation: You cannot cancel your order for the supply of digital content if the delivery has started upon your request and acknowledgement that you thereby lose your cancellation right.

This last bit turns out to be critical. It gives Apple the right to defend against people who might abuse the no-questions-asked refund policy. Here’s one report, showing this clause at work:

One reader explains that when Apple introduced the new 14-day return policy, he started treating this policy as a trial period of some sort. After spending about $40 in various apps to trial, he was able to get $25 refunded, but Apple took notice of his behavior and a message popping up in the App Store now warns him that he will no longer be eligible for refunds on new purchases.

Here’s the language in the new alert:

I acknowledge that if I download this app within fourteen days of tapping ‘Buy’, I will no longer be eligible to cancel this purchase.

Seems fair.

There are a lot of Uber-likes in the startup world. There are startups competing to be the Uber for food, Uber for alcohol, Uber for parking, Uber for valet-ing your car, and many, many more. Most of those will never see the light of day.

One of the central features that makes Uber successful is the elimination of payment handling. You use an app to call a car, then just sit back and enjoy the ride. The linked article is about some Uber-likes for the restaurant industry. One in particular, Reserve, has a secret advantage.

Reserve is the first launch from Expa, an incubator (billed as a “startup studio”) helmed by Uber cofounder Garrett Camp and Foursquare cofounder Naveen Selvadurai. Expa’s portfolio currently includes three companies: Uber, Reserve, and a shadowy product called Operator. The incubator has some prominent investors as well: Sir Richard Branson, Meg Whitman, author Tim Ferriss, Google board member Ram Shriram, and TPG’s David Bonderman are all on board.

The idea is to make a reservation on your app, then show up in the restaurant, where you continue the transaction on an iPad-based system built into the restaurant. Order what you like, then leave. The payment is automatically billed to your account.

Offering pay-through-app capabilities to restaurants and bars is a natural idea for startups. Handling payment is one of the biggest choke points for the hospitality industry, and slow waitstaff account for a significant amount of angry Yelp reviews. But the restaurant industry is an incredibly hard one to build a sustainable startup in—restaurant owners are legendarily mercurial and diners are slow to adopt new services unless there’s an obvious selling point.

Another central feature of Uber-likes is the ability to establish an account (or multiple accounts) that do not require any validation beyond the initial setup. In the restaurant universe, this means you could use your business card to set up accounts for your employees to use for entertainment, and another card for your family.

Of all the Uber-likes I’ve seen, Reserve seems like it has the functionality and the pedigree to succeed. The limiting factor is the willingness of the restaurant industry to sign up.

The New York Times:

Popular messaging services like Snapchat and WhatsApp are in the cross hairs in Britain.

That was the message delivered on Monday by Prime Minister David Cameron, who said he would pursue banning encrypted messaging services if Britain’s intelligence services were not given access to the communications.

I’m sorry to our British friends but you have an idiot for a Prime Minister.

New York Times:

Untrammeled oases beckon, once-avoided destinations become must-sees and familiar cities offer new reasons to visit.

Some obvious choices like Rome and some I really agree with like Milan, Cuba and Quebec City but some suspect suggestions, too. Squamish, BC? Orlando, FL? Cleveland, OH? Seriously?

The Robservatory:

Last week, I used the just-released Hubble Space Telescope images of the Andromeda galaxy to create a couple of desktop images for my Retina iMac. I liked the results so much that I spent some time collecting other suitable images from the Hubble site, and then cropping and/or scaling them to create interesting high-res desktop images.

The end result is a collection of 50+ Retina iMac-sized (5120×2880) desktop wallpapers, courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope. Here’s the full collection.

That nice young man, Rob Griffiths, put together this gorgeous collection of images.

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi has been on a tear lately, although when you look at some of its devices, you quickly notice that they bear a striking resemblance to devices released by Apple. This is why we find it amusing that Xiaomi’s CEO is now warning its fans to watch out for knockoff Xiaomi products being sold at phone retail outlets in Chinese cities.

These guys are just incredible.

The Daily Dot:

We’re glad that 15-year-old Tyler Barlow decided to stick an old barbecue in a grassy field and ignite 5 pounds of thermite on top of it, because the resulting video is super cool.

A fifteen year old kid and 5lbs of thermite – what could possibly go wrong? Turns out, nothing bad because, except for a disturbing lack of safety gear, the kid seems to know what he’s talking about. And the thermite reaction is pretty cool.

The Consumerist:

Even though the newest and freshest iPhones, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, are now legally available in mainland China, hauling them over the border from Hong Kong is still a profitable enterprise. Apparently. According to a report in Chinese media, an enterprising young man created a plastic suit that held 94 iPhones, strapping them around his arms, legs, hips, and torso.

The pictures are hilarious.

Jason Snell offers an interesting analysis on the daily battery expectancy for iOS devices.

Over the years I’ve said numerous times that when it comes to battery life on iOS devices, Apple appears to have a target battery life in mind and builds its hardware—a balance of power-saving software, hardware efficiency, and battery capacity—to hit that number.

In other words, Apple thinks we need, say, a minimum of 10 hours of daily battery life and as they design each device, they make sure the battery is big enough to support that goal, but no bigger than that.

The one outlier to this model is the iPhone 6 Plus. Why? Because they weren’t driven by the need to make the phone as small as humanly possible. They had the luxury of design space, of battery headroom.

A panel at CES was discussing disruptive technologies, predicting what each panelist thought would be the most disruptive tech over the next five years.

The panelists tossed around ideas they thought would be disruptive over this period — robotics, self driving cars, sensors, wearables, home automation and a few others. Creative Strategies Partner and Tech.pinions co-founder Ben Bajarin was on the panel and was asked at the end what he thought would be the most disruptive technology he saw on the horizon. He stated it would be the fact that more people will come online for the first time over the next five years than have in the past 30 years. The global implications of adding another two billion Internet users could be quite disruptive.

Hard to disagree with this opinion. Think about the walls governments build to keep news of the outside world from reaching the masses and what happens when technology emerges to tear down those walls. Think Gutenberg press, Arab Spring, Twitter and the Iranian Green Movement, fax machines and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Definitely an interesting read.

This study at the University of Missouri is making its way around the blogosphere:

While completing the first puzzle, the researchers recorded participants’ heart rate and blood pressure responses. Participants then reported their levels of anxiety and how unpleasant or pleasant they felt during the word search puzzle. Next, and while in possession of their iPhones, participants were informed that their iPhones were causing “Bluetooth interference” with the wireless blood pressure cuff, and that they needed to be placed further away in the room for the remainder of the experiment. The researchers then provided the participants a second word search puzzle. While working on the puzzle, the researchers called the participants’ iPhones. After the phones finished ringing, researchers collected blood pressure and heart rate responses. Participants then reported their levels of anxiety and how unpleasant or pleasant they felt during the word search puzzle. The researchers found a significant increase in anxiety, heart rate and blood pressure levels, and a significant decrease in puzzle performance when the participants were separated from their iPhones as compared to when iPhone users completed similar word search puzzles while in possession of their iPhones.

Seems to me the anxiety was driven not by the absence of the iPhone, but by being able to hear a call coming in and not being able to do anything about it. Not sure what that proves.

Jason Snell:

If Gurman’s reports are accurate, this new model pulls the MacBook Air line away from the MacBook Pro. In fact, it returns the MacBook Air to its roots—as a product full of choices that we consider crazy at first, because they’re out of step with conventional computer design, but that will appeal to a target audience that doesn’t actually care about those de rigueur features.

Some good thoughts in here.