You can see the photo captions by hovering.

[Via Michael Mulvey]

At least half of the designers knew HTML and CSS well but wanted a more visual way to get at it. Well, a new generation of visual responsive design tools has arrived. These responsive design tools are for anyone who understands HTML and CSS (or is willing to learn) and wants to visually design a responsive website — and have code to show for it.

It’s always good to at least know what’s on the horizon.

Microsoft explains what happened when they received a National Security letter from the FBI. Fascinating read.

[Via TechCrunch]

Newegg is notorious for standing their ground when it comes to patent trolls. Follow the link to read about their latest confrontation. Standing up to a patent troll is a risky move, since you have to lay out attorney fees and might not get them back and, even worse, you might lose in court. Most people settle rather than take that risk.

But if you have the resources to stand up to a troll, win, and force them to pay your attorney fees, that’s behavior-changing.

Privacy concerns (AKA, Facebook sticking their nose in all my business) is one of several reasons I walked away from the platform more than a year ago.

Facebook is worried that you will start sharing less – or maybe even move to more anonymous services – unless it helps you better manage your private information. On Thursday, the company announced that it would give a privacy checkup to every one of its 1.28 billion users worldwide.

Facebook, which is based in Menlo Park, California, will also change how it treats new users by initially setting their posts to be seen only by friends. Previously, those posts were accessible to anyone.

To me, this is a small step in the right direction. I think Facebook should also make it clear when it has access to any information on your device. For example, in my browser, if I close my Facebook window, does that terminate Facebook’s access? I believe it does not. If I log out first, does that do it? I find the lack of clarity in this regard troubling.

The change in default settings and the person-by-person review is a sharp reversal for Facebook, whose privacy settings are famously complicated. Some users may be shocked when they see just how widely their personal information has been shared.

For most of its 10-year history, Facebook has pushed and sometimes forced its users to share more information more publicly, drawing fire from customers, regulators and privacy advocates across the globe.

Is Facebook truly taking privacy more seriously?

This, on top of the 34,000 job cuts already announced. A great legacy in trouble.

The garage in which HP first started is considered to be the birthplace of Silicon Valley. If you ever find yourself in Palo Alto, make your way to 367 Addison Ave and take a look.

Who fucking knew there was such a thing.

Wired:

Airports are known for rules and regulations, a reputation that applies to the runways as well. Almost all airport designs are governed by regulations established by the International Civil Aviation Organization to ensure pilots circling Toledo or Timbuktu remain properly oriented and deliver passengers and cargo safely.

Lauren O’Neil turns those strictures into art, with the help of Google Earth. The Brooklyn-based designer has made a meticulous study of airport runways and logged the results on a Tumblr called Holding Pattern. These views reveal beautiful compositions at airports that are nothing special at ground level.

You often see these signs and markings on and at airports. Interesting to read what they signify.

Fast Company:

Before founding Storehouse, Kawano was a senior designer at Apple for seven years, where he worked on Aperture and iPhoto. Later, Kawano became Apple’s User Experience Evangelist, guiding third-party app iOS developers to create software that felt right on Apple’s platforms. Kawano was with the company during a critical moment, as Apple released the iPhone and created the wide world of apps.

In an interview with Co.Design, Kawano spoke frankly about his time at Apple–and especially wanted to address all the myths the industry has about the company and about its people.

Interesting comments from a guy who was in the trenches.

You Could Be in Star Wars: Episode VII

Fantastic.

Om Malik:

It is irrational and it is crazy, but I am indeed that “guy” who lately has been fighting for the mayorship with that “girl” for the mayorship of that “coffee shop.” It is one of the primary reasons why I keep Foursquare app on the first screen of my iPhone.

I never understood this.

I enjoyed this. Easy-to-read and he gets to the point.

Algoriddim on Thursday released a new version of djay for iPhone and iPad. Like previous releases, djay has a number of cool features, but the one that stood out to me was Spotify integration.

I met with the guys before the release to get a look at what they were working on, and I was impressed. They didn’t just add integration into Spotify’s library, they made it work as if the music was sitting right on your device. The music also works with all of the other great features that djay has to offer like Harmonic Match, HD Waveforms and others.

When Spotify integration was first demoed for me, djay was running on an iPad, connecting to Spotify over Wi-Fi—it worked very well. There were no glitches or waiting to load songs—it just worked.

Being the skeptic that I am, I asked how it would work if the venue where the DJ was playing lost Wi-Fi. The guys turned off Wi-Fi and played it over 4G, then over 3G, all without a single hiccup. I ever asked to pick my own song to ensure they hadn’t anticipated my question and cached something. It worked perfectly.

The last thing I asked them to do was turn off networking altogether. My thought was what if the network dropped out—would djay scream to a halt? When it came back on, would it remember where it was or would it reset itself back to the beginning?

We turned off networking for about 10 seconds and djay kept playing. When we turned it back on, the app just kept streaming music like it never knew about the outage. I guess it didn’t.

Creating music is about being able to focus on creation. Algoriddim gives you that with djay. I’ve been very impressed with the company and their products for a long time now.

“We recently fixed a server-side iMessage bug which was causing an issue for some users, and we have an additional bug fix in a future software update,” Apple told Re/code in a statement. “For users still experiencing an issue, please contact AppleCare.”

An annoying bug for a few people, but it was fixed.

Jon Phillips:

Yet in its simple, two-trick-pony earphone gadget, LG seems to have delivered on the promise of its product packaging. No, the HeartRate Earphones don’t run apps, or tell the time, or respond to voice commands. But they play music and monitor your heart rate—ostensibly with a high degree of accuracy. And that’s all they need to do.

Sometimes doing one thing, and doing it well, is all it takes.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles produced a set of testing regulations for manufacturers of driverless cars. Those regulations went through a period of public comment and were then submitted for legislative approval. The regulations were approved this week and will become effective on September 16th, 2014.

Interested in the details? Here’s a link to the regulations.

The vast majority of the first half of the regulations involves making sure anyone testing a vehicle has massive ($5 million) insurance coverage. That’s certainly appropriate, but I worry that there are those who might equate proper coverage with safety. But I digress.

It took me a while to find the key to all this, in a section titled “Prohibitions on Operation on Public Roads”:

A manufacturer shall not permit any of its autonomous vehicles to be operated on public roads in California when the operator is not seated in the vehicle’s driver seat and either: monitoring its operations and able to take over physical control of the vehicle; or, in physical control of the vehicle.

OK, that’s better. Looks like there will always be someone behind the wheel, ready to wrest control from the hive-mind. What could go wrong?

Re/code:

The Internet is filled with tales of frustration from those who have traded in their iPhone for an Android phone only to find their text messages trapped within Apple’s cloud. The issue arises when an iPhone customer trades in his or her phone for, say, an Android device, but keeps the same phone number that Apple’s messaging system recognizes as an iPhone.

iMessage is far from perfect but has gotten much better over the past year (at least from my experience). But that said, there is a point here.

Spurring this little number:

The iMessage problem is now the subject of legal action by a California woman seeking class-action status for a suit against Apple. She charges that Apple’s message-grabbing ways are depriving former customers of the ability to get full value from their wireless service after they give up their iPhone. The suit, filed last week, claims Apple’s actions violate California’s unfair competition law and also interfere with a wireless carrier’s abilities to deliver its promised service to consumers.

Which brings up an interesting point. What responsibility does a tech ecosystem bear to enable customers to easily leave that ecosystem? When an ecosystem is created, do the exit tools need to be created at the same time? Obviously, part of the value of an ecosystem, from a business point of view, is the friction that keeps customers on board. Clearly, there is a disincentive to making it easy for customers to leave.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I’m an unabashed Apple fan, have been since the Apple II days. Part of what makes me so loyal is Apple’s value of quality over strategy. I think Apple designs every product and service with the loftiest of functional and aesthetic goals. The “friction” problem becomes a “magnetic” solution. People stay because of attraction, not because of the difficulty of leaving.

There seems to be a friction problem here. My guess is, there’s a fix in the works.

“Nest is being run independently from the rest of Google, with a separate management team, brand and culture,” he said in an emailed statement. “For example, Nest has a paid-for business model, while Google has generally had an ads-supported business model. We have nothing against ads — after all Nest does lots of advertising. We just don’t think ads are right for the Nest user experience.”

I really like Nest CEO Tony Fadell. It’s not him I don’t trust, it’s the Google bosses.

While Samsung sold the most handsets, Apple remained the top vendor of U.S. smartphones, claiming 37 percent of smartphones sold outside of the variety of Android and Windows Mobile licensees that Counterpoint analyzed.

Apple accounted for the largest share of smartphones for three of the top four U.S. mobile carriers: 52 percent at AT&T, 51 percent at Verizon Wireless, and 36 percent at Sprint, while taking the second place spot behind Samsung on the more value-oriented T-Mobile/Metro PCS with 24 percent.

The latest version of Facebook for iOS and Android automatically recognizes the song you’re listening to or TV show you’re watching and adds it to your status. The Shazam-like feature is called “audio recognition,” and starts listening as soon as you start typing a new status.

I wonder what this will do to Shazam. Facebook has a lot of users that will use the new feature by default.

EBay Inc. operator of the online-auction site, asked users to change their passwords after a cyber-attack exposed a database with login information and data such as birthdays and phone numbers.

There’s no evidence of unauthorized activity resulting from the breach, EBay said today in a statement. While credit-card numbers are stored separately and encrypted, it’s still best to change passwords, the company said.

Go change them now.

Those who expressed concern about Google’s acquisition of Nest may have have been right: the company has told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it may choose to serve ads on “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.”

You are the product with this creepy company.

I really like the concept behind this iPad case. At first blush, it seems like a knockoff of Apple’s iPad cases. But no, not at all.

The Ergo Book has a big strap that is hidden away until you need it, and your iPad can rotate in the case so you can view or stand it in portrait or landscape mode.

I’m in! Looks like these will be shipping in September. [Via TUAW]

Rene Ritchie gives a nice guided tour of Siri setup. A perfect link to pass along to the less iOS-savvy of your friends and family.

But even if you’re an old hand, scan through the article. This is a current pass through all the settings, good for a refresher. Always a chance there’s something new that you’ve not used before.

For example:

Since Siri is usually activated by just holding down the Home button, it can pose a security risk to the data on your iPhone or iPad. If you are security conscious and have activated a Passcode Lock for your iPhone or iPad, you may want to make sure Siri isn’t allowed to bypass that lock — it’s less convenient, but that’s always the cost of security.

I didn’t know you could bring Siri under passcode protection. Cool.

In 1972, copyright law was amended to cover sound recordings, but not retroactively. Yet there are many pre-1972 songs that are played on streaming and satellite radio, enriching the companies that play them. This issue is coming to a head.

Fantastic article, does a great job laying out the issues/players involved.

A common discussion among app developers involves the pros and cons of developing for both iOS and Android. Among the biggest hurdles in developing for Android is device fragmentation. This is both a software problem (which version of Android is in place) and a hardware problem.

Yesterday, John Gruber linked to a brilliant post showing 7 different Android devices, each running a compass app. The post was also linked in Benedict Evans’ excellent post on Android fragmentation and the cloud.

To sum it up, the compass results were literally all over the place, not something you’d want to see in a compass, especially if you are lost. Gruber ran a similar test using iOS devices. Click here to see his unsurprising results. Steady as a rock, in perfect sync.

This is not about favoritism. This is about the downside of uncontrolled fragmentation.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and Executive Vice President Stephen Elop decided that the product in development wasn’t different enough from rivals and probably wouldn’t be a hit, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans weren’t public. Engineers had been working on the device and had planned to unveil it as early as today at an event in New York, two of the people said.

I can’t imagine how bad it would be using apps on a mini version of the Surface. It was probably a smart idea to kill that.