“Apple and Google have agreed to dismiss all the current lawsuits that exist directly between the two companies,” the companies said in a joint statement. “Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform. The agreement does not include a cross license.”
Josh Centers found some interesting differences between Beats and its competitors.
My thanks to Betterment for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.
Imagine if poring over your finances were as easy as using your favorite app, or smartphone. – “The Apple of finance,” Quartz.
Now it is, with Betterment.
Betterment is the most preferred online financial advisor, integrating technology and years of investment expertise in one elegant application already being used by over 30,000 customers. Betterment has eliminated the unnecessary costs and complications of investing intelligently. It’s straightforward investing for all, whether you have $10,000 or $10 million.
Whatever your goal, Jerome Myers financial coach will help you create a plan, with milestones along the way, so that you can achieve it in your desired time frame.
Betterment lets you manage multiple investment goals in one delightful place. Our UX and UI are adored by design enthusiasts, separating us from the red tape of other investment providers. Betterment is slick on the outside, with killer technology under the hood, and our free iPhone and Android apps help you stay connected to your diversified portfolio at all times.
Ready to invest? We’re excited to offer readers of the Loop three months of Betterment investment management for free.
Samsung is taking over Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and turning it into a giant advertisement. Apple, on the other hand, talks about its customer satisfaction and design—the iPhone sells itself.
I just love the Massey Plug-ins. If you talk to any pro in the business, they will tell you how good they are. I’ve used them for years, but today I got the full versions.
It’s easy to go to someone’s sites and portfolio to get a sense of what they’re about. Product Managers still appear to be stuck in the “Let me tell you how awesome I am” rut, though. This is a generalization, of course, but what I’m mostly seeing right now is resumes that excel at vagueness.
I’ve seen many of those types of resumes over the years. It makes you sit back and say, “what does that even mean?”
An unpublished story flagged last week during our editing process led to an internal investigation that uncovered other examples in about 50 published stories, and our investigation is ongoing.
I guess it happens everywhere, I just don’t expect it from CNN.
My next vehicle will definitely have CarPlay.
It’s amazing the difference in sound the Neve 1073 Preamp plug-in makes.
Nice article from Tim Truby.
This is part of the risk of moving everything into the cloud. If your app/data is installed on a hard drive and your computer fails, you can replace the hardware, restore from backup, get back up and running. If the cloud fails or the company goes under, you lose access to your work.
From the EFF report, Protecting Your Data From Government Requests:
Apple earned credit in all 6 categories in this year’s Who Has Your Back report. Apple’s rating is particularly striking because it had lagged behind industry competitors in prior years, earning just one star in 2011, 2012, and 2013. Apple shows remarkable improvement in its commitments to transparency and privacy.
Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter, among others, also got the same rating as Apple.
[Via 9to5mac]
There has been a lot of misinformation in the blogosphere about the implications of yesterday’s vote. The linked post made the most sense to me, did a good job of laying things out.
When Apple released OS X 10.9.3, many users found that the /Users folder was hidden. In my case, when I click on Dave's Computer in the Finder sidebar, then click on Macintosh HD, I don’t see the usual Users folder at the top level of my hard drive. The folder is there, it’s just hidden.
This is not a big deal for most people, and not everyone’s /Users folder is hidden. If yours is, and you need access to it, open a Finder window and select Go To Folder… from the Go menu. When the dialog appears, type /Users and click the Go button. The /Users folder will become visible, albeit temporarily.
For a more permanent solution, control-click on the /Users folder and select Make Alias from the contextual menu that appears. Though the /Users folder will become hidden again when you close your Finder window, the alias will stick around.
Not sure why Apple made this change, and why some people are seeing it and not others. Whatever the reason and whatever the ultimate resolution, this is an easy thing to deal with and, I suspect, will be resolved in the next release.
UPDATE: Twitter user Jan suggested using this bit of code (which you’d enter using Terminal) to permanently change the /Users folder’s hidden status:
sudo chflags nohidden /Users
Good tip, but personally, I’d advise waiting to give Apple a chance to resolve this in their own way before going under the hood yourself.
[Hat tip to Kirk McElhearn for pointing this out]
When Apple released OS X 10.9.3, they also released a new version of iTunes, iTunes 11.2. In the linked article, Kirk McElhearn walks you through some significant podcast management changes that came with the release.
In this piece, I’d like to share some of the keyboard shortcuts and related functionality that I use every day on the Mac.
It’s amazing how many shortcuts I use everyday and don’t even think about.
All kinds of changes.
The ad, called Intelligent Details, is really nice. At the end they show a behind-the-scenes of how it was shot and put together.
It’s a free download.
I love this song.
Sensible words from Ben Brooks. Not being a good photographer myself, I take pictures with my iPhone and I’m happy that I had it with me.
This isn’t good for Avid—Bobby Lombardi in particular is a huge loss.
CNBC:
The popular mobile app, which was pulled from app stores in February, will return in August, Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen told CNBC on Wednesday. The game will include multi-player capabilities and be less addictive, Nguyen said.
I found this entire episode incredibly bizarre and emblematic of the evolution of the App Store from a garage mentality to what it has become today.
Are you a Mac power-user? Do you use Terminal? Even a little? If so, read the linked article. Good stuff.
If you haven’t seen this video that explains Graphene, take a look.
The linked article is about the brewing patent battle. Very interesting.
When the top European court ruled that users have a right to be forgotten by search engines, they opened the door to a disruptive wave of possibilities.
“It’s just such a mind-bogglingly impossible decision,” said Fred Cate, distinguished professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. “Courts aren’t responsible for the practical implications of rulings but this really staggers the imagination.”
And:
“They’d have to hire an army of compliance officers,” said Justin Brookman, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Project on Consumer Privacy. That may make it difficult for companies to “scalably compete online,” he said.
Also:
At the company’s annual shareholder meeting today, Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said the ruling “went too far.” He added that the EU court “didn’t consider adequately the impact on free expression, which is absolutely a human right.”
I can’t imagine Google, et al, won’t challenge this ruling.
I don’t normally post this sort of thing, but this video is remarkable. A child was riding a tricycle in his driveway when a dog viciously attacked. Enter the cat to save the day. Wow.
Coda 2.5 is essentially complete. But, we’re still encountering sandboxing challenges. So, in the interest of finally getting Coda 2.5 out the door and in the hands of you, our very eager and patient customers, we’ve decided it’s time to move on—for now.
In short: Coda 2.5 will not be sandboxed, and therefore will not be available in the Mac App Store.
It’s unfortunate, but the folks at Panic aren’t the only ones running into these issues.
Logic Pro X 10.0.7 was updated with a monster list of changes and improvements.
WSJ:
As more third-party sellers have signed up to offer products through Amazon and use its order-fulfillment services, the Seattle-based giant has allowed many to pool their inventory with supposedly identical items supplied by other sellers—in essence commingling products from third-party merchants with those supplied directly to Amazon by the brands themselves.
In other words, a product ordered from a third-party seller may not have originated from that particular seller. If the bar code matches, any one that is on the shelf will do.
The implication here is that you might order a brand name product and receive a knockoff instead. I can’t imagine that Amazon isn’t working on a fix for this.