June 7, 2013

Yeah, I like these.

Cheers brother.

Wall St. can’t make up its mind who is doomed.

The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald

Such a sad tragedy, but a classic song.

This made me smile.

Obama’s ConnectED promises high-speed Internet to classrooms

The Obama Administration has announced a new initiative called ConnectED, its goal to see 99 percent of schools across the nation outfitted with high-speed Internet access within the next five years.

In this case, “high speed” is defined as at least 100 Mbps, with 1 gigabit being the goal. Other aspects of the initiative include training teachers to help use technology and having schools deploy “feature-rich educational devices” to provide “college and career-ready” content.

The announcement has absolutely no legislative teeth, of course, because the Executive branch of the U.S. government can’t do that. But Obama is calling on the FCC to leverage its E-Rate program, which provides telecommunications and Internet access discounts to schools and libraries.

Apple lawyer Orin Snyder questioning Thomas Turvey, Google’s director of strategic partnerships in the e-book trial:

Things went downhill from there. Under Snyder’s questioning, Turvey acknowledged that he couldn’t remember a single name of any of the publishing executives who had told him Apple was the reason the publishers were switching their business model. He conceded that the publisher’s move to the agency system was important to Google’s own business, yet Turvey couldn’t remember any details about the conversations with publishers. By the end of the interview Turvey had gone from saying the publishers had told him directly, to saying they had merely told people on his team, to finally saying the publishers had “likely” told someone on his team.

Oh Google.

It’s interesting when you use something that’s really well designed—it just becomes part of what you’re doing. However, use something that’s poorly designed and all you notice is the poorly designed tool. It takes away from the experience.

June 6, 2013

Hi, Mayors – today we are announcing that we are moving the release date of the Mac version of SimCity to August. We have made this tough decision because we do not believe it is ready for primetime yet. We want to ensure the Mac is a great experience for our players and that is why we are taking more time.

“As a culture we have moved into a realm where the consumption of news is a near-constant process,” says Richard Gingras, Senior Director, News & Social Products at Google. “Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day — replacing the old standard behaviors of news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of the day.”

So Google moved to the more creepy Google Now and Google Plus. No thanks.

Great article by John Kirk that looks beyond market share numbers.

Maccast 2013.06.04 – WW We’ll See

Adam Christianson of the Maccast podcast asked me some WWDC questions on this week’s show. He also talked with Bart Buschotts, Katie Floyd and David Sparks.

In this issue, actor Matthew Modine talks about his short movies, Luis Pérez highlights the importance of accessibility, Eva Giselle looks at the future of design, Dave Addey goes outside his comfort zone and Harry C. Marks investigates his heritage.

You can download The Loop Magazine on the App Store and get a seven-day free trial when you subscribe.

Vesper is a simple and elegant tool for collecting notes, ideas, things to do — anything you want to remember. Use tags to group related items into playlist-like collections. Vesper imposes no system; organize and curate your notes whatever way comes naturally to you. Eschewing complications, Vesper’s focus is on how it feels to use it.

Great looking app from John Gruber, Brent Simmons and Dave Wiskus.

Dan and Jim discuss what could be announced at Apple’s 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference next week in San Francisco. Later they discuss the risk of malicious, hacking iPhone chargers, the importance of an external power source for your phone at events like WWDC, Apple and Samsung’s US market rivalry, The White House’s war on patent trolls, and more.

Sponsored by Hover (use code DANSENTME for 10% off), Shutterstock (use code DANSENTME6 for 30% off), and Squarespace (use code DANSENTME6 for 10% off).

June 5, 2013

According to VCs, without VCs we wouldn’t have Silicon Valley.

Venture capital is the lifeblood of our industry; the jet fuel in our Gulfstream; the saliva in our 23andme test. If it weren’t for free and easy capital, Instagram and Tumblr and {insert your employer’s name here, you unit-test-skipping, standup-meeting-lying bullshit artist} would have had to come up with a pesky business model.

He’s at it again—and it’s funny.

Eddie Van Halen is absolutely amazing. Having the tracks isolated, you can really hear him play.

  • Less than a tenth of Android users care that it’s open

  • The number of people who care that Android is open is about the same as the number of people who run Linux

This was a fascinating read.

Intel officially calls Falcon Ridge “Thunderbolt 2” instead

A new posting on Intel’s blog from Dan Snyder talks about Thunderbolt 2 – the next generation of Thunderbolt technology that will be coming to market in 2014.

Known up to now by its Intel code-name, Falcon Ridge, Thunderbolt 2 doubles Thunderbolt’s bandwidth to 20 Gigabits per second. Intel says this is enough to do 4K video file transfer and display simultaneously (4K is so-called “Ultra HDTV”). The connection is DisplayPort 1.2, so it’s backwards-compatible with today’s cables and connectors.

Intel already revealed that Falcon Ridge was due to go into production before the end of the year, and this news reiterates that. Things will be ramping up next year, so mark 2014 as the year of Thunderbolt 2.

I remember all of these.

[Via Shawn Blanc]

The Washington Post will phase in a paid online subscription model for Web content starting June 12, charging some readers $9.99 a month for access to more than 20 articles a month on desktop and mobile devices.

For $14.99 a month, readers can get a premium package that includes access to all of The Post’s custom apps.

It will be interesting to see how they do with this strategy.

Bare Bones updates TextWrangler and BBEdit

New versions of BBEdit and TextWrangler are available for download from Bare Bones Software web site. Bug fixes – no new features. Grab updates from the Mac App Store if that’s where you downloaded them from.

Is Owen there?

Typical Masshole.

June 4, 2013

The U.S. International Trade Commission today reached a decision [PDF] in the ongoing Apple vs. Samsung case, ruling that Apple infringed on Samsung Patent No. 7,706,348, titled “Apparatus and method for encoding/decoding transport format combination indicator in CDMA mobile communication system.”

It’s important to note that any sales ban that comes from this ruling will only affect older iPhone models. The iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 and future models will not be held up with this decision.

OS X has been updated with lots of fixes. The download is available in the Mac App Store — just check for updates.

Apple leads Samsung in US smartphone market share

Market research firm comScore on Tuesday released results of its latest research into smartphone market share in the United States. The results showed that Apple is leading and growing faster than its competition, including Samsung.

During the three months ending April 2013, Apple held 39.2% of the U.S. market, up 1.4 points from the 37.8% it held in January 2013. For April, Samsung has 22.0% market share, up only 0.6 points from the 21.4% it held in January.

HTC (8.9%), Motorola (8.3%) and LG (6.7%) round out the top five. All three were down slightly in the April report.

Android leads the platform race for the April report with 52.0% of the U.S. share, but that’s down -0.3 points from the 52.3% it held in January.

Apple’s iOS, on the other hand, is up 1.4 points to 39.2% in the April report. iOS had 37.8% in the January report.

BlackBerry (5.1%), Microsoft (3.0%) and Symbian (0.5%) round out the top five. None of these companies grew market share.

The White House announced a set of executive actions and policy recommendations Tuesday aimed at preventing certain patent-holding firms, known as “patent trolls” to their detractors, from abusing the patent system.

The Obama administration’s actions are intended to target firms that have forced technology companies, financial institutions and others into costly litigation to protect their products. These patent-holding firms amass portfolios of patents and focus on pursuing licensing fees rather than using the patents to build new products.

Good.

One of the biggest parts to making a song sound good is having an experienced engineer to mix and master your work. It’s great to see professionals get together and give indie artists an affordable way to have their songs sound top notch.

Until now reading aids for the visually impaired and the blind have been cumbersome devices that recognize text in restricted environments, or, more recently, have been software applications on smartphones that have limited capabilities.

In contrast, the OrCam device is a small camera worn in the style of Google Glass, connected by a thin cable to a portable computer designed to fit in the wearer’s pocket. The system clips on to the wearer’s glasses with a small magnet and uses a bone-conduction speaker to offer clear speech as it reads aloud the words or object pointed to by the user.

I’ve been testing out Byword’s new blog features on The Loop and it works like a charm. This is great update. The Mac version is available on the Mac App Store.