John Ruwitch for Reuters:

Apple Inc and its key supplier Foxconn Technology Group will share the initial costs of improving labor conditions at the Chinese factories that assemble iPhones and iPads, Foxconn’s top executive said on Thursday.

One of my favorite apps of all time.

Jacqui Cheng for ArsTechnica:

“We went through scores of names, but the one that I hit on early on was the iMac,” Segall said. “Steve didn’t like any of our names, including the iMac, and said, ‘if you can’t beat MacMan, that’s what it’s gonna be.’ We came up with a few more names and came back, but still brought back some of our old favorites. At that point, Steve said, ‘well I don’t hate it this week, but I still don’t like it.”

Fascinating.

These pages describe a personal journey – my attempt to recreate the Marshall 50 watt 1987 head I owned in the early seventies. I was a tube geek even back then, and carefully hand-drew a schematic while I owned it.

If you go the last page, you can hear how it sounds. Very impressive.

Brett Terpstra:

There are a few great Markdown text editors available, and more being worked on right now. I want to put a list of features out there that I think any true Markdown editor should include. Some of these are implemented in one editor or another, but nothing has brought it all together (aside from TextMate with all of my customizations, and even that lacks some of the polish mentioned below).

Om Malik:

Facebook says it is launching an app store that will allow people to get access to social apps on the network, without much heavy lifting. The company made the announcement in a blog post today. The company is hoping that the new app store will make it easy for apps to be discovered on the platform.

Oh great, just what we need.

This Week Myke And Terry Are Joined By Jim Dalrymple and they discuss WWDC and Apple’s upcoming plans as well as Jim’s Mac and iOS Set-Up.

Nilay Patel for the Verge:

Apple just released OS X Lion 10.7.4, which fixes a nasty bug that exposed FileVault passwords in plain text if Snow Leopard users upgraded to Lion but kept using their legacy FileVault settings. (FileVault 2 in Lion never had a problem, so if you bought a new Lion machine you’re in the clear.)

Fire up Software Update and grab it, folks. Other changes afoot too, including improved SMB server compatibility, a fix to the “Reopen windows when logging back in” setting and more.

HP Vice President of Industrial Design Stacy Wolff talking about how they didn’t copy Apple:

I think if you look at the new Spectre XT, there are similarities in a way, not due to Apple but due to the way technologies developed. Apple may like to think that they own silver, but they don’t. In no way did HP try to mimic Apple. In life there are a lot of similarities.”

Yeah Stacy, because this looks nothing like a MacBook Air, nothing at all.

We figure this story got skewed because PandoDaily is going through its own troubles, and looking for a target to project its drama onto; Sometimes not wanting to seem weak makes you seem weak.

Ouch. You can also look at this scathing article about PandoDaily.

Alexis Madrigal:

I’m sympathetic to the business concerns of the media industry. I really am. But this myth that slideshows are the path to salvation has got to be put into a rocket and sent hurtling into the sun. People know when your product is cheap; there is no “trick” of the web.

Please make them go away.

Alex Brooks:

As the fifth month of the year continues to progress the time is nearing for Apple to release a flurry of new Macs. Unlike the days of IBM’s PowerPC CPU architecture it’s now relatively easy to pinpoint when and what Macs are going to get refreshed at what point during the year and that is all down to Apple’s use of Intel’s architecture.

Alex has been doing some great work lately.

However, by my reckoning, in the 22 Bond films to date, there have been at least 4662 shots fired at our hero. A static well-aimed shot would almost certainly have proved lethal, but assuming all 4662 were “on the run”, the probability of a single fatal shot is about 5 per cent.

Those bad guys need some target practice.

USA Today:

Kodak will close its online photo service on July 2 after a federal bankruptcy judge approved selling the business to Shutterfly for $23.8 million. Shutterfly Inc. emerged last month as the sole bidder for Eastman Kodak Co.’s Kodak Gallery. The judge issued an order approving the sale last week.

Kodak has sent out an e-mail to Kodak Gallery account holders advising them of the change. Users have until May 28th to opt out of the transition, which will happen on July 2.

Mark Milian for Bloomberg:

Wearing a hoodie to a meeting in New York on Monday with potential investors is a sign of Zuckerberg’s lack of seriousness, according to Michael Pachter, an analyst for Wedbush Securities.

Some might think that judging someone based on their appearance or the clothes they wear is a sign of immaturity. Just food for thought.

A California judge tossed out a lawsuit in which the Chinese firm Proview Electronics Co Ltd accused Apple Inc of tricking them into selling the “iPad” name for less than it might have.

The iPad trials were underway since 2011, and the House of Commons administration committee recently recommended the rapid rollout of suitable mobile tablet hardware to all 650 MPs.” And by tablet they meant iPad.

Good move. Let’s hope other governments follow.

Marco Arment on AppleInsider’s report about Apple working on multi-user support on the iPad:

That’s the standard “duplicate bug” response email. It’s a form letter. It means nothing, except that he was not the first person to make that suggestion.

Michael Markman:

Glenn, Mike, and I marched into Steve’s office to give him the pitch. Pretty much the way I outlined it in the previous paragraph. Steve’s eyes were sparkling through it all. By the time I got to, “and you as FDR,” I had made the sale.

And here is the video he’s talking about.

[Via MacStories]

Abdel Ibrahim:

When it comes to Android, though, my second in-depth experience wasn’t any less jarring than the first. Despite my time in the trenches with ICS on the Galaxy Nexus, HTC has slapped on so much paint with Sense that I often struggled to find my way. And what I recognized I still didn’t like. Granted, I cut my teeth on iOS devices, which pride themselves on simplicity, but I refuse to believe Android couldn’t be more user friendly. For all its options, there’s too much clutter. But if you can look past that or are accustomed to Android, I have little doubt you’d love the HTC One X.

Unfortunate for HTC that a review comes down to how much Android sucks balls.

EZkeys is a revolutionary plugin and stand alone instrument that combines a world-class piano player, songwriting partner, arranger and a meticulously sampled grand piano – all in one package.

Toontrack is taking its experience making one of the best drum plug-ins to piano.

There’s also the usual bickering over whether Samsung makes “copycat products” infringing Apple’s rights or, as the Korean company argues, “innovative, independently developed technologies”.

You kind of get the feeling that Samsung actually believes they’re innovative.

YOU COPY OTHER COMPANIES’ PRODUCTS. THAT’S NOT INNOVATIVE.

Apple posted the specifics of the security fixes in today’s release.

Alexander Sliwinski for Joystiq:

The rumored $99 up front Xbox 360 and $15 a month afterwards for two years is official. It includes a Kinect, Xbox Live Gold service, a two-year warranty.

To be clear, in order to get the $99 price you need to commit to a two-year subscription to Xbox Live Gold, Microsoft’s premium Xbox gaming service. And you can’t use renewal cards that will lower that rate, or tack it on to an existing subscription. Also, it’s a 4GB Xbox 360 – a model without a hard drive. You’ll need to upgrade its storage capability pretty quickly (Microsoft sells them as add-ons you can install yourself).

If you’ve held off getting an Xbox 360 until it was cheap enough, this may be the right time.

(via Engadget)

Jason Pontin for Technology Review:

So we created iOS and Android apps that were free for use; anyone could read our daily news and watch our videos, and people could pay to see digital replicas of the magazine. We launched the platforms in January of 2011. Complimenting myself on my conservative accounting, I budgeted less than $125,000 in revenue in the first year. That meant fewer than 5,000 subscriptions and a handful of single-issue sales. Easy, I thought.Like almost all publishers, I was badly disappointed. What went wrong? Everything.

As I read it, Pontin’s major problems were in underestimating development costs and overestimating the demand for his product.

Pontin spells out in detail the mistakes he and other publishers have made when it comes to releasing content on iOS. He makes a mistake to assume that he can paint his own experience with the same broad brush as everyone else, but certainly some of the lessons he learned translate to others, as well.

The bottom line is that each individual company needs to take a hard look at their business model and prospective revenue stream to decide if selling content through apps is going to be right for them.

Bloomberg News:

Proview Technology (Shenzhen) Co. said a “big gap” remains with Apple Inc. (AAPL) after the U.S. company offered compensation to settle their dispute over ownership of the iPad trademark in China. Apple proposed an amount of money to resolve the legal case as part of the mediation process being directed by the Higher People’s Court of Guangdong, Roger Xie, a lawyer for Proview, said by phone today. He declined to disclose the amount or when Apple made the offer.

Apple is in the midst of the trademark dispute after Proview, based in Shenzhen, said that it only paid Proview’s Taiwanese subsidiary to license the iPad marque, not the parent company.