New York Times:

Hyman Strachman, a 92-year-old, 5-foot-5 World War II veteran trying to stay busy after the death of his wife. And he has sent every one of his copied DVDs, almost 4,000 boxes of them to date, free to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.“It’s not the right thing to do, but I did it,” Mr. Strachman said, acknowledging that his actions violated copyright law.

Go ahead, Hollywood. Just try to sue this guy.

BuzzFeed:

The Space shuttle Enterprise, mounted atop a 747, flew over NYC today. The shuttle will eventually be put on permanent display at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. Unsurprisingly, a space shuttle on top of an airplane is a really cool thing to see.

Don Reisinger for CNet:

Speaking to the Austin-based Statesman newspaper, Dave Porter, senior vice president for economic development at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, said that the deal between the city and Apple is not done, and “remains in peril.” Porter went on to tell the newspaper that Apple is now “frustrated” with the recent developments.

Apple’s expansion of its Austin, Texas customer support operations was a big deal – the company plans to double its headcount and build new facilities. Texas governor Rick Perry has even mentioned it in speeches as an example of how Texas provides a business-friendly environment to big companies.

Some of the loudest noise opposing Apple’s deal with Austin is attorney and former judge Bill Aleshire, who called it a “sorry contract” and suggested that Apple had “rigged” the process in its own favor.

Om Malik for GigaOM:

Apple acquired app discovery service Chomp earlier this year, betting that it would help make app discovery easier and better on its iTunes Appstore. The casualty of that acquisition is the Chomp for Android app which seems to have been discontinued.

So far Apple has, in standard fashion, kept quiet about its long-term plans for Chomp. But clearly Android isn’t part of Chomp’s future anymore.

George Colony on Forrester Blogs:

When Steve Jobs departed, he took three things with him: 1) singular charismatic leadership that bound the company together and elicited extraordinary performance from its people; 2) the ability to take big risks, and 3) an unparalleled ability to envision and design products. Apple’s momentum will carry it for 24-48 months. But without the arrival of a new charismatic leader it will move from being a great company to being a good company, with a commensurate step down in revenue growth and product innovation. Like Sony (post Morita), Polaroid (post Land), Apple circa 1985 (post Jobs), and Disney (in the 20 years post Walt Disney), Apple will coast, and then decelerate.

Didn’t we hear this same crap when Jobs retired last year, and again after he died?

Does anyone really think that Cook et al are just riding Jobs’ coattails still, as they’re setting records for growth and profitability?

I look forward to 2014-2016, when Forrester CEO George Colony will be lauded as a visionary – the only one who really understood that beleaguered Apple was doomed from the start!

No, wait a minute, no he won’t. He’ll be ignored. Unlike people with a plan and the ability to execute it. Like, say, Tim Cook.

Apple has had a planning request approved for a new off-campus restaurant by the Cupertino Planning Commission, providing employees with a place to eat and discuss company plans and product development without fear of Apple’s competitors overhearing conversations.The new 21,468-square-foot cafeteria, which was approved at a meeting on Tuesday, is located a short walk from Apple’s Infinite Loop headquarters and will provide cafe, meeting room, lounge areas and courtyard facilities, as well as a dedicated second floor for restaurant staff.

Loose lips sink ships.

I wonder if this will do anything to help prevent iPhone prototypes from being left in bars.

Many thanks to ScreenCastsOnline for sponsoring The Loop this week.

Established in 2005, ScreenCastsOnline is acknowledged as one of the primary online training resources for the Mac and iOS, publishing two brand new video tutorials each and every week.

ScreenCastsOnline members automatically receive a new Mac or iOS video tutorial (or both) each week, as well as access to a huge video library of over 340 Mac tutorials and 50 iOS tutorials, covering the latest Apple and third party software.

Special offer for all “The Loop” readers – 20% discount off the first payment for any monthly, quarterly or annual membership.

More recently, ScreenCastsOnline has launched a number of low cost tutorial apps in both the Mac and iTunes App Stores.

SCOtutor for Lion – For Mac users upgrading to Lion SCOtutor for Mac – For new Mac users wanting to learn about the Mac from scratch. SCOtutor for iPad – For new iPad users – all about the iPad and iOS from first principles. SCOtutor for iPhoto on iOS – Learn all about the new iPhoto app for the iPad and iPhone.

All SCOtutor apps include an optimised video player, full chapter navigation, English subtitles and many other unique features. All apps are available on both the Mac and iOS devices.

More information about the special ScreenCastsOnline membership discount or the SCOtutor tutorials apps is available on the Web site.

Andrew Scheps’ engineering and mixing credits read like a who’s who of popular music. He mixed four tracks on Adele’s Grammy-winning album, 21, and engineered and mixed 11 songs on the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I’m with You. The latter was one of his many collaborations with production legend Rick Rubin. Scheps has also worked with Jay-Z, U2, Justin Timberlake, Green Day, Metallica, and many others. As a producer, Scheps’ credits include bands such as Favez, The Duke Spirit, and Audrye Sessions.

It’s always interesting to see how the pros do it.

The iPad is drawing new consumers to the Apple brand with more than one-in-four iPad owners saying the device is their first Apple product. According to leading market research company, The NPD Group’s recent Apple Ecosystem Study, 33 percent of U.S. homes, (37 million households) own Apple products. While a majority (69 percent) of these consumers own iPods, ownership of iPads is growing.

This is good news for Apple. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Mac, iPhone or iPad that draws people to Apple, once they start using the product they will buy more. The simplicity of using any Apple products will win people over.

The Q1 findings showed that Apple’s iPhone 4S hit a record high, claiming the number one device spot overall, with 37 percent of all activations for the first quarter (four times that of any other device). The iPad 2 claimed the second spot overall, with 17.7 percent of activations for the quarter. With less than one month on the market, the new iPad™, released in March 2012, rocketed to the number four spot with 4.3 percent of all activations for the quarter, and an impressive 12.1 percent of activations in March alone.Good found that iPads collectively represented roughly 97.3 percent of its tablet activations for Q1 2012. Apple’s continued growth is not only being driven by consumers and the overall BYOD trend, but also by proactive enterprise deployment of iPads.

We knew Apple was doing really good in the consumer market, but this is quite impressive.

Image editing software Pixelmator has been updated to version 2.0.3 with the following improvements:

• Improves the performance of the Move Tool
• Fixes memory leaks
• Fixes a situation where performance would degrade over time
• Fixes issues with Export for Web
• Fixes a problem that caused corrupt PXM files

Taylor Wimberly:

We know Samsung has an unhealthy obsession with Apple, but this is getting a little weird. This week in Australia, Samsung hired a marketing agency called Tongue to conduct some kind of guerrilla marketing campaign where they sent a bus of protesters to an Apple store and taunted people with the message “WAKE UP.”

Here’s an idea: just make products that don’t copy everything Apple does.

The Verge:

The Google Drive cloud storage service launched yesterday to much fanfare, but as with any new Google product, there are important questions about how the company will actually use personal data uploaded to the system. Google sells ads against your data, after all, and the more data you give the company, the more opportunity it has to screw up. That means the Google Drive terms of service and privacy policy are critically important, and there’s been a lot of selective interpretation floating around the web in the past 24 hours — and a lot of comparisons to the privacy policies of competitive services like Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.That’s great — all web services should be subject to harsh scrutiny of their privacy policies — but a close and careful reading reveals that Google’s terms are pretty much the same as anyone else’s, and slightly better in some cases. Let’s take a look.

You might be surprised to see the answer.

CNET:

Sprint Nextel is banking that its unlimited data plan will continue to set its iPhone apart from the others — even when the next version arrives.If the next iteration of the iPhone arrives with LTE, Sprint will continue to offer a no-strings unlimited plan, CEO Dan Hesse told CNET.Hesse believes the decision to stick with unlimited has been a boon for the company, drawing in new customers who wouldn’t have otherwise considered the carrier.

He may very well be right. My next iPhone might be one from Sprint.

Laura Hazard Owen for paidContent:

Macmillan science fiction/fantasy imprint Tor/Forge — the publisher of titles like Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” — will sell its e-books DRM-free as of “early July 2012,” the company announced today.

This is great news for fantasy and science fiction enthusiasts who want to buy content unencumbered with restrictions on how it can interact with devices or apps – a very real problem when buying ebooks from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble or even through Apple’s iBooks.

Tor publishes books from Orson Scott Card, Whitley Strieber, Robert Jordan, John Scalzi and many others.

Don Reisinger for Cnet:

As one might expect, Apple’s iPhone proved quite popular on Sprint’s service, with 1.5 million of those devices activated during the first quarter. According to Sprint, 44 percent of those activations went to new customers.

With 4.3 million phones activated on AT&T and about 3 million activated by Verizon, Sprint is by far the smallest iPhone reseller of the major US carriers. Forty-four percent of those iPhone activations on Sprint’s network went to new customers, though, which must make the company’s executives pretty happy.

Wired How-To:

How will you make sure your battery lasts long enough?Here’s the rundown on what will — and won’t — make your iPhone or iPad battery last the longest, and some tips to make sure it lasts as long as your device.

Sophos’ Naked Security blog:

One in every five Mac computers is harbouring some kind of malware, a new study from the experts at Sophos has revealed.

The key phrase here is “some kind of malware.” Sophos is including Windows malware, sent to you by e-mail, for example, by unwitting Windows users. That stuff will never give OS X a problem.

How many times have you received a spam e-mail or message from a Windows using friend (or total stranger) with a strange file attachment?

Get rid of it, obviously, but you’re using a Mac for a reason – and one of them may be so you don’t have to deal with Windows and its problems.

What’s more, Sophos’ thesis is predicated on assumptions made using data retrieved from “Mac computers which have recently downloaded Sophos’s free Mac anti-virus software.” Mac users who have downloaded anti-virus software are a self-selecting group if ever I heard one. One in five of those Macs may have some kind of malware on them, but I’d be very surprised if that was the same as the public at large.

Mac users don’t routinely use anti-virus software. I expect that many of them are downloading Sophos’ product with the expectation that they’re going to find problems.

Sophos is simply trying to drum up interest in its own products – the blog post links back to its anti-virus software for Mac, which is indeed free, but is also quite capable of building a captive audience for other products in the future.

Susan Decker for Bloomberg:

Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. (MMI) won a partial U.S. International Trade Commission judge’s ruling in its bid to block imports of Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s devices including the iPhone and iPad tablet computer. ITC Judge Thomas Pender said Apple violated one of four Motorola Mobility patent rights. The patent relates to Wi-Fi technology. The judge’s findings are subject to review by the six-member commission, which has the power to block imports that infringe U.S. patents.

Two of the patents concern Wi-Fi; one involves how the phone senses if it’s close to the user’s head, and the last one describes the way the server tracks application availability.

Sean Gallagher for Ars Technica:

The low headcount and the urgency of just about every project—where the millions spent on a grant for a particular project may be lost if data can’t be collected or transmitted—demands that the few IT pros on hand in Antarctica have not just depth of knowledge, but skills across other fields as well. “Typically, they’re at an engineer level as opposed to a technician,” Gitt says. “They could fix almost anything.” One technician had to diagnose a problem with the Windows software package needed for a project on a researcher’s laptop—and the program was written and documented in French.

I never really thought of IT as an “extreme” profession, but for these folks, it definitely is.

An alternate view on clicky keyboards.

Financial Post:

Over the next five years, the global market for touchscreen tablets is expected to grow to 375 million devices sold in 2016, up from 56 million sold in 2011, bringing the total global tablet install base to more than 760 million.

To infinity and beyond.

AppleInsider:

Among the 4.3 million iPhones that AT&T sold in the first quarter of calendar 2012, 21 percent of those were new to AT&T. The total 5.5 million smartphones AT&T sold in the three-month period was a new record for the company.

Android is winning!