“Light, shadows, depth — all perfect!”

Such an impressive photo.

[Via Veerie’s blog]

In my book Instapaper is certainly a “ridiculously good deal” and that may sum up Instapaper 4 perfectly.

I’m a proud paying member of Instapaper and I’m really impressed with what Marco did with version 4.0.

PDFpen is a great application for editing your PDFs. You can add signatures to PDFs and email them back, instead of resorting to printing and faxing. You can even make corrections and edit images. There’s also OCR for scanned documents — essential for those going paperless.

Download a fully-functional demo of PDFpen. At $59.95, it’s the affordable alternative to Acrobat.

New York Times:

Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.

Book publishing continues to undergo nothing short of a seismic upheaval as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and others change the rules. I’m sure that some will lament these changes as the end of publishing as we know it, but change is inevitable.

James Stewart writing for the New York Times about Steve Jobs’ accomplishments in retail architecture:

In many ways, the retail architecture is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped, and Mr. Jobs was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product’s presentation and customer experience.

Jobs touched so many aspects of design in his years. We think mainly about the products Apple released, but it’s evident in things like architecture and Web design too.

Apple today announced it has sold over four million of its new iPhone 4S, just three days after its launch on October 14. In addition, more than 25 million customers are already using iOS 5, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, in the first five days of its release, and more than 20 million customers have signed up for iCloud, a breakthrough set of free cloud services that automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices. iPhone 4S is available today in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, and will be available in 22 more countries on October 28 and more than 70 countries by the end of the year.

Impressive for the iPhone 4S and iOS 5.

Apple to Samsung during negotiations.

The detail on the close-ups is just incredible.

An easy way for small business owners to build Web sites. Maybe this will help rid the Web of the travesties called Web designs we often stumble across.

Dan Frommer:

About 85% of Google’s net revenue comes from ads running on Google sites. About 10% comes from ads running on other sites. And about 5% comes from “other”…

Phil Hornshaw:

Like just about everyone else in the tech world, I didn’t expect the iPhone 4S to be nearly as popular as it is…

No, only people that believed the rumors thought it would be a disappointment. Like me, everyone else that was at the event thought it would be successful. Don’t speak for the rest of us in the tech world because you were wrong.

Many thanks to Marketcircle’s Daylite for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop.

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For a free 30-day trial visit Marketcircle’s Web site. You can also find more information about Daylite for iPhone and iPad there too.

BGR.com:

“AT&T had already activated a record number of iPhones on our network — and is on-track to double our previous record for activations on a single day.”

Looks like the naysayers were right, the iPhone 4S is clearly a failure.

Massively:

Today CCP continued show its commitment to this new development direction with a special reactivation offer for returning players. Most account-holders whose subscriptions lapsed during or before the Summer drama have been sent an email offering a special rate of $4.95 US for 30 days of subscription time.

CCP Games lost the goodwill of many EVE Online players over the summer following the release of a new installment of the long-running MMO that implemented some unwelcome changes in the game. Recently CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson posted an apology to gamers upset by the changes; this continues the company’s acts of contrition.

BusinessWeek:

In the weeks leading up to Apple’s (AAPL) Oct. 4 announcement about the new iPhone 4S, Tim Hickman lived and breathed rumors about the device. His company, Hard Candy Cases, makes protective covers for mobile phones, and he was determined to get a jump on production. After three separate manufacturing partners in China sent him detailed 3D models of an iPhone with a widened, pill-shaped “home” button and a slightly tapered back, Hickman decided to roll the dice. He paid $50,000 to make steel moldings to mass-produce cases for the new design and, on the morning of Apple’s announcement, began taking orders on his website. The gamble backfired: Apple’s new iPhone 4S included no major changes to the exterior design. The home button remained circular. Hickman suddenly owned $50,000 worth of paperweights.

What’s more, some Apple rumor sites rely on the same information as these case manufacturers to report on future Apple designs. They, too, got burned. The report says that smartphone cases are now a $436 million a year business, so it’s no wonder some companies are taking risks like this to be the first to market.

Macworld:

At a service update conference held on Thursday afternoon, RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said, “We don’t know why the switch failed and why service never failed over to another alternative switch.” Asked why the company couldn’t avoid network traffic backlogs by re-routing traffic by bypassing Slough, RIM didn’t give a straight answer.

They’re like deer in the headlights.

With this update, djay Apps now feature professional audio FX, integrated iCloud capabilities, enhanced music library features and the ability to include sounds from other music apps using the audio cut and paste feature.

Reuters:

A Dutch court on Friday turned down Samsung Electronics’ request for an injunction against all of Apple’s mobile products that use 3G telecommunications technology, including iPhones and iPads.

Hopefully Samsung will realize it’s barking up the wrong tree pretty soon. Things just aren’t going its way in court, regardless of the country.

Cool idea.

Businessweek:

In many ways, Forstall is a mini-Steve. He’s a hard-driving manager who obsesses over every detail. He has Jobs’s knack for translating technical, feature-set jargon into plain English. He’s known to have a taste for the Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG, in silver, the same car Jobs drove, and even has a signature on-stage costume: black shoes, jeans, and a black zippered sweater. (He favors Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirts for normal days at the office.)

A detailed six-page feature.

Mel Martin for TUAW:

44% of 3G and 3GS owners plan to upgrade to the iPhone 4S 42% of iPhone 4 owners say they plan to make the jump 24% of BlackBerry owners say they are coming on board the Apple 4S 12% of Android owners say they are willing to switch

Update: Changed the 24% from Android to BlackBerry.

Reuters:

A U.S. judge said Samsung’s Galaxy tablets infringe Apple’s iPad patents, but also that Apple might have a problem establishing the validity of its patents.

Australia and now the US.

Khidr Suleman reporting on Michael Dell speaking at Dell World:

We are very aligned with Microsoft around Windows 8. You’ll hear more about Windows 8 from us and see a wide range of products released,” Dell told journalists during a Q&A at Dell World 2011 in Texas.“Android is certainly another opportunity as well, but that market has not developed to the expectations they would have had.”

Wait, there’s actually a Dell World?

As usual Macworld has done an incredibly thorough job of looking at each aspect of Apple’s latest offerings. They have two series running today — one called “All About iCloud” and another called “Up Close with iOS 5.”

Neil Hughes for AppleInsider:

The new iPhone 4S features a redesigned antenna design that allows for better reception and faster wireless data speeds.

A good look at the antenna issues over the past year. I love the new dual antenna system.

Logo Design Love:

The only thing Rand knew was that the mysterious NeXT computer was a black cube. With this scant yet meaningful intelligence, Rand developed a unique proposal book for the mark that walked the reader — Mr Jobs — through the step-by-step conceptual process to the final, logical outcome.

Rupert Goodwins, for ZDNet UK:

While the introduction of Intel’s 4004 microprocessor in 1971 is widely regarded as a key moment in modern computing, the contemporaneous birth of the C programming language is less well known. Yet the creation of C has as much claim, if not more, to be the true seminal moment of IT as we know it; it sits at the heart of programming — and in the hearts of programmers — as the quintessential expression of coding elegance, power, simplicity and portability.Its inventor, Dennis Ritchie, whose death after a long illness was reported on Wednesday and confirmed on Thursday by Bell Labs, similarly embodied a unique yet admirable approach to systems design: a man with a lifelong focus on making software that satisfied the intellect while freeing programmers to create their dreams.

Ritchie developed Unix with Kenneth Thompson at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, and then developed C with Brian Kerninghan to make it easier for programmers to write code that would work on different platforms.

It’s not hyperbole to say that without Ritchie’s work, there’d be no OS X or iOS today, no Linux or Android either, no C++…truly a giant in his field.