Colin Campbell:
If you’re looking to read a dark tale of deception, greed, betrayal and intimidation, then you should get stuck into Leslie Benzies’ lawsuit against former partners Dan Houser and Sam Houser, the bosses of Grand Theft Auto house Rockstar Games.
Add guns, cars, and helicopters, and you’ve got a good plot for GTA 6.
Nick Statt:
Apple today let slip another reference to its potential operating system rebranding from OS X to MacOS. As part of its new environmental webpage in honor of Earth Day 2016, the company lists off names when discussing how it evaluates product life spans. “Years of use, which are based on first owners, are assumed to be four years for MacOS and tvOS devices and three years for iOS and watchOS devices,” the company writes.
Why ‘MacOS’ and not ‘macOS’, which would fit the current iOS, watchOS and tvOS scheme?
Sarah Perez:
To support these claims, the MLB gathered usage metrics from the first two weeks of the season — to clarify for non-baseball fans, the MLB season is not quite two weeks old at this point (Opening Day was April 3rd).
During these first two weeks, MLB fans spent 20 percent more minutes per day, on average, watching live video on iPad compared with the 2015 season, when multitasking was not available. (MLB says that any form of multitasking behavior was counted here, not just spilt-screen viewing.)
The only video I watch on my iPad is on YouTube, which doesn’t support any of these features. Their whole site and app completely sucks on mobile — I actually deleted the app it was so bad. Perhaps someone will get off their behind and finally do something about it.
Sean O’Kane:
One of the most talked about things this week was a strange video of a man who appeared to have a real life jet-powered hoverboard. The video was published by Zapata Racing, which has made water-powered versions of these flying machines for a few years now. The difference is that those are always tethered to some kind of personal watercraft. This new “Flyboard Air,” as CEO Franky Zapata calls it, is something totally different.
The video went viral on Monday, and it polarized the internet. People thought it was either the coolest thing ever invented, or that it was a massive hoax. Even optimistic parties, like myself, were skeptical. Maybe we all still feel a little burned by Tony Hawk and FunnyorDie, or maybe we were just being careful — after all, the video was suspiciously edited, there were very few details, and it just looked a little fake.
Over the week, more videos of the flight(s) surfaced, and it appeared to be the real deal. This morning, though, Franky Zapata himself called me up to talk a little bit more about the Flyboard Air, how it works, and what he wants to do with it.
The interview itself has a lot of technical details which was interesting. I laughed when he said that they ‘only made one because they didn’t expect any media attention’ — every single kid will want one of these. Myself included.
For the next ten days, until April 24, all proceeds from this curated selection of apps will go to the WWF.
Alex Kierstein:
From an aesthetic standpoint, the front fascia will be the most obvious and consequential change to the consumer. It brings the styling inline with the Model X, and likely the production version of the Model 3. The headlights also adopt a Model X look. Inside, there are two new woods available to trim the interior: one that Tesla calls “Figured Ash”, and the other simply a dark ash. That rounds out the changes this time around, although Tesla would like you to remember that over-the-air software updates may bring other changes as soon as they’re available.
Love the new look, much prettier than the old one.
Alan Taylor:
110 years ago next week, on April 18, 1906, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake centered near the city of San Francisco struck at 5:15 AM. The intense shaking toppled hundreds of buildings, but the resulting out-of-control fires were even more destructive. Broken water mains and limited firefighting capabilities allowed city-wide fires to burn for several days. Nearly 500 city blocks were leveled, with more than 25,000 buildings destroyed. At the time, the city was home to more than 400,000 residents—after the disaster, 250,000 were left homeless. The exact death toll is undetermined, but most estimates place the number of deaths caused by the earthquake and fire at more than 3,000.
Nick Statt:
Today, Facebook announced a bold new bot initiative that lives inside its Messenger application: artificial intelligence-powered personalities at our beck and call for shopping, checking the weather, getting news updates, and more. There’s just one problem: the bots are slow… painfully slow. In fact, Poncho the “weathercat,” which Facebook messaging chief David Marcus demoed onstage at the company’s F8 developer conference today, comes with a disclaimer that it “typically replies within an hour.” That’s neat, if you’re the kind of person who can spend an hour waiting to know whether it’s going to rain.
Quite frankly, this is about as interesting as 360° video and 3D TVs. A waste of time for everyone involved — developers, users, etc. I rarely have such negative feelings about something, but the fact that this is even news is unbelievable.
Joshua Hammer:
One year after a young pilot crashed a German airliner into the remote French Alps—a suicide and mass homicide that transfixed and horrified the world—Joshua Hammer investigates what really happened that day.
I’ve had this one sitting in the queue for a while now — a tragic story, but worth reading nonetheless.
Graham Spencer:
Today, numerous third-party Reddit clients were removed from the App Store by Apple for breaching clause 18.2 of the App Review Guidelines. This clause states that apps will be rejected if they contain “user generated content that is frequently pornographic”.
I wonder if they’ll pull Safari next.
User tangoshukudai on Reddit:
It is actually a funny story. When they were prototyping the iPad, they ported the iOS calc over, but it was just stretched to fit the screen. It was there all the way from the beginning of the prototypes and was just assumed by everyone at apple that it was going to be shipped that way. A month before the release, Steve Jobs calls Scott Forstall into his office and says to him, “where is the new design for the calculator? This looks awful” He said, “what new design?” This is what we are shipping with. Steve said, “no, pull it we can’t ship that”. Scott fought for it to stay in, but he knew he had to get their UI team involved to design a new look for the calculator but there was no way they could do it in that short time frame, so they just scrapped it. It has been such low priority since then that no one cares to work on it since there is more important things to work on. (Source: I worked at Apple)
They should have just licensed PCalc [App Store].
Myke Hurley:
By this point, my love of the Apple Pencil has been well documented, and it is now an essential part of the iPad experience for me.
I use my Apple Pencil for taking notes, sketching out ideas, and for navigating the iOS user interface. The latter use of my Apple Pencil is the one that’s most important to me. After having used a Wacom tablet on a Mac for the last 6-8 months, I have come to truly appreciate the benefits of pen input. The fact that the Apple Pencil lets me do this, is easily my favourite use of the device.
As with most devices that I love, I have taken it upon myself to make some customisations to it, and the iPad Pro it is connected to.
Love the skin.
John Everington:
BlackBerry has switched its focus back to the mid-range smartphone market after admitting that its recent flagship Android device, the BlackBerry Priv, was priced too high for enterprise customers.
The company’s chief executive, John Chen, told The National that BlackBerry plans to launch two mid-range Android handsets this year, one with a physical keyboard and one with a full touchscreen. He declined to say when the new devices would go on sale.
BlackBerry last week announced it had sold just 600,000 handsets during the three months to the end of March, well below analyst forecasts of 850,000. Mr Chen declined to say how many Privs had been sold during the period.
Mr Chen admitted that the Priv “was too high-end a product”, with its target market of enterprise customers put off by the handset’s US$700 price tag.
“The fact that we came out with a high end phone [as our first Android device] was probably not as wise as it should have been,” Mr Chen said during a visit to Abu Dhabi.
“A lot of enterprise customers have said to us, ‘I want to buy your phone but $700 is a little too steep for me. I’m more interested in a $400 device’.”
I know of a pretty big and well-known international company which used to spend as little as possible on BlackBerries. At one point the people working there started to demand other options, and many of them stopped using their work phones, preferring to bring their own. They were polled by management and soon thereafter, the firm bought close to ten thousand top of the line iPhones for their employees at full price. In the case of this particular enterprise, they would probably say the following to BB as feedback:
‘I want to buy your phone but it’s not worth $700 to us. I’m more interested in a $400 device.’
Russell Brandom:
If the bill becomes law, Apple and other companies will have a much harder time resisting similar legal demands. Essentially any hard encryption — that is, encryption that cannot be broken by the company providing it — would be in violation of the proposed measures, presenting a massive problem for a broad range of tech companies.
I did not expect to see a bill this quickly. Quite frankly, I expected people to be intelligent and not even try to pass this sort of garbage.
My bad.
Sator writing for PetaPixel:
There is a big craze for Sony full frame (FF) mirrorless cameras at the moment, and seeing people rush onto that bandwagon is like watching lemmings following each other over the cliff.
While I don’t agree with many of his posits and the tone of his article, his body and lens sizes arguments are precisely why I’m not planning to invest in the Sony mirrorless family at this time.
Bryan M. Wolfe:
Apple has added two new keys labeled “isFirstParty” and “isFirstPartyHideableApp” in iTunes metadata. These two new values started showing up a few weeks ago on every app in the App Store. The iTunes metadata is where all the information about an app is stored. It shows things like the date it was released, the App Store category it’s in, its size, etc. The new keys suggest the ability to remove apps such as Stocks, Compass, and Voice Messages is coming very soon.
Greg Bensinger:
In a first for the Seattle online retailer, Amazon will soon sell a higher-end Kindle with a rechargeable protective case for extended battery life, according to a person familiar with the matter. This removable cover will allow the Kindle to be thinner than earlier devices.
Also under development is a separate Kindle case with a battery that can be charged using solar power. It is unlikely this case will be released in the immediate future, another person familiar with the matter said.
Jim Dalrymple:
When Apple started Newsstand, I thought it was a way to reach readers with unique content, pay writers well for their content, and create a great experience on an iOS app. I guess I should have realized when Apple killed Newsstand that it was over, but I pressed on. That was a mistake on my part.
Apple’s heart wasn’t in it and I wish they’d done more to promote Newsstand, but they could have handled the transition much more gracefully.
Now I’m starting to wonder if Apple News has a future. It’s biggest problem is that if I share an article on social media, only people that have the app can read the article. Not a good start.
Cade Metz:
This means that if any group of people uses the latest version of WhatsApp—whether that group spans two people or ten—the service will encrypt all messages, phone calls, photos, and videos moving among them. And that’s true on any phone that runs the app, from iPhones to Android phones to Windows phones to old school Nokia flip phones. With end-to-end encryption in place, not even WhatsApp’s employees can read the data that’s sent across its network. In other words, WhatsApp has no way of complying with a court order demanding access to the content of any message, phone call, photo, or video traveling through its service. Like Apple, WhatsApp is, in practice, stonewalling the federal government, but it’s doing so on a larger front—one that spans roughly a billion devices.
I can’t help but wonder if/when encryption will be illegal in the United States, UK, and France — these three countries seem to be the ones who want it gone most. It should of course never come to that. And I truly hope it doesn’t.
Also: Wired’s title is completely baffling. We should never forget about the Apple vs. FBI kerfuffle.
Matt Gemmell:
Markdown is also concise, and isn’t well served by a lengthy guide. Accordingly, I’ve written a mini-ebook to help you get started. It’s ultra-focused, digital only, and can be read cover-to-cover in about twenty minutes. A quick, approachable, readily digestible briefing, so you can go from zero to informed within a lunch break or a brief commute.
It’s called Writing in Markdown, it’s about 5,000 words long, and it’s available now.
I also prefer to write in Markdown. The biggest bonus that I see is that you end up with a bunch of plain text files which you should be able to access for many years to come — being able to open your files ten, twenty, or thirty years from now should be a high priority for everyone.
If you don’t know what Markdown is, get Matt’s book and also read this in your spare time
I have had my reservations about electric cars for many years now, and for many reasons. David Smith chose to write about his experience, and I’m happy he chose to:
The only real analogy I can think of to describe how different this feels is to compare it to SSD hard-drives. SSD hard drives when they came out were ‘worse’ than traditional spinning disks in a wide variety of ways. They were smaller capacity, sometimes had lower maximum throughput and were considerably more expensive. But, from the moment you first used one it completely ruined computers for you. Going back to spinning disks once you have tasted instantaneous delivery feels broken.
It is the same with driving a Tesla. There is essentially no latency in your driving interaction with the car. I’ve often heard car fanatics (especially those who love manual transmissions) describe the feeling of being ‘connected’ to their car as they drive it. That their desire and the car’s ability to deliver it become closely and completely linked. Tesla delivers that experience but without all the training and skill needed to dance with a transmission.
That’s a unique way of looking at it, and I understood what David’s trying to convey instantly.
However, there are a few things I love about cars, being an enthusiast myself:
Perhaps most remarkable is how having regenerative braking changes things. Whenever I slide my foot slightly backward on the accelerator the car immediately begins to slow. The subtle difference between having to pull my foot all the way off the accelerator and then depress the brake makes a huge difference in how responsive the car feels to my desires.
I spent a day driving a BMW i3 — the regenerative braking experience was probably the only thing that really spoke to me, and which I got the hang of in just a few minutes. I do have one issue with this however — I used this method of braking to actually stop the car at lights, etc, but if you use regenerative braking to stop or slow down an electric car, the rear stop lights don’t light up. This could potentially be very dangerous if someone behind you isn’t paying attention.
Owning an electric car in my country is currently only for the extremely brave — there are hardly any charging stations and zero Superchargers. While I could see myself owning a Model S or 3, it would be relegated to being driven only in the city. One of my Twitter followers calculated that a 400 kilometre drive that I take regularly every few weeks, most of which is at 140-150 km/h speeds on the motorway, would take at least 7 hours, instead of the 3.5 it does now. No Superchargers, no fun.
They have an article on the leak itself, FIFA, and the corruption on Iceland. Great artwork too.
Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer:
The interrogation room in which Iceland’s recent history was rewritten is sparse, furnished only with a table, some chairs, and a computer. A camera is fixed to the wall, and the frosted, double-glazed windows have completely blocked out the sound of the gale-force winds in Reykjavik’s Faxafloi Bay.
It was in this room that some of Iceland’s most powerful bankers, executives, and investors had to answer to special investigator Olaf Hauksson. A tall man with a heavy build, Haukkson has spent the past six years investigating the transactions that brought Iceland’s economy to its knees in October 2008.
At the time, the country’s three biggest banks folded within just three days, in part because their senior executives had illegally doctored the stock listings of their own banks. “Market manipulation”, as Hauksson curtly calls it.
When asked what happened to the three bank bosses in the end, Hauksson grins. “They all went to jail,” he says, pointing to the empty chairs. “They sat right there.”
Olafur Hauksson has only just begun to wrap up proceedings for the biggest scandal in Iceland’s history. And it’s entirely possible that the publication of the Panama Papers will trigger the next one (…)
Iceland is in for another storm, it seems.
People flying into Reykjavík in early 2016 land in a country still healing from the last crisis. The fault lines of the financial earthquake that hit the country in the fall of 2008 ran deep. For several months, Iceland found itself at the center of the global financial crisis. At the time, three of Iceland’s largest banks – Landsbanki, Kaupthing, and Glitnir – collapsed almost simultaneously under the weight of their foreign debts.
The Panama Papers leak is astounding, although not shocking. And the journalists analysing them actually kept everything under wraps.
P.S. This particular story concerns Iceland’s Kaupthing bank among others, which always reminds me of this series of brilliant ads with John Cleese.
John Gruber:
If you’ve already upgraded to an iPhone 6 or 6S and have made peace with the trade-offs of a larger, heavier, less-grippy-because-of-the-round-edges form factor, the appeal is less clear. Me, I talk the talk about preferring the smaller form factor, but ultimately I’m a sucker for top-of-the-line CPU/GPU performance and camera quality. For the next six months or so, the iPhone SE stands on the top tier. After that, it won’t — I think — and it’ll be back to the 4.7-inch display form factor for me. So why bother switching back for just a few months? I keep asking myself.
And then I pick up the iPhone SE, and hold it in my hand.
Sometimes, it’s what’s in your heart that’s important, despite your head telling you otherwise.
John also mentions how many errors he now makes while typing on the 4″ virtual keyboard — I remember I was great at typing on that screen until I moved to the iPhone 6 and later to the iPhone 6S Plus. When I tried to use the small keyboard a few months after making the switch to the 4.7″ screen, I found I was abysmal at typing on it.
Apple Computer was founded on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne. They flew the Jolly Roger for the first time in 1983 — Andy Hertzfeld tells the story in detail:
Finally, on Sunday night around 10pm, it was time to hoist the Jolly Roger. Capps climbed onto the roof while we stood guard below. He wasn’t sure how he would attach the flag, and didn’t have many tools with him. He scoured the surface of the roof and found three or four long, rusty nails, which he was able to use to secure the flag pole to a groove in the roof, ready to greet the Mac team members as they entered the new building the next morning.
We weren’t sure how everyone would react to the flag, especially Steve Jobs, but Steve and almost everyone else loved it, so it became a permanent fixture of the building. It usually made me smile when I caught a glimpse of it as I came to work in the morning.
Today, on Apple’s 40th anniversary, the Jolly Roger is flying over the Cupertino campus. Epic.
Phil Nickinson:
Here we go again. If you caught the saga of AT&T’s Galaxy S7, you probably know what’s coming. Fire up the operator’s version of the LG G5 and marvel in the amount of bloatware packed into a single phone.
Wow. This is obnoxiously bad.
The Associated Press:
The FBI agreed Wednesday to help an Arkansas prosecutor unlock an iPhone and iPod belonging to two teenagers accused of killing a couple, just days after the federal agency announced it had gained access to an iPhone linked to the gunman in a mass shooting in California.
And so it begins.
Dave Wiskus:
You can slice it, package it, or spin it however you like, but the bare fact is that you’re making money off of songs you aren’t paying for. Worse, you’re doing it while perpetuating an air of exclusivity around the concept of making money. All while you’re pretending to be a friend to the little guy. There’s nothing artist-friendly about this approach.
Jim Dalrymple:
Look at the iPhone SE like this.
Pick your favorite classic car. An old Corvette or Mustang—whatever your favorite car is. That design will always be classic, no matter what has happened in the automobile industry in the last 40 years, those 1960s designs will always be classic.
Now, take that classic car design and replace the engine, drive train, and everything else you can think of. What do you have? A hotrod. An incredible classic design with the most advanced technology that you could put in it.
That is the iPhone SE. A classic design with a lot of the newest and greatest technology.
The iPhone SE is Apple’s classic hotrod.
Patrick Klepek:
We don’t know the full details of what happened, or what the conversations were like between Rapp and Nintendo. It’s possible that Nintendo truly was uncomfortable with Rapp’s college essay (despite it being publicly linked on her Linkedin page) or old Tweets about similar topics and decided to part ways with her.
But we do know this: Nintendo was publicly silent while one of their employees was harassed and smeared online over something she did not do. That’s a fact. It’s not in dispute. Nintendo watched Rapp become the center of a witch hunt and did nothing publicly to defend her. Despite my requests for comment, the company said nothing. As it turns out, maybe that silence said everything.
This sort of harassment is unacceptable and quite frankly I cannot imagine why something isn’t being done about this. Nintendo’s actions are not particularly chivalrous either — they should have defended one of their own.