We at The Prompt are excited to announce the world’s greatest t-shirt. With a two-sided color design and printed on black, it celebrates the culture surrounding Apple and a community that’s bigger than any country or accent. We’ve been testing the design for a while now, and we really like it.
All orders and shipping are being handled by Teespring, so there’s no doubt about the quality of the product and the service. The best part? They’ll be at your door well in time to pack for WWDC.
Ezra Klein at Vox:
Today, the right struggles with Obamacare Derangement Syndrome: the acute inability to see Obamacare as anything but a catastrophic failure that the American people will soon reject. For those suffering from ODS, all bad Obamacare news is good news, and all good Obamacare news is spin. In this world, delays of minor provisions in the law prove that the entire structure is collapsing, while surges of millions of people enrolling in insurance don’t prove anything at all.
ODS has kept Republicans from updating their mental model of how Obamacare is doing. To them, the law’s disastrous rollout proved that it was doomed. The fact that it recovered beyond anyone’s expectations — literally, not a single analyst or policymaker I spoke to in December thought it credible that the exchanges would sign up 7 million by April, much less 7.5 million — hasn’t made much of an impression.
On Saturday, a friend of mine jumped out of a plane to raise money for my brother’s non-profit, Operation Broken Silence which works to bring peace and justice to Sudan. While it was a blast to help film and edit this video, the back-breaking work of using media to share the stories of the people of Sudan, who are being bombed and starved by their own government is expensive, difficult and more dangerous than jumping out of a plane on a Saturday afternoon. You can help fund Operation Broken Silence’s work by donating here.
Primary for Instagram is a universal iOS app created to enhance your Instagram viewing experience. It features an attractive minimalistic design that feels right at home on iOS 7. Primary has been carefully crafted to put focus on the photos that matter to you.
Primary is full of unique features. Fast-switch between multiple accounts for viewing, liking, and commenting. Pinch to zoom photos. Hide unwanted posts, people, videos, and tags. Create simple lists of people or tags. Toggle between light and dark themes. And much more.
The Next Web called Primary “a beautiful new way to browse Instagram”. iMore wrote: “I seriously love” Primary. Cult of Mac called it out as “essential on the iPad mini” and “even better than the Instagram app” on the iPhone. Primary was also featured on Beautiful Pixels’ platter of well-designed iOS 7 app updates, calling it “gorgeous”.
Primary for Instagram is available now in the App Store.
The older Brushed Metal gets, the weirder it seems.
via Brent Simmons
Michael Riley at Bloomberg:
The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.
The NSA’s decision to keep the bug secret in pursuit of national security interests threatens to renew the rancorous debate over the role of the government’s top computer experts.
So, instead of alerting the American people (and Internet users everywhere) of this shockingly-bad bug in OpenSSL, the federal government took advantage of it, possibly using private keys to decrypt data it had gathered via its myriad of tools.
A year ago, I wouldn’t have believed this. When the Heartbleed news broke the other day, I just assumed the government was using the exploit to spy on people. Hell, part of me thinks the NSA was behind it in the first place.
Update: The NSA has released a statement saying it was unaware of the OpenSSL bug until it was publicly disclosed. The language used is pretty clear. Make of that what you will, but the fact that we have to have this discussion is simply terrible.
Viticci has a run-down of the new beta. I’ve kicked ReadKit to the curb already.
The NBTS:
More than 4,000 children are diagnosed with a brain tumor each year and today it’s the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in children under the age of 10. To drive progress in pediatrics, National Brain Tumor Society has committed to direct one-third of its research budget toward this area, including Project Impact.
Merissa Marr at the WSJ:
CBS said in a news release that it had signed a five-year agreement with Mr. Colbert to take over its flagship show when Mr. Letterman retires next year.
Mr. Colbert, 49 years old, will retire the character he plays on his Comedy Central show—a sendup of Republican talk-show hosts—and will be himself as the host of the CBS show, the company said.
I truly enjoy The Colbert Report, and will miss the character, but Stephen Colbert is a genius nonetheless.
This seems like a good a time as any to remember the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner:
Cleaning up OS X’s pesky “Open With” contextual menu isn’t hard.
Rumors continue to fly about a slim, 12-inch Retina MacBook Air that could be coming later this year. Here’s the gist of it:
…a new 12 inch notebook without fan assembly. It comes with a new trackpad design that doesn’t include the mechanical button, as we do on current MacBooks.
Here’s a mention of the machine from October of last year:
We expect the unprecedented 12” model will boast both the portability of the 11” model, and productivity of the 13” model. The high resolution display will also offer the outstanding visual experience of the Retina MacBook Pro. The offering will likely be lighter and slimmer than the existing MacBook Air to further highlight ease of portability in the cloud computing era. We think the form factor will showcase a much improved clamshell structure, and that it will redefine laptop computing once again following the milestone created by the MacBook Air.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Apple views the MacBook Air as the flagship Mac these days, and that while the current design is still great, Apple likes to move the bar from time to time with popular models.
The nitty-gritty of this set of rumors is interesting to me. I’ve long complained that the 13-inch MacBook Air still takes up a sizable amount of desk/lap space. I have owned the 11.6-inch MacBook Air, and found after a while that the size was just too small for me. I think 12 inches could be a nice sweet spot.
The bit about the fan and trackpad are a little harder to swallow. Apple’s got a history of trying to ship Macs without fans — think iMac G3 and the G4 Cube — but nothing recently. The MacBook Pro with Retina display ships with asymmetric fans, and the new Mac Pro uses one large fan, but a modern Mac with no fan seems almost impossible. While my current-gen 13-inch MacBook Air runs almost silently, under load the single fan will spin up and the area around the hinge will become quite warm.
There are fanless ultrabooks on the market using Intel’s Haswell chipsets, and of course, with rumors of ARM-powered MacBooks dating back in 2011, fanless suddenly seem more possible.
Lastly, the bit about these machines coming with “a new trackpad design that doesn’t include the mechanical button” makes me sad. As shallow as the movement is on Apple’s current trackpads, the physical click gives users a sense of place and execution that that tap to click simply doesn’t. While I’m sure I would adjust over time, I find tap to click disorienting and accident-prone when I spend time with it on.
While I’m all for a silent, thin 12-inch laptop — and my guess is that it’s coming — there are a lot of questions left to be answered.
But that’s why this sort of thing is fun.
This week, Federico, Myke and I reflect on our input into the world of dental healthcare, then move on to discuss Dropbox’s recent news, shake-ups in Apple’s design department and the WWDC lottery system.
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