512 Pixels

Welcome back, friend. I’m curious if we’ll see any fallout from the week of downtime.

Balls. Of. Steel.

Last night, our son Josiah participated in an interview/dance party with The Wiggles on behalf of St. Jude. It was a blast.

This week, everyone’s favorite international trio discuss a truckload of follow-up, then move on to talk about Apple’s developer site and quarterly results then Google’s new Nexus 7 and Chromecast TV dongle. Myke interrupts the show to find Federico’s alt rock band on MySpace. To wrap up, Chris Bowler files a report on Cloud.typography and Federico gives a tip about bookmarklets in Chrome for iOS.

Apple:

We plan to roll out our updated systems, starting with Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, Apple Developer Forums, Bug Reporter, pre-release developer libraries, and videos first. Next, we will restore software downloads, so that the latest betas of iOS 7, Xcode 5, and OS X Mavericks will once again be available to program members. We’ll then bring the remaining systems online. To keep you up to date on our progress, we’ve created a status page to display the availability of our systems.

With this update, the company has launched a new webpage, indicating the current status of various Developer tools. Currently, only iTunes Connect is online.

In its letter, Apple says engineers have been working “around the clock” to fix the issues that brought the Developer Center to its knees six days ago. From the way this all is worded, I feel like it’s going to be a little while longer before things return to normal.

(As a side note, we just wrapped recording today’s episode of The Prompt literally 10 minutes ago, so that section of the podcast is already out of date. Such is life.)

The original Nexus 7 sparked great interest in nerd community. The new one is better in every way. It’s thinner, lighter, faster, has optional LTE and a much better display. The 16GB model is $229, with the 32GB being $40 more. $269. $349 will get you a 32GB model with unlocked LTE that’s compatible with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The Wi-Fi versions ship next week.

Roger Cheng:

Verizon Wireless and Motorola are getting exclusive with their relationship.

Starting with the Droid Ultra lineup, Motorola will be the only smartphone manufacturer to build Droid smartphones, Verizon marketing executive Jeff Dietel told CNET on Tuesday.

Sigh.

Tim Cook:

We are especially proud of our record June quarter iPhone sales of over 31 million and the strong growth in revenue from iTunes, software and services. We are really excited about the upcoming releases of iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, and we are laser-focused and working hard on some amazing new products that we will introduce in the fall and across 2014.

The high points of the results filing include:

• $35.3 billion in revenue and $6.9 billion in profit. Revenue was basically flat over last year, but profits were down 22 percent.
• An all-time June quarter high of 31.2 million iPhones sold, up from 26 million in the year-ago quarter. 20 percent higher than last year.
• 14.6 million iPads sold, compared to 17 million in the year-ago quarter.
• 3.8 million Macs sold, down from 4 million a year ago.

Additionally, Apple has declared a cash dividend of $3.05 per share of the company’s common stock. The dividend is payable on August 15, 2013.

(If numbers aren’t your thing be sure to check out MacStories’ charts or this PDF published by Apple a few moments ago.)

The iPhone news is great for the company. The Mac’s slippage should not be surprising, given that the entire desktop PC market is crashing. Matthew Panzarino notes that the iPad is probably falling in to the sales style that PCs used to inhabit. That makes sense to me, as the iPad has replaced the PC in many, many circles. Factoring in Apple’s shift to a non-spring release cycle for new models, my guess is that the iPad will soon bounce back.

Here are some quotes and tidbits from the company’s live call:

• CFO Peter Oppenheimer: “iPhone sales ahead of expectations, and particularly pleased with strong year-over-year growth, in developed and emerging markets.”
• iPhone 5 is the most popular model of iPhone currently for sale.
• iPhone grew 66% year over year in Japan.
• Kantar measured 93% loyalty rate among iPhone lawyers, and iPhone continues to lead in customer experience.
• iPad ranked number 1 in 2013 U.S. tablet satisfaction survey by JD Power. iPad leads tablet web usage share in U.S. and Canada.
• Oppenheimer: “Global computer market contracted by 11% in June quarter, so Macs gained share.”
• New Mac Pro coming later this year, built in the US. Mac Pro and OS X Mavericks will be available in the fall.
• US education market generated highest quarterly revenue in history, fueled by iPad sales, not Macs.
• 60,000 movies and over 230,000 TV episodes on the iTunes store. 1 billion TV episodes and 390 million movies downloaded in total.
• iOS App Store just turned five. 50 billion downloads with developers earning over $11 billion.
• Apple killing Android in the enterprise: Good Technologies found iPhone 5 was the most frequently activated device of any kind. iPads represented 88 percent of all tablet activations.
• $4.1 billion quarter for Apple Retail, on par with last year. 408 stores open worldwide, with 156 of them outside the US. 16,000 visitors per store, per week.
• $146.6 billion in cash plus short-term and long-term securities. $106 billion is off-shore.
• Apple spent $4 billion to retire 9 million additional shares.
• Tim Cook: “We think that if we make great products, the financial metrics will come.”

Craig Hockenberry:

If Mavericks is Aqua becoming a grown up and mature operating system, brushed metal was the rebellious teenage years.

Dana Liebelson:

Last month, a federal court granted Chevron access to nine years of email metadata — which includes names, time stamps, and detailed location data and login info, but not content —belonging to activists, lawyers, and journalists who criticized the company for drilling in Ecuador and leaving behind a trail of toxic sludge and leaky pipelines.

Who needs the NSA when you have federal courts?

Today, Verizon held an event in New York City to unveil a “all-new” series of it’s Motorola-built “Droid” phones.

It was eight minutes long.

Starting at 11:54 AM EST, Verizon’s Vice President of Marketing Jeff Dietel and Rick Osterloh Senior Vice President Product Management at Motorola got on stage to talk about three handsets: the Droid Maxx, Droid Ultra and Droid Mini.

The phones are all closely related, with the Maxx sporting 48 hours of battery life, the Ultra being super thin and the Mini having the same specs as the Ultra, but in a thinner, smaller case.

All three phones have a new, custom system on a chip that is made up of 8 cores that promises to be powerful and easy on the batteries inside these devices.

At 12:06, they were done.

The companies didn’t say what version of Android is shipping with these devices, but they all come with touchless voice control, like the Moto X will.

While these phones do run what seems to be close to stock Android, I really don’t understand these products.

Why does the Google-owned Motorola still crank out these products? It’s confusing, and if the Moto X is as good as people think it will be, I’ll have a hard time reconciling the fact that the same people put the Droids announced today. My best guess is that Motorola shipped these phones because it had to.

I’m really mostly confused about why this wasn’t all done with a press release. I can see why the wouldn’t want to muddy the waters on August 1, though. Maybe Google is ashamed of these phones after all.

There are lots of ways to gather and organize files and information on the Mac. For photos and images, however, there’s not a great option. Dropbox is great for files, but Finder is Dropbox’s UI, which isn’t always the best option. Evernote is well-liked, but can be overkill for some.

Now there’s Ember.

Ember is a digital scrapbook. Like a real scrapbook, it’s easy to add photos and images, but because it’s digital, the data can be organized easily and quickly. There are tags and collections, as well as metadata and smart folders. There are some great built-in editing and annotation tools, as well.

Here’s a collection I threw together pretty quickly:

Ember isn’t a lazy app. In addition to being able to create screenshots — and automatically import them — it comes with plug-ins for the major browsers and a menu bar utility, making it easy to snap something for collection and move on with your work. You can even give Ember RSS feeds for it to automatically crawl. Ember shows just the images found in the feeds, and offers a single-click interface to add those images to your local library.

Currently, Ember doesn’t sync with anything, and there’s no mobile counterpart for the Mac app. Ellis Hamburger at The Verge mentions these features are coming in the future, however.

Ember is on the Mac App Store for $49 and is built by the fine-looking people over at Realmac Software. If you want a clean, easy way to capture and sort screenshots and images on a Mac, it’s worth the pricetag.