Benjamin Mayo

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Like most other broadcasters this upfront week, CW execs today urged advertisers to consider the network’s involvement with digital platforms — and announced that its streamed shows, now available on Windows and Xbox, will also work with Apple TV.

Unlike most apps of this ilk, CW will not not require users to associate the app with a cable subscription. This is real unbundled internet television.

Apple, on the other hand, is pioneering a hybrid web and radio service — one that resembles Pandora but melds it with some on-demand features, the sources said. The licensing agreement had to be created from scratch.

Apple’s service sounds more involved than just a mere Pandora clone, which has no concept of “on-demand” music at all. As a result, I’m a lot more intrigued about “iRadio” (which may be a bad moniker for the product, in light of this news) than I was before.

When updates are available, iTunes 11.0.3 will display a red “Update” ribbon on an application’s icon, similarly to how iOS displays a blue ribbon for “New” apps on the Home screen. In iTunes 11.0.3, updates are handled by the Updates area without requiring users to open the iTunes Store anymore.

The experience is so much better; you no longer get kicked out to the iTunes Store UI anymore to update.¹ It’s just neatly integrated into the Apps section.

¹ Should iOS’ Springboard get a similar update shortcut? Is it really necessary to have to go into the App Store app just to update?

Windows Phone posted the largest year-over-year gain among the leading operating systems, more than doubling its size from a year ago. Nokia was largely responsible for driving these volumes higher, accounting for 79.0% of all Windows Phone shipments during the quarter. Since Nokia began shipping Windows Phone devices, the company has shipped a total of 20.3 million units and grown the footprint worldwide to include address multiple market segments. Meanwhile, other vendors continue to offer Windows Phone devices, but mainly as an alternative to their signature Android devices. Still, the gains made by Windows Phone demonstrate both end-user demand and OEM support.

Windows Phone outshipped Blackberry.

They insist Apple will employ a capacitive touch home button for the first time with the iPhone 5S, eliminating one of the most unreliable components in an iOS device (the physical home button has a tendency to fail after long periods of use).

Not only will it be a capacitive touch button, but it’ll also incorporate a fingerprint sensor, the sources claim.

The idea conflicts with this report from March that purported to show the 5S’ (mechanical) home button. However, I actually think a capacitive sensor replacing the physical Home Button is a very plausible scenario, for a couple of reasons.

It’s clear that Apple wants to have a fingerprint sensor on the next iPhone and they need to put it somewhere. The Home Button, conceptually, is the most elegant location. In practical terms, though, integrating the biometric sensor into a mechanical button is a significant engineering problem. Making the iconic Home Button capacitive makes that integration simpler without sacrificing most of the usability¹ of the Home Button. Capacitive buttons are already very common across Android phones — consumers are used to them.

Moreover, Geniuses have told me that one of their biggest support issues are related to faulty Home Buttons. Eliminating the mechanical elements of the button would both improve the reliability of this part of the phone and remove considerable burden from Apple’s support services, including the Genius Bar.

¹ Yes, you would lose the tactile response of a push button.

No more sneaking peeks at toys in the mall: SideWays, a new eye-tracking device, will catch you at it. As soon as you walk up to it, it automatically starts tracking what you peer at – which could allow shop owners to show you adverts on a video screen for products that you seem interested in.

When everything’s tracking you, nothing will be.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Bang With Friends. It’s a rather controversial thing. Simply put, it’s a Facebook and mobile app that lets you pick which of your friends you’d like to “bang.” Oh, but it’s more clever than that: the app won’t reveal your intentions until that friend picks you back. Then, theoretically, you can clandestinely meet for a night of sex without any fear of rejection, or the need for awkward dates, and none of your other friends will be the wiser. Needless to say, some people aren’t so happy about the idea. They’re worried that it objectifies people, that it could promote infidelity, and other things of the sort.

Using the symmetric follow-pattern for potentially embarrassing interests is a clever idea.

“You shouldn’t expect an iTunes app on Windows 8 any time soon,” said Tami Reller, chief financial officer of Microsoft’s (MSFT, Fortune 500) Windows division. “ITunes is in high demand. The welcome mat has been laid out. It’s not for lack of trying.”

Does this shock anyone at all? This quote from a Microsoft executive is just confirmation of the obvious situation: Microsoft wants it, Apple won’t do it.

Apple put iTunes on Windows originally because they were the underdog, but in tablets they are not the underdog. In the Isaacson biography, Jobs said he “didn’t want to make Android users happy” by making iTunes for Android. Naturally, the same reasoning applies to Windows 8 as well or any of Apple’s lesser competition.

So this is all worth taking with a big grain of salt. Yet Apple would be wise to consider a different naming scheme for the next iPhone. The ‘S’ naming scheme, while honest, does imply to consumers that they are getting only a slightly spec-bumped, year-old phone. What the ‘S’ stands for usually depends: with the iPhone 3GS, it stood for ‘speed’, while with the iPhone 4S, it stood for ‘Siri.’ But it doesn’t send as strong a statement to consumers as a whole new number, and you don’t see the likes of Samsung dicking around with launching, say, Galaxy S4 And A Halfs.

Ultimately, I don’t think consumers are fooled by names, and the press certainly aren’t.¹ What’s more interesting about Apple’s upcoming branding is how they position the cheaper iPhone variant in the lineup. With the iPad mini, the differentiator was screen size, which meant Apple could focus the branding on that distinction rather than its lower price point.

This likely won’t be the case with the cheap iPhone though, as it will use the same 4 inch display as its bigger brother, so Apple can’t use the same trick. It also doesn’t seem to be “lighter” or “thinner” either so adjectives like “nano” and “mini” are also out of the question.

The rumours point to the distinguishing factor being “cheaper” … I think it’s fascinating to see how Apple will brand “cheaper”.²

¹ “iPhone 6 Looks Just Like An iPhone 5, Apple Doomed”

² A potential outcome is that they borrow from their Mac business, and introduce a “Pro” moniker to the iPhone lineup.

Get closer to your ideas. Pinch to bring up zoom without losing your place.

Rather than scaling the entire canvas, pinching in Paper pops up a loupe that sits on top of the canvas, magnifying only the area beneath the loupe’s glass. It keeps the context of the wider picture visible, whilst still enabling finer-grained editing on the zoomed-in area.

Please try this out in person, because the delight is in the details. For instance, the developers have made it such that the zoom scale is a fraction of the overall loupe size — it doesn’t scale 1:1. This creates a wonderful ‘parallax’ effect as you make the loupe bigger and smaller, mimicking how a lens functions in real life.