American Apparel Files for Bankruptcy

Hiroko Tabuchi reporting for The New York Times today:

[…] the bankruptcy would wipe out American Apparel’s current shareholders, including Mr. Charney, whose stake in the retailer that he founded in 1989 was worth about $8.2 million as of Friday. It would instead put the company’s creditors in full control, including Standard General, the little-known hedge fund that is also leading the turnaround at RadioShack, which went bankrupt in February.

I didn’t see that coming.

October 5, 2015 ✚ Permalink

Apple’s New Safari Extensions Gallery

Apple has had an Extensions Gallery for Safari, a place where you could discover and download 3rd party extensions for your browser. With the recent launch of Safari 9.0 along with OS X El Capitan, Apple has now moved the Extensions Gallery to a new place and URL. The Safari Extensions Gallery is now available at https://safari-extensions.apple.com and with Version 9.0, Apple has changed the way Safari Extensions are built, distributed and updated. A brief summary of the changes is that:

1. To be able to build and distribute Safari Extensions, you now have to sign up for the Apple Developer Program, which costs $99/year. Previously, you could develop and self-sign your own Safari Extensions. That is no longer possible.

2. Apple now hosts and serves Safari Extensions directly from the above linked Extensions Gallery. The extensions are neatly categorized and are manually approved by Apple. You can download and install the extensions with a single click.

3. Only those Safari Extensions that are downloaded directly from Apple can be updated automatically. This means that the extensions you have downloaded from 3rd-party website, or a developer’s own website, will **not auto-update**. Developers can still sign their own extensions and make them available for download, but users will have no way to updating them.

Popular Safari Extensions like 1Password, Ghostery, Pocket are already available on the new gallery.

October 4, 2015 ✚ Permalink

Apple Watch Charging Clip by Studio Neat

The folks at Studio Neat have come up with this nifty 3D printed product out of an idea that was born originally to Matthew Panzarino. Of course, the nice people that they are, got to solving the problem and here’s what we have.

A few weeks ago Matthew Panzarino emailed us a photo of a crude setup: a rubber band wrapped around the face of the watch, holding the puck securely as a sort of seat belt. He had been using the watch extensively during the day and needed to charge while out and about. He wanted to simply throw the charging watch in his bag, and this was his MacGyver’d solution.

The Apple Watch Charging Clip is a little thing that attaches to the back of your Apple Watch to hold the magnetic charger in place.

stuido-neat-apple-watch-charging-clip

The clip is available via Shapeways in multiple colors for both 38mm and 42 mm watches. Shapeways is also offering Free worldwide shipping this weekend.

I love that 3D printing has made it so easy these days to solve small problems like these.

October 4, 2015 ✚ Permalink

WD My Passport Pro Review — Thunderbolt Powered RAID Storage

WD My Passport Pro

For as long as I can remember, Western Digital (WD) has been my favorite storage companies. They’ve long been making phenomenal hard disk drives and I’ve personally owned several of their products since 2003. I presently own four external drives to house all kinds of data and to power my backup and I couldn’t be happier with their performance, compared to the drives from a couple of other companies that I’ve tried in the past, one of which failed on me in just six months. That’s why I’ve only recommended WD drives (or Hitachi) to my friends & peers whenever I’ve been asked about one.

A few weeks ago, WD India was kind enough to send me a review unit of the My Passport Pro. I have a 13” MacBook Air with a mere 128GB of storage and this drive has been a near perfect storage extension for me over the last few weeks.

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October 2, 2015 ✚ Permalink

Evernote Crosses 5 Million Users in India

At the end of February 2013, we announced 1 million users in India and within just 2 and a half years, we’re excited to announce that we’ve crossed the 5M user mark.

and

Our new users have increased by 3000% between Dec 2010 and Sept 2015. Evernote users in India are growing rapidly and we expect to meet our next 5 million users in record time as well.

October 2, 2015 ✚ Permalink

Gruber’s iPhone 6s Review

Of all the reviews that I’ve read so far, John Gruber has the best take on it over at Daring Fireball.

This part was particularly interesting:

I have only two bad things to say about 3D Touch. First, Apple missed an opportunity to borrow a great feature from Apple Watch. On Apple Watch, you can force touch in the notification list and you get an option to Clear All. 3D Touch has no effect in iOS 9’s notification list, and there remains no way to clear all notifications at once.

Downright lunacy there, Apple. Come on!

September 23, 2015 ✚ Permalink

 

September 19, 2015 ✚ Permalink

Tim Cook awarded $58M of Apple stock for performance & tenure achievements

Chance Miller writing for 9to5Mac:

As noted in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today, Tim Cook on Monday was awarded 560,000 restricted Apple stock units. Cook was given these stocks as time and performance awards. At Apple’s stock price at the end of day Tuesday of $103.12, those stocks are worth roughly $57.5 million.

Cook chose not to sell any vested restricted stock units, although 290,836 were withheld by Apple to keep in line with minimum statutory tax withholding requirements.

August 26, 2015 ✚ Permalink