Apple’s retail stores have always been attractive places, but their newest store in at the West Lake shopping center in Hangzhou, China, is more than attractive: it’s gorgeous. Nearly nine years after the opening of the iconic Fifth Avenue cube, the West Lake Store continues Apple’s traditions of glass, steel,and light, but in a striking cantilevered design by Foster + Partners architects (the same firm behind the design of the enormous ring-shaped Apple Campus 2). The store is the largest Apple Store in China and opened late last month.

Every aspect of the store has been optimised, minimised and de-cluttered. The white ceiling, which appears as an opaque surface during the day, is dramatically illuminated at night – the custom-made lighting panels emit a pure, even glow, as well as absorbing noise.

The 15-metre-high volume creates a sense of space and calm within the busy store and city. It is divided horizontally by a dramatic cantilevered floor, which extends 12 metres from the rear wall like a diving board to create a 9-metre-high piano nobile. The extremely slim floor structure is only made possible by tuned mass dampers to eliminate vibration, and it tapers from 1.2 metres to just 10 centimetres. This gives the impression of a floating stage in the centre of the space – a new living room for the city.

Tucked on either side of that impressive cantilevered upper floor are a pair of glass stairs — the treads and the stringer (the vertical portion that runs perpendicular to the steps for the length of the stairs) are both made of sheets of laminated glass.

Source: Foster + Partners; Via: Cult of Mac

As Apple Car rumors continue to make their way around the internet, former GM CEO Dan Akerson has taken it upon himself to warn Apple to stay away from automotive manufacturing and, instead, continue to focus on software infotainment efforts, namely, CarPlay. According to Bloomberg:

“I think somebody is kind of trying to cough up a hairball here,” Akerson said in a telephone interview. “If I were an Apple shareholder, I wouldn’t be very happy. I would be highly suspect of the long-term prospect of getting into a low-margin, heavy-manufacturing” business.

Apple’s car project, reportedly code-named Titan got a lot of attention last week when accounts surfaced of “hundreds of employees” being tasked to work on electric vehicles — supposedly resembling minivans.

Akerson’s comments harken back to former Palm CEO Ed Colligan, who infamously commented on Apple’s prospects in the phone market:

“PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

And we all know how that turned out.

While Apple may or may not enter the car market, and may or may not succeed in it, at this point it seems like a mistake to simply write off anything they attempt.

Some hotfixes for users of the Windows 10 Technical Preview Build 9926 are pushing out today for Internet Explorer security and to help prepare for the next build. Microsoft’s Gabe Aul has detailed the news via his Twitter account, and they should be available right now or very soon.

Vint Cerf is sometimes called one of the “fathers of the Internet” for his role in developing the TCP/IP protocol suite that’s in use on every Internet-connected device. So when he warns of a forgotten century of data, it’s worth paying attention to. What’s more, we’ve seen some of these dangers already, as Mac users — dangers we must stay vigilant for.

Bit rot

During a recent speech recounted at The Guardian, Cerf warned that bit rot will lead to a forgotten generation, or perhaps a forgotten century of data.

The bit rot that Cerf describes is what happens to data as it ages; software capable of reading it changes over time. Some software is discontinued. And we’ve seen it happen on the Mac, time and time again. Think Microsoft Word files are eternal? Talk to people trying to extract useful information from old FrameMaker templates or Aldus Freehand files.

These are more than just data files. They’re the sum total of our creative output and our analytical output, our ability to interpret the world around us. Within data there is meaning and there is structure.

It is important to preserve what we do and how we do it for the posterity of future generations, the same way we learn about the creation of the cotton gin, harnessing of electricity, development of transcontinental railroads.

But this sort of preservation affects us on deeply personal levels, too.

A few weeks ago a customer came into the computer store I work at on the weekends. He was using a pre-Intel Macintosh; a PowerPC-based iMac that sported a copy of ClarisWorks, an integrated productivity software suite that Apple developed.

The Mac still worked, and that database still contained files he needed: A mailing list of donors to a non-profit charity he dedicated his time. If he bought a new Mac, how would he access the files? ClarisWorks doesn’t run on Intel Macs anymore, because Apple itself stopped supporting the technology which allowed it to work when OS X Lion came out in 2011.

The solution, it turns out, is using a free software program called LibreOffice, an office productivity suite that actually supports ClarisWorks file imports.

This might make for an interesting Mac how to at some point, but the point is this: There was a way to transform the data and make it useable again, but it was several steps removed from the owner of the data simply being able to double-click on the file and expect something to happen. If we hadn’t been able to intervene, what would have happened to his fund-raising efforts? Would they have changed? Would he have recreated the database from scratch?

That’s one very real danger associated with the type of bit rot that Vint Cerf is talking about. Cerf, who’s now a vice president at Google, advocates the development of what he calls “digital vellum,” to help preserve the way old software and hardware works for the benefit of future generations.

Moving from PowerPC to Intel processors on the Macintosh forced Apple’s hand here: Eventually the technology to smoothe out that transition, a translation technology called Rosetta, was deprecated in OS X. When that happened, people who needed access to apps that ran on PowerPC, and their datasets, were left behind.

Forced upgrades sometimes leave data behind

My ClarisWorks example is one case of Apple not doing the best job it can for customers. Certainly ClarisWorks is the most narrow edge case these days, but it’s a real problem faced by a loyal Apple user.

Compare that to a more recent example, however: Apple discontinued iPhoto for iOS with the release of iOS 8. What’s more, though, it prevented iOS 8 users from opening iPhoto at all, even if they owned it from a previous release.

Essentially, iOS 8 killed iPhoto and forced a messy transition to Photos. Text and layouts from certain projects you created with iPhoto were lost in the transition without any easy way to convert that data into another useable format.

Apple has shown that it’s willing to impose short term discomfort to its users in order to employ a long-term strategy of iterative software and hardware improvement. That improves things for the widest possible audience, but it can have a profoundly disruptive effect on those of us who are not ready for the transition.

Apple must always, always be mindful of those people caught in the crossfire. Progress and profit should never get in the way of doing the right thing for the greater good.

Agile Tortoise, the developer the Drafts text app, has relaunched the Tally counting app. Tally 2 comes to the table with full gesture support and even a widget for the Notification Center.

Tally 2 is easy to use. Open the app, and you’ll be looking at at big screen. Tap the screen to add a tally, and swipe down to remove one. Tap the marks in the upper left hand corner to see all of your tallies, and tap the plus and minus buttons to keep count right from that menu. You can also use the Notification Center widget to keep count without even having to open the app.

While Tally 2 is free to download and use, you’ll need to pay $1.99 in order to unlock the full version, which includes unlimited tallies (the free version is limited to 2), as well as a dark theme meant for low light.

• Free – Download Now

If 2015 is rustling up your Back to the Future nostalgia, you can now make your love for the film known to the world through none other than an iPhone case. Bandai recently unveiled a case for the iPhone 6 that is fashioned after the time-traveling DeLorean from the hit movie trilogy.

Though the video (or is that trailer?) above comes off as a bit cheesy, one can’t help but admire the enthusiasm that harkens back to toy commercials from our childhood. As the video shows, the case features a slide-out compartment to reveal your phone’s camera (CAMERA!), fully-functioning doors to access your power and volume buttons (OPEN!), and it even lights up when you’re on a call.

If you’re interested, you can pre-order the case directly from Bandai for 5,940 yen (about $50), and the company expects it to ship sometime in June. Now if only everything else Back to the Future promised for 2015 would come to fruition (there’s still time, right?).

Source: Bandai; Via: Yahoo

It has been a week since Windows 10 Preview for phone was released and you’ve probably realized that it is far from being finished. While you had fun checking out the Preview, you want to go back to a more stable build. If you want to roll back to Windows Phone 8.1, Microsoft has made it really simple. You’ll need a computer, your phone, a USB cable, and the Windows Phone Recovery Tool. Watch our step-by-step instructions on video.

It looks like Apple is about to get some new competition in the mobile payments arena from Samsung. The company announced today that it will acquire LoopPay, an Apple Pay competitor that works with existing magnetic strip readers.

From Samsung:

LoopPay has built an advanced and widely accepted contactless payment solution using its patented Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) technology. LoopPay’s talent and technology, paired with Samsung’s world leading mobile technology, global presence, and distribution capabilities will help drive the next wave of innovation in the digital smart wallet.

If you’re unfamiliar with LoopPay, the company uses a technology wirelessly transmits data that would normally be stored on your card’s magnetic strip to a store’s payment terminal. Currently the company only has its technology embedded in a few hardware products, including a fob and a LoopPay phone case.

There’s no doubt that when Apple released its Apple Pay platform last fall, it brought a certain heft to the sector. However, it will be interesting to see what, if any, effect Samsung’s acquisition of LoopPay has on the mobile payments scene.

Source: LoopPay

Press Release:

Pandora will soon let musicians get in touch with their fans directly. Artist Audio Messaging will let artists send “personalized” audio messages to their fans through the Pandora app, and will roll out to users later this week. Only a small number of artists are participating in the program while it’s in the pilot stage.

Pandora sees artist messages including things like new album announcements, tour dates, and more. From the Pandora blog:

We’re excited by the range of possibilities of what these messages could be: a tour announcement, new album drop, a crowd-funding campaign, the story behind their latest song or simply a thank you to fans for listening.

If you get tired of receiving messages from artists, you’ll be able to turn them off in the Pandora app’s settings.

Source: Pandora

Snapchat scored an update on iOS today that finally brings the ability to snap while playing muisic and other audio from your phone. This is sure to be a welcome change for many, as avid Snapchatters will no doubt be aware of the frustration that occurs when the app cuts all audio coming from your phone the second you press that record button.

Other than the ability to play music and snap at the same time, there isn’t much in this update other than bug fixes. You can hit up that store link below to snag the update and finally start annoying your friends with snaps of you lipsyncing Mariah Carey songs (just me?).

• Free – Download