Half Wheeling

Firstly, is Gruber really still an "Apple Journalist"? He seems to have moved on from the days of breaking Apple stories, I don't think that kind of thing really matters to him anymore.

The two services are both similar in regards to their emphasis on human curation, which is becoming a must-have feature in the streaming music arena.

Is it becoming a must have feature yet though? Beats were the first to market the curation feature, and the last reported subscriber figure I can find is 250,000. It's widely assumed a big chunk of this was an AT&T promotion granting thee months free, so I'm not even sure this is a solid number. Either way, this is well short of Spotify's 10 million paying users. It's completely insignificant in the face of the combined 105 million total users Spotify and Pandora command once free users are taken into account.

I find Beat's curated playlist quality really impressive; I've long had issue with Spotify's 'radio' function and Apple's 'genius' in that their intelligence is presumably built on stats around what songs are commonly put in playlists together by the user base. I, like many others I imagine, simply toss together some songs I like when creating a playlist. I rarely try to curate my own playlists into groupings that make sense from a musical standpoint. Given how odd some of the suggestions Spotify radio and genius make, I'm guessing a lot of people do the same. That said, how many people actually care enough about this to consider switching?

Closest I've seen someone come to mocking something I could believe Apple might build. If this is the way Apple go, that's a hell of a big 'face' compared to a typical watch, especially to a typical ladies model.

This would be more of a bracelet, and at these dimensions it would simply have to be a curved display. This might be how they solve the problem of having enough packaging space for a reasonable battery life too.

Includes a Snapdragon SoC, motion-tracking screen, and 13MP camera with OIS.

The same price as an iPhone 5S is a tall order for Amazon. Surprising they didn't go more aggressive here. Their tablet marketing strategy is largely based on them costing way less than an iPad.

Not buying the official explanation that this all about the controller. With the momentum behind the PS4 right now, Valve would have had to have done something pretty special for the launch to make a dent.

I suspect that something special will be using Half Life 3 as a system seller. With a 2015 release, surely the potential is there for a steam box bundle with Half Life 3 and an Oculus Rift style headset. That combo, coupled with a high profile launch campaign, would be one hell of an entry to the living room market.

Let me get this straight. Apple completely scrapped a superior interface to Health because Mark Gurman published screenshots back in March. That is to say, Apple cared more about the surprise of revealing a never-before-seen Health interface during the keynote than they cared about the actual design quality of an interface that will be used by hundreds of millions of iOS users for years to come.

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OK, sure.

Ouch. A public criticism from Gruber is the Apple blogger equivalent of having the executive washroom privileges revoked.

Something I've noticed about friends who ask me for camera advice: they never follow it. This got me thinking about the strange state of the digital camera industry, interchangeable lens cameras in particular.

I find the whole concept of Digital SLRs incredibly anachronistic. It's insane, that in 2014, we are still building many interchangeable lens cameras around a basic design that is largely unchanged from the 1930s. We persist in putting hulking great glass prisms and large, noisy mechanical mirrors inside.

The draw backs of this approach in 2014 are huge.

I've always wondered if the SNP's 'deal'1 with Megrahi over his release was really a way to kick the issue into the long grass until they got a referendum through. It's difficult to overstate just how enormous the ramifications of an acquittal would be for the Scottish establishment. The Lockerbie case didn't just put Megrahi on trial, it put Scottish Justice to task on a global stage. A miscarriage of justice of this magnitude would be to the nation's shame and embarrassment.

The Scottish legal system is one of the few areas to have remained independent, and proudly so, even over the past 300 years of Union in the United Kingdom. To have failed so dramatically would cast doubts over Scotland's abilities to manage its own affairs, bolstering the 'No' campaign's case against an independent Scotland.

Remember when DPReview used to be one of the best sites on the internet? Today I visited it for the first time in years. Amazon have run the place into the ground since Phil Askey sold it to them. The forensic detail and depth of their camera reviews used to be spectacular. The drop in quality didn't happen overnight, it took time for Amazon to strip the soul from a once proud site. Doesn't bode well for the Comixology aquisition.