(Really.)

Powerful stuff:

We believe that this special webpage carries strong philosophical, symbolic, and aesthetic attributes.

Interestingly, the page loads pretty fast.

I pull no punches in this article for The Industry.

Never found a flashlight app you really love? Read this and that’ll change.

Spencer Ackerman writes a pretty great article showing how Muslim terrorism is barely a thing anymore:

Only 14 people out of a population of millions were indicted for their involvement in violent terrorist plots in 2012, a decline from 2011′s 21. The plots themselves hit the single digits last year.

That shocked me. Sometimes data really can knock you sideways. But why do we always hear so much about terrorism in the news?

Spencer continues:

Since 9/11, Kurzman and his team tallies, 33 Americans have died as a result of terrorism launched by their Muslim neighbors. During that period, 180,000 Americans were murdered for reasons unrelated to terrorism. In just the past year, the mass shootings that have captivated America’s attention killed 66 Americans, “twice as many fatalities as from Muslim-American terrorism in all 11 years since 9/11,” notes Kurzman’s team.

Looks like the US really has its priorities in the wrong order.

Chris Gonzales agrees with Shawn about the iOS world being empowered by apps:

The iPad started looking more and like a suitable and legitimate replacement for a laptop, although admittedly, it couldn't have gotten there without the help of the App Store.

I’m reminded of a line from the Egg Freckles piece I just linked to:

The Windows [app] Store is void of choice and polish. Most entries appear to be experiments in Microsoft’s latest development framework. Most iOS developers benefited from years of Objective-C Mac programming experience before releasing their first iOS apps. With the release of the Surface RT, even veteran Windows developers need to tackle an entirely new application development framework, and it shows.

Boy, it does show.

Egg Freckles’ thoughts on Microsoft’s Surface RT:

It is ironic that the hardware this good would come from a software company on their first try, while the operating system and third-party apps require a second attempt.

Shawn Blanc writes a fantastic article, which (annoyingly) nails a point I always find difficult to explain when discussing the way I work to others: It’s all about apps. Shawn can get his work done with just an iPad. But it wasn’t always like that:

When the iPad was new, many of us had ambitions of one day leaving our MacBook Pros at home and traveling only with our iPads. But, at least for me, that idea quickly faded away as I ran head-on into the fact that I just couldn’t get a lot of the work done on my iPad that I needed to do. The iPad was by no means useless, it just wasn’t the laptop replacement I wanted it to be.

But that was nearly three years ago. And, like I said, a lot has changed.

The solution? Apps.

I too was an early adopter of the iPad, picking up the first generation device on impulse in June 2010. Whilst I probably could work entirely using nothing else, I would rather use what I feel most appropriate: for me, that’s OS X.

To me, iOS is more fun to use than OS X — although that gap is rapidly shrinking. My iOS devices are my “treats”, once I’ve done some serious work on the Mac.

I had the pleasure of reviewing this new app over at The Industry. Whilst it isn’t replacing Fantastical on my phone, it’s a great app which I can see many people enjoying:

If an event has an address associated with it, Sunrise offers to give you directions. This is a feature I’ve wanted in a calendar app for as long as I can remember. There’s even a preference to choose between Apple or Google Maps services, provided you have Google Maps installed on your iPhone. This saves me a lot of time — I no longer have to remember an address and copy it into Maps from my Calendar. It’s all much more seamless.

Cyrus Farivar, writing for Ars Technica:

[A] new European activist group has published evidence illustrating that significant proposed revisions have been introduced, nearly wholesale, via model legislation written by American and European corporate interests.

Disgraceful.

Whilst it isn’t possible to completely block numbers from calling an iPhone, David Smith has some tricks to help manage unwanted callers. Very clever:

You can’t prevent your phone from responding to a call (without crazy jailbreak hacks) but you can control how it responds.

Speaking of Gruber, his take on the HP/Android situation matches mine. Quoting Taylor Wimberly, John writes:

It’s a bit of a Hail Mary pass for HP, which has fallen years behind its rivals in the mobile space. It’s also a big win for Google, which adds another powerful partner to the Android ecosystem.

And a loss for Microsoft. This might add some context to Microsoft’s recent investment in Dell — HP seemingly doesn’t see a future in Windows or Windows Phone.

Microsoft’s stake in the recent Dell buyout is starting to look pretty defensive.

I wrote about how I browse Flash free on OS X and have since been doing some research to ensure I’m going about it the best way. John Gruber wrote about this exact topic a few years back. It’s worth a read, but my method covers everything I want.