A museum under construction is an awesome scene. It's like peeking backstage before the premiere of Broadway play, seeing the outer experience taking shape.

The Exploratorium - a unique museum of science, art and human perception - is still two months away from its grand reopening. The lower floor is strewn with half-built exhibits and criss-crossed with caution tape. The upstairs is a buzzing office full of people planning for the big day and beyond. This vast new space on Pier 15 in San Francisco opens to the public on April 17.

But on Monday the museum released Sound Uncovered, its second free iPad app, which the creators showed me during a visit to the unfinished museum. As I explored the app's exhibits, the tablet disappeared in my hands. When you launch this app, you're in the museum, no matter where you are.

Everywhere Is A Laboratory

The design of physical Exploratoreum starts with the goal of creating an experience and builds up from there. An iPad is just as good as a room in the museum if it's the right place to focus the experience of an exhibit. "What makes the Exploratorium a unique place is that it's the combination of a museum, a laboratory, and a developmental studio," says Rob Semper, executive associate director of the museum.

Semper is a physicist whose tenure at the Exploratorium goes back to designing some of its original exhibits with founder Frank Oppenheimer (also a physicist, who worked on the Manhattan Project with his older brother Robert Oppenheimer). Semper took a little time off from the Exploratorium to run the collaboration between Apple and Lucasfilm. Now he's back creating museum exhibits again, both in San Francisco and at partner museums around the world.

Extending its exhibit design to the iPad is a natural move for the Exploratorium. This museum came online in 1993, making its website among the first 600 in the world. The Exploratorium is like a laboratory for turning things into laboratories. In the same way it is turning its new U-shaped port building and the walkways and docks outside into a delightful maze of science experiments, it can turn flat, pixellated spaces into exhibits as well. And on the iPad, these experiments come to life, gaining the inputs of touch, movement, light and sound.

It's All About Perception

The two Exploratorium iPad apps so far are both "buffet-style" collections of short, multi-sensory exhibits. You can select from a table of contents or swipe through like a magazine. The first was Color Uncovered, which uses properties of the tablet's display to demonstrate properties of light. The new app, Sound Uncovered, uses both the speakers and microphones, as well as text and video explanations, to show off some of the surprisingly bizarre properties of sound.

"Perception is a strong subject for us," says Sound Uncovered project director Jean Cheng. Designing a museum exhibit at the level of user experience comes right down to perception. "This app is about sound, but it's really about you." By causing you to notice weird things about your perception that you usually take for granted, the Exploratorium forces you to think more critically about your environment, and it does so purely through fun.

I'm not going to spoil the illusions for you. If you have access to an iPad, you should download Sound Uncovered for free and try it yourself. Right now.

But I will tell you about my favorites:

I love "Find the Highest Note," which presents a circular organ and demonstrates the mind-bending auditory Möbius strip known as the Shepard scale. As you move upward and downward in base pitch, the eerie Shepard tone's partials replace each other at the top and bottom range of hearing. As a result, even though you're moving up or down in pitch, it ultimately never sounds like it's getting higher or lower. It's the auditory version of the barber-pole illusion, where the corkscrewing shape seems to move upward or downward forever while remaining in the same place.

What's also cool about this exhibit in the app is that it doubles as a musical instrument.

Another great social exhibit is the "How Old Are Your Ears?" test, which lets you slide down from an inaudibly high frequency into the ranges that humans naturally lose the ability to hear over time. The younger people in the room will start to hear an ear-splitting whine, but the elders won't hear a thing until lower down.

As we ran through the illusions at the museum, the construction crews periodically tested the fire alarm in the building, which pierced through our conversation. It was uncomfortable for a second, disrupting this carefully arranged social situation, but then we realized the building itself was demonstrating the very kinds of sensory and cognitive tricks we were playing with on the iPad.

Simply Social

The Exploratorium is not afraid to take risks with its apps. One exercise in Color Uncovered asks the user — with plenty of caution — to put a drop of water on the screen, which creates a magnifying bubble in which one can clearly see how pixels work. The team laughs about some of the App Store reviews they got from people who didn't handle that part carefully.

But the apps are simple and magazine-like, going out of their way not to overwhelm people less used to figuring out how iPad apps work. "We don't want to further mystify people with this tech," director of online engagement Lowell Robinson says. "Frank [Oppenheimer]'s dream was to demystify people about how the world works." Accordingly, these apps are not about deep-down, immersive virtual experiences. "We're trying to give you physical ways to test," says Cheng. The apps ask you to try things, try them on others, and pass the tablet around.

The Exploratorium apps are social, but not in the Facebook way. "Social in the old-fashioned sense where you're sitting next to somebody," Robinson says. We had a good laugh about that.

Sound Uncovered for iPad is available for free on the iTunes App Store.

Photos by Amy Widdowson.

Android Authority has snagged an intriguing video that purports to show a sleek, new Chromebook with 2560 x 1700 resolution touchscreen called the Chromebook Pixel. The video claims the machine is "designed by Google, down to the last pixel."

Is this for real?

There's no smoking gun, but I have subtle yet compelling evidence that it is.

New ChromeBook - Next Generation Concept... by androidauthority

Where Did This Video Come From?

The video came from Android Authority, as far as I'm concerned, because it has disappeared from its original sources. Bogdan Petrovan at Android Authority tells it like this: A developer named François Beaufort, who spotted exciting upcoming features in Chrome last week, posted this video on Google+. It disappeared shortly thereafter, but not before Android Authority could snag it.

The description made it sound like the clip came from a company called Slinky.me, which makes some kind of visual guides to things. The company posted on Google+ claiming that its servers were attacked by hackers and apologizing for "the fact that many projects have been shown previously ! ! ! Please re-share ! This is very important" [sic].

Now, that sounds like classic tech blog trolling to me. "Whoops! You've never heard of us, but we accidentally lost control of a sexy new Google product video! We're really sorry!" And then the company gets press. That's a win for some companies, even if it means getting blackballed by Google forever.

But I've been dealing with Google PR for a while. I've covered ChromeOS device launches and had briefings with the team. And there are some clues in here that seem totally legit to me.

Smells Like Google

First of all, we've been seeing evidence of touchscreen Chrome OS for a long time. My instinct was always that this meant a development in the other direction, a Chrome tablet, rather than a touchscreen Chromebook. And I wouldn't rule that out, either. When I interviewed the Chrome OS people in May, VP of engineering Linus Upson said to expect "a number of different form factors." A touchscreen laptop would qualify under that description as well.

But the telltale sign about the Chromebook Pixel to me is in just one line from the narrator in the video. "Your computer actually gets better over time," the disembodied voice says. This was straight out of the Google PR playbook. The Google PR folks intoned it over and over again when I talked to them ahead of the Samsung Chromebook and Chromebox launch.

The translation is that Chrome OS devices get better because they're just a browser in a box, and whenever Google improves Chrome, the machine's whole OS benefits. But it's a subtle point, a geeky point. One Googlers would care about more than anyone else. It's one you'd have to be very familiar with Google's party line not to miss.

So I'll go out on a limb here and say this machine is real. A high-spec Chromebook is definitely what Google needs to prove the worth of the Chrome OS idea, and a touchscreen is icing on the cake.

I needed a new meditation timer app for my iPhone, and I was not looking forward to browsing for one. The search for "meditation" in the App Store turns up a lot of garbage, and the app I had settled on before still had too much going on. But in the middle of the pack, my eyes fell on Mind, which had a striking, simple design that stood out from the rest.

It was free, so of course I grabbed it, and I was shocked to see how perfect it was for my needs. How could the meditation apps on the store all be so bad except one, and that one happens to be free?

As it turns out, Mind was a simple labor of love with an atypical App Store story. It was built by Fred Oliveira, just @f on Twitter, a full-stack developer and designer. He's also an O'Reilly author and a mentor at 500 Startups. So I had to hear the rest of the Mind story.

"I built Mind mostly for myself," Oliveira says. "I looked around for a timer app (for meditation as well as a Pomodoro Technique tool) that was as simple as it could be. The App Store was packed with apps that looked bad, were poorly designed or were just too complex."

"So since building mobile and Web apps is what I do by trade, I just created my own."

Keep It Simple

Meditation apps are a funny category. App-making is a business. Meditation is a practice of letting go of busyness. These two drives come into conflict surprisingly often.

It's immediately obvious when a meditation app is just about making money; it costs too much for what it is (or it's free and full of distracting ads), and the design shows no care at all. There are plenty of apps in this category.

But even in the apps that are carefully designed, there's often a problem on the opposite extreme. In order to justify charging for such a simple app, many developers feel a need to pack in as many features as they can. These commonly include tons of configurable chime sounds; multiple presets for lengths of time; crazy, changing artwork; and even analytics of your meditation performance over time.

But these features actually detract from meditation apps even more than mere bad design does. The quality of the apps is higher, so it draws people in, but all the bells and whistles — especially the analytics — create pressure to do everything "properly," to make sure you don't miss your daily stats, to fiddle with the chime sounds, and otherwise be distracted from what should be the simplest of all activities.

"Meditation isn't about configuring a bunch of parameters. It's about sitting," Oliveira says. "I didn't need a complex UI, a number of buttons, to help me track how long I sit."

Mind Is A Tool

So Mind is the simplest meditation app it could possibly be, and that's why it works. It has one screen. You swipe the colored time slider left and right to set the duration anywhere between one minute and one hour. Then you hit the button, the app prompts you to relax and focus on your breathing, and when it's done, it chimes three times. It remembers your last session duration for next time. That's all there is to it.

My favorite thing about Mind is that even the imagery is minimal. Meditators come to the practice from different traditions and with different aesthetics, so apps that commit to a particular kind of Buddhist imagery — or worse, some kind of fake pastiche of New Age-y Zen/Hindu/Hippie fusion — are disturbing to me. Mind, from its name to its icon to its full-spectrum colors, is a simple foundation built for anyone.

"I never intended to make money from it," Oliveira says, "which is why it's free today and will probably stay that way forever. It was easy to build, and is easy to maintain. The emails and thanks I get from people who use it are payment enough, to be honest."

"I guess in the last few years I realized I'm a tool maker. Making tools is a calling. Mind is one of those tools. But I've built others before, and will continue building tools in the future. It makes me happy."

Ah! Good morning! I'm feeling mighty fine! How are you? Oh, why am I so cheerful this morning?

Because Twitter was down.

It's coming back online now, but it was straight-up out of commission for most of the morning. It's the third outage this month, in fact. And it makes me so happy each time. I only wish this morning's outage had lasted a little longer into the day for us West Coast folks.

Snow Day

Why the schadenfreude, you might ask? Why take delight at the misfortune of others? Well, let me be clear. I have endless compassion for the brilliant engineers at Twitter. They've built something unbelievably powerful, and it's a testament to their talents that it runs at all. But I think the human users who spin the wheels of that real-time interruption machine could use a break every once in a while.

When Twitter is down, it's like a Snow Day on the Internet.

I understand that most people can and do use Twitter by choice. That's a very good thing. As an intentional hobby, Twitter is immensely valuable. Just dipping into the stream can provide an hour's or a day's worth of news, humor and even friendship, if you keep your Twitter feed tidy enough. "Twitter is my rosary," my word-hero Erin Kissane once said.

Twitter is my rosary.

— erin kissane (@kissane) December 9, 2011

But Twitter is slightly darker for some of its users. In fact, it's the dark part that Twitter the company has decided to focus on for its business goals. Those users would be the media. That's us.

For the blogosphere, Twitter is the tip of the spear. Sifting through it all day for leads is the only way to even try to know what's happening everywhere at once. And if a blogger like me wants to take a break from Twitter to concentrate on something, too bad. If I do, I'll miss a hundred other things. So, except for those brilliant emergencies at the top of the news cycle, the decision to concentrate is basically the decision to give up.

The Heartbeat

Most of the time, to ignore Twitter is to fall behind. Whether you care about that or not is up to you, unless it's your job. But not on Internet Snow Days. On Snow Days, everything is nice and quiet.

I'm just being poetic, of course. Twitter outages are actually excellent opportunities to break news, but that's precisely because so many other people are out playing in the snow. The media have become so dependent on this one service, this one critical point of failure, that it has begun to coalesce around it. Twitter is the heartbeat of the media now. That's great for Twitter. Long may it reign.

But for me, as a little neuron in the brain of the media, I could use a rest.

Oh, what? Twitter's back up? Great. I'll refill the coffee.

Photo credit: Jon Mitchell

Tapbots announced Wednesday that Netbot, their App.net client for iPhone and iPad, is now free "for an unspecified period of time."

The Tapbots App.net post announcing the Netbot sale says it's "[I]n order to spur adoption of App.Net."

Netbot was born out of Tapbots' beloved Twitter client, Tweetbot, and anyone who uses that app will quickly get used to Netbot. For those who haven't used Tweetbot, just trust that Tapbots is a top-shelf iOS shop and makes apps that feel good and make sense. If you've wanted to try out App.net, this is the app with which to do it.

In fact, it was when Tapbots announced their App.net client that much of the tech world started to take App.net seriously. App.net is betting that a paid-for social infrastructure will give rise to a vast field of great apps that have sustainable businesses. That plan needs buy-in from big-name developers.

When Tapbots joined the service, things got interesting. The app caused a huge spike in attention when it first appeared for $4.99. But App.net's adoption hasn't been as swift as the Tapbots duo, programmer Paul Haddad and designer Mark Jardine, had hoped. As Haddad confirmed on Twitter, going free means that Tapbots stands to make more money from the App.net Developer Incentive Program, which doles out over $20,000 per month to ADN developers based on user satisfaction ratings. That must be a better deal than app sales at this point.

@glennf yes.

— Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) January 31, 2013

But App.net announced this week that paid users will now get 10GB of cloud storage behind their accounts, which app developers can put to any use they can dream up. Not only does that mean more powerful applications can be built, it means that now App.net can build the same kind of freemium revenue model as services like Dropbox and Evernote use. If paying for the service gets you the storage space, App.net can give away the Twitter-like messaging features for free.

Paid-only adoption of App.net hasn't lived up to these bigtime developers' expectations. But if the service becomes free for messaging-only users, that could easily change.

Okay, forgive me, but I have to nerd out on you for a second. I have just learned that you can turn any modern browser window into a text notepad, and you can save the contents. It even works on mobile browsers.

Type this into your browser's location bar:

data:text/html, <html contenteditable>

Hit enter, then click on the blank page below. Now type away. And on a desktop browser, if you save the page, you'll get an HTML file that will open right back up in your browser with the text you had written.

How Does It Work?

The reason this works is laid out in a post by Jose Jesus Perez Aguinaga on Coderwall. It uses the Data URI format to tell the browser to make a simple HTML page that contains the new HTML5 element "contenteditable." It's pretty basic stuff, unless you aren't using a modern browser, but I sure hope you are by now.

Aguinaga explains that he uses it as a scratch pad since he lives in the browser, and he doesn't want text editor windows cluttering up his workspace.

I can relate to that. I wouldn't use it for writing a blog post, but I'd certainly use it for a tab of notes on the contents of the browser tab next to it. I regularly have browser windows with 10 or 12 tabs of stuff for an article I'm writing, and I can use this trick to keep my notes on each item right there next to it. It isn't pretty, but it works.

I've entered the magic words as a snippet in TextExpander by Smile. So whenever I type "tttype," my Mac or TextExpander-enabled mobile apps will spit out the real thing.

That's pretty neat, but the wizards in the comments section below Aguinaga's post have figured out even more powerful tweaks, including making it into a bookmark.

I learned this via Glenn Fleishman, who learned about it via Tom Standage. Nerd-out complete.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Google's flagship Nexus 4 phone is currently back on sale on Google Play for customers in the U.S. and Germany. It's $299 for 8GB and $349 for 16GB, and the phone is unlocked. Shipping time is currently listed as 1-2 weeks.

If you want one — and we think you will — you should act quickly. This phone has sold out within hours every time it has appeared.

Photo by Eliot Weisberg

I don't want to give up my desktop computer, but it seems like many people do.

Dan Frommer at SplatF lays it all out: The PC industry is in decline. The Mac, which was growing while the rest of PCs were shrinking, is now shrinking, too. But if you add in the iPad and count all of Apple's "computers" at once, the numbers are through the roof.

It's pretty clear what all this means. As Steve Jobs said, PCs are trucks, and tablets are cars. Most people don't drive around in trucks. But the ones who drive trucks need great ones, and that's where Apple is starting to focus its Mac efforts exclusively.

Here in the U.S., at the peak of the George W. Bush era (remember him?), a trend began where people whose jobs entailed parking their car, going inside, and doing something on a computer began driving hulking monster trucks designed to resemble military assault vehicles. But after realizing over decades how much unnecessary energy those SUVs consumed, the trend swung back, and now many people conspicuously drive little hybrids instead.

Consumer products can be like that. Trends swing back and forth like a pendulum as new technology becomes available to meet people's tastes.

The Tablet Trend

What we see in Frommer's amazing charts is the adoption of just such a trend. Yes, it may be that Mac sales declined 22% in 2012, the biggest drop in 10 years, but that fall in Mac consumption can't come close to accounting for the soaring iPad numbers.

Certainly, there's a use case for a tablet that replaces the point-and-click PC completely. It does a better job for lots of people, since the battery lasts all day and it fits in a handbag. Apple should be thrilled to sacrifice Mac sales in exchange for selling iPads to those people. The company is even betting that this trend will take a bite out of the enterprise PC market, and it seems a pretty safe bet.

But the iPad was not the first $500 portable computer. It may (seriously) be the best one, but its astronomical adoption rate is not simply driven by the sudden realization by tens of millions of people that they can be more efficient workers on this device.

Tablets are also entertainment systems. They're an elective choice, like the choice of a Hummer or Prius over a used Honda. They're trendy.

Likewise, not everyone who bought a white plastic MacBook needed all its capabilities. They needed some of them, which a $300 Windows netbook also offered, and they wanted some of them, like the ability to watch Netflix in bed. But those people have the iPad now. It's a better choice for those uses. And Apple doesn't have to make that Mac at all anymore.

The Real PC Market

Since the "what is a PC?" argument is not yet resolved, I propose this definition: A PC is a computer with a multi-window workspace and a pixel-precise input method. For now, though I think this part can change with good-enough voice interfaces, let's include a physical keyboard, too.

The PC market is surely subject to trends, but that 22% drop in Mac sales is not the end of the Mac trend. Apple knows that as well as anybody. In 2012, Apple shipped the first Macs with retina displays and a striking new iMac, which, as CEO Tim Cook pointed out in the Q1 2013 earnings call was not available for most of the quarter in which the low Mac numbers were reported.

Why would Apple ship those products in a down year, fighting the clear trend against PCs? Because today's PC market is the real PC market. The people who still buy PCs actually need them. It might be a pretty hard crash for low-margin PC manufacturers, but for Apple, with high-end Macs bolstered by roaring iPhone and iPad businesses, it's just a chance to build the best, most powerful PCs it has ever made.

And that's not to say that Windows PCs are finished, either. It just means they have to be excellent enough for an increasingly high-end market.

Lead image by Eliot Weisberg for ReadWrite. Chart courtesy of Splatf. Bottom image from Apple. 

Apple Monday released iOS 6.1, now available as on over-the-air update from Settings > General. The system update should be available in iTunes shortly.

The update adds fast, 4G LTE connection support for more carriers worldwide (see the complete list here for iPhone and iPad).

It also allows U.S. users to purchase movie tickets through Fandango directly with Siri. iTunes Match subscribers can now download individual songs from iCloud. And there's a new button to reset the Advertising Identifier, the new tracking number Apple has assigned to iOS users instead of a permanent Unique Device Identifier (UDID).

Paid social network App.net is about to become the iCloud of the Web. And with the freemium economics of a cloud storage service, it could end up making the Twitter-like part of App.net free for anyone.

App.net Monday released its application programming interface (API) for Files, so apps built on the service can now read and write files like photos, videos, documents or whatever else to every user account. App.net users now have 10GB of all-purpose storage attached to their account. This opens up the service to virtually any kind of application, all backed by the cloud.

"I think it's a big deal for the future of the platform," says App.net founder Dalton Caldwell. It makes possible new applications that are much less Twitter-like. For example, App.net could now host full-fledged blogs with hosting for images, audio, video, and everything. Caldwell says it's "about as powerful as the Facebook API in terms of the kinds of stuff you can build."

App.net's browser-based demo clients — Alpha for the public timeline and Omega for private messaging — will now get photo sharing using the Files API, storing the photos in user accounts.

Free Accounts Coming Soon?

Though this hasn't happened yet, the announcement of the Files API makes possible a future App.net story that would be the most interesting so far. By providing the 10GB of cloud storage to paid accounts, App.net makes a new tier of pricing possible that could allow social-only accounts to be free. In that scenario, App.net would be just like Twitter, only with a thriving ecosystem of client apps, the possibility of upgrading to a powerful, cloud-backed service, and no ads whatsoever.

You can already try the service for free by invitation. Cloud-backed file storage might make it economical to use App.net for free indefinitely.

Is App.net A Good Deal?

App.net's 10GB per account is more space than Microsoft's SkyDrive, Apple's iCloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox provide with their lowest tiers of service, and App.net costs $36 per year for users (or $5 per month on a monthly basis).

The fairest comparison is to Dropbox's Pro tier, since Dropbox, like App.net, has a powerful API for applications on all major platforms. For $9.99 per month, Dropbox users get 100GB of storage, which they can access through applications or as a file system on their devices. For half the price, App.net users get only 10GB, but the use case is very different. App.net users get a name on a real-time social network as nimble as Twitter but with an ever-changing growing of applications providing new ways to interact with it. And those apps can now handle big files as well as 256-character messages.

From the user's perspective, the most apt comparison is actually iCloud. Rather than browsing through folders in the desktop metaphor like one does on Dropbox, App.net's file storage will just be a handy but invisible back end that syncs the files and data from various applications. But instead of the closed Apple ecosystem, App.net's cloud back-end is open to the entire Web. In fact, it's actually more flexible than iCloud, since you can easily move your files between applications.

"It's a different metaphor," explains Caldwell. "It's your bucket of content, and you can give access to different applications for it." If you try a photo-sharing app for a while and decide to switch to a new one, you just switch apps. Your photos are attached to your App.net account, and they're portable. If you've recently tried to switch from Instagram to Flickr, for example, you know it's not as easy as a similar move will be within App.net.

A New Web With The Right Incentives

When App.net first appeared, it was seen as a paid Twitter clone. That was an enticing concept only to hyper-geeks. But the Files API makes clear just how different — perhaps better — the Web could be if it spread.

App.net has a login button for Web applications just like Google, Facebook and Twitter do. Any website or application could let users log in with their App.net accounts, even if they were just free, social-only accounts. But App.net doesn't use those logins for ad tracking. It doesn't have ads. It just gives connected applications access to the user's data, which the user can revoke at any time.

That means App.net users can bring a huge amount of their files and data with them to try out new Web services. And it's not hard to imagine that App.net could make its authenticated payment services available to applications as well, just like Apple's iTunes accounts.

Imagine everything that works about Apple's closed ecosystem, but made available on any platform, including the open Web. Imagine the basic level of participation being free forever. That's why I'm excited about App.net.

In its Supplier Responsibility Report released Thursday, Apple revealed that it had fired a supplier, Guangdong Real Faith Pingzhou Electronics (PZ), because it had employed 74 workers under 16 years old who used fake papers.

Bloomberg reports that the workers were recruited by Shenzhen Quanshun Human Resources Developing Co., which cooperated with the children's families to forge documents and get around age-verification procedures. The recruiter was reported to the authorities, fined and had its license suspended.

Problem Goes Beyond Apple

PZ manufactures a standard circuit-board component used by many companies in many industries. This is not a problem specific to Apple. But partly due to its high-profile success, Apple has been the subject of intense scrutiny and criticism of its labor practices. And while Apple is certainly not the only hardware company using suppliers with bad labor practices, much of the criticism is well deserved.

In response to the bad publicity Apple got for worker suicides and riots over labor practices at its suppliers, it began naming these companies in its corporate reports last year in order to pressure them through transparency.

Jeff Williams, Apple's senior vice president of operations, told Bloomberg that Apple has decided to name the companies with which it works to highlight bad practices and put pressure on the industry to change. Apple's number of inspections was up 72% from the year before. It conducted 393 audits covering 1.5 million workers in 14 countries, and 28 of the inspections were surprise visits.

60-Hour Workweek Rankles Workers: They Want More

Apple's policy mandates a maximum 60-hour work week, but compliance with this policy has been a problem. Especially at Foxconn, Apple's best-known assembly partner, workers often push for more overtime hours and may quit if they can't get enough of the lucrative work. But Apple's inspections and enforcement have pushed compliance with the 60-hour maximum up to 92% of workers surveyed, up from 38% last year.

Consumer electronics are still fraught with ethical problems, but increased coverage and transparency is forcing incremental progress.

On January 28th and 29th, Google is holding a shadowy event for Google Glass developers in San Francisco. There's another on February 1st and 2nd in New York.

It's called a Glass Foundry.

Google will be introducing developers to the Google Mirror API, which will let them start building software that interacts with Google's futuristic augmented-reality glasses. We know from members-only Google+ posts from the organizers that developers will get to play with Project Glass units during the workshop.

According to the document we've got, developers "may" even be getting a test pair to take away. And you won't believe how intense the rules are.

ReadWrite got a look at the non-disclosure agreement — or NDA — for developers attending the first Glass Foundry, and it is a serious piece of work. Google doesn't want anything to leak out about the state of this project.

Google has been pretty ostentatious about its goals for its augmented-reality glasses. Remember the skydiving Hangout stunt? And Google co-founder Sergey Brin was spotted last week riding the subway in New York wearing Project Glass. But now that the first outside people who promised to fork over $1,500 at Google I/O last summer are getting their hands on the things, mum is definitely the word.

Here are some highlights from the NDA on the Project Glass events. We've reordered and paraphrased them in order to protect our sources from any devious wording tricks Google might use to identify them. We've retained the original title and headers for relevant sections, and we've quoted one amazing phrase verbatim.

GLASS DEVICE USAGE AGREEMENT FOR GLASS FOUNDRY DEVELOPERS

1. General

• Google "may" give attendees access to "Glass and other Google products," but it's only for testing purposes and to solicit feedback.
• Only U.S. residents are allowed.
• The Google Glass devices attendees "may" receive can be used only in the U.S.
• No one other than the attendee can wear or use Glass without Google's permission.
• Either Google or the participant can terminate participation freely.
• Everything is covered under Google's overall terms of service and privacy policy, as well as any additional terms for individual products.
• Google warns participants not to use Glass while driving, biking, using sharp objects, or playing sports, and to use caution while walking and crossing streets. If they have any concern about the safety of using Glass, Google asks participants to stop using them and return them immediately.
• Glass has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth transmitters/receivers, but since it hasn't been FCC authorized, they must remain in the hands of authorized testers.
• Google will collect feedback from users, including location and usage data, survey responses, and recordings of voice or images taken during in-person interviews or studies. It will all be associated with participants' names and retained by Google.
• Photos or videos taken of Glass devices or at Glass Foundry events, including (but not limited to) images of the participants wearing Glass, are Google's confidential information, and participants can't copy, store, or share them without Google's written consent.
• Participants are not allowed to use their own Google accounts with Glass. They're getting developer accounts to which Google has full access, which will be deleted after the agreement is over.
• Photos taken wearing Glass will all be added to the Instant Upload album of developers' test Google+ accounts, so Google will see them all immediately, as well as their location data.

2. Ownership and Intellectual Property Rights

• Google owns everything, basically. "You waive any moral rights you have and agree not to exercise them." (The term "moral rights" is lawyer-speak for a very specific set of copyright restrictions.)
• Google can only use participants' photos and videos externally with their consent, except photos, audio, and video of or by the participant while using Glass or at the Foundry event. Google can use that internally or externally as it pleases.
• Google "may" provide participants with copies of their photos and videos, but they can use them externally only with Google's consent.
• Software developed by participants is governed by separate terms.

3. Confidentiality

• Participants cannot talk to the media or post publicly about Glass without Google's written consent.
• All information provided by Google to participants, as well as their feedback, is Google's confidential information. If participants are legally required to disclose any information, they must tell Google immediately.

4. Term and Termination

• The agreement goes into effect when signed, and participants have to notify Google in writing to terminate it. Google can suspend or terminate participation at any time.
• Sections 2 through 8 still apply after the agreement is terminated.
• Participants have to return Glass devices and confidential info to Google immediately after the agreement is terminated.
• Google will delete the developer's account information after termination but keep all the photos, videos, logs, and usage and location data.
• If participants breach the terms of the agreement, Google can blacklist them forever from developer programs.

Miscellaneous Bits At The End

• Google is liable for warranty claims in relation to this program only up to $100.
• Google is indemnified against anything participants do in violation of the agreement.
• Google's failure to enforce any provision of the agreement does not constitute a waiver of it.

Lead photo by Eliot Weisberg.

Tech pundits spend a lot of time wondering about the next black rectangle — that is, the next touchscreen mobile or tablet computer. How many inches and pixels of screen will it have? How many cores? How thin and light will it be? But we all know those questions will only apply for a few more years at most.

If you observe the trends in sensors, networked objects, and AI, it begins to seem inevitable that, while they're certainly the present, black rectangles are not the future. Computing can be much more intelligent and subtle than that. It can blend in and enhance our environment. Think visual or auditory signals triggered by the world around you, not navigating through apps on a screen.

In fact, the most innovative tech companies are already working on getting hardware and software out of our way entirely, so that we don't have to really use them at all. They just happen.

As one of my favorite tech observers, Kontra, noted this week, this seems to pose a problem for Apple. Apple is unique among mobile hardware manufacturers by having the whole business, hardware and software alike, rolled up into one. For Apple, the interface is the experience it sells, and the delightful hardware is the place where we make contact with it. If we're headed for a world where hardware disappears into the background, what does Apple have left to sell?

As Kontra observes, Apple's Siri interface is the key to riding out this transition. In this future we're imagining, there will be a wider variety of ways to interact with the computer. Not only will we use touch, movement, and voice, we'll be passively interacting with it all the time just by going about our business. The key to this computing experience is having an aware, intelligent assistant application that can understand all these inputs, and Siri is Apple's hope.

AI Isn't Easy

It's a tough climb, though. As my colleague John Paul Titlow writes, even though voice control's potential is amazing, it's pretty clunky so far. Kontra's post highlights the underlying challenges of gathering and understanding enough data to make this work, and we've already seen how much trouble Apple had there with Maps, a comparatively simple problem to solve.

One wonders whether Google's slow and steady approach will bear out, even though Apple is definitely winning the present, compared to Google's hardware partners individually. Google's Android strategy has created hundreds of millions of mobile Google users, no matter whose devices or OS versions they're using. Google has gathered tons of data about the world, and data is Google's specialty.

For that reason, Google Now is a much better AI assistant than Siri right now. I'd be using it if there was an Android device I liked better than the iPhone all around.

But again, that won't matter for long. Google is already working on heads-up display glasses as a future interface. Maybe Apple is, too, but they certainly aren't talking about it yet. By not worrying overly much about hardware and just concentrating on getting the software out there to collect the data, Google looks like it could leapfrog the black rectangle era and dominate the next one.

But Apple has a way of surprising everyone by announcing that the new era is already here. And when Apple does that, it unveils a new kind of computer and says you can have it next week. With the kinds of profits and loyalty Apple has built, it would be foolish to rule out another surprise.

If you're an Apple watcher that isn't too busy focusing on the present, you're probably wondering what Apple has cooking for the near future. While Wednesday's critical earnings report will reflect on the health of its existing products, the smart money is on whether or not Apple's got new magic in the pipeline.

Looking at the successful models in the Android world, much of the mobile geek chatter is about Apple's conspicuous lack of a phone in the five-inch screen range. Apple showed with the iPad Mini that it isn't above letting other manufacturers beat it to market with a new device size. It just waits to enter the market until it makes sense internally to do so.

Well, Rene Ritchie at iMore has a pretty spotless record of figuring out when it makes sense. Instead of fiending over rumors, he just uses math and common sense and says, "look, here's how Apple could do it." He was right about the iPhone 5. And this week, Ritchie has taken a look at a variety of five-ish-inch phone form factors and figured out which ones are plausible for Apple to actually do.

He considers a stretched-out 1136x640 pixel-doubled, the same resolution as an iPhone 5, on a theoretical 5-inch phone. This would have a lower pixel density than the 5's retina screen, but still not bad. He also looks at 3x and 4x possibilities, which would make for some very nice displays, but given that Apple just made developers rework everything to get to 2x resolution — and that work is still not done — this new display density seems farfetched.

Ritchie also looks at more outlandish possibilities. It's well worth reading.

Apple fans are resistant to believing that this device size matters. Just because there's a market for five-inch Android phablets doesn't mean that an iThing in the same size would sell. But Ritchie plays devil's advocate on that and shows why people might very well be interested in a five-inch iPhone.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock

As usual around this time in the quarter, the tech world waits with bated breath as Apple prepares to tell us Wednesday how it did that quarter. In the quiet period ahead of the report, the usual supply chain rumors and doomsaying speculation abound.

John Moltz has a good column at Macworld today that he must be tired of writing. He refers to the biggest rumor of this earnings cycle, an unnamed source from which two newspapers reported that Apple had cut orders for iPhone 5 screens, and he shows how the press reaction to that mysterious report follows a predictable pattern.

The press seizes on any number it can find that suggests any kind of change. It extrapolates from that number according to this formula: "See? Apple can't keep doing exactly what it's doing forever because its products will be commoditized. The company's doom is inevitable!"

Moltz points out, as he and other Apple watchers have to do every couple of weeks, that this outlook always skips the part of the technology story about inventing new things. It is the ability to imagine the future that makes Apple Apple, and the lack of this ability that makes people into tech rumormongers.

He's certainly right about that. But I wish Apple defenders in the press would be more upfront about admitting the deeper, more cynical truth about the rumor cycle. They're the same over and over again because the media go with what works. The same battles raging every quarter are the sign of a perpetual media frenzy. But hey, it's risky to poke holes in that illusion. What else would we write about?

As TechCrunch reported Tuesday, Apple has pulled the apps from photography network 500px from its App Store because, after 16 months of use, their clearly marked nude photo galleries suddenly became intolerable.

In addition for 500px's own app, the third-party 500px app ISO500, whose parent company 500px acquired because of ISO500's excellent integration, has also received notice that its app will be removed from the App Store shortly - for the same reason.

But here's the thing: Flipboard integrates completely with 500px as well. Everything you can do on 500px's app, you can do on Flipboard. Is Apple going to pull Flipboard as well? What about Tumblr, Instagram and all browsers - including Apple's own Safari? You can get to nude images with them pretty easily, too.

How 500px Got The News

500px Chief Operating Officer Evgeny Tchebotarev told ReadWrite that Apple called about an upcoming minor bugfix update to the app around 9pm Monday night. Apple told Tchebotarev the update would be rejected "because it is too easy to look for nude photos in search." The person on the phone initially said the app would be reverted to the earlier version.

"We said, 'it's fine, we can make the changes within a day,'" Tchebotarev says, "but in an hour, we got an email [from Apple] saying it would be pulled anyway, not just reverted." Though the representative he spoke to initially said the existing version could stay, Apple had second thoughts and decided to pull the app altogether.

The update changed nothing about search or the availability of nude photos in the app. It was just a minor release to improve performance and fix some bugs. Just as it has the whole time, the app defaults to a Safe Search mode that excludes nudity, and you have to log in on the desktop version to change that.

Tchebotarev says 500px is issuing a hot fix on the server side in order to satisfy Apple and get the app back into the store as soon as possible. "It's a little rough," he says, "just filters out some search terms. It's not the elegant solution we are usually looking for." Once Apple lets the app back in, 500px will be able to figure out a more permanent fix.

What's The Deal, Apple?

So will Apple pull every app that lets its users find nudity? This rhetorical question is getting tiresome. Apple has always been weird when it comes to defining what kinds of culture it deems appropriate for its users. It has also always been cagey and inconsistent with developers when applying these rules to the App Store.

Apple is rarely clear and upfront with its developer community about why and how these policies are applied. Usually, as with 500px, it's vague and confusing. Sometimes, as in another case on which ReadWrite has reported, it's completely inscrutable. Is the 500px takedown just the overzealous action of a new app reviewer? Or is there a whole new crackdown going on?

"What I've been thinking in the last hour is that our app['s name] starts with a number, so maybe they are getting stricter with not-safe-for-work apps, and ours was at the top of the list," Tchebotarev says. If that's the case, and this issue spreads beyond the apps that plug into 500px, we'll keep you posted.

We've reached out to Apple for comment, and though we probably won't get a response, we'll update the story if we do.

Google announced Friday that the Google Places data it makes available to app developers will now include Place Summaries, which are hand-curated reviews of the places and businesses listed on Google. This means high-quality information from Google such as Zagat reviews can be easily included in location-based apps.

As a Google Maps user, I'm excited about this. I really want Google to beef up its offerings for finding restaurants, stores, and other local places. The more rich place info it makes available to developers, the more useful Google Maps and Google Places will be for people in the Google ecosystem.

The Best Place For Places

The competition in local search apps is intense right now. Yelp is built into Apple's OS, so iOS users end up searching from there all the time, but it's not as good at personal recommendations as Foursquare. Many other mobile applications pull places from Foursquare, but since it's not integrated completely into any mobile OS, it's not as easy to use.

Meanwhile, when Facebook announced Graph Search this week, Yelp's stock fell off a cliff. Facebook has the best social data for recommendations by far, and Graph Search will make it easy to use Facebook for searches like "sushi restaurants my friends like."

Undoubtedly, these new features will come with more provocation by Facebook's app to use Facebook to check into places. Facebook has features built into iOS, OS X and Windows, so it seems plausible that Facebook's Graph Search will become native features of those operating systems.

Google Should Have The Edge

But for Google users on any OS, there are really good reasons to prefer Google Places to being locked into Facebook. Google Maps is the best mapping service in the world, for one thing. But Google also likely has data from your email and searches, making its personal recommendations quite accurate as well. It may not have the relationship data from Google+ that Facebook has inside its own blue walls, but Google has a pretty good idea of what its users want, and it offers the best service for helping them get there.

And Google Places is especially important for Android users, who have Google Now as a sort of concierge reminding them of appointments and suggesting convenient places to go.

But unfortunately, especially for iOS users, there aren't that many useful features of Google+ Local as a recommendation service yet. But starring places on Google services is the easiest wan to make a list of bookmarks in Google Maps, which, speaking for myself, is definitely my preferred navigation app on iOS. So I want more powerful features for place recommendations.

Now that Google is extending better review content to developers, I hope more apps will build interesting ways to discover places using Google's services.

The big Facebook news tech blogs were all freaking out about turned out to be just another shot in the platform wars.

There's nothing exciting about Facebook's Graph Search. It's just another way to lock in free users to a mediocre, incomplete service, just like Google wants to do with Google+. Until there's a personalized, natural-language search box that can search whatever and wherever we want, I don't think anything else matters.

The way I see it, there are three companies offering rudimentary artificial intelligence to consumers at a grand scale: Google, Apple, and now Facebook. (Sorry, Microsoft, you're a distant fourth.) All of these companies want to provide you convenient answers when you ask them questions in your own language. Hundreds of millions of people use more than one of these. Many use all three. But they can only be used one at a time. While you're using any one of them, you're not using the others. Therein lies the problem.

Asking questions and getting answers is one of the most important things we want to do with computers. It's the thing that impresses us most. Our sense of living in the future is bolstered by this very feature. When it works, we're amazed. When it fails, we feel like our magical gadgets have let us down.

And right now, each contender has its own box we have to use to ask different questions of different data sets. We have to remember the strengths and weaknesses of each box. If our question fails in one box, we have to go to another box and start over again. Facebook Graph Search is just another box.

The next interesting kind of search is a single, personal, natural-language interface to all of the data sources of our choosing. Wake me when we get that.

Facebook Is Too Creepy

Facebook's Graph Search will tell you things about your friends and "friends" and "likes" and your "friends' likes" on Facebook. It's Facebook's first bit of AI stalking enhancement. It lets you ask natural-language queries about your social sphere, like "single people near me who work at Facebook," and it displays all the answers it can find. This makes privacy more important than ever. If you don't take care of your privacy settings on your posts and profile, Facebook's AI search is going to dig that stuff up.

So everyone who's smart will limit the amount of information that can be found about them on Facebook, since now it's so easy to find. People will realize that they should share only things they want people to find, and that's a good thing. But it also means searching on Facebook will show you only a narrow band of things.

If the answer is not on Facebook, Graph Search searches the Web with Bing. Oh, great. What if your search and browsing history, your email, your saved places, and (for nostalgia's sake) your RSS feeds are all on Google? Well, you'll have to go to another site or app and ask a different AI for that.

Google Is Too Geeky

Google's mission has always been to "organize the world's information." Lately, the end goal of that mission has become clear. Google gathers information about absolutely everything, and relates that information to us personally, because it wants to build the Star Trek computer that can answer all our questions. It even has Ray Kurzweil, one of the most starry-eyed proponents of powerful AI, working on the problem.

The issue is that Google doesn't know us very well. It knows a great deal about our searches, our email, oftentimes our location and all of that, but it doesn't have a clear enough picture of our relationships to draw many conclusions about them. It's trying to get us to point them out with Google+, but Facebook is still the place where the lion's share of online friendship happens. It's where we indicate who and what we really care about.

Because Facebook and Google are in competition for our attention, they don't work together. Both companies offer cheeky bromides about being willing to work together, but that just means they each want the other to compromise its business and hand over the valuable data. That's not going to happen under today's economics. So for different kinds of questions, we're stuck with different search boxes.

Apple Is Too Paranoid

The biggest question mark in consumer AI is Apple's Siri. Apple seems to realize, at least partially, that the AI has to have many, many data sources in order to have good answers. The problem is that it won't partner with Google, which is the best data source in most businesses, because they're competitors at the OS level.

There are finally great iOS apps for the core Google features, but they don't talk to Siri. If you ask Siri for directions, she uses Apple Maps, which are not as good. If you ask her for a list of restaurants, she uses Yelp, which might be fine, but not if you're a Google Maps or Foursquare user (unless Apple buys Foursquare).

The problem with Siri — and iOS in general, really — is that you can't switch the data sources. You can't choose to use Google Maps with Apple's AI, and if you choose to use Google's AI on Apple's device, it's a hack. It's not integrated with the system.

Now, Facebook is integrated into Apple's operating systems, so it would be interesting to see Siri use Facebook's Graph Search. Now we're getting somewhere. But Google is still the best AI for a great many kinds of questions, so we'll still need two boxes.

Search That Works For Us

We won't really be in the future until it works like this: We've got our own AI assistants who know us intimately but protect our information. We can ask them questions, and they will use every data source to find the right answer for us, not merely the best one available on a proprietary service.

Until then, all these companies will keep building their own boxes, and we'll have to run around between them pretending it's convenient.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. Facebook photo by Taylor Hatmaker.

The Wikimedia Foundation launched Wikivoyage Tuesday, adding a travel site to its stable of free resources edited by anyone and everyone. Travel, and all the local advertising money that comes with it, is a hotly contested market on the Web, so having Wikivoyage as a non-commercial alternative feels like a breath of fresh air.

Why isn't it called Wikitravel? Well, because that already exists. It's independent, and it has been around since 2003, and it will stick around, presumably. But Wikivoyage is now backed by the Wikimedia Foundation, home of Wikipedia. That means there will be marketing muscle behind it.

Anyone can create or edit a Wikivoyage post, and the collaborative editing works basically the same way it does on Wikipedia. People who care a lot will do the work, and everyone gets the benefits. Wikivoyage has a long and exhaustive list of policies about what does and does not fly. Examples: "The traveler comes first," "Do not wage edit war," "Generally, if an attraction or business is not worth going to, leave it out."

Wikivoyage content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means you can read, copy, share, print, save, download, modify and even sell the content if you want. The only condition is that you uphold the terms of the license by attributing the work to its creators and freely licensing any reuse or derivative works. There are no ads. The only agenda is to get you to contribute work or money if you believe in the concept.

The State Of Travel Sites

Contrast Wikivoyage with established travel sites like TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor is a content business. Between its exhaustive listings and ratings, its hooks into social networks through Facebook, and its active community forums and photo galleries, it's a gold mine for searching for all kinds of destinations. It's a very busy site that's all organized around its ad business.

Then there's Google, which has put the pieces in place to utterly dominate online travel research. Google already has your maps, it has your search history, it probably has your email and now it's tying that all together with your name on Google+. It knows what you're into. Then it bought ITA Software for flights, Zagat for restaurants and Frommer's for the rest of the stuff in travel guides. Google can serve you for travel just like it can for other kinds of searches.

There's a lot of money in travel sites and applications, and the for-profit ones will surely keep improving. But as they do, there's room for a strongly backed non-profit alternative like Wikivoyage, where the motivations are at least slightly more pure. That means what you see is less likely to be influenced by the service's commercial interests. It also means less clutter.

The Wiki's Voyage

Wikivoyage was actually founded independently in Germany in 2006. Like many wiki projects, it emerged as a self-motivated passion project before being picked up by the Wikimedia Foundation. The content and brand was donated to the Wikimedia Foundation in October 2012, and the site was moved over in November. It has been in beta since then, and it launches today with around 50,000 articles and 200 editors on board.

"There's a huge global demand for travel information, but very few sources are both comprehensive and non-commercial. That's about to change," said Sue Gardner, executive director of Wikimedia, in a press release.

"The purpose of the Wikivoyage Association is to promote education and knowledge of all countries and regions in the world, as well as understanding among nations,” said Stefan Fussan, Chairman of the board of the Wikivoyage Association, in the same press release. "We're very excited about the launch of Wikivoyage as a Wikimedia project, and about the future role of the Association in supporting the Wikivoyage community through its programs."

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

On Monday, the U.S. government dropped its charges against Aaron Swartz following his suicide. Swartz was charged in 2011 with illegally downloading 4.8 million academic papers from the digital database JSTOR over MIT's network using fake credentials.

For that, Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison and up to $1 million in fines.

Since he died before the case went to trial, the feds dismissed the case according to standard procedure.

Swartz has been fondly remembered as a brilliant programmer, activist, leader and folk hero, not to mention a beloved human being. But in considering the crimes with which he was charged, try to leave aside the many things that made Swartz exceptional. He was simply a citizen of a country proud of its freedom of information.

If Swartz did what he was accused of doing, he committed a crime. But that crime was essentially victimless. No profits or royalties or other material value is destroyed by the theft of academic articles. Yes, it would be against the law of the land. But what is the appropriate punishment for this crime?

A Victimless Crime

As Lawrence Lessig points out, JSTOR itself decided it was appropriate not to pursue any charges. It asked the feds to drop the case. Then it gradually opened its stance on freedom of information, opening its public-domain articles to anyone. It also created a test program giving access to 4.5 million articles — a trove nearly as large as the one Swartz was charged with stealing — available to anyone who signs up for a free account.

While it's not fair to speculate about Swartz's motivations to commit the alleged crime, he was certainly known as a champion of free and open access to information of this sort. While JSTOR is a closed database, a privilege of the academy, it has come around to some of these ideas in recent years.

And yet MIT, the institution through which the files were downloaded, took a harder line against it, and U.S. attorney Carmen M. Ortiz continued her prosecution of Swartz, aiming to lock him away for most of his life and ruin him financially. For someone devoted to rearranging the world and its social order through the sharing of information, this dogged persecution must have been impossible to understand.

Overreaching Prosecution

Alex Stamos, CTO of Artemis Internet and an expert witness for the defense in United States v. Aaron Swartz wrote just after Swartz's death that "I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail."

Swartz's family and partner wrote a statement after his suicide that shows the impact the vicious prosecution had on him and those around him:

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

In the wake of the tragedy, thousands of Americans have signed a petition calling for U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz to be removed from office.

On Sunday, MIT announced it would launch an internal investigation into the matter. And on Monday, in one emotionless sentence, Ortiz "respectfully submitted" her dismissal of the case. With the painful example of Aaron Swartz in mind, one hopes our society will learn more respect for the difference between a crime of information theft and a crime with victims.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that the articles allegedly downloaded by Swartz ended up on The Pirate Bay file-sharing site. The JSTOR articles posted on The Pirate Bay were shared in protest of the charges against Swartz, but they were not from the same collection.