Taylor Swift revolts, Apple changes tune on royalties - Apple doesn't want any bad blood between it and Taylor Swift. Her complaints prompt the company to pay artists royalties during Apple Music's free trial period. Also: Amazon changes its ratings system.
(Via CNET News.com.)
Fitbit makes stock market debut, share price jumps by more than 50% - Wearable fitness tracker firm Fitbit, which competes with the Apple Watch with its own hardware, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday, and investors promptly drove the company's share price up by more than 50 percent in the opening hours.
(Via AppleInsider.)
EFF again awards Apple perfect score on digital privacy - 
For the second year running, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has given Apple and a handful of other tech firms a perfect "five out of five" star rating for efforts related to securing consumer data against both theft and government intrusion. The high score reflects a top initiative of Apple CEO Tim Cook, and the company generally, in believing that the business model that requires collecting and monetizing customer data is fundamentally flawed ...
First-gen iPad mini vanishes from Apple's store, leaving only Retina models - Apple on Friday unceremoniously removed the first-generation iPad mini from its website, including product pages and the online store, leaving only the iPad mini 2 and 3, both of which feature high-resolution Retina displays.
(Via AppleInsider.)
DMV does a reverse, releases reports of accidents involving self-driving cars - The California Department of Motor Vehicles at first denied the Associated Press' request for the information, but has now changed course.
(Via CNET News.com.)
How an astronaut shook hands with someone on Earth from space - NASA astronaut Terry Virts is part of the current ISS crew, while ESA telerobotics specialist André Schiele is in the Netherlands. Thanks to two special joysticks with force feedback in both locations, though, they were able to "shake hands" during a ...
How to Create eBooks on a Mac using Pages -
Pages is a fantastic program used to create visually appealing documents, but you might not realize how versatile it is. It can also be used to create digital books for the iBooks app, and sold on the iBooks Store.
This conversion from Pages to iBooks is done via the ePub file format, which is used for digital books on Apple’s iBooks app on both OS X and iOS. With Pages for OS X you can export a text document straight into ePub, and import it directly into iBooks for OS X.
Pages has featured some form of ePub export since 2010, but until recently it was cumbersome. Each new edition has improved the exporting process and with Pages 5.2 it’s now as easy to create a digital book as it is to print a document. In this way, you convert something you’ve written to an ebook format, or grab a royalty-free book from the internet in a text format and turn it into a more rich, pleasant to read format.
For those looking to self-publish, in Pages you can add Retina display-quality images, chapters, headings, custom artwork, even video clips. Pages turns it into an ePub you can share, or even sell on Apple’s iBooks Store. Pages doesn’t offer the extra interactions of iBooks Author, but is ideal for many books.
(Via Mac|Life all.)
As journalists, we love Audio Hijack for long being one of the best and safest ways to record interviews conducted over Skype, but it’s useful to anyone — maybe you need to record a group meeting happening over an obscure web service, or need to get a sound from a file. If it goes through your Mac, this can record it.
(Via Mac|Life all.)
Review: Mrice E300 Earphones -A company from China you've never heard of has made a pair of $15 earbuds that outperform some big-name models costing ten times as much.
The post Review: Mrice E300 Earphones appeared first on WIRED.
(Via Wired Top Stories.)
