Linked List: April 29, 2016

Friday, 29 April 2016

Procreate 

My thanks to Procreate for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Procreate is an advanced, beautifully-designed painting app for iPad. It works with any iPad, of course, but with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil it is simply amazing. If you’ve got an iPad Pro and Pencil, you owe it to yourself to get Procreate. This is one of those apps that is simply pushing the limits of “pro” app design.

And: it’s yours for a one-time $6 purchase. No subscription model or anything like that. You pay $6, you get an amazing, professional painting app.

Instagram Is Testing a New Black-and-White Design 

Looks like a great redesign. I’ve been using Instagram since the day it shipped, and I’m still thrown off by the way the camera tab always looks selected because it has a blue background.

Rovi Buys TiVo for $1.1 Billion 

Tony Maglio, reporting for The Wrap:

Entertainment technology company Rovi has purchased original DVR service TiVo for $1.1 billion, or $10.70 per share. Talks of such an acquisition heated up last month, and now it’s official — pending customary regulatory approval, of course.

That $10.70 per-share price represents a premium of approximately 40 percent over TiVo’s closing stock price of $7.66 on March 23 — the last trading day prior to media speculation about a possible transaction. It breaks down into $2.75 in cash and $7.95 in the new company’s common stock. Rovi stockholders will have an easy 1-for-1 swap for their own new stock.

The merged firms will be led by Rovi CEO Tom Carson, though it will adopt the TiVo brand as the new company name.

We’ve had a TiVo for the last 16 years. I really hope this isn’t the end of the line for TiVo as we know it. Crazy cool feature they added recently: they index the commercial breaks in many popular shows, and for those shows, you can precisely skip the entire commercial break with one button. Press the button, fun noise plays, and boom, your show is back on.

Carl Icahn Sells His Shares in Apple 

CNBC:

Icahn said China’s attitude toward Apple largely drove him to exit his position.

“You worry a little bit — and maybe more than a little — about China’s attitude,” Icahn said, later adding that China’s government could “come in and make it very difficult for Apple to sell there … you can do pretty much what you want there.” He added, though, that if China “was basically steadied,” he would buy back into Apple. […]

Last May, Icahn said he had a $240 per share price target on Apple when it traded around $130 per share. As recently as September, Icahn told CNBC he considered buying more of the company’s stock, saying it looked cheap.

Engadget: ‘Apple iPhone Sales and Revenue Finally Decline’ 

Finally, a headline where finally is actually apt.