Google did it first. Apple does it better. These are the important details that you'd never see in a tech spec sheet. These are subtle differences that separate an Android feature from an Apple solution.

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Bloomberg:

Under deals reached with banks individually, Cupertino, California-based Apple will collect a fee for each transaction, said one of the people, who requested anonymity because terms aren’t public. While that gives the tech company a share of the more than $40 billion that banks generate annually from so-called swipe fees, lenders expect to benefit as consumers spend more of their money via mobile phones and other digital devices, the person said.

I've been switching around my homescreen a lot since I got the iPhone 5s. Here are some quick notes on my latest iteration:

• Only one page for my homescreen.

• Dark wallpaper for slightly better battery life.

• I love keeping the bottom row of folders and the homescreen empty. It feels more spacious and gives me a natural place to swipe when I want to go to the next page.

• I spent a lot of time organizing my less-than-important apps into four folders.

• "Camera" folder is mostly for photo editing.

• For the "Personal" folder, the general idea is, "If I had a personal assistant to help me organize my life, what apps would I have to give her access to?" So these apps would include: messaging, Dropbox, to-do lists, calendars, and online banking.

• "Media" folder is for anything non-essential that I'll read, play, or watch.

• "Utilities" is for everything else, including navigation apps.

• My most frequently-used messaging apps get a spot on the homescreen so their badge notifications keep me up-to-date.

• The four apps in the dock are by far my most frequently used apps.

• Photos app gets a spot on the dock because, with iOS 8 especially, I do all of my photo touch-ups there.

• Phone app is under the Personal folder. I'm not much of a phone person. 85% of my calls are to my parents and my brother, whom I just call via Siri.

• Tweetbot is my primary method of keeping up with breaking news, tech bloggers, friends, and NBA news. (I have separate Twitter accounts for each and just swipe-left on Tweetbot’s navbar to switch accounts.)

• Reeder is mostly for following blogs and articles that aren't news-breaking, e.g. Lifehacker.

• Waze is placed near the top-right for easy thumb access while I’m driving.

Tweet me for any questions! @meltajon

NY Times:

Steven P. Jobs established Apple University as a way to inculcate employees into Apple’s business culture and educate them about its history, particularly as the company grew and the tech business changed. Courses are not required, only recommended, but getting new employees to enroll is rarely a problem. [...]

Unlike many corporations, Apple runs its training in-house, year round. The full-time faculty — including instructors, writers and editors — create and teach the courses. Some faculty members come from universities like Yale; Harvard; the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford; and M.I.T., and some continue to hold positions at their schools while working for Apple.

The program was devised by Joel Podolny, then the dean of Yale School of Management. Mr. Jobs selected him when the program was founded, in 2008, and he remains head of the effort. He is also a vice president of human resources at Apple.

This is why Apple will continue to live on long after Steve Jobs.

Sure, the company lost their master decision maker that took the company from rags to riches. But Jobs' greatest invention wasn't any one single Apple product; it was Apple itself. The company's mission, values, and corporate culture were all refined over 30 years by Jobs to grow Apple into what it is today.

While Steve is no longer around to give orders, he did something even better — he left the company with a winning formula so his generals could come up with their own answers. (Which is exactly what we're seeing now, with Tim Cook making un-Steve-Jobs-like decisions but still staying true to The Apple Way.)

Not only did he leave a winning formula; he established a year-round university staffed with professors from the prestigious colleges around to ensure his legacy will be firmly embedded into the hearts and minds each and every employee.

As the saying goes: "The goal isn't to live forever. The goal is to create something that will."

Arstechnica has a great (somewhat technical) rundown of how iOS 8's implementation is much smarter and more secure than Android's.

bigzaphod:

Apple now has everything they need to disrupt the game console industry in a way that none of them see coming. I predict that we’ll see a new AppleTV update (and hardware) this fall along with a new app extension type for AirPlay. AirPlay will become about more than just streaming video to your AppleTV - instead that’ll simply be one of the things you can do with it. Apps (mostly games, I suspect) will be able to bundle an AirPlay extension inside - just like how apps can now bundle photo editing or sharing extensions as of iOS 8. The key difference is where the AirPlay extension app actually executes - instead of running on your device itself from within another host app, the AirPlay extension app will be automatically uploaded to whatever AppleTV you are currently AirPlaying with and will run directly on the AppleTV natively instead. This means no video streaming lag and minimal controller lag. Your iPhone would then turn into a generic game controller with onscreen controls or, if you have a physical shell controller attached to your iPhone, it activates that instead. The game controller inputs are then relayed to the AppleTV and thus to the AirPlay extension app using the new game controller forwarding feature.

Wow. Super fascinating theory.

In my experience, mirroring a game from my iPhone to an Apple TV has been lame because there's always a significant delay between what I do and what I see on the TV. If Apple can solve that problem, this could be a total game-changer for casual gamers. (For hardcore gamers, probably not so much. They'll always stick to their powerful gaming PCs and consoles.)

Scott Hurff:

Apple's iMessage upgrades show how the company is embracing the ways people have evolved their use of iMessage, and shows a bold willingness to adapt the “most frequently used app on iOS” to the new daily habits of its customers.

This update shows that Apple is keenly aware of the changing habits of their customer base, and I think this is going to be the most important change in iOS since Apple added “swipe up” access to the Camera in iOS 6.

These design details are so, so good.

On top of this, there are two more great additions that I love:

• temporary location sharing, which makes coordinating nights out with friends a lot easier.
• the ability to send/receive text messages on my Mac.

For the first time ever, I'm considering giving up on Google Voice/Hangouts and committing to the new iMessage.

Depending on how techie you are, Apple's WWDC announcements last week left you with one of these impressions:

• “No new iPhone?! LAME.”
• “PATHETIC. Android has had all of that for years!”
• "HOLY. SHIT. MINDBLOWN."

If you're in the first group, you're most likely a consumer and not a developer. We have to remember, WWDC — short for World Wide Developer Conference — is a developer conference. For developers. Not consumers.

If you're in the second group, I got news for you: everyone copies. That's how technology moves forward. The best ideas are copied, remixed, refined, and evolve. As long as consumers win, why do we still need to argue about this?

If you're in the last group, you are either an iOS developer or an Apple enthusiast, and have a solid understanding/appreciation of how Apple does things.

As a developer and user experience designer, my job entails identifying specific user problems, researching/testing the right solutions, and delivering them to the right people at the right time. My passion lies in finding what makes new technology meaningful to real people, not just early adopting techies like me.

With that said, I'll try to break down all the developer stuff into real world examples for you.

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Former Apple Genius, Scotty Loveless, shares his insights on iOS battery drain from his two years of working as an Apple Genius.

Two things stuck out to me:

I have confirmed this behavior on multiple iPhones with the same result: percentage points actually increase after disabling these background functions of Facebook.

After iOS 7's changes to multitasking, this sheds some light for me:

By closing the app, you take the app out of the phone's RAM . While you think this may be what you want to do, it's not. When you open that same app again the next time you need it, your device has to load it back into memory all over again. All of that loading and unloading puts more stress on your device than just leaving it alone. Plus, iOS closes apps automatically as it needs more memory, so you're doing something your device is already doing for you. You are meant to be the user of your device, not the janitor.

The truth is, those apps in your multitasking menu are not running in the background at all: iOS freezes them where you last left the app so that it's ready to go if you go back. Unless you have enabled Background App Refresh, your apps are not allowed to run in the background unless they are playing music, using location services, recording audio, or the sneakiest of them all: checking for incoming VOIP calls , like Skype. All of these exceptions, besides the latter, will put an icon next to your battery icon to alert you it is running in the background.

Buzz around the fabled "iWatch" has really hit fever-pitch levels since 9to5Mac's big scoop. Here's an overview of everything that we know, what we should expect, and what I think could happen.

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