Apple News: Apple patents MacBook with illuminated touch controls in chassis, bezel & frame
A new patent filing reveals Apple’s experimentation with a touch-sensitive MacBook chassis, which would offer the ability to sense a user’s touch across a notebook’s entire bezel, potentially allowing the company to eliminate physical buttons and allow for a more intuitive computing experience. Apple’s continued interest in taking touch input and extending it beyond the trackpad was disclosed in a newly awarded patent discovered on Tuesday by AppleInsider. Entitled “Housing as an I/O device,” U.S. Patent No. 8,654,524 describes a notebook housing intended not only to hold and protect the parts inside, but also serve as an input/output device, allowing users to control the Mac through touching the chassis.
Read full story => AppleInsider

Technology News: DocuSign partners with Microsoft to integrate e-signature technology into Office apps
DocuSign, the Seattle-based e-signature company currently ranked No. 2 on our GeekWire 200 startup index, today announced a new partnership with Microsoft that will embed DocuSign’s technology directly within Office apps. DocuSign’s apps, which will be available in the Office Store starting in early March, will enable Office 365 subscribers to submit and sign documents without leaving Microsoft Outlook, Word, SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server 2013. “There isn’t a person or organization that can’t benefit from keeping their business 100 percent digital with DocuSign,” wrote DocuSign Chief Marketing Officer Dustin Grosse. “And the same is true with Microsoft Office and Office 365.”
Read full story => GeekWire

Programming News: Alternative to Rails
I wanted to blog about Rails::Engine ever since I tried it out. I understood that this feature was something built to help developer modularize their code, but ended up making things worse for me. Rails already has a lot of feature to break your code into module that I don’t see why/how engines could be helpful. Taskrabbit’s post about engine gave me the start I neede to actually write my ideas about engines, so here you go! When I started Ecrire, I built the administration panel inside its own engine (like Taskrabbit). Unfortunately, I ended merging the engine back into the main project. Engines only made sense to me if you handle them as separate applications, with it’s own repository. On the other hand, many things engines do can be done without them. By understanding how routing, namespacing and sprocket work, you can build modularize applications with very little work.
Read full story => Pothibo

Photography News: Being a Well-Behaved Photographer: Landscape Photography Field Etiquette
As Ron and I started writing our first e-book on photographing Iceland, we decided to include a section on photography etiquette since we had encountered a string of distressing behavior from other photographers during some recent trips. These incidents started becoming so common that Ron gave them the nickname of Crimes Against Photography, some of which are included below. While the vast majority of my experiences with other landscape photographers have been positive, these other less-than-positive incidents have become frequent enough to suggest that the landscape photography community could benefit from practicing some common etiquette principles. Considering that landscape photographers should be ambassadors for and respectful of the wild and natural places we visit and photograph, it is surprising to find that an important topic like this receives almost no attention from the typical sources of photography information. This also helps explain why the behavior we have observed occurs so frequently. With some landscape photography locations only becoming more crowded and more people taking up this pursuit, this topic is only becoming more important.
Read full story => SarahMarinoPhoto