It feels like it wasn’t too long ago that BlackBerry was a major player in the smartphone market and a status icon.

BlackBerry CEO steps down as company secures $1 billion funding from investors

Today was always going to be a momentous day for BlackBerry, with a looming deadline for its proposed takeover deal with Fairfax Financial Holdings. As it turns out, the full takeover deal isn’t taking place, but the company is going to receive an investment of $1 billion from Fairfax and a group of other institutional investors as it seeks to steer a new course. That will involve some major reshuffling at board level, starting with CEO Thorsten Heins, who is stepping down to be replaced by interim CEO John S. Chen.

There are universal apps, and there are also separate apps for the iPhone and iOS. While different businesses will take different approaches, it’s always important to plan for the future when pricing your app. Questions such as “why should screen size determine an app’s value” should be asked.

The clearest example of this concept is OmniFocus, a productivity app that costs $20 on the iPhone,$40 on the iPad, and $80 on the Mac. This pricing policy makes sense at first glance. The increased display sizes of the iPad and the Mac could allow for more features than the comparatively cramped display on the iPhone — since it makes little sense to charge the same amount for a less capable product, the current system appears to be the best choice.

But the iPhone app isn’t less capable than its larger counterparts. It better supports location-based features, was the first to be updated for iOS 7, and is probably used more often than the other apps. (It’s easier to use a task list on a device in your pocket than it is to use one on the computer sitting on your desk at home.) And the iPad app is often considered the best version of the app because of its ease of use and, previously, access to exclusive features. Saying that these apps should have different prices has little to do with the apps’ functionality and everything to do with App Store economics.

Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps

Another intriguing characteristic: in addition to jumping “airgaps” designed to isolate infected or sensitive machines from all other networked computers, the malware seems to have self-healing capabilities.

“We had an air-gapped computer that just had its [firmware] BIOS reflashed, a fresh disk drive installed, and zero data on it, installed from a Windows system CD,” Ruiu said. “At one point, we were editing some of the components and our registry editor got disabled. It was like: wait a minute, how can that happen? How can the machine react and attack the software that we’re using to attack it? This is an air-gapped machine and all of a sudden the search function in the registry editor stopped working when we were using it to search for their keys.”

Update 6 Nov 2013: Some researchers are having trouble reproducing the symptoms described in the badBIOS report. Of course, since we’re still in the early stages, it’s hard to confirm or disregard this just yet.

How Steve Jobs Made the iPad Succeed When All Other Tablets Failed

iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. … The bottom line is, many apps which were cute toys on iPhone can become full-featured power tools on the iPad, making you forget about their desktop/laptop predecessors. We just have to invent them.”

If you think Apple splurges on marketing, check out this chart.

And before you suggest that Samsung spreads its budget over a wide range of electronics, look at this chart.

Dave Brasgalla converts Ron Cobb’s “Semiotic Standard” iconography into iOS 7 icons.

The iOS 7 versions of the symbols keep both their strength and their characteristic flavour. It makes me smile to think that 35-year-old designs can suddenly feel current and even trendy again. It’s tempting to say that Cobb was ahead of his time with his Semiotic Standard, but I think the larger point here is simply that good design is timeless.

I concur.