The hot topics of the week — concerns about Apple’s software quality and the rumors surrounding an Apple smartwatch — occupy this discussion between Adam Engst and host Gene Steinberg.

The premise of our recent “Apple Is Doomed, According to News at 11” article was that criticisms of Apple’s financials are unwarranted, but that the company faces legitimate problems, largely with software quality. In this article at Macworld, David Sparks of MacSparky makes the same point, saying that we should leave the business side to Apple but keep calling on the company to improve its products and services.

The discontent is spreading. In his most recent post, Lloyd Chambers of the Mac Performance Guide site outlines his concerns with Mac OS X and Apple’s policies of late. He’s no dilettante, having been the developer behind the innovative DiskDoubler and AutoDoubler compression products from the 1990s, now focussing on topics of interest to advanced and professional photographers.

We’re having huge discussions internally about just how secure we should make our digital lives, and this recent blog post by security expert Jeremiah Grossman brings a wonderful level of reality to the table. Jeremiah takes extreme security precautions, thanks to his position in the security industry, and this post is the tale of how he forgot a key password and the astonishing lengths he went to in order to get it back.

Over at Macworld, Lex Friedman covers the strange saga of the Starfish smartwatch, which purports to mirror your iOS device's screen on your wrist. At Macworld/iWorld, Starfish first didn't show up at all, then appeared without the watch, then showed a mostly nonfunctional prototype briefly on the last day, with the company's non-technical CEO flitting in and out.

The Next Web’s Emil Protalinski explains the amusingly awful bug in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion that causes most Mac apps to crash when you type the string file:/// (you have to capitalize one of the letters in the word “file,” which we didn’t to avoid inadvertent crashes). The bug turns out to be in Apple’s Data Detectors code, and affects only apps that use NSTextFields. So the Finder, Safari, Messages, and TextEdit all crash, as does the Mac’s error reporter, but BBEdit and Firefox do not.

Twitter reset the passwords for 250,000 users last week after it became aware of numerous unauthorized access attempts. According to Twitter’s Director of Information Security Bob Lord “…attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords” for a quarter of a million accounts. Although it would be inconvenient to have someone else posting to your account, the greater danger is to people who reuse passwords among other services. As always, we recommend creating strong passwords, preferably using tools such as 1Password or LastPass.

Adam and Tonya Engst appear as guests on TidBITS editor Glenn Fleishman's new podcast, The New Disruptors, which covers ways that creative people reach audiences. While the show is about "new" technological tools, Glenn is also interviewing people who have reinvented their work and their approach over a career.

Ewan Birney and Nick Goldman, two scientists from the European Bioinformatics Institute, have worked out a system to encode text, audio, and other data in DNA. Teaming up with Aligent Technologies, the two encoded all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, an audio clip of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking, and a photograph into a synthesized DNA sample. Though Aligent did the DNA synthesizing work for free, the cost of the DNA synthesis is estimated to have been roughly $12,400 per megabyte. Luckily, prices for DNA synthesis are dropping, and it is estimated that 50 billion megabytes of text, roughly equivalent to everything ever written by humans, could be encoded into a sample that would weigh less than “a granola bar.” This takes the idea of cloning your data to an entirely new level.

3D designer and illustrator Peter Zigich has posted a number of beautifully rendered mockups of what a future Mac Pro could look like, were it to use significantly more efficient CPUs. It is, of course, highly likely that Peter’s designs will bear no resemblance to what Apple is reportedly planning for this year’s Mac Pro refresh, but it’s still fun to ponder whether or not his designs could work.

In this lengthy but engaging discussion with Generational’s host Gabe Weatherhead, Adam Engst shares numerous thoughts about writing, editing, and publishing, with forays into specifics about customer service, the use of DRM as a platform lock-in, issues with iBooks Author, why small publishers must build their own audiences, the role of different people in the publishing process, how we choose book topics, why outlines are important, and much more.

At iMore, Rene Ritchie looks at the fusillades being thrown at Apple so far in 2013 — endless nonsensical punditry, rumors of iPhone production cutbacks, possible stock price manipulation — and how everyone is attacking the supposedly invincible market leader. He argues that Apple is fighting against psychology as much as competing products, and points out the company’s edge. Ritchie writes: “But here’s the thing — Apple has been here before. They’ve been to the very bottom, and they came back. Apple knows they’re beatable — that everyone is beatable — and they know how to fight their way back. It’s part of them now.”

On 6 October 1997, Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell Inc., when asked how he would fix the then-struggling Apple Computer, told an audience at the Gartner Symposium that, were he in charge at Apple, he would “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Today, Bloomberg reports that Dell is said to be in buyout talks with private equity firms. Meanwhile, the once-beleaguered Apple has something in the neighborhood of $123 billion in cash and securities on hand, according to its last financial statement.

For those thinking about attending CES — the Consumer Electronics Show — but worried it won’t have much of interest to Apple users, CES has asked MacTech to host a full day of Apple-focused sessions for the technology-minded about dealing with the cloud, home automation, building iOS apps, managing mobile devices, protecting data, and more. Registration costs $350 until 2 January 2013, and is $500 on site, but TidBITS readers can take 25 percent off with coupon code MT25P. Assuming that this new MacTech Insight event is like the MacTech Conference and MacTech Boot Camp events, the content will be extremely worthwhile, though aimed instead at the non-technical professional.

In this episode of Tech Night Owl Live with Gene Steinberg, Adam and Gene talk about the Apple TV set rumors, along with the fact that iTunes Match accounts can download for 90 days after expiration, and the quality of the data underlying Apple’s Maps app in iOS 6.

An “art project to explore distances and heroism in user interface design” from masswerk.at offers a Google search interface as it might have appeared in the days of punch cards and line printers. Between the sound effects and the artfully rendered skeuomorphic interface, you’ll be sweeping chad off the floor.

More than a year after becoming Apple CEO, Tim Cook has granted an extended interview with Bloomberg Business that reveals more personal detail. Although it’s clear that Cook isn’t baring his soul — he’s very savvy about reinforcing Apple’s marketing messages and knows how to evade tricky questions — we do get a better sense of how this normally private man is dealing with the massive attention being Apple’s CEO brings.

Peter Kafka at All Things D (itself owned by News Corp.) hits the nail on the head in his coverage of the shuttering of The Daily, the much-ballyhooed iPad-only news app that had the blessing of Apple. “While the app boasted lots of digital bells and whistles, in the end it was very much a general interest newspaper that seemed to be geared toward people who didn’t really like newspapers.” That’s in line with the title of our article covering The Daily’s launch: “Why The Daily Is So Yesterday.”

Over at The Next Web, Matthew Panzarino reviews Fantastical, a new calendar app for the iPhone that rethinks the way we interact with calendars on a small screen. It’s an in-depth piece, and if you’ve been frustrated by Apple’s Calendar app, it’s worth reading to see if Fantastical is the replacement you’ve been waiting for.

Yet another reason why DRM is wrong. When a Barnes & Noble customer tried to download a previously paid-for book, an error message appeared, stating that the download had failed because the credit card on file had expired. As the cool kids say, “Epic fail.” The expiration status of a credit card for a previously purchased book should be entirely irrelevant for a later download, and to extend the scenario, there should be no requirement that the account be linked to a credit card at all after the purchase has been completed.