Amazon Fire TV Cube
Mitchel Broussard: Amazon today unveiled its latest “Fire” branded product, called the “Fire TV Cube.” The company describes the device as a hands-free box that streams 4K Ultra HD video using Alexa...
View ArticleApple’s Design Language Has Killed Fun in Consumer Electronics
Mike Murphy: For a while, the company stuck to this design trend, selling increasingly ambitious and playful products, including the original iPod, the iBook G4, the Power Mac G4 Cube, the iPod Nano,...
View ArticleTraining a Text Classifier with Create ML
Mattt Thompson: Consider this: in under an hour, we went from nothing to a working solution without any significant programming. That’s pretty incredible. Create ML is a powerful way to prototype new...
View ArticleShortcuts: A New Vision for Siri and iOS Automation
Federico Viticci: On the surface, Shortcuts the app looks like the full-blown Workflow replacement heavy users of the app have been wishfully imagining for the past year. But there is more going on...
View ArticleIntel FPU May Spill Crypto Secrets to Apps
Chris Williams: The security shortcoming involves what’s known as lazy FPU state restore. Operating system kernels would only save and restore the floating-point unit (FPU) registers, and other context...
View ArticleIAPKit
Black Pixel (tweet): Last week at WWDC 2018 Apple announced they are officially supporting free trials for apps via a Non-Consumable IAP item. Inspired by The Omni Group, this is exactly the approach...
View ArticleA New Home for ToothFairy
ToothFairy has been one of my favorite little Mac utilities since I first heard about it last year. If you’ve used AirPods with a Mac, you know that they don’t auto-switch the way you might expect....
View ArticleWe Are All Trapped in the “Feed”
Om Malik: No matter where I go on the Internet, I feel like I am trapped in the “feed,” held down by algorithms that are like axes trying to make bespoke shirts out of silk. And no one illustrates it...
View ArticleYou Are Probably Using the Wrong HDMI Cord
Alex Cranz (via John Gordon): The first thing to understand is that the HDMI cable is not like the component, composite, or S-video cables you might have plugged into your TV in years past. All that...
View ArticleHow to Improve Your Productivity as a Working Programmer
Michael Malis (via Dan Luu): I now schedule meetings specifically at the times of the day when I’m least productive. It doesn’t take a ton of energy to sit through a meeting, and scheduling my day this...
View ArticleThe Unified Log in macOS Mojave: Signposts and Instruments
Howard Oakley: Mojave is set to offer no respite or solution for the system administrator or advanced user. Console and the log command may have gained a few tweaks, but there are no signs of their...
View ArticleParsing AppleScript
Chris Nebel: AppleScript’s parser works mostly like any other parser: there’s a tokenizer that breaks the input into meaningful pieces, in particular, identifiers. The key difference is that there’s an...
View ArticleOn the Sad State of Macintosh Hardware
Quentin Carnicelli (tweet, Hacker News, John Siracusa, MacRumors): The inevitable march of technology means Mojave won’t install on all of our older hardware. There’s no shock there, but the situation...
View ArticleWho Gets to Be on the Steam Store?
Valve: The challenge is that this problem is not simply about whether or not the Steam Store should contain games with adult or violent content. Instead, it’s about whether the Store contains games...
View ArticleThe iPhone X Suica Problem
Joel Breckinridge Bassett: The iPhone X Suica problem is an issue that causes transit gate errors when using Suica Express Transit on iPhone X. Errors occur with any transit gate or any reader device....
View ArticleHow Apple Can Fix 3D Touch
Eliz Kılıç: Not all of these buttons can be 3D Touched. How are you supposed to know which is which? The only possible thing you can do is try 3D Touch and remember it. And to make things worse, 3D...
View ArticleQuick Look Cache Reveals Sensitive Data From Encrypted Drives
Wojciech Regula: I found out that Quicklook registers com.apple.quicklook.ThumbnailsAgent XPC service that is responsible for creating thumbnails database and storing it in...
View ArticleFaster Swiping Between Pages
Keir Thomas: One of the irritations is that, if you’re using a trackpad, it reloads the page each time you two-finger swipe to go back. This can be slow but also infuriating if you’re scrolling through...
View ArticleWebView and UIWebView Deprecated in Favor of WKWebView
Brady Eidson: I hope most of you have heard the news by now, but UIWebView has been formally deprecrated. That means it is going away altogether in a future release. Please start adopting WKWebView...
View ArticleMalware via USB Charging
Reuters (in 2016, via Alasdair Allan): A nuclear power plant in Germany has been found to be infected with computer viruses, but they appear not to have posed a threat to the facility’s operations...
View ArticleAndy Hertzfeld Interview
Devon Zuegel (tweet): Welcome to the first episode of Tools & Craft! My name is Devon, and I spoke with Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the team that built the original Macintosh. I’ve always been...
View ArticleEurope’s New Copyright Rules
Karl Bode: The EU proposal in question is an attempt to shore up existing problems with EU copyright law. But the poorly crafted nature of the effort could have a profoundly negative impact on...
View ArticleAirbnb Switching Away From React Native
Gabriel Peal (Hacker News): The primary benefit of React Native is the fact that code you write runs natively on Android and iOS. Most features that used React Native were able to achieve 95–100%...
View ArticleAirPower Status and Removing the Lightning Port
Mark Gurman (tweet): Apple also wants users to be able to place any of their devices anywhere on the charging mat to begin a charge. That ambitious goal requires the company to pack the AirPower with...
View ArticleApple Launches Keyboard Repair Program for MacBook and MacBook Pro
Juli Clover (tweet, Hacker News): Apple today launched a keyboard repair program for MacBook and MacBook Pro models equipped with butterfly keys to address complaints over letters or characters that...
View ArticlereMarkable Tablet
Omar Shahine: I’ve been using a reMarkable Tablet for 3 months. The reMarkable is a kindle like device that simulates the experience of writing on paper.[…]Well the hardware is pretty great. The device...
View ArticleSelling PowerSchool
Bradley Chambers: Apple bought the US leading web-based student information system seven months before they announced the original iPod. They purchased PowerSchool before Flickr was created, before...
View ArticleSpeeding Up WWDC Videos
Ricky Mondello: Wanna watch a lot of WWDC videos in a short time? If you’re in a web browser, on a page like this one, you can run some JavaScript to speed up videos:...
View ArticleiOS Game Revenue
Jeremy Horwitz (tweet):There are over 800,000 games in the App Store, and in 2017, only the top 50 of them took 76 percent of all the revenue, leaving 24 percent of revenues to be shared by the...
View ArticleIntel and the Danger of Integration
Ben Thompson: As Bajarin notes, 7nm for TSMC (or Samsung or Global Foundries) isn’t necessarily better than Intel’s 10nm; chip-labeling isn’t what it used to be. The problem is that Intel’s 10nm...
View ArticleOpen Sourcing NonEmpty
Point-Free (via Ole Begemann): We believe that a compiler proven non-empty type is incredibly important for every developer to have at their disposal, and so that’s why today we are open sourcing our...
View ArticlePrivacy News
Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison: Facebook used its apps to gather information about users and their friends, including some who had not signed up to the social network, reading their text...
View ArticleFibonacci Hashing
Malte Skarupke (via Hacker News): Everyone uses the algorithm that’s unnecessarily slow and leads to more problems, and nobody is using the algorithm that’s faster while at the same time being more...
View ArticleiOS 12 Beta: Easier-to-Access Trackpad Mode
Federico Viticci: Previously available only on 3D Touch-enabled iPhones or with a two-finger swipe on the iPad’s keyboard, trackpad mode can be activated in a much easier way in iOS 12: just tap &...
View ArticleGit Tower 3 Switches to Subscription
Tobias Günther: Today, after years of work, we are finally launching a brand new version of Tower! It’s packed with awesome new features like Pull Requests, Interactive Rebase, and our unique “Quick...
View ArticlemacOS Mojave: Back to the Mac
Jason Snell: macOS Mojave feels like a macOS update that’s truly about the Mac, extending features that are at the core of the Mac’s identity. At the same time, macOS Mojave represents the end of a...
View ArticleSoftware Updates: the “Unknown Unknown” of the Replication Crisis
Anastasia Ershova and Gerald Schneider (via Simon Hix): By trying to replicate the results of a conditionally accepted article, we uncovered discrepancies between the reported results calculated by the...
View ArticleSR-7380, Ambiguous KeyPath
Matt Diephouse: Here’s the bug I fixed (with a lot of help): 7380.swift:1:16: error: type of expression is ambiguous without more context "str"[keyPath: \.count] ^~~~~~~ That seems obviously broken....
View ArticleNintendo’s Method for Detecting Online Switch Piracy
SciresM (via Hacker News): After doing some research earlier today into how the Switch gains authorization to play a given game online, I learned that Nintendo has implemented some very strong...
View ArticleHandles Are the Better Pointers
Andre Weissflog (via Joe Groff): The worst case being tens- to hundreds-of-thousands of small C++ objects, each in its own heap allocation, pointing to each other through smart pointers. While such...
View ArticleMarzipan As a Path to ARM-Based Macs
Gus Mueller: I really do hope we see things from iOS move to the Mac, touch and Pencil support in particular. And the idea that “folks don't want to use touch on the Mac” is pretty dumb when you...
View ArticleiTunes Remote Updated
Benjamin Mayo: Rising from the ashes, iTunes Remote has been updated with a new design and support for the latest device form factors. The icon is greatly improved. It went from a white roundrect with...
View ArticleMaking Your Shell Prompt Show Xcode and Git Status
Marc Palmer: Often I run two or more different Xcode builds on the same machine, either because a client project can’t yet build on the latest Xcode release, or because we’re in a new Xcode beta...
View ArticleRun, RunLoop, Run
Nicolas Bouilleaud (tweet): Put simply, a run loop is a messaging mechanism, used for asynchronous or interthread communication. It can be seen as a post box that waits for messages and delivers them...
View ArticleAT&T More Than Doubles Administrative Fee
Juli Clover: The fee hike was first noticed by BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk (via CNBC), who pointed out that AT&T has increased its monthly fees by approximately $1.23 in 2018 with two price...
View ArticleApple Event Sandboxing in macOS Mojave Lacks Essential APIs
Felix Schwarz (tweet): In the WWDC 2018 session “Your Apps and the Future of macOS Security”, Apple announced big changes to macOS security. One of them - and possibly the one with the biggest impact:...
View ArticleEverything You Knew About Chromebooks Is Wrong
Mike Elgan: Today, the best new Chromebooks can runs apps from three additional operating systems.Not only do Chromebooks run apps, but they run more apps without dual- or multi-booting than any other...
View ArticleExploring @dynamicMemberLookup
Olivier Halligon: This proposal had some controversy, and one thing I didn’t personally like on this new feature is that it meant that typed annotated with @dynamicMemberLookup would not, by design,...
View ArticleTwitter to Show Ad Payment Information
Selina Wang (via Hacker News): Twitter Inc. said it will show detailed information about advertisers on the social-media service, addressing concerns from lawmakers that the company let foreign...
View ArticleRebuilding Apple Maps Using Apple’s Own Data
Mark Gurman (in 2015, tweet): The current plan is to revamp the foundation of the Maps application, shifting to the in-house base map database by 2017; this would lead to the cutting of ties with...
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