MacRumors:

Canadian software company Corel today announced that CorelDRAW has returned to the Mac for the first time since 2001.

CorelDRAW is best known for vector graphic design and illustration, but it can also be used for page layout, layer-based photo editing, RAW image processing, indexing and organizing font libraries, and more. The suite will compete with the likes of Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer on Mac.

I no longer do any kind of work that requires me to use these kinds of apps but it’s good to see CorelDRAW back on the Mac.

The important takeaway for this Article, though, is the degree to which Senator Warren missed the point: there is significant consumer benefit both to having preinstalled apps and also to Apple controlling the installation of apps. There is a big benefit to suppliers (app developers) as well: the app market on PCs died in large part due to security concerns, which Apple obviated with the App Store to the tremendous benefit of every participant in the ecosystem. Senator Warren’s proposal would make the App Store worse for everyone.

There is just so much goodness in Ben’s article, you really have to read it all to get a sense of how wrong Warren is in her proposal.

The BBEdit 12.6 update includes 88 discrete additions, changes and fixes addressing all manner of ‘quality of life’ issues from improved performance to UI refinement. In addition, BBEdit 12.6 introduces architectural changes for compatibility with macOS App Sandboxing, a set of security policies and practices put forth by Apple. The App Sandboxing model endeavors to ensure privacy and data security for macOS users, and serves as a requirement for BBEdit’s participation in the Mac App Store.

Bare Bones recently released BBEdit 12.6, which included sandboxing, allowing it to be sold in the Mac App Store. This is one of the apps I’ve used the longest as a Mac user and love it.

iMazing has always featured simple yet powerful tools to print and export data from the iPhone Messages app. In iMazing 2.9 (macOS) and 2.8 (Windows), we’re introducing support for WhatsApp chats, as well as a completely overhauled engine which can now display, print and export both Messages and WhatsApp conversations faster and in more detail than ever before.

iMazing is an incredible app to get at all the files on your iPhone.

The Verge:

Apple has officially confirmed that it will hold an event for March 25th where the company is expected to announce its long-rumored TV streaming and Apple News subscription services.

As usual, the invitation doesn’t have much to go by, but the animated countdown GIF and “It’s show time” tag seem to hint that the new TV service will play a big role. Rumors of an event at the end of March began last month, saying that the company will reportedly focus exclusively on services, although there is the chance that we could see the anticipated announcements of a revamped AirPods, a new entry-level iPad, and the long-delayed AirPower wireless charging pad.

Gonna be interesting.

New York Times:

The internet consists of tiny bits of code that move around the world, traveling along wires as thin as a strand of hair strung across the ocean floor. The data zips from New York to Sydney, from Hong Kong to London, in the time it takes you to read this word.

These kinds of stories about the infrastructure so much of our modern world relies on are always fascinating.

Pro Tools Keyboard Shortcuts. There are just so many. Some are very well known, some really obscure but there is a middle ground of what I consider essential but in my experience aren’t as widely known as they should be. Here are six. You’ll probably know some of them.

Depending on what you’re doing, shortcuts can be indispensable when editing audio. We all have our favorites, but you can always use more.

VentureBeat:

The new Skype for Web client that Microsoft released on Thursday isn’t functional on several browsers, the company confirmed to VentureBeat today. The revamped version of the company’s messaging and video chat client only supports Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome — and Chromium-based browsers such as Vivaldi — but not Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox, or Opera.

No real surprise but still a PITA for users who favor those browsers.

The Verge:

enator Elizabeth Warren proposed breaking up Amazon, Google, and Facebook yesterday in a post published on Medium. Her plan, which comes as the Democratic presidential primary contest continues to heat up, would classify any company that runs a marketplace and makes more than $25 billion a year in revenue as a “platform utility” and prohibit those companies from using those platforms from selling their own products.

But Warren’s proposal didn’t mention Apple, which clearly matches the same set of criteria: the company makes far more than $25 billion a year in revenue, and it operates the iOS App Store, in which it distributes its own apps.

This is just electioneering and won’t amount to anything but I thought it odd that, when asked why she didn’t include Apple in her original post, the senator said, “No reason.” Apple is larger than all of the other companies she originally mentioned.

TechRepublic:

Photo-editing applications are plentiful, and many simplify the previously challenging task of applying filters, adjusting hues, and improving photo finish quality, whether the images are for personal use, blogs, commercial websites, marketing materials, ads, or other professional pursuits. Luminar and sister app Aurora HDR have gained popularity by simplifying the process to just a few clicks for busy professionals, while still retaining customization options for users with more image-editing knowledge and experience. Skylum, which manufactures both applications, has loaded performance and integration improvements within Luminar 3 for Mac.

I’m a big fan of Skylum (formerly Macphun) and am testing out their AirMagic software for drone pilots. I like Luminar 2 and the “performance improvements” will be very welcome. It can be slow on my Mac.

Kotaku:

Across the globe, Gary Gygax was eulogized everywhere from the New York Times to the Guardian, and in essays by pop fantasy titans like Wil Wheaton and Neil Gaiman. In his obituaries, Gygax was celebrated as the world’s first and greatest dungeon master, the father of role-playing and founder of a tradition that would feed the rise of blockbuster role-playing video game series like Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft and Skyrim.

Eleven years after the death of Gary Gygax, there are still battles over who will control his legacy—the rights to his name, his biography, his memorial, his intellectual property, and the future of countless other priceless artifacts, among them Gary Gygax’s original dungeon, the maps to an 11-level magical castle where he prototyped a fantasy role-playing game that 8 million people play every year.

Such a bizarre, sad story about something many of knew and loved as kids and many still love as adults.

Ars Technica:

Ask a record-collecting audiophile why vinyl is back and you may hear a common refrain: “Of course vinyl’s back! It’s a more accurate reproduction of the original! It just sounds better than digital!”

To this I reply, “Does it really, though? Or is it just EQ’d better? And since when did we start caring so much about the perfect fidelity of our recordings? I grew up—as did many of you—listening to cassette tapes on a boom box. They sounded horrible, and we loved them.”

I think the real reason for vinyl’s return goes much deeper than questions of sound quality.

I loved vinyl and, if I had the space, I might even have a record player with some old albums lying around to play every now and then.

FastCompany:

Making an ad with an in-your-face social point of view isn’t something many corporations are willing to bet on. There was a certain amount of doubt at Nike when the advertising department showed the Kaepernick “Just Do It” 30th anniversary TV ad to CEO Mark Parker and Knight. “Parker looked at it and went, ‘Gulp.’ And they said, ‘Well, here’s the deal. If we’re going to get this in time for the campaign, you’ve got 24 hours,’” Knight recalls.

It’s a shame this had to be “controversial” in the first place.

Gizmodo:

Automation is often presented as an inexorably advancing force, whether it’s ushering in a threat to jobs or a promise of increased leisure or larger profits. We’re made to imagine the robots rising, increasingly mechanized systems of production, more streamlined modes of everyday living. But the truth is that automation technology and automated systems very often fail. And even when they do, they nonetheless frequently wind up stranded in our lives.

For every automated appliance or system that actually makes performing a task easier—dishwashers, ATMs, robotic factory arms, say—there seems to be another one—self-checkout kiosks, automated phone menus, mass email marketing—that actively makes our lives worse.

I’ve taken to calling this second category, simply, shitty automation.

While I don’t loathe it as much as the writer, I certainly never look forward to any kind of self-checkout.

Bloomberg:

According to the company’s annual Supplier Responsibility Report, just two cases of bonded labor were found last year, involving 287 employees. That’s too many, to be sure, but it’s incredible progress compared with two years ago, when 10 violations were uncovered. By employee numbers, it’s an 82 percent improvement from last year alone.

Honest question — is any other company, especially in tech, as transparent as Apple with regards to its Asian supply chain?

This really takes me back. Clarus was one of the elements that really showed the difference between Apple and the rest of the gray, gray world. I miss that particular brand of quirkiness.

Stephen Hackett does a nice job bringing this history to life in the video embedded below.

Moof!

Marketplace:

All the bad press about Facebook might be catching up to the company. New numbers from Edison Research show an an estimated 15 million fewer users in the United States compared to 2017.

15 million. Wow. That’s a big drop and, for Facebook, a worrying trend.

Interesting timing. This data follows hot on the heels of Mark Zuckerberg’s A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking.

Too little, too late? It certainly is for me.

Variety:

Spotify, Google, Pandora and Amazon have teamed up to appeal a controversial ruling by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board that, if it goes through, would increase payouts to songwriters by 44%, Variety has learned.

Note one big name missing from that list. Apple.

Sources say that Apple Music is alone among the major streaming services in not planning to appeal — as confirmed by songwriters’ orgs rushing to heap praise on Apple while condemning the seemingly unified front of the other digital companies.

And:

Bart Herbison, executive director of the Nashville Songwriters Association International: “It is unfortunate that Amazon and Spotify decided to file an appeal on the CRB’s decision to pay American songwriters higher digital mechanical royalties,” he said in a statement. “Many songwriters have found it difficult to stay in the profession in the era of streaming music. You cannot feed a family when you earn hundreds of dollars for millions of streams.”

And:

Israelite did single out Apple for praise for not participating in an appeal. “We thank Apple Music for accepting the CRB decision and continuing to be a friend to songwriters,” he said. “While Spotify and Amazon surely hope this will play out in a quiet appellate courtroom, every songwriter and every fan of music should stand up and take notice.

Indeed.

If you’ve never taken the time to play with Shortcuts, dig into this archive. It’s a terrific resource for interesting shortcuts, but the process of downloading and running a shortcut is also a good learning experience.

To get started, first be sure you’ve got the Shortcuts app downloaded from the iOS App Store. Run it once, just to get the on boarding out of the way, then exit.

Next, follow the headline link on your iOS device, scroll down, pick a category, and pick a shortcut. One I particularly love is Music > Apple Music Wrapped, which creates a detailed report for the music you’ve listened to in any particular year.

Tap the “Get the shortcut here” link, which will bring you into the Shortcuts app, then tap the Get Shortcut button.

Lots of choices to make, interface to make your way through, all of which gives you a sense of what you can do with Shortcuts. It also shows the immense amount of work that Federico and the MacStories team put into this effort.

Once you jump through all the hoops, return to Shortcuts and tap the Library tab at the bottom of the screen. That’s where you’ll find the Apple Music Wrapped shortcut. Tap the ellipsis (…) to see all the steps that went into the shortcut.

And, apropos of nothing, my favorite artist of 2018 was Kevin Penkin. I listen to an awful lot of anime soundtracks.

New York Times:

> The second-to-last Blockbuster, a squat blue-and-yellow slab wedged next to a real estate agency in Western Australia, will stop renting videos on Thursday and shut down for good at the end of the month. Two stores in Alaska, part of the final group of Blockbuster outlets in the United States, closed in July. > > That will make the Blockbuster in Bend, Ore., one of a kind: a corporate remnant, just off the highway, near a cannabis retailer where you get high quality CBD joints.

And:

> The store has several years left on its lease and a license agreement that its owners sign annually with Dish Network, which bought Blockbuster for $320 million in 2011.

I hope it never closes. A throwback to another time, when Back to the Future was still in the future.

But also, what an investment decision by Dish. $320 million, at just the wrong moment in time. Wow!

Two things I drew from this post (which came via this Cult of Mac post):

• The Samsung Galaxy S9 is a pretty horrible investment, dropping about 60% in nine months, as compared to the iPhone X, which dropped about 30% in the same span.

• The worst time to trade in your iPhone is in the 3 months following the September iPhone event. This from the headline linked article:

A massive 68.86% of the iPhone X and 8’s total yearly depreciation was seen in Q4 following the Sept 2018 Apple Keynote (31.14% of their value between Q1-Q3). The months after the keynote is a trade-in black hole consumers should avoid.

iPhone values trend upwards every January. Lots more info in the article. Interesting.

LA Times:

…consumer prices for frames and lenses are so astronomically high, with markups often approaching 1,000%.

if you wear designer glasses, there’s a very good chance you’re wearing Luxottica frames.

The company’s owned and licensed brands include Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Polo Ralph Lauren, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Valentino, Vogue and Versace.

Along with LensCrafters, Luxottica also runs Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Sunglass Hut and Target Optical, as well as the insurer EyeMed Vision Care.

The monopoly EssilorLuxottica holds on the eyewear industry is obscene. In our small town, we’ve only got two places we can buy prescription glasses or sunglasses. Both carry the same product and both charge about the same prices and those prices are often hundreds of dollars. If you’re poor and/or don’t have a health care plan that covers you, you simply can’t afford to wear glasses. Even if you do have a plan, glasses are still going to cost a minimum of $400 that someone has to pay.

Motherboard:

Dev-fused devices are sometimes called prototypes in the security research industry. They are essentially phones that have not finished the production process, or have been reverted to a development state.

These rare iPhones have many security features disabled, allowing researchers to probe them much more easily than the iPhones you can buy at a store. Since the Black Hat talk, dev-fused iPhones have become a tool that security researchers around the world use to find previously unknown iPhone vulnerabilities (known as zero days), Motherboard has learned.

Fascinating look at a world few of us know about.

The Daily Beast:

One of the most fiercely debated new developments is the question of how the wood is “seasoned” before being made into barrels. Seasoning takes into account the time between when the tree is cut down, inspected, rough-milled into staves and then made into barrels. While it sounds straightforward, the wood needs to be dried between milling and becoming a barrel—anywhere from four to about 48 months of air drying, and/or kiln drying.

With proper seasoning, along with the toasting and charring that creates sweeter flavors, oak becomes a major partner in the creation of whiskey flavor. That’s why seasoning has become a selling point for the higher end of the barrel and bourbon market.

Until I moved to Tennessee, I had no idea how important the physical barrel was to various whiskeys and bourbons.

This is part of an ad campaign for Halo Top ice cream. The ads are uniformly bleak. But I kind of love them. Not sure why.

Here’s one (embedded below), follow the headline link for more.