iNaturalist:

Seek encourages outdoor exploration and learning by harnessing image recognition technology to help you identify plants and animals from your photos. Choose from a list of nearby plants, animals, and fungi and collect photographs of as many species as you can!

Drawing from millions of wildlife observations on iNaturalist, Seek shows you lists of commonly-recorded insects, birds, plants, amphibians, and more in your area. Use our maps and charts to determine what you want to look for and snap a photo when you think you’ve found it. Our image recognition software lets you know if you got it right and, if it’s a match, adds it to your collection.

As a City Kid, I’ve never had much need to “identify the plants and animals around me” but now that I live in a semi-rural area, I’m kind of curious about the flora and fauna I see. This app may be able to help.

CTV News:

It was just around lunchtime, so the story goes, when Stefan Michalak saw several unusual silver objects cross the sky in Manitoba’s Whiteshell Provincial Park.

It was May 20, 1967, and Michalak, an avid rock collector, was searching for new specimens near the shores of Falcon Lake.

What unfolded that day would go down in Canadian history as one of the country’s best-documented UFO encounters – one that’s now commemorated in a limited-edition coin from the Royal Canadian Mint.

I find this to a very odd thing for our Royal Canadian Mint to do. Thanks to John Kordyback for the link.

Facebook Inc said on Wednesday it planned to revise the written policies that people agree to when they use the social network, adding language about the protection of personal data as it prepares to comply with a strict new European law.

I wonder how much of this will show up in the U.S. considering Facebook already said it wouldn’t extend the new European law globally.

From this Wall Street Journal Journal article:

Users who opt not to input credit-card information for Apple Pay when setting up their phones now constantly see the red circle over their settings icon, indicating their setup is incomplete. Some users also periodically get notification reminders that go away only once they start the enrollment process.

To me, this is a dark pattern, something we happened to write about yesterday in this post, The terrible scourge of Dark Patterns.

John Gruber responds to Mickle’s WSJ article in this excellent Daring Fireball post:

Mickle has a point here. This does annoy people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to set up Apple Pay. There is a way to dismiss the red badge, but it’s not obvious how, because the button you have to tap says “Set Up Apple Pay”. (After that, you tap “Cancel” or “Set Up Later in Wallet”.) It is inscrutably counterintuitive to need to tap a button that says “Set Up Apple Pay” when your intention is to stop being nagged to set it up because you don’t want to set up Apple Pay.

A dark pattern, right? To me, if Apple is going to red dot persist you into signing up or not, better for the user to force the decision up front. In or out, your choice, thank you for your time.

Moving on, Gruber gets to the heart of the Apple Pay issue, adoption:

I do think Apple has a marketing problem with Apple Pay, though. I can tell from talking to family members that a lot of people just don’t see why they should try Apple Pay, because they have no idea how it works or why they’d want to use it. And I think they worry that because it’s new and sort of science-fiction-y it will make their credit card more likely to be hacked, when the truth is the opposite. I think Apple needs more ads that explain and demonstrate the convenience and indisputable security advantages of using Apple Pay instead of a credit card, and the extraordinary convenience of Apple Pay Cash. I can see how a lot of people think, “Eh, I’ll just keep using my credit card” when they’re paying for something in a retail store. But Apple Pay Cash could be enough to get these people to set up Apple Pay.

Coincidentally, Apple just posted a terrific series of Apple Pay ads (watch them here). I think John is spot-on here. The value of Apple Pay is wildly under-appreciated. Though Apple is pushing to brand Apple Pay as a cool shiny, it has not pushed across the message of Apple Pay’s safety, security. Possibly because safety and security is boring. It’s critically important, but it’s tough to make the point in any sort of entertaining way.

Google Developer Blog:

We’re turning down support for goo.gl over the coming weeks and replacing it with Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL). FDLs are smart URLs that allow you to send existing and potential users to any location within an iOS, Android or web app. We’re excited to grow and improve the product going forward. While most features of goo.gl will eventually sunset, all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.

And:

Starting April 13, 2018, anonymous users and users who have never created short links before today will not be able to create new short links via the goo.gl console. If you are looking to create new short links, we recommend you use Firebase Dynamic Links or check out popular services like Bitly and Ow.ly as an alternative.

If you have existing goo.gl short links, you can continue to use all features of goo.gl console for a period of one year, until March 30, 2019, when we will discontinue the console.

I can only imagine there’s a subtlety to this change, something that brings traffic through Google in a more useful manner than goo.gl did.

A possible clue:

URL Shortener has been a great tool that we’re proud to have built. As we look towards the future, we’re excited about the possibilities of Firebase Dynamic Links, particularly when it comes to dynamic platform detection and links that survive the app installation process.

Interesting. Have to learn more about Firebase Dynamic Links.

Lots of interesting discussion on the implications of any move Apple might make to move Macs from Intel to ARM.

One point to keep in mind? If it does happen, this will be no easy transition for developers. As Rich Siegel points out in this tweet:

Anyone who says “you just have to click a check box” or “it’s trivial” without actually having done the transition for a shipping product is engaging in wish fulfillment or marketing.

If you are interested in a bit of detail on this, take a look at this tweet thread from yesterday. Lots of responses and paths off to specific sub-topics. Learned a lot.

NPR:

A woman with an apparent grudge against YouTube for what she claimed was censoring and “de-monetizing” her videos, opened fire at the video-sharing service’s San Bruno, Calif., headquarters, wounding several people before fatally shooting herself, according to police.

The NPR article has lots more detail, links to other sources.

The Verge:

The Weeknd’s latest project, My Dear Melancholy, pulled in over 26 million streams in its first 24 hours on Apple Music, with the lead song “Call Out My Name” pulling in 6 million of those streams, the company tells The Verge. That in itself isn’t a record, but Apple Music’s numbers did beat out the single’s performance on Spotify, which pulled in nearly 3.5 million streams in the same period — the largest debut of 2018 on the service — according to Republic Records.

So what? Apple Music beat out Spotify in this one instance. Why is that so odd?

Here’s why:

Spotify has over 120 million more users, had two exclusive music videos from the EP, and it was where The Weeknd pointed his fans to stream the album on social media.

In effect, the deck was stacked in favor of Spotify, well stacked. And yet, somehow, Apple Music pulled more streams.

And this isn’t an anomaly either: this is the third time Apple Music has outperformed Spotify on a major release in the past 13 months.

First-day streams of Drake’s More Life on Apple Music outpaced Spotify by a staggering 28.6 million, and the streaming service dominated first-week streams of Post Malone’s chart-topping single “Rockstar” in the US.

Some kind of secret sauce at Apple Music HQ. Very interesting.

Apple has hired Google’s chief of search and artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, a major coup in its bid to catch up to the artificial intelligence technology of its rivals.

Apple said on Tuesday that Mr. Giannandrea will run Apple’s “machine learning and A.I. strategy,” and become one of 16 executives who report directly to Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook.

Okay, that is a big hire. It’s especially interesting that Giannandrea agrees with Apple’s privacy stance.

Zuckerberg told Reuters in a phone interview that Facebook already complies with many parts of the law ahead of its implementation in May. He said the company wanted to extend privacy guarantees worldwide in spirit, but would make exceptions, which he declined to describe.

His comments signals that U.S. Facebook users, many of them still angry over the company’s handling of personal information, may soon find themselves in a worse position than Europeans.

Extending the privacy law globally may be a great thing for the user, but it certainly won’t be for Facebook.

Police have responded to multiple 911 calls at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California. Multiple victims have been taken to the hospital following the shooting, CBS San Francisco reported. About 1,700 people work in the building, according to ABC News.

Mike Thornton takes you from 1983 to present day. It’s fascinating to see when some of the features I remember using were actually released.

The linked map is interesting, both for the specifics on San Francisco’s history, and for the interface itself. I’d love to see this concept spread to other cities.

To use the map, zoom in, then tap/click on any highlighted road or feature. Nicely done.

[H/T Eric Vitiello]

Dark Patterns are sneaky interface design patterns that trick users into doing something they otherwise might never do. Like share their contacts, or register for a service, or give an app permission/access unintentionally.

The video embedded below does a great job explaining this, and shares some terrific (terrible?) examples. If nothing else, just watch the incredibly great lengths Amazon goes to to hide the “delete my Amazon account” option.

If this interests you, take a few minutes to scroll through the Dark Patterns Hall of Shame.

[Via Kottke]

Useful walkthrough from Dennis Sellers, Apple World Today.

Adam Engst, TidBITS:

It’s live! After years of planning and months of work with our developer, Eli Van Zoeren, we’ve finally pulled back the curtains on our new Internet infrastructure. If you’re reading this in email, head over to the TidBITS Web site to take a look and click around — all 28 years of TidBITS articles and comments are there.

I’d like to explain more about various aspects of the system, since it’s vastly different from the homebrew system that Glenn Fleishman created for TidBITS nearly a decade ago. Yes, it really has been that long.

Nice look, snappier loading too. Click through to Adam’s post for all the details. Congrats, TidBITS team!

Benedict Evans:

If you’ve friended 300 people, and each of them post a couple of pictures, tap like on a few news stories or comment a couple of times, then, by the inexorable law of multiplication, yes, you will have something over a thousand new items in your feed every single day.

And:

We’re ‘supposed’ to post stuff, but by posting stuff, we overload each other’s feeds. Facebook’s Growth team was too good at its job.

This overload means it now makes little sense to ask for the ‘chronological feed’ back. If you have 1,500 or 3,000 items a day, then the chronological feed is actually just the items you can be bothered to scroll through before giving up, which can only be 10% or 20% of what’s actually there.

Though the core of this post was about Facebook, it applies equally well to Twitter or, I suspect, to any free-form social platform. In a nutshell, as you follow/friend more and more people, the complexity of your feed grows exponentially, making more than a handful of follows impossible to keep up with without that app taking over your life. And if you have multiple social networks, yeesh.

This is the logic that led Facebook inexorably to the ‘algorithmic feed’, which is really just tech jargon for saying that instead of this random (i.e. ‘time-based’) sample of what’s been posted, the platform tries to work out which people you would most like to see things from, and what kinds of things you would most like to see. It ought to be able to work out who your close friends are, and what kinds of things you normally click on, surely? The logic seems (or at any rate seemed) unavoidable. So, instead of a purely random sample, you get a sample based on what you might actually want to see.

Unavoidable as it seems, though, this approach has two problems. First, getting that sample ‘right’ is very hard, and beset by all sorts of conceptual challenges. But second, even if it’s a sucessful sample, it’s still a sample.

Someone is going to solve this problem. A new model will emerge that allows us to keep up with our friends/interests more efficiently and with less stress.

Interesting post from Ben Evans, right to the heart of the problem.

ZDNet:

Cloudflare is an old hand at speeding up corporate internet services with its content delivery network (CDN). The company is also a pro at blocking Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Now, with its new 1.1.1.1 public Domain Name System (DNS) resolver, it can speed up and secure your web browsing, as well.

When I read about this yesterday, I was sure it was an April Fools’ joke. Good to read it isn’t.

Apple Inc. is planning to use its own chips in Mac computers beginning as early as 2020, replacing processors from Intel Corp., according to people familiar with the plans.

The initiative, code named Kalamata, is still in the early developmental stages, but comes as part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple’s devices — including Macs, iPhones, and iPads — work more similarly and seamlessly together, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The project, which executives have approved, will likely result in a multi-step transition.

There is no doubt that Apple knows how to build fantastic chips for its mobile devices, and if this plan received the go-ahead from executives, they must have fast Mac chips on the horizon. When Apple switched to Intel years ago, the transition was pretty smooth—If this is going to happen, the transition will need to be just as smooth.

From the linked, long Mark Zuckerberg interview:

Q: Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, gave an interview the other day and he was asked what he would do if he was in your shoes. He said, “I wouldn’t be in this situation,” and argued that Apple sells products to users, it doesn’t sell users to advertisers, and so it’s a sounder business model that doesn’t open itself to these problems.

Do you think part of the problem here is the business model where attention ends up dominating above all else, and so anything that can engage has powerful value within the ecosystem?

And Mark Zuckerberg’s response:

You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people.

That doesn’t mean that we’re not primarily focused on serving people. I think probably to the dissatisfaction of our sales team here, I make all of our decisions based on what’s going to matter to our community and focus much less on the advertising side of the business.

But if you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford. I thought Jeff Bezos had an excellent saying on this in one of his Kindle launches a number of years back. He said, “There are companies that work hard to charge you more, and there are companies that work hard to charge you less.” And at Facebook, we are squarely in the camp of the companies that work hard to charge you less and provide a free service that everyone can use.

I don’t think at all that that means that we don’t care about people. To the contrary, I think it’s important that we don’t all get Stockholm syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you. Because that sounds ridiculous to me.

Shots fired.

The other night, I was at dinner, and conversation turned to space exploration and to the earliest days of Soviet Russia’s Sputnik and Lunik satellite launches. What followed was a story so unbelievable, I had to do some digging to convince myself it wasn’t just a folk legend.

From Popular Science, a few years back, soon after the story was declassified:

Sometime between the end of 1959 and 1960, the Soviet Union toured several countries with an exhibit of its industrial and economic achievements. Among the artifacts were a Sputnik and a Lunik upper stage that contained the payload, the latter freshly painted with viewing windows cut into the nose.

Remember, this was the height of the Cold War, and the start of the Space Race. Fear of falling behind was rampant and, given our lack of visible results at the time, was realistic.

So what do you do if you see that your rival is touring the world with their technology? You plan a technapping caper, of course.

Incredible story. Take a few minutes and read it. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. This should be Andy Weir’s next book (he wrote The Martian).

This British Vogue interview starts slow, with some pretty softball questions, but does ease down an engrossing path, especially so if you are interested in design.

Two callouts. This first, on designer Azzedine Alaïa:

He was the consummate craftsman. I loved the physical studio in which he worked, I loved the way, and how directly, he worked – his process. I was in utter awe watching him, and I loved that he let me watch. I thought that was so generous. It was incredible to see the way that he understood material, and the way he would be frustrated with material and so create new ones. And then these beautiful forms would emerge.

And this, from the very end, on hiring a new team member:

The main thing is how they see the world. Ultimately, Steve’s legacy is a set of values and, I think, the belief in trying. Often the quietest voices are the easiest to overlook, but he was brilliant at lis-ten-ing as well as leading and speaking. A lot of com-munication is listening – not just lis-ten-ing to figure out what you want to say in response.

Good read.

Daily Mail:

Recovered Apple smartwatch data, which indicated when a murder victim’s heart stopped beating, will be key prosecution evidence in the case against a South Australian woman charged with killing her mother-in-law, a court has heard.

Riveting story, and more so because the prosecution went through the process of recovering the victim’s heart rate data from her Apple Watch to tell the story of her death.

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Included in iOS 11.3 and macOS 10.13.4 is a new way to communicate with companies called Business Chat. Available in the United States as a beta to start, Business Chat lets you conveniently use iMessage for customer service and even complete transactions with Apple Pay. Check out our hands-on to see how it works.

I think Business Chat has huge potential. Zac does a nice job taking it through its paces. Key to success, as with Apple Pay, is adoption.

Joshua Fruhlinger, Thinknum:

Apple hiring trend data suggests that the company is finally taking its Siri intelligent assistant seriously. According to hiring data that we track at Thinknum, the number of open positions that contain the term “Siri” has accelerated in recent weeks, with a current all-time high of 161 job listings posted today alone. This marks a jump in hiring for the keyword of 24% in just over a month. With a talent management strategy, the hiring process could be more efficient than they anticipated.

It’s not a good business practice to hire just anyone who walks through your door. It’s also not a good practice to merely rely on trust. You should know both who they are and their history. Don’t be a victim of deceit by simply looking at a resume or take someone’s word they are honest and qualified. When it comes to your organization, you cannot afford to take chances! Therefore, you may consider visiting this informative page to use professional staffing services to find your new employees.

Conducting background checks on potential employees and volunteers should be a major part of your organization’s business process. Background checks can help reduce risk for criminal activities such as violence, abuse and theft. They can also verify the information on an applicant’s resume or job application and assist your organization in deciding if an individual is the right person for the job. To learn more about how delicate is the process, read here about what I learned about enhanced dbs check for myself.

Check out the chart embedded in the article. Job openings moved from a low of 46 back in 2016, in a relatively steady climb up to 160 today. That’s a big swing, slow and steady.

New York Times:

In one set of patent applications, Amazon describes how a “voice sniffer algorithm” could be used on an array of devices, like tablets and e-book readers, to analyze audio almost in real time when it hears words like “love,” bought” or “dislike.” A diagram included with the application illustrated how a phone call between two friends could result in one receiving an offer for the San Diego Zoo and the other seeing an ad for a Wine of the Month Club membership.

A separate (Google) application regarding personalizing content for people while respecting their privacy noted that voices could be used to determine a speaker’s mood using the “volume of the user’s voice, detected breathing rate, crying and so forth,” and medical condition “based on detected coughing, sneezing and so forth.”

If this is the future, let me off the planet. I want no part of it.

Wired:

The modern web contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there’s no panacea for what ails this internet we’ve built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that’s been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It’s time to head back to RSS.

I don’t know if it’s time for a revival but I still use RSS as a fast, efficient way to get through a lot of news very quickly.