Sure, your browser can download. But does it let you easily accelerate downloads, limit bandwidth, download on a schedule, or execute rules to sort incoming downloaded files? Doubt it. And clearly, you’re not going to be able to quit that RAM-consuming monster of a browser until all your downloads are done.

I like the folks at Many Tricks. I think they make good software.

A core member of Apple’s elite industrial design team for more than 20 years, Mr. Coster is credited for his contributions to a wide range of now iconic consumer electronics ranging from the iPhone 4 to the iPad wireless keyboard. He holds more than 500 design patents and several utility patents, and has been recognized by several international design organizations for his work.

I’m always interested to see how Apple designers do outside the Apple ecosystem.

Wired:

At least two dozen primary suppliers on three continents and two islands (Japan and Taiwan) provide these parts.

The transportation complexity is magnified further because many components do not move in a simple path from supplier to final assembly. Some go on a hopscotching world tour from one country to the next and back again as one piece is joined to another to create an assembly, which is then moved elsewhere in the world for another part to be inserted or attached.

The phone’s innards are put together much as a cook assembles ingredients for a dish that becomes, in turn, a component of another chef’s course, which is then incorporated by someone else into a larger meal.

Few of us give much thought to the innards of our electronics but the supply chain process of getting all that stuff into your hands is remarkable. It’s also why we see so many rumors of individual components. The devices have become far too complex for Apple to keep a lid on everything.

USA Today:

Two older brothers pulled an epic prank on their little sister after she had her wisdom teeth taken out and was still feeling the effects of the dentist’s drugs.

After their younger sister Millicent had her wisdom teeth removed by an expert just like the ones you find at the local dentist westminster ca, brothers Cabot, Hudson and Barrett Phillips convinced her that a zombie outbreak had hit their city. And, of course, they captured it all on video.

Researchers believe that wisdom teeth were necessary for our ancestors, as their diet mostly consisted of hard nuts, crunchy leaves and uncooked meat. Today, however, we eat more cooked food and use forks and knives to cut our food up into smaller pieces. As a result, wisdom teeth are widely regarded as vestigial structures (parts of the human body that have become unnecessary). Most people are comfortable in three to four days, but it can take a couple of weeks for your gums to completely heal. Your oral surgeon will provide you with detailed post-surgical instructions to keep you comfortable.

Most people can go back to work or school in two to three days after wisdom teeth extraction. However, if your job requires physical labor or heavy lifting, you may need to take a few extra days off of work.

As an older brother (to eight), I can definitely understand and appreciate playing this kind of prank on a younger sibling.

Amazon says it’s the thinnest and lightest Kindle ever. They also say it has the longest Kindle battery life–the included leather charging cover boosts battery to last months.

Survey Monkey:

The game, propelled by featuring by both Apple and Google, quickly rocketed to the top of the charts. Every day last week, the game was downloaded an average of 370,000 times. Roughly two-thirds of the app’s downloads are on iOS, with the remainder on Android.

and:

Monetization has also increased steadily and we estimate that the game is now making $40,000 combined per day across iOS and Android. Roughly 80% of the revenue is from iOS with Android only contributing 20%.

Fascinating.

Justin Moyer, writing for The Washington Post:

Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” has faced a lot of accusations in the 45 years since it was released. It’s overplayed, some say, particularly at high volumes by dudes trying to impress other dudes at guitar shops. It’s overlong, say others. And, for years, people have said “Stairway” sounds a lot like “Taurus” — a song by a much less famous band called Spirit who performed it allegedly while sharing bills with Zeppelin in the late 1960s.

and:

But after decades of gossip, members of Led Zeppelin — specifically, singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page, the writers of “Stairway” — will face a jury trial on May 10. The question: Did they copy at least some parts of their most famous song?

There’s a fine line between similar/influenced by and plagiarism.

Here’s a video that plays the intro to both songs so you can get a sense of what the dispute is all about.

I think the style is certainly similar, but there are many songs that use that descending root note pattern: Michelle by The Beatles, My Funny Valentine, lots of classical pieces.

Did Jimmy Page lift this opening and change it? Possibly. But the rest of the song is so different, so unique, I just don’t see this as Zep riding on the Spirit guitarist’s coattails.

Samuel Gibbs, writing for The Guardian:

In the hand the body feels sharp and hard, with unforgiving edges which are only acceptable because of the phone’s diminutive size. The hard edges are easier to grip than the slippery rounded sides of the iPhone 6S, and particularly the large 6S Plus, but they hurt my palms after clutching it for an hour or two.

I don’t remember a single comment about the edges of the iPhone 4 or 5 being too sharp and hard. It’s purely when compared to the iPhone 6. So the SE is too hard and small, and the 6 is too slippery. Hmm.

Using a 4in screen in 2016 is a compromise. Websites feel very cramped, apps often leave only a small amount of screen to the content they’re trying to display and buttons can end up very small making tapping them a bit of a challenge.

If the 4 inch screen is too small, no one will buy them and the iPhone SE will quickly die. But people are buying them, and there seems to be plenty of love for the smaller screen.

To be fair, I love my iPhone 6s Plus. I wouldn’t go back to the smaller screen. But my kids (with their youthful eyes) have no issue with the smaller screen and love the smaller footprint.

I think my central point of disagreement with this review is the generalization that a small screen has no place in 2016. Apple did their homework. They would not have sent the iPhone SE to manufacturing unless they dead certain knew that there were folks out there who would buy a smaller, cheaper iPhone.

This is a remarkable mistake:

I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.

All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).

In a nutshell, one bad command erased all his customers’ data as well as all his backups.

Wow.

UPDATE: The story was a viral campaign. Words cannot express how much I hate this. Here’s the Snopes link, if you want the details

Kirk McElhearn debuts a new Macworld column called “Hey Apple, fix this!”

The first of this series focuses on this issue with the Mac’s Notes app:

Apple made a bewildering design decision: They don’t allow users to choose a default font and size in the OS X version of the app. On iOS, the Notes app inherits the overall font settings you choose; if you choose to increase the size of the system font, in Settings > Display & Brightness > Text Size, then the font in Notes gets bigger, as it does in apps such as Mail, Reminders, and others. (Not all apps support this Dynamic Type setting.) But there is no such system font size option on OS X. So all notes start out in a tiny (to me) font.

I love the idea for this series. There certainly is no shortage of this sort of issue on both the Mac and iOS. Kirk’s daylighting of this sort of issue can only help bring it attention, get it fixed.

Here’s an issue I’d like to see daylighted in Kirk’s column:

Every so often (perhaps one in five calls), my phone rings and iOS refuses to recognize my slide to answer. The slider appears, but does not recognize my touch. I’ve tried everything I can think of, but once it goes in this mode, there’s no way for me to answer the call. But once the call goes to voice mail, my phone returns to normal.

I’ve done all the normal things, like restart the phone, hit the power button, nothing seems to help.

And I know I am not alone in this. I’ve gotten a wave of Twitter responses from folks experiencing the same issue, with some going as far back as iOS 6 and an iPhone 4s.

An exceptionally poor decision.

Jeremy White, writing for the Sacramento Bee:

A national debate over smartphone encryption arrived in Sacramento on Tuesday as legislators defeated a bill penalizing companies that don’t work with courts to break into phones, siding with technology industry representatives who called the bill a dangerous affront to privacy.

The bill did not receive a vote, with members of the Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection worrying the measure would undermine data security and impose a logistically untenable requirement on California companies.

This is cooler heads prevailing. Just one bill among many, so this fight is ongoing.

Assembly Bill 1681 would authorize $2,500 penalties against phone manufacturers and operating system providers if they do not obey court orders to decrypt phones.

Note that 1681 was introduced by Assemblyman Jim Cooper and is a California state bill. Not to be confused with Burr-Feinstein, which is a “discussion draft” federal bill. And then there’s Cyrus Vance’s proposal for a New York anti-encryption bill.

On the flip side, there’s Ted Lieu’s H.R. 4528, a proposed federal bill that basically says a state can’t force a manufacturer or seller to change their product to enable surveillance.

Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization Ltd., the forensics unit of a little-known Japanese pinball company, is fast becoming the go-to guys when law enforcement needs to unlock smartphones. Its group chief executive officer has plans to keep the firm on the frontlines against terrorism.

Not a big surprise they have some of the world’s biggest law enforcement agencies as clients.

Interesting move for Logitech.

Juli Clover:

Teen interest in Apple’s iPhone continues to grow, according to data gathered by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster in the latest semiannual teen survey. 69 percent of teens surveyed own iPhones, up from 67 percent in the Fall 2015 survey. 75 percent of teens queried expect their next device to be an iPhone, up one percent from the previous survey.

This is very important. These are the people that Apple is relying on to purchase the iPhones of the future.

I’m always impressed with the things people can do with CSS.

110 years ago next week, on April 18, 1906, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake centered near the city of San Francisco struck at 5:15 AM. The intense shaking toppled hundreds of buildings, but the resulting out-of-control fires were even more destructive.

Devastating.

[Via Kottke]

Smile made some adjustments to its upgrade plans and pricing.

There are signs that Gibson’s move to diversify isn’t working out as planned. Moody’s Investor Service has downgraded Gibson Brands (formerly Gibson Guitar Corporation) credit to junk status, and according to reports, the company has put up two of its Nashville warehouses for sale as a result.

Gibson has been in trouble for a long time. I’m not sure if they tried to buy their way out of it or tried to ignore it, but either way, it seems to be getting worse.

That case and others show how cyber-criminals have professionalized ransomware schemes, borrowing tactics from customer service or marketing, law enforcement officials and security firms say. Some players in the booming underworld employ graphic artists, call centers and technical support to streamline payment and data recovery, according to security firms that advise businesses on hacking threats.

I didn’t realize how “professional” these people have become.

If you haven’t already seen it, click here to watch one of seven new Apple Watch ads posted yesterday. In it, actress and designer Chloë Sevigny uses her Apple Watch to ping her iPhone.

In this post, Keir Thomas takes things one step further, showing you how to add the iPhone’s flash to the equation.

Nice post from Faiz Orz (with pictures and arrows) on setting up restrictions on your iOS device.

Andy Meek, writing for The Guardian:

“It’s understandable why media on the web is like it is today,” Williams tells the Guardian. “That’s not to say there’s not a lot of great stuff out there, but a lot of people are dissatisfied with it. A lot of journalists who want to do great stuff are dissatisfied. Advertisers and brands are dissatisfied. We’re still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that’s what they want – it’s like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.”

Very interesting writing here. Ev Williams, founder of both Twitter and Medium, talks about feedback loops, the mechanisms that reward journalists for writing certain kinds of stories. If journalists are rewarded (with page views, which translates to dollars) for propagating junk food, junk food it shall be.

Graham Spencer, writing for MacStories:

Today, numerous third-party Reddit clients were removed from the App Store by Apple for breaching clause 18.2 of the App Review Guidelines. This clause states that apps will be rejected if they contain “user generated content that is frequently pornographic”.

The official Reddit app, which launched last week and was featured by Apple on the App Store, currently remains in the App Store, but other Reddit clients including Narwhal, Antenna, Eggplant and BaconReader have all been removed for sale. These third-party Reddit clients were removed from Apple without any advance notice to developers, despite some of the apps being available on the App Store for well over a year. It should also be noted that many of these third-party apps, such as Narwhal, did have a filter to enable or disable NSFW content.

And:

Some of the third-party Reddit clients have now returned to the App Store. Both Narwhal and Antenna are now available in the App Store, but both have been updated to remove the NSFW toggle that used to be in their apps. It is our understanding that Apple’s objection is with the implementation of those NSFW toggles. Apple wants them removed from all Reddit apps so that if a user does want to view NSFW content, that toggle must be manually changed from the Reddit website.

I suspect this was a dawning realization prompted by someone at Apple playing with the official Reddit app. A light switch went on when they realized the NSFW content could be controlled from Reddit’s website and a decision was made to enforce a policy that already existed.

Neil Cybart, writing for Above Avalon:

The Apple Watch Sport band takes up nearly four times as much wrist area as a Watch case.

By this, he means that the Apple Watch body consumes just the top part of your wrist real estate, while the band goes all the way around, with lots of “wasted” wrist real estate.

Obviously, this ratio will change depending on the user, but the primary point is that simply utilizing the top of our wrist is not optimal for wrist wearables. While the top part of the wrist is ideal for viewing data, the rest of our wrist can still be used for other purposes.

Including additional sensors, battery volume, and other components directly into Watch bands will better utilize wrist real estate. Instead of having the Watch case be the only “smart” piece, Apple will likely begin selling Watch bands that go much further than just representing pieces of fashion.

And:

We likely got a glimpse of this future when looking at the New Yorker’s profile of Jony Ive which mentioned that he admitted much of Apple’s Watch R&D was focused on the bands and not the rectangular Watch case.

Interesting post, lots of solid conjecture. Two obvious watch band solutions that strike me:

• Batteries that can charge your Apple Watch and, in a pinch, your iPhone, too.
• Better sensors for more accurately measuring pulse rate.

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