I had a question: What’s the right way to disinfect my screens and keyboards without damaging them?

I did a lot of reading, found a lot of conflicting advice. Fortunately, I came across this Apple Support page, which offered this highlighted addition:

Is it OK to use a disinfectant on my Apple product?

Using a 70 percent isopropyl alcohol wipe or Clorox Disinfecting Wipes, you may gently wipe the hard, nonporous surfaces of your Apple product, such as the display, keyboard, or other exterior surfaces. Don’t use bleach. Avoid getting moisture in any opening, and don’t submerge your Apple product in any cleaning agents. Don’t use on fabric or leather surfaces.

Good to know.

Launch your Music app, tap the For You tab, scroll that top row to the side, and you should see a “Get Up! Mix” slide into view. For me, it was the second item, right next to my Favorites Mix.

If you don’t see it, you can also ask Siri to:

Play Get Up Mix

Both worked for me, even on my HomePod.

As to the mix itself, I absolutely love it. Great selection of songs, all of them in line with music I love. Not a dud in the bunch. Definitely worth checking out.

Apple, on their developer site:

The macOS version of your app can now be included in a universal purchase, allowing customers to enjoy your app and in‑app purchases across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS by purchasing only once.

John Voorhees, MacStories:

Prior to universal purchase, Mac apps were treated as separate products by Apple’s stores, which meant developers had to either charge separately for apps and, in some cases, jump through complex receipt-checking hoops to bundle their apps. This change should make the process of charging a single price or signing up for one subscription for apps across the Mac, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS much simpler and will enable cross-platform In-App purchases too.

Universal purchase will certainly make life simpler, both for developers and for users.

Nikkei Asian Review:

Foxconn, the top assembler of Apple’s iPhones, said it has secured enough workers to meet “seasonal demand” at all major Chinese plants, stressing a steady recovery from the labor shortage caused by the novel coronavirus epidemic on the mainland.

And:

The company is expected to hit a peak production period after July to manufacture iPhones for release in the fall.

This is certainly good news for Apple and for the economy. But it only addresses the supply side of the equation. It remains to be seen when demand for electronics will recover, given the massive impact the coronavirus crisis has had on the stock market, jobs, and buyers’ budgets.

Over the weekend, Jeff Bezos sent out a memo to all employees. Follow the headline link to read the whole thing, but here are a few excerpts:

Across the world, people are feeling the economic effects of this crisis, and I’m sad to tell you I predict things are going to get worse before they get better. We’re hiring for 100,000 new roles and raising wages for our hourly workers who are fulfilling orders and delivering to customers during this period of stress and turmoil. At the same time, other businesses like restaurants and bars are being forced to shut their doors. We hope people who’ve been laid off will come work with us until they’re able to go back to the jobs they had.

And:

We’ve placed purchase orders for millions of face masks we want to give to our employees and contractors who cannot work from home, but very few of those orders have been filled. Masks remain in short supply globally and are at this point being directed by governments to the highest-need facilities like hospitals and clinics. It’s easy to understand why the incredible medical providers serving our communities need to be first in line. When our turn for masks comes, our first priority will be getting them in the hands of our employees and partners working to get essential products to people.

And:

My own time and thinking is now wholly focused on COVID-19 and on how Amazon can best play its role. I want you to know Amazon will continue to do its part, and we won’t stop looking for new opportunities to help.

Amazon is certainly filling a vital role during this crisis. I do worry about the fulfillment and delivery people at the front lines, in terms of potential exposure.

I also worry that Amazon is making further inroads on replacing mom and pop brick and mortar, shops that might never recover from this crisis, territory that Amazon might never give back. So the phrase “until they’re able to go back to the jobs they had” is a real question mark for me.

AppleInsider:

An occasional promotion has been relaunched by Apple, providing those who added credit to their Apple ID an extra bonus amount on top. Purchases will add an extra 10% of credit on top for a fund addition, worth up to $200 in the United States, 200 GBP in the United Kingdom, and up to 300 euro in some European territories, with similar offers provided in a number of other markets.

The bonus will only be applied to one purchase, according to the terms of the offer, meaning it will only apply on the first top-up purchased since the offer’s introduction. The offer stands until April 3, 2020, with eligibility of users varying based on their account information and purchase history.

If you use this promotion, it’s basically getting free money. And who can’t use a bit of extra money?

Stumbled on this Cake post over the weekend, wherein Cake co-founder Chris MacAskill talks about setting up a call with Intel CEO Andy Grove behind Steve Jobs’ back.

A tiny taste:

I got Andy’s assistant on the phone. His assistants were executives-in-training who spent 2 years mentoring under Andy. I explained that if Steve heard about this call I would be fired. I justified the call by saying sometimes history has shown you have to do the right thing and keep it secret from Steve until later, as the Mac team famously did when they hid a Sony engineer in the Apple building so Steve wouldn’t find out.

I said I had no idea what Steve’s relationship with Andy was. For all I knew, Steve thought Intel chips were shit (the word Steve would have used). But I knew Steve liked people at the top of their fields who admired and mentored him. Could I meet with Andy and explain our situation so Andy could call Steve?

Great read. If you’ve got some time on your hands.

In a nutshell, fire up Siri and ask:

Do I have coronavirus?

Siri will respond by running you through the current CDC protocol, asking about fever, dry cough, and exposure to other COVID-19 cases.

Works on HomePod Siri as well.

Interestingly, if you ask Siri if you have the Chinese virus, Siri will correct you, lead you down the path to learning about coronavirus.

Frank McShan, MacRumors:

Apple this past week had set purchase limits across several of its products. For example, the new ‌MacBook Air‌ and Mac mini were limited to five orders per customer, the new ‌iPad Pro‌ was limited to two 11-inch models per customer and two 12.9-inch models per customer, and iPhones were limited to two of each model per customer.

Why the limits? Could be a campaign to combat gray-market in response to supply chain shortages.

Why lift the limit? What changed? Not clear.

Jason Del Rey, Recode:

Amazon announced earlier this week that it would start prioritizing the most in-demand essential items in its warehouses, as the e-commerce giant struggles to keep up with customer demand during the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

Now the other shoe has dropped.

To be clear, there are definitely long shipping delays on certain items, but most Prime items I checked (as of this writing) still deliver in a few days. This is about demand and Amazon’s attempts to keep essential goods flowing.

One thing to keep in mind: Some delays don’t show up until checkout. On the product page, it might say 2 day shipping, but verify the arrival date on the checkout page before you complete your purchase.

Bradley Chambers, 9to5Mac:

Earlier today, the Apple Books app sent out a push notification offering a free Apple Book to users. The notification mentioned read-alongs for kids, cozy mysteries, and audiobooks for the whole family.

Welcome timing and worth checking out.

To get a sense of what’s free (limited time or not):

• Fire up the Books app on your iOS device
• Tap the Book Store tab
• Side scroll that first section to find “Free books for everyone, from kid…” (that’s what it says on my iPhone)
• Tap the image to take you to the Free Books collection
• Scroll down for other free content

TidBITS:

One of the best features of the Apple TV is its Aerial screen saver. That’s not hyperbole—Apple always makes a big deal out of the new scenes it adds to tvOS, often promoting them as a marquee feature of major tvOS updates. If you have liked these screen savers on your TV, you can get them on your Mac, thanks to the free and open-source app Aerial.

I’m not sure how the development team gets away with it (Aerial is currently maintained by Guillaume Louel), but Aerial has been available for five years without interference from Apple. Which is a good thing!

Many of these screen savers are spectacularly beautiful.

Ars Technica:

Microsoft Edge received the lowest privacy rating in a recently published study that compared the user information collected by major browsers. Yandex, the less-popular browser developed by the Russian Web search provider Yandex, shared that dubious distinction. Brave, the upstart browser that makes privacy a priority, ranked the highest.

The rankings were revealed in a research paper published by Trinity College Dublin computer scientist Doug Leith. He analyzed and rated the privacy provided by Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave, Edge, and Yandex. Specifically, the study examined the browsers’ sending of data—including unique identifiers and details related to typed URLs—that could be used to track users over time. The findings put the browsers into three categories with Brave getting the highest ranking, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari receiving a medium ranking, and Edge and Yandex lagging behind the rest.

Not exactly surprising.

CNN:

Netflix and YouTube will reduce streaming quality in Europe for at least the next month to prevent the internet collapsing under the strain of unprecedented usage due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Both companies said the measures will affect all video streams for 30 days.

The changes follow appeals from EU officials for streaming services and individual users to ditch high definition video to prevent the internet from breaking. With so many countries on forced lockdowns to fight the spread of the virus, hundreds of millions working from home and even more children out of school, the officials were concerned about the huge strain on the internet.

I’ve noticed this “slow down” (reduced quality) with YouTube videos here in Canada.

PPA:

Make the most of your downtime; over the next few weeks we are unlocking all of our education.

Times are tough – we need to be at our best. More kindness. More patience. More giving. And we at PPA want to pitch in to make things a little easier. What better way to spend your time at home than preparing your business for when things kick back into high gear?

That’s why PPA is opening ALL of our online education to ALL photographers and small business owners worldwide for the next two weeks.

All you need to do is create a free account to access over 1,100+ online classes. If you already have a PPA account, login to access all of PPA’s education.

More and more organizations are stepping up and helping out like this.

Oh You Pretty Things:

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit is streaming his documentaries free worldwide during the global COVID crisis. Each week we’ll be posting another film here. We hope you enjoy them, and please stay strong.

Helvetica is a feature-length documentary about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.

It’s a bit dated but still a great film to watch.

Affinity:

With all that’s going on right now due to the COVID-19 pandemic and in response to the many stories we’re hearing from the creative community about how they’re being severely impacted, we felt it was our responsibility to try to offer as much support as possible during this incredibly difficult time.

That’s why we’ve put in place three new measures which we hope will help at least some of you out there. These are:

A new 90-day free trial of the Mac and Windows versions of the whole Affinity suite

A 50% discount for those who would rather buy and keep the apps on Mac, Windows PC and iPad

A pledge to engage more than 100 freelance creatives for work, spending the equivalent of our annual commissioning budget in the next three months (more details of this will be announced soon).

Your move, Adobe.

Audible:

Stories entertain. They teach. They keep young minds engaged. And they bring us together.

That’s why, for as long as schools are closed, we will be open. Keeping to our founding belief that the spoken word can be inspiring and transporting in deeply intimate ways, we have created Stories.Audible.com—a place where anyone, in any country, can enjoy unlimited streaming of hundreds of titles for kids and families for free.

The stories were hand-picked by our Audible editors and offer a mix of education, entertainment, and general-interest titles, from the classic to the contemporary, with a focus on stories that are suitable for children. The collection includes favorites like Winnie the Pooh, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Aladdin, Jane Eyre and The Call of the Wild.

What a great move by the folks at Audible.

The Verge:

The 50th anniversary of NASA’s infamous Apollo 13 mission is almost here, and a new website just went live today that will let you relive the heart-wrenching journey as if it were happening live. The website, called Apollo 13 in Real Time, provides transcripts, video footage, and audio recordings surrounding the historical flight, posting the material at the exact times they were created half a century ago.

The website is the creation of Ben Feist, a contractor at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston who did a similar project for the Apollo 11 anniversary last summer. It took a team of people eight months to gather all of the historical material for the mission, he says. All in all, the website contains about 90 percent of the documents and footage that exist surrounding Apollo 13. Every word that was spoken by the astronauts on the mission is reproduced in a transcript form, and there are 7,200 hours of audio from NASA’s mission control, much of which was digitized for the first time for the website.

We posted a similar story about Apollo 11’s real-time website. It’s an incredible resource. Take the time to poke around the site and see the wealth of details in it. Amazing work.

Fascinating read. Be sure to click the “View Entire Discussion” button, then focus on Bill’s responses, labeled with the user name thisisbillgates.

John Gruber, referring to this new ad Apple released with their new iPad Pro:

It’s impossible to miss that MacBooks are just as much the butt of the jokes as any PC. “Do not touch the screen.” “Your computer comes with a standard arrow cursor.” “You must stay within reach of a Wi-Fi signal.” “It does not have a camera; to connect one, refer to your instruction manual.”

And:

I get it, all of these are things that make iPads fun and useful. The Mac can take it — it’s the mature workhorse platform. But it’s a little incongruous coming on the same day Apple launched its best-ever MacBook Air.

Fair point. Until Apple releases their version of the the Microsoft Surface that replaces both the Mac and iPad (a mighty big if), they could have kept some distance between the MacBook Air and iPad Pro releases. Odd choice to have that ad drop on the same day as the new MacBook Air.

Well, no, Apple never said any such thing.

The Verge article paints the path that Microsoft took to bring the touch screen Surface to market, while Apple maintained the chasm between the Mac and iPad.

That chasm has been bridged, first by enabling a mouse on the iPad via Accessibility settings, and now by the trackpad support in iPadOS 13.4.

But, to me, rather than being an admission that Microsoft was right all along, the 13.4 addition of trackpad support is more like the emergence of Apple Watch (and a very different approach than the glued on feel of mouse support via Accessibility). As they do, Apple took their time bringing Apple Watch to market, creating something different than the rest of the electronic watches in the market. And, as history has proven, Apple got it right.

Microsoft Surface is, in effect, a touch-screen laptop, with little UI difference between mouse on the tablet and the mouse on a laptop or desktop. To me, the finger is a second class citizen on the Surface and in Windows 10. Apple took a different path here.

With your finger, the elements on your screen are passive. Until you tap on an element, the screen waits for input, with no sense of where your finger is, or is going, until it makes contact with the screen.

With a trackpad, there is context. As you slide the trackpad cursor, and it approaches an element, the cursor animates to give you a sense of context, and the object being approached by the cursor might animate as well. This is a hybrid approach. While it might not be ready for prime-time (time will tell), this shows how carefully Apple is considering this problem, how much they care about creating something that works well, without losing responsiveness.

Looking forward to watching this new hybrid model evolve. Also wondering if the new hybrid model will cross the chasm as iPad apps make their way to macOS via Catalyst.

A fun little machine learning exercise. Upload an image, the site will tell you if it’s a cat (a la the hot dog identifying app from a few years ago on HBO’s Silicon Valley).

This is a rock-solid example of augmented reality.

Get on your iOS device (no rear-facing camera on your Mac) and tap this link.

This is a lot of fun to play with, feels very real, though it is filtered through a screen. It’ll be interesting to see this through some sort of heads up display or goggles.

Mel Magazine: >For an expert opinion, I reached out to the world’s leading water sommelier, Martin Riese. Turns out, he’s not much of a Dasani fan either. > >Dasani, he explains, along with Smartwater, Aquafina and “any other bottled water that doesn’t say ‘spring water’ on the bottle,” is a capitalistic abomination. They take tap water and filter out all of the minerals and chemical contaminants before inserting some combination of minerals until the combination creates a flavor profile people like. “It’s the biggest lie on planet Earth,” Riese says. > >“So when you go to the grocery store, look at the labels: If it says spring water, that means it comes from a naturally occurring source and they cannot do anything to it, it’s 100 percent water created by nature. If it’s a purified water like Dasani, you know it’s nothing else than filtered tap water created in a factory,” Riese says.

I used to drink bottled water like Dasani, but I’ve since moved away from it entirely. Instead, I focus on more sustainable options, especially for larger needs like filling up water storage. That’s why services offering water delivery for tanks have become a fantastic solution. It’s not only convenient but also a great way to ensure a steady supply without the environmental impact of single-use bottles. Interestingly, even when shelves are cleared of most bottled water, you can still spot cases of Dasani lingering behind—it always makes me chuckle! If you are avoiding bottled water altogether, you may check this link here to find services that can help improve your home’s drinking water through the installation of water filtration systems.

AppleInsider:

Apple has set limits on the number of new iPad Pro and Mac devices, as well as current iPhone models, that users can order from its online storefront across the globe.

The Cupertino iPhone maker has occasionally implemented order limits in the past to help curb the gray market, but these new restrictions seemed to be aimed at mitigating lingering supply issues due to COVID-19.

Currently, there appear to be limits on new MacBook Air and Mac mini models with customers restricted to five per order total. For iOS and iPadOS devices, the limits appear to be a bit more stringent, with customers only able to buy two units each of 11-inch iPad Pro and 12.9-inch iPad Pros. The two-per-order limit also applies to every iPhone model Apple currently sells, from the iPhone 11 Pro to the iPhone 8.

Hopefully, people aren’t thinking of hoarding iPads like they’re hoarding toilet paper.