A Few Silent Men - You want the dialogue? You can't handle the dialogue.
Control is moving back to the center, where powerful companies and governments are creating choke points. They are using those choke points to destroy our privacy, limit our freedom of expression, and lock down culture and commerce. Too often, we give them our permission—trading liberty for convenience—but a lot of this is being done without our knowledge, much less permission.
In Steve Jobs’s eras as CEO, Apple reflected his character and qualities. That was thrilling in most ways, because he demanded something close to perfection. But then the underdog revolutionized mobile computing and became the winner—one day we all realized it was one of the planet’s most powerful, profitable and valuable companies. Apple became the kind of company I prefer not to support: control-freakish to a fault with customers, software developers and the press; and, I came to believe, even dangerous to the future of open networks and user-controlled technology.
While Apple is busy working on watches and television sets and self-driving electric cars that takes pictures of the streets, I do hope that Apple is really serious about privacy.
Apple has made good decisions, in my humble opinion, about privacy with respect to third parties. It chose not to give customer information up to app makers, no matter if they are one-person-developer or large corporations like New York Times or Conde Nast. iMessage and FaceTime are secured by encryption, according to experts, rather well. Customer information doesn't leave the phone in Apple Pay transactions.
However, Apple still does know a lot about its customers. The telcos do know a lot too. In a sense, of course they know a lot. Apple need to know about customers' purchases, for example, so that customers can re-download apps or share family purchases. Telcos need to know about customers, for example, so that they can, well, provide and meter connectivity. Can Apple work towards more privacy for customers in these areas? I am not a smart person so I really don't know if there are real obstacles that even Apple can't overcome... But, I do think there are different tradeoffs between security and privacy and convenience that Apple can make to enhance privacy for customers and freedom for developers, and I hope Apple is studying and building them.
See also this next news item when balancing between security, privacy, and freedom...
There is sufficient proof in the comments section alone that patients are using these apps not for recreational purposes, but as medical devices, having the potential to lead to disastrous health consequences. Apple and Google shouldn’t allow developers to hide behind veiled disclaimers that try to prevent FDA regulation and liability if someone were to die. If an app even has the potential to be used as a medical device using sensors on a phone, it should be regulated in the appropriate manner.
Sustaining complex misdirection required an editing tool that was just the opposite — clear, straightforward, and accessible enough that the directors could edit footage along with lead editor Jan Kovac. It needed to be fast so they could experiment with scores of alternate takes. It had to be flexible so they could easily move between cutting on Mac Pro in the edit suite and working with MacBook Pro on location. And it had to be robust enough to reliably organize and process 2K Apple ProRes 4444 footage from production through multiple stages of post.
After researching several workflows, Requa and Ficarra decided to cut their major studio feature entirely in Final Cut Pro X. The results were even better than they’d expected. The movie came in on time and under budget, and it played and looked just as they’d envisioned it. “We got exactly the film we set out to make,” says Requa. “What I love about Final Cut Pro X is that it allowed me to be involved with, and in control of, every aspect of making our film.”
Also:
Facebook's mobile prototyping tool, Origami, has been updated to version 2.0 with plenty of new features that include code export, Sketch integration, and an iOS app.
Ambitious media-manager app views and organizes over 30 file types.
The iOS people never stopped laughing at the growing stack of test devices in all colors and shapes hogging our developer’s desk. We did hit a few bumps further down the road. Still, Android has come a long way from the unsightly UX and low quality device mess it was just three years ago. Here’s what we have learned on the way to the release of iA Writer for Android.
This photo has made me far happier than it probably should have done. pic.twitter.com/tW2sXOJIQc
— Amanda (@Pandamoanimum) February 24, 2015Thanks for reading.