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The Tight-Lipped Edition Monday, January 18, 2016

These Are The Signs Apple Is Working On The Next Major Computing Platform, by Steve Kovach, Business Insider

As always, Apple is tight lipped about what it’s cooking up in its research and development labs. But a recent series of acquisitions and hires shows the company is at least experimenting with augmented reality.

Apple's Purchase Of Emotient Fuels Artificial Intelligence Boom In Silicon Valley, by Phillip Molnar, Gary Robbins and David Pierson, Los Angeles Times

Facebook is working on a virtual personal assistant that can read people's faces and decide whether or not to let them in your home.

Google is investing in the technology to power self-driving cars, identify people on its photo service and build a better messaging app.

Now Apple is adding to its artificial intelligence arsenal. The iPhone maker purchased Emotient, a San Diego maker of facial expression recognition software that can detect emotions to assist advertisers, retailers, doctors and many other professions.

Privacy Vs Gamers

Apple Demands Widow Get Court Order To Access Dead Husband's Password, by Rosa Marchitelli, CBC

A Victoria widow is outraged over Apple's demand that she obtain a court order to retrieve her dead husband's password so she can play games on an iPad.

"I thought it was ridiculous. I could get the pensions, I could get benefits, I could get all kinds of things from the federal government and the other government. But from Apple, I couldn't even get a silly password. It's nonsense," 72-year-old Peggy Bush told Go Public.

Stuff

Fileloupe For OS X Is A Convenient Photo Browser/video player/PDF Viewer, by Dennis Sellers, Apple World Today

Harnessing the power of Apple's Quick Look technology, Fileloupe offers users one of the fastest ways to browse, view and share photos, videos, PDFs and documents.

Roundup: The Best Mac Email Clients For Push Gmail, by Marty Edwards, AppleInsider

The Logic Pros: 3 Overlooked Tricks To Keep Your Logic Sessions Tidy And Efficient, by Justin Kahn, 9to5Mac

WhatsApp Gets Rid Of Annual Subscription Fee, by Harish Jonnalagadda, iMore

Develop

Four Things Working At Facebook Has Taught Me About Design Critique, by Tanner Christensen, Medium

Critique is a team effort, not a one person show. Critique truly becomes valuable when we come together with the intent of understanding, identifying opportunity, exploring, and building up those we work with.

Notes

How Slate, The Washington Post, Bloomberg Fight Ad Blocking, by Lucia Moses, Digiday

If no panacea to combat ad blocking has emerged, that hasn’t stopped publishers from trying a variety of approaches, from ridding their sites of intrusive ads to demanding people disable their ad blockers. At Digiday’s WTF Ad Blocking event on Thursday, several of them from Slate to Forbes to The Huffington Post shared how they’re attacking the problem.

Teletext Time Travel, by Russ J Graham, Transdiffusion

Previously, it was possible – difficult but possible – to recover teletext from SVHS recordings, but they’re as rare as hen’s teeth as the format never really caught on. The data was captured by ordinary VHS but was never clear enough to get anything but a very few correct characters in amongst a massive amount of nonsense.

Technology is changing that.

Bottom of the Page

CoverFlow is the first big feature on iTunes (and then, Finder) that I really didn't care about. On hindsight, this may well be the first sign of the shift of iTunes from something I enjoyed using to something that I don't.

I'm mostly a textual person, I think. I prefer outlines over fishbone diagrams. I make lists, not doodles. I liked the hierarical lists when iTunes and iPods first arrived on the scene. Lists of songs, lists of artists, lists of albums. It was simple and delightful for me.

Now, everything changed. Everything are now pages of pictures and pictures. I miss those simple lists of stuff. And I don't kinow where everything is. (For example, some albums on Apple Music don't end up under the Album page because they end up in the Compilations page.)

~

Thanks for reading.