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The See-The-World Edition Saturday, January 30, 2016

Apple Builds Secret Team To Kick-start Virtual Reality Effort, by Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times

Apple has assembled a large team of experts in virtual and augmented reality and built prototypes of headsets that could one day rival Facebook’s Oculus Rift or Microsoft’s Hololens, as it seeks new sources of growth beyond the iPhone.

The secret research unit includes hundreds of staff from a series of carefully targeted acquisitions, as well as employees poached from companies that are working on next-generation headset technologies including Microsoft and camera start-up Lytro, according to people familiar with the initiative.

Apple Acquires Flyby Media, Makers Of Tech That “Sees” The World Around You, by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch

Apple’s VR ambitions continue. According to a new report from the Financial Times, Apple has acquired an augmented reality startup called Flyby Media, which developed technology that allows mobile phones to “see” the world around them.

Apple’s VR Team Is Real, Here’s Who They Are, by Chris Burns, Slashgear

Stuff

Tweetbot For iOS And Mac Updated With Twitter's Hearts And Likes, by Aldrin Calimlim, AppAdvice

On iOS, the lists of trends are now truncated to smaller sets, mute filters can now be shared again by long-pressing on the filters tab, and retweets from unfollowed accounts are no longer shown on the timeline.

Downcast For iPhone Adds CarPlay Integration For Enhanced Podcast Playback, by Zac Hall, 9to5Mac

iPhone Users, The AdWords App For iOS Has Arrived, by Ginny Marvin, Search Engine Land

With the app, you can get campaign performance stats and update budgets and bids on the go. You can also take action on campaign suggestions and get billing and ad status notifications from the app. And you can call an AdWords rep if you need support.

Develop

Swift Struct Storage, by Mike Ash

Swift's classes tend to be straightforward for most people new to the language to understand. They work pretty much like classes in any other language. Whether you've come from Objective-C or Java or Ruby, you've worked with something similar. Swift's structs are another matter. They look sort of like classes, but they're value types, and they don't do inheritance, and there's this copy-on-write thing I keep hearing about? Where do they live, anyway, and how do they work? Today, I'm going to take a close look at just how structs get stored and manipulated in memory.

Making 20% Time Work, by Begriffs

I’d like to share a technique I developed to organize teamwork on open-source days. It helps each person do the work they love while coordinating everyone into an efficient machine. I noticed remarkable results after applying it for a few weeks. My coworkers went from diffuse experiments to regularly making tools that would trend on Github. It felt great and best of all it is reproducible.

Coding As A Career Isn't Right For Me, by Tom Reece

What do I really want? I want to pay off this massive $65,000 student loan debt bill that earned me the "privilege" to build someone else's dream from 9 to 5. And then I want to get away from coding for you and code for me. I don't like coding for you. I don't think any of us do. We only do it because you pay us way too much money and we have loans to pay off. We're nice components of the system.

Why You Should Avoid Vibrating Color Combinations, by Eli Schiff, Envatotuts+

In this quick article you’ll learn about how color vibration affects interface legibility in the context of web and interface design.

Notes

Apple Maps Stops Sending People Searching For "Abortion" To Adoption Centers, by Christina Farr, Fast Company

In the past week, after performing identical searches to earlier ones, we received a more comprehensive list of Planned Parenthood facilities and other abortion providers. Adoption clinics continue to pop up, but near the bottom of the list.

Why the sudden change? One explanation is that these changes are a result of the company's efforts to improve its Apple Maps search results with the launch of Apple Nearby. The company has been working to more accurately categorize small and large businesses for Apple Nearby, which was released with the most recent software update. With the new Nearby feature in iOS 9, Apple confirmed that "typed search queries deliver more relevant results from more categories."

Bottom of the Page

To steal a quote from somebody we all know, VR is a feature, not a product.

What is the product? The car. No, I'm not talking about having some VR goggles in your car. But rather, all the technologies of VR is going to help in the car's self-driving and navigation capabilities.

Or at least this is what I hope. VR goggles are silly.

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Can all-you-can-listen be coming to Audible too?

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Thanks for reading.