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The Individually-Sourced Edition Thursday, April 14, 2016

Your iPhone’s 500,000-Mile Journey To Your Pocket, by Edward Humes, Wired

Along with the processor and graphics chipset and the rechargeable battery (the most massive internal part), there is a long list of individually sourced components: two cameras, a video recorder, a digital compass, a satellite-navigation system, a barometer, a fingerprint scanner, a high-resolution color display, an LED flashlight, touch sensors, a stereo system, a motion sensor/game controller, encryption circuits, an array of radio transmitters that connect via WiFi, Bluetooth and near-field communication bands, and, last and also least, the guts of a cellular telephone.

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.

iTunes Just Got A Little Less Complex

Apple To End iTunes Allowances On May 25, by Mitchel Broussard, MacRumors

Apple has announced that it will be ending support for iTunes Allowances, a feature of the service that allowed parents to automatically place money into a child's iTunes account on a monthly basis. As of April 13, users can no longer create new iTunes Allowance deposits, with the feature officially getting cut-off for good on May 25, 2016.

Fortnightly Release

Apple Releases First Update To Safari Technology Preview Browser, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

Apple today released a new update for Safari Technology Preview, the experimental browser that debuted on March 30. Release 2 includes a long list of feature tweaks and updates to JavaScript, CSS, Web APIs, Web Inspector, Accessibility, Rendering, Media, and Networking, plus bug fixes.

Write On Rides

Now You Can Write The Great American Novel On The Subway, by Kit Eaton, New York Times

It used to be that when a moment of inspiration struck writers, they would have to rush over to a stone tablet, or find parchment and ink, to record their thoughts. Later, writers had to find paper and a typewriter, or a laptop or desktop computer, to get busy with their storytelling.

Nowadays, they can write into a smartphone and tablet app almost anywhere when an idea seizes them. So what are some of the popular apps for scribes?

Stuff

The iPad Pro’s Killer Display Proves Pixels Ain’t Everything, by Brian Barrett, Wired

According to Dr. Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies, the iPad Pro has enough improvements to make it not just the best LCD tablet or smartphone display available; it even keeps up with industry-leading OLED tech.

Jamie Oliver's Cooking App For iOS Gives You A Wealth Of Guides And Recipes From The Pro Himself, by Luis D., PhoneArena.com

The famous British chef and TV show personality has a cooking app on iOS that looks and handles as nice as a recipes app possibly could with its slick and easy to navigate interface. The app gets updated with new recipe content and seasonal collections every Monday. It also features a cook-friendly search tool that comes with dietary tags and cooking times for each recipe.

Brilliant - Franz Combines All Your Messaging Apps (Slack, Skype, Whatsapp) Into One Platform!, by Mohd Shazni, Vulcan Post

Develop

This Guy Sold His Last Startup To Yahoo For $40 Million — Now He's Trying To Make Everyone A Better Programmer, by Matt Weinberger, Business Insider

The Kite software for Mac OS X sits next to your development tools and automatically makes suggestions and autocompletes your code. For beginners, it provides lots of examples and a social network-like community to ask questions. For the advanced programmer, it's a way to step up your game with suggestions drawn from the wisdom of the community.

It's meant to provide an Internet-powered improvement to the experience of Pair Programming, a popular technique where two programmers team up to spot-check each other to deliver better code.

Developer Tips: Quality Assurance Checks Worth Doing, by Vidit Bhargava, The App Factor

While I was completing the development for LookUp, I started looking for tips that could help me improve the user experience. I came across a lot of interesting resources that helped me build a small list of items I could test each time I submitted to the App Store. More importantly, there were a few things that were so easy to miss during a regular test of the app that I’ve made a Separate checklist for them.

Facebook Open-sources Developer Tools For iOS, by Caitlin McGarry, Macworld

During F8 on Wednesday, Facebook announced that it just open-sourced two tools for iOS developers so they can create apps much more quickly: Remodel, an Objective-C code generation tool that offers a quick way for developers to flow data around their apps, and the iOS Memory Management Bundle, which includes tools like the Retain Cycle Detector that will help you prevent memory crashes in your app.

Notes

Source: Nothing Significant Found On San Bernardino iPhone So Far, by CBS News

A law enforcement source tells CBS News that so far nothing of real significance has been found on the San Bernardino terrorist's iPhone, which was unlocked by the FBI last month without the help of Apple.

Apple iPhone Unlocking Maneuver Likely To Remain Secret, by Joseph Menn and Mark Hosenball, Reuters

The company that helped the FBI unlock a San Bernardino shooter's iPhone to get data has sole legal ownership of the method, making it highly unlikely the technique will be disclosed by the government to Apple or any other entity, Obama administration sources said this week.

Bottom of the Page

My very first iPhone failed with an unresponsive home button. Many iPhones later, I use Launch Center Pro's Today Widget to minimise the number of times I click on that home button nowadays.

I figure a lot of people turn on AssistiveTouch on their iPhone for the same reason: Home-button-clicking avoidance.

I wish Apple will bring the iPad's gestures -- especially the four-finger-pinch to go to home screen -- to the iPhone.

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Software is hard. It seems like almost every app I use daily on my iPhone have bugs.

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Thanks for reading.