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The Museum-Experience Edition Saturday, June 4, 2016

A Is For App: Rodin, Art Museum Changing Visitor Experience With Tech, by Alison Burdo, Philadelphia Business Journal

Inspired by the popular book "A is for Art Museum" by Katy Friedland and Marla K. Shoemaker, the app was first introduced to a select audience last summer through the museum's family-friendly Art Splash summer program. Some private tour groups also got to experience the new tech over the past year.

The children's book, first published in 2008, connects the museum and pieces in its collection with a letter in the alphabet.

Using a similar model, visitors can use the free app as both a guide and a game. Stick to the alphabet's order and the iPad will pull up a map of the museum, directing you from a painting to a sculpture to an installation.

Retro Apple Fan Makes 3D Miniatures Of Classic Macs, by David Pierini, Cult Of Mac

Self-taught hardware hacker and 3D printer artist Charles Mangin happily tries to satisfy those vintage tech longings by recreating pieces of Apple’s past in miniature. He even brings the screens to life — sort of.

When It Just Didn't Work

Apple Needs A Report Button For When iCloud Music Library Plays The Wrong Version, by Kirk McElhearn, Macworld

Apple needs to include a way to flag incorrect tracks. Because this is more than just annoying; it’s unfair. You may really want to hear that live album, or you may not like live albums at all. And if you bought a song with explicit lyrics, you don’t want to hear the bowdlerized version. You have the right to hear what you want.

Stuff

Taking OS X Security Seriously, by J. D. Biersdorfer, New York Times

In addition to offering its own suggestions for safer computing to Mac users, Apple promotes the security features it builds into OS X, including malware detection and the ability to encrypt data with the FileVault tool. To avoid malware, the company also advises users to install software from the Mac App Store or other trusted sources only.

Develop

Apple Updates WWDC App With Dark Theme, First Apple TV Version Ahead Of June 13th Conference, by Zac Hall, 9to5Mac

Apple has updated its WWDC app for iPhone and iPad with a new look and feel ahead of the annual conference later this month. The updated version of the app also includes tvOS support for the first time. This means video content and session information can be accessed from the fourth generation Apple TV.

The Clean Screen Habit, by Brent Simmons, Inessential

Having these two panes clear tells me that the baseline health of the project is good. And it ensures that when something does appear, it’s an extraordinary event that I can’t miss — and can’t miss dealing with.

Notes

How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War To Crush Google Plus, by Antonio García Martínez, Vanity Fair

The contest for users, he told us, would now be direct and zero-sum. Google had launched a competing product; whatever was gained by one side would be lost by the other. It was up to all of us to up our game while the world conducted live tests of Facebook versus Google’s version of Facebook and decided which it liked more. He hinted vaguely at product changes we would consider in light of this new competitor. The real point, however, was to have everyone aspire to a higher bar of reliability, user experience, and site performance.

In a company whose overarching mantras were DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT and PERFECT IS THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD, this represented a course correction, a shift to the concern for quality that typically lost out to the drive to ship. It was the sort of nagging paternal reminder to keep your room clean that Zuck occasionally dished out after Facebook had suffered some embarrassing bug or outage.

Eerily Empty Louvre: What It’s Like When Floods Keep Tourists Away, by Lilia Blaise, New York Times

The square at the center of the Louvre, dominated by I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid, was desolate early Friday morning, save for a few tourists taking selfies.

The museum was closed to visitors, as Paris experienced its worst flooding since 1982 — but inside, staff members and volunteers had worked around the clock to remove artworks from the threat of the rising waters of the Seine River.

Punctual Time Travel Depends On How Fast The Earth Spins, by Scott K. Johnson, Ars Technica

Want to set your time machine to catch a solar eclipse with a group of curious Mesopotamians in the year 700 BCE? It's not as simple as you think. You need to adjust for the subtle slowing of Earth’s rotation over time and know the history of sea level change—and even those bits of knowledge might not be able to get you there on time. That's the conclusion that a team led by Harvard’s Carling Hay reached when they looked at what the ancient astronomical record tells us about our planet's timekeeping.

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