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The Separate-Processor Edition Tuesday, November 29, 2016

How A Little iOS Magic In Every New Touch Bar Adds Security, by Glenn Fleishman, Macworld

Apple having a separate processor and OS to handle Touch ID is good news for consumers, because iOS, watchOS, and tvOS are more clamped down than macOS, which remains more open to inspect and manipulation as a general-computing platform. While iOS has suffered exploits, there should be even fewer paths to the Touch Bar to find and trigger flaws, as it acts as a peripheral rather than running apps directly.

Don’t Be Fooled: The Mac App Store Is Full Of Scams, by How To Geek

Seemingly official applications of dubious value are way to easy to accidentally find by searching. It’s understandable that Apple wants the App Store to appear full, but leaving things seemingly designed to deceive people is hardly an answer.

The Devil’s In The Dashed Line Details, by Khoi Vinh, Substraction

This is not to say that Adobe apps do not have lots of work ahead to be simpler, more performant, more in tune with what users want. It’s just to say that creating software for designers requires an extraordinary amount of attention to even the smallest details; you have to account for nearly every detail that every designer would ever want to finesse. You know how designers are; we’re fussy.

How I Drowned My Fiancé's iPhone 7 Plus On Vacation, by Serenity Caldwell, iMore

The iPhone's ten-second exposure to water was to be its downfall. Ten minutes later, the screen had a water leak; within an hour, the Taptic Engine had shut down; and by the next day, even after burying it in rice, it looked more like a multicolored piece of art than an iPhone 7.

And that's how, on Black Friday, we ended up at an Apple Store to replace the poor thing. Happy Thanksgiving!

Stuff

Workflow 1.6 For iOS Adds Features And Redesign To Win Over Casual Users, by Mike Wuerthele, AppleInsider

It is well implemented, and it is going to be enough to tip more people over into trying out Workflow and seeing how it can dramatically speed up their most repetitive tasks.

Canadian mHealth Project Uses iPads For School Hearing Tests, by Eric Wicklund, mHealthIntelligence

Elementary schools in three Canadian cities will soon conduct hearing tests with an iPad, thanks to an mHealth program launched by the University of Ottawa Medical School. It’s the first step in what the medical school students hope will someday be a national program.

Panic Discontinuing Status Board Stats App Following Final iOS 10 Support Update, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

One contributing factor, the company writes, is that the app is targeted mainly towards pro users and there’s simply not a large pro market on iOS. [...] Panic also notes that it was always a challenge to integrate all types of data that pro users wanted with the limited revenue it had.

Notes

Australian Regulator Opposes Collective Bank Bargaining On Apple Pay, by Jamie Freed, Reuters

The decision is a setback for the banks' hopes to bypass Apple's in-house payments system and roll out their own versions free of competition from the Silicon Valley giant, which has the biggest smartphone market share in Australia.

It also sets a precedent which may solidify Apple's dominance of the digital wallet system globally, since the Australian banks had mounted the first challenge to it.

'A Classic Commons Problem': Publishers Are Going Notifications Crazy, by Max Willens, Digiday

Publishers have quickly realized the power of mobile notifications in drawing people back to content, so naturally they’re at risk of overdoing it.

“This is a classic commons problem,” said Andrew McLaughlin, the co-founder of Betaworks. “It’s a space where if everybody behaves badly, everything gets trashed.”