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The Aid-Pledge Edition Friday, October 13, 2017

Apple Ups Wine Country Aid Pledge To $1 Million As Facebook, Google Offer Help, by Kate Galbraith, San Franisco Chronicle

Apple said it plans a $1 million donation to fire-relief efforts and is also matching employee donations two-for-one. “Our thoughts are with our Bay Area friends & neighbors affected by wildfires,” CEO Tim Cook tweeted Tuesday.

Tim Cook Took A Stroll In 'Breathtaking' Swedish Forests With A Company That Makes Apple's Packaging, by Sam Shead, Business Insider

Holmen has secretly been supplying Apple with packaging for products like the iPad for over a decade, according to Swedish news site Dagens Industri (Di).

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"This has been secret for so many years. It's nice to get some cred when he came and greeted us after more than ten years of development work together, " Sjölund reportedly told Di.

Google's AutoML Project Teaches AI To Write Learning Software, by Tom Simonite, Wired

In a project called AutoML, Google’s researchers have taught machine-learning software to build machine-learning software. In some instances, what it comes up with is more powerful and efficient than the best systems the researchers themselves can design.

Stuff

BBEdit 12: Here's To A Million More, by Jason Snell, Six Colors

I do a lot of text and data formatting in BBEdit, and one of the great additions in this version is a Columns editing command, that enables quick processing of comma- and tab-delimited text ranges—you can cut, copy, delete, and rearrange columns. You might think that sounds like an esoteric feature, but I’ve probably pasted a tab-delimited text block from BBEdit into Microsoft Excel purely for column management hundreds of times at this point. Now I don’t have to. (Though I’d love it if BBEdit would add support for even more functions on columnar data, like sorting and maybe even styling.)

Back at IDG, I built an AppleScript script that I’d pass around inside a BBEdit package that would take a Markdown file and format in some very particular ways for the quirks of our content-management system and site design. Embedded in that script, as well, were a bunch of text replacements based on our house style—replacing “web site” with “website”, for example. BBEdit 12 includes a feature like that, too—it’s a tool called Canonize that batch searches-and-replaces text strings.

More Great Shelf Apps To Boost iPad Productivity, by Ryan Christoffel, MacStories

While all the apps I originally highlighted continue to fill this role well, several additional quality apps have launched that bring new things to the table in this young category of apps.

Augmented Reality? Pogue Checks Out 7 Of The First iPhone AR Apps, by David Pogue, Yahoo

Last month, Apple released iOS 11, required to use all of the new AR apps— and, in effect, made the iPhone the most common AR platform on Earth.

Now the apps themselves are reaching the app store. Plenty of them are games, of course, and that’s great—but I wanted to see if these apps can actually be useful. Software companies have had only 12 weeks to write these apps, so they’re mostly fairly simple. I thought I’d sample the first wave and give you a report.Google's most underrated app finally comes to iPhone](https://www.cultofmac.com/508043/googles-underrated-app-finally-comes-iphone/), by Killian Bell, Cult of Mac

Opinion Rewards is a genuine and incredibly easy way to earn real money. Google sends out more than 3 million surveys every week from companies big and small. You get the chance to answer some of them and you get paid up to $1 a time for your efforts.