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The First-Day-Of-Spring Edition Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Apple Announces New Watch Bands With ‘Vibrant Colors For Spring’, by Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac

On the first day of spring, Apple has announced a new collection of Apple Watch bands with ‘vibrant colors and unique designs.’

The new bands include Sport, Nylon and classic buckle designs as well as special Nike and Hermès models.

Beware Taking Your Mac Running High Sierra To The Genius Bar: APFS Might Surprise Them, by Charles Arthur, The Overspill

At this point I suddenly realised why the network-booted versions hadn’t been able to run the video card drivers from my hard drive, and now they could. The network drives were formatted with HFS+, which is the file system Apple has been using on Mac OSX (and MacOS) for a couple of decades. That’s why the version number on the network drive was 10.12 – the file format for Sierra.

But I had brought the machine in running 10.13 – High Sierra – which uses the APFS filesystem. [...] That, of course, is why the Genius’s HFS+-encoded 10.12 network drive couldn’t understand my APFS-encoded SSD. So I’d wiped the hard drive for nothing. If there had been an APFS-encoded network drive, it could have booted up the machine and run the video test and found the problem. (Well, probably.)

After Cambridge Analytica Scandal, Publishers See Apple News As A Solid Alternative To Being Burned By Facebook, Google, by Daniel Eran Dilger, AppleInsider

The exposure of how Cambridge Analytica was able to obtain private data on 50 million Facebook users without permission, and why Facebook did nothing for two years after finding out about the egregious misuse of the massive social graph it maintains, has awakened a "Delete Facebook" movement among users tired of web advertising's malicious incompetence running roughshod over any remaining notion of online privacy and digital security.

But it's also a wakeup call to news publishers, who have long partnered with Facebook and Google with the expectation that all of the surveillance data those advertisers collect would eventually be of benefit to publishers, rather than just continuing to take away the revenues that have historically supported journalism.

Stuff

'Today View' Is The Underutilized iPhone Feature That Mimics The Best Thing About Android Phones, by Prachi Bhardwaj, Business Insider

The default Today View displays the date, time, weather, next appointment, and stock prices. Once I updated it, my Today View had icons for speed dials, messaging conversations, quick Chrome actions, and my route home, to name a few.

Apple's apps offer a pretty good variety of actions — I appreciated finally being able to see the amount of battery left in my Apple battery pack without putting it on the charger, for example — but the third-party apps that make even better use of the widget were even more exciting.

Use PhonoPaper To Turn Drawings Into Music, And Sound Into Images, by Charlie Sorrel, Cult of Mac

PhonoPaper is an iPhone app that turns sound into images, and uses the camera to turn pictures back into sound. It’s also probably the most fun you’ll have with your iPhone today.

Trello iOS App Sees Major Update With Multi-select Support, Custom Fields Power-Up, Drag And Drop, More, by Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac

The refresh brings its Custom Fields Power-Up functionality, clickable links in checklists and comments, multi-select and drag and drop support, and more.

Bottom of the Page

As a young child who liked to read, I once believed that I would grow up and become a book-seller. (I was being realistic by not choosing the goal of growing up and become a writer.) And I believe I am not alone, judging by the number of books and articles that I've read about others chasing their passion by opening a book store.

I have not realize that dream yet. And I do know that selling books is not a good business to be in.

But, in this day and age (of digital content and the Internet), shouldn't it be easier to own a bookshop, virtual or otherwise? Or am I just not looking hard enough?

~

Thanks for reading.