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The Sweat-the-Details Edition Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Apple Now Runs On 100% Green Energy, And Here’s How It Got There, by Mark Sullivan, Fast Company

The achievement is the culmination of a furious effort over the past six years that involved financing, building, or locating new renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind farms, near the company’s facilities Apple says it now has 25 operational renewable energy projects–with 15 more now in construction–in 11 countries.

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According to Jackson, it would have been easy enough for Apple to trumpet its landmark achievement in renewable energy earlier. “If you look at our trajectory, for the last couple of years we’ve been close to 100%,” she says. “It’s just four percent more, but it’s four percent done the right way. So this announcement feels like a classic Apple product release. Like our products, we sweat the details, we have pretty strict standards, and we prefer to wait and meet our standards than to rush and make a claim.”

The New iOS Update Killed Touch Functionality On iPhone 8s Repaired With Aftermarket Screens, by Matthew Gault, Motherboard

According to Oberdick, every iPhone screen is powered by a small microchip, and that chip is what the repair community believes to be causing the issue. For the past six months, shops have been able to replace busted iPhone 8 screens with no problem, but something in the update killed touch functionality. According to several people I spoke to, third-party screen suppliers have already worked out the issue, but fixing the busted phones means re-opening up the phone and upgrading the chip.

Stuff

Darkroom Releases Version 3.5, by Josh Ginter, The Sweet Setup

Darkroom scans photos you’ve shot in Portrait Mode and allows you to apply edits to the foreground and background separately. This is especially handy if you’re looking to bring an image’s entire focus onto your subject. Darkroom’s Depth Editing is a good example of a feature that could only happen thanks to Apple’s Portrait Mode — a DSLR or mirrorless camera separates a foreground or background simply based on physics and the construction of a lens.

Microsoft Office And The Files App Finally Play Nice Together, by Ryan Christoffel, MacStories

Now, iOS users can go straight to the Files app, locate the appropriate document, and open it directly with only a tap or two.

Develop

Will Apple Redefine Mobile Advertising With SKAdNetwork?, by Eric Benjamin Seufert, Mobile Dev Memo

The SKAdNetwork APIs launched with very little fanfare, and it's not clear as of yet what the impact on the mobile advertising ecosystem will be. Apple certainly has the power to incentivize use of the SKAdNetwork APIs over the use of third-party attribution systems, but it seems likely that they will tread lightly with respect to Google and Facebook. Ad networks will require some sort of certification from Apple in order to attribute their installs via SKAdNetwork, and it's possible that some ad networks (especially those that are known to peddle fraudulent traffic) may not be certified.