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The Book-Excerpt Edition Tuesday, May 1, 2018

‘Apple News Exclusive’ Promoting John McCain’s Upcoming Memoir With iBooks Excerpt, by Zac Hall, 9to5Mac

Here’s an interesting observation from Walt Mossberg: Apple News is promoting an ‘Apple News Exclusive’ today, complete with a special badge and top spot on the front page of the app.

The ‘News Editors’ Picks’ exclusive isn’t original reporting, however, but instead a book excerpt from Senator John McCain’s new book due out next month.

iPhones, Armed Robbery, And Hacking, by Gustavo Duarte

I hope this motivates you to enable 2FA on all of your accounts, even the unimportant ones. They can interact in incremental and unexpected ways to become your undoing. Moreover, using TOTP apps as the second factor is far safer than SMS.

2016 MacBook Pro Butterfly Keyboards Failing Twice As Frequently As Older Models, by Mike Wuerthele, AppleInsider

Apple launched its new butterfly key-switch keyboard with the MacBook, with some usability complaints starting nearly immediately, but it wasn't until its adoption in the MacBook Pro in 2016 that reliability concerns started popping up —and AppleInsider has the hard data on failure rates.

Stuff

Apple Releases Final Cut Pro 10.4.2 Bug Fix Update To Address Timeline Selections And XML Support, by Jeff Benjamin, 9to5Mac

Bug fix number one fixes an issue related to selecting multiple clips on the timeline using the Shift key or when using a marquee selection. This bug caused additional clips on the timeline to sometimes be inadvertently selected.

Bear 1.5: New Tag Icons, Note Archiving, An Additional Export Option, And More, by John Voorhees, MacStories

Users with large libraries of notes will appreciate the added flexibility as will anyone else who values customizing their apps to suit their work habits.

Develop

Swift Playgrounds Updated With Support For ‘What’s Next’ Suggestions, Speed Improvements, by Peter Cao, 9to5Mac

Today’s update brings the app to version 2.1 and adds support for a new What’s Next feature that suggests other playgrounds based on the progress of your current project.

In addition, this update also brings speedier downloads to those who have multiple Swift Playground users on their network.

Scuttlebutt Regarding Apple’s Cross-Platform UI Project, by John Gruber, Daring Fireball

The general idea is that rather than writing classic procedural code to, say, make a button, then configure the button, then position the button inside a view, you instead declare the button and its attributes using some other form. HTML is probably the most easily understood example. In HTML you don’t procedurally create elements like paragraphs, images, and tables — you declare them with tags and attributes in markup. There’s an industry-wide trend toward declaration, perhaps best exemplified by React, that could be influencing Apple in this direction.

Notes

AirPort Axed, by Benjamin Mayo

Maybe one day, the company will take another stab at it when they have a really good idea, when they can envision something that only Apple can do well. I think six years since the last update of any kind shows they were out of ideas, or at least weren’t motivated to continue it, for the time being.

WhatsApp Founder Plans To Leave After Broad Clashes With Parent Facebook, by Elizabeth Dwoskin, Washington Post

The billionaire chief executive of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, is planning to leave the company after clashing with its parent, Facebook, over the popular messaging service’s strategy and Facebook’s attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption, according to people familiar with internal discussions.

Bottom of the Page

I wish Apple will change Safari so that no stupid web sites will be able to hijack copy-and-paste.

Especially for those stupid web sites that believe their login and 2FA pages are so precious that they disable copy-and-paste so that I cannot use my password manager nor copy-and-paste passwords into their stupid web pages, and I have to type in a whole bunch of nonsense characters one-by-one. Like an animal.

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I blame all these problems with web browsers on Netscape, and its desire to be a platform that can replace Windows.

Today, both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer has been abandoned. Leaving us with all these mess.

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Thanks for reading.