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The Day-to-Day Edition Thursday, June 14, 2018

A Week In The Life Of WWDC 2018 Scholarship Winners, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors

Each year, students aged 13 or older at accredited schools and STEM organizations can apply to become a WWDC scholar. This year, Apple tasked applicants with creating a short interactive scene in a Swift playground, and winners were selected based on the technical skills shown, creativity, and accompanying written responses.

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Apple was kind enough to provide me with a media pass to attend WWDC this year, and during my week in San Jose, I crossed paths with a few of these scholars. After learning about how much fun they were having, I was inspired to connect with more scholars to have them share their day-to-day experiences.

Encrypted Messaging Is Essential—But It Isn’t Magic, by Lily Hay Newman, Wired

While end-to-end encryption is a vital privacy protection that can thwart many types of surveillance, you still need to understand the other avenues a government or attacker could take to obtain chat logs. Even when a service works perfectly factors like where messages are stored, who else has received them, and who else has access to devices that contain them play an important role in your security. If you're using encrypted chat apps as one tool in your privacy and security toolbox, more power to you. If you're relying on it as a panacea, you're more at risk than you realize.

Beta Track

Apple Finally Has The Right Attitude About Notifications In iOS 12, by Dieter Bohn, The Verge

Taken together, I see a shift away from treating notifications as a feed of information you just dip in and out of. It’s a recognition that notifications are like email: some are very important, most are not, and we need ways to differentiate between them.

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What’s important about this attitude shift is that Apple is adding quite a bit of complexity to iOS. It’s a recognition that hard problems like notifications sometimes require complicated solutions. Whether or not Apple has struck the right balance of simplicity and complexity is a matter for the review, but for right now, I think I can speak to the philosophy of it.

Shortcuts: A New Vision For Siri And iOS Automation, by Federico Viticci, MacStories

On the surface, Shortcuts the app looks like the full-blown Workflow replacement heavy users of the app have been wishfully imagining for the past year. But there is more going on with Shortcuts than the app alone. Shortcuts the feature, in fact, reveals a fascinating twofold strategy: on one hand, Apple hopes to accelerate third-party Siri integrations by leveraging existing APIs as well as enabling the creation of custom SiriKit Intents; on the other, the company is advancing a new vision of automation through the lens of Siri and proactive assistance from which everyone – not just power users – can reap the benefits.

While it's still too early to comment on the long-term impact of Shortcuts, I can at least attempt to understand the potential of this new technology. In this article, I'll try to explain the differences between Siri shortcuts and the Shortcuts app, as well as answering some common questions about how much Shortcuts borrows from the original Workflow app. Let's dig in.

Apple To Close iPhone Security Hole That Police Use To Crack Devices, by Jack Nicas, New York Times

Apple said it was planning an iPhone software update that would effectively disable the phone’s charging and data port — the opening where users plug in headphones, power cables and adapters — an hour after the phone is locked. In order to transfer data to or from the iPhone using the port, a person would first need to enter the phone’s password. (Phones could still be charged without a password.)

Such a change would hinder law enforcement officials, who have typically been opening locked iPhones by connecting another device running special software to the port, often days or even months after the smartphone was last unlocked. News of Apple’s planned software update has begun spreading through security blogs and law enforcement circles — and many in investigatory agencies are infuriated.

Stuff

iPhone X Burst Mode, Slo-mo Featured In New Apple Photography Tutorials, by Malcolm Owen, AppleInsider

Published on Thursday morning to coincide with the start of the sporting event, the tutorials consist of a collection of five videos. While four of the videos provide educational content, a fifth titled "How to shoot Soccer on iPhone X" provides a compilation of clips, showing the kind of images the user could create using the mobile device.

Reviewed: Apple HomePod Goes Stereo And Multi-room, by David Pogue, Yahoo

HomePods have always sounded fantastic. Reasonable people can disagree on whether or not it’s the best sounding smart speaker on the market [...], but few complain about its sound quality.

But in stereo—ooh, man. Yes, obviously, there’s twice as much sonic power now. But there’s more to it than that; the sum of the two speakers sounds somehow greater than its parts. The clean, musical bass, already a HomePod specialty, blossoms.

Office Getting A New Consistent Interface Across Web, Desktop, And Mobile, by Peter Bright, Ars Technica

Microsoft is overhauling the interfaces of all the Office versions to bring a much more consistent look and feel across the various platforms that the applications support.