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The Typing-on-a-Computer Edition Thursday, August 2, 2018

Icon Found In iOS 12 Shows iPad With Thin Bezels, No Home Button Or Notch, by Guilherme Rambo, 9to5Mac

A new asset found in iOS 12 developer beta 5 seemingly confirms a new bezel-less iPad for the fall. The asset is part of the battery usage UI and it shows an iPad with no home button and thinner bezels.

[...]

One thing notably missing from the glyph is a notch.

You Can Turn Off Autocorrect On Your Phone, It's Fine, by Steve Rousseau, Digg

As of today, I am one month autocorrect free, and I am happy to report that I have never felt better. As it turns out, if you disable autocorrect on iOS, it will still highlight things that are misspelled. It's like… typing on a computer. I know that this sound obvious, but literally within minutes of turning off autocorrect, I realized that anything misspelled could be easily corrected with two taps of my thumb.

Sure, I can't just mash away and expect the computer to tidy up after me, and not having autocorrect to fall back on means that I need to pay slightly more attention as I type. But it hasn't turned me into a squinting, inscrutable luddite who has to hunt and peck to transmit the simplest of messages.

Siri Finally Understands “Gazpacho”, by Paul Kafasis, One Foot Tsunami

As far as I can recall, it’s never worked.

App Discovery

Apple Says It Is Removing Apps & In-app Purchases From Its iTunes Affiliate Program, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

The company explains that, with the launch of the new App Store interfaces for iOS and macOS, there are new methods of app discovery that mean less of a focus needs to be on the Affiliate Program.

Apple Removing iOS And Mac Apps From Affiliate Program, by Stephen Hackett, 512 Pixels

Apple is a for-profit company, and it has no bottom-line reason to keep this program open, but sometimes doing the right thing comes with a cost.

Ahead of its Time

“I Have A Secret. My Father Is Steve Jobs”: Lisa Brennan-Jobs Recalls Memories Of Her Famous Father, by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Vanity Fair

I studied my father’s face. What had changed? Why had he admitted it now, after all these years? Of course it was named after me, I thought then. His lie seemed preposterous now. I felt a new power that pulled my chest up.

“That’s the first time he’s said yes,” I told Bono. “Thank you for asking.” As if famous people needed other famous people around to release their secrets.

Adapted from Small Fry: A Memoir, by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, to be published September 4, 2018, by Grove Press.

Developing Solutions

Cupertino City Council Balks At New Tax After Apple Objects, by Nour Malas, Wall Street Journal

Cupertino officials had intended the tax to raise as much as $10 million for transportation projects to help ease crippling traffic into the city, though they hadn’t developed a specific project or spending plan. Instead, they decided to take up the proposal in two years, for the 2020 ballot, giving the city time to work directly with Apple—Cupertino’s biggest employer—and other companies on developing transportation solutions, potentially new public-private funding models, and a spending plan.

Apple Working With Chinese Telecom Firms To Reduce Spam: State Media, by Reuters

Apple Inc is working with Chinese telecom firms on finding ways to reduce junk messages which are received through iMessage, state media reported on Thursday.

Stuff

How To Exploit Apple Mail's Patchy But Powerful Rules To Control Your Email, by William Gallagher, AppleInsider

If you're using an Apple email account then everything goes through iCloud before it gets to your devices so maybe you could set up rules there. Have iCloud deal with deletions or forwarding or out-of-office auto replies.

You can. To our mind, though, the flaw is that the rules you can set up in iCloud are so limited that they're close to useless —and we just don't use them and just can't recommend you do.

However, you can work around this a little and if you do, you can also use the excellent Mail rules on your Mac to help you wherever you are.

We Compared 3 Of The Most Popular Note Taking Apps For iPhone — But The Winner Depends On What You Want To Do, by Kaylee Fagan, Business Insider

These three apps each have invaluable qualities that I believe are unique for the function that they do best. For that reason, I think they are each superior when it comes to specific tasks.

Hands On: New Video Editing Abilities Make ScreenFlow 8 A Mac Professional's Must-have Tool, by William Gallagher, AppleInsider

ScreenFlow 8 used to be an exceptional tool for recording your Mac's screen and it still is —but the new update has it knocking at the door of apps like Final Cut Pro for video production.

Develop

The End Of Employees, by Lauren Weber, Wall Street Journal

The shift is radically altering what it means to be a company and a worker. More flexibility for companies to shrink the size of their employee base, pay and benefits means less job security for workers. Rising from the mailroom to a corner office is harder now that outsourced jobs are no longer part of the workforce from which star performers are promoted.

Notes

Password Breach Teaches Reddit That, Yes, Phone-based 2FA Is That Bad, by Dan Goodin, Ars Technica

The upshot of all of this is that SMS-based 2FA is better than no 2FA at all, but only minimally so. Sites that allow stronger forms of 2FA but offer SMS- or call-based 2FA as a fallback should take notice. An intermediate improvement is to use phone-based apps with no fallback to SMS. The most superior forms of 2FA that are viable now include physical tokens with no use of OTPs or, if that’s considered too difficult for users, OTPs generated solely by apps. Security practitioners have been preaching this gospel for years. Reddit’s post demonstrates that people who should know better aren’t always heeding this advice.

The Sadness Of Deleting Your Old Tweets, by Emily Dreyfuss, Wired

I held my breath and pushed the button. “Delete All,” it read. Yes, I clicked, do it. “Are You Sure?” it asked. I wasn’t. But I’d made a decision, about which I’d written an entire article already, and I wasn’t about to renege.

The tweets started disappearing in batches. I refreshed my timeline every few minutes to find myself back in time, tweets from 2016 at the top of my feed, as though suddenly it was just after election day again and I was… unhinged. Refresh. Now I went back further, 2015, tweets about my newborn son. Oh god, I seem happy! Refresh. 2014, tweets about… shoes and the weather? Was I really ever so naive?

Bottom of the Page

I have turned off 3D Touch. I haven't turned off Autocorrect.

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The notch on the phone is a workaround, a compromise. It shouldn't be a defining feature of iOS devices. If the FaceID iPad doesn't come with a notch, it will be great.

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Thanks for reading.