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The Going-Up-In-Flames Edition Wednesday, September 12, 2018

The Explosive Problem With Recycling iPads, iPhones And Other Gadgets: They Literally Catch Fire., by Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post

Around the world, garbage trucks and recycling centers are going up in flames. The root of the problem: volatile lithium-ion batteries sealed inside our favorite electronics from Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and more. They’re not only dangerous but also difficult to take apart — making e-waste less profitable, and contributing to a growing recycling crisis.

These days, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are in smartphones, tablets, laptops, ear buds, toys, power tools, scooters, hoverboards and e-cigarettes.

IPhones Should Be DTF, by Rachel Withers, Slate

D and F are uncomfortably close, but Kocienda’s nanny state could have simply made duck an alternate suggestion for when users type the F word, rather than overruling them—and vice versa proposed fuck for duck.

Stuff

The Logitech Crayon Is A Good Apple Pencil Substitute That Makes Some Compromises, by Dami Lee, The Verge

You can see the subtle changes in line width and pen pressure, and the experience of drawing felt a lot more natural with the Apple Pencil. Ergonomically, I found that gripping both styluses felt more or less the same, but kids with smaller hands may feel more comfortable holding the Crayon.

iMessage Has A Bunch Of Secret Games, by Chris Edwards, Digital Spy

From classics like Connect Four and chess to Word Hunt and Tanks, a wide range of iMessage-compatible games are available to download from Apple's App Store to play with your friends while texting.

Develop

How Apple Watch Apps' Death Spiral Nearly Killed My iPhone App, by Graham Bower, Cult of Mac

Two years ago, my partner and I launched an Apple Watch app to complement our iPhone fitness app. Little did we know that our embrace of Apple’s smartwatch would threaten the very existence of the gym app we’d been developing since 2012.

Each year since we launched Reps & Sets, we updated it to keep up-to-speed with all the cool new features Apple rolled out at its Worldwide Developers Conference. That all changed last year, though. That’s when we discovered that, by adding support for Apple Watch, we had inadvertently taken a poison pill that could effectively kill our iPhone app.

Notes

What It Was Like Working At Apple To Create The First iPhone, by Mike Murphy, Quartz

"We were committed to get the work done, but if you’re really pursuing a creative process, you don’t really know what the answers are going to be until you have them. So yeah, there was always worry, there was always concern, that we weren’t going to make it, that maybe we wouldn’t be able to come up with the ideas that were necessary."

"Of course hanging over me, in particular, doing the keyboard work was the shadow of the Newton. Apple made a product in its history that failed because the text entry wasn’t good enough. I was worried about that and I just worried that we wouldn’t come up with good enough ideas to make the whole product to come together up to Apple quality."

Amazon And Apple Don’t Provide Employees With Free Lunches — Here’s Where Their Employees Go To Eat Instead, by Áine Cain, Business Insider

Amazon and Apple both bucked the Silicon Valley trend of providing employees with free food.

And now that California localities have begun introducing legislation meant to curtail free meals and boost local eateries, we might see more tech giants beginning to follow suit.

Let’s take a look at how employees stay fueled throughout the day at Amazon and Apple.

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As usual, while Apple is showing off all the new phones at Cupertino, I'll be asleep and dreaming of XR and XS and XSMAX in many many colors.

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Thanks for reading.