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The Easy-to-Discover Edition Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Amazement At iOS Cursor Movement Shortcut Says A Lot About Discoverability, by Dan Moren, Six Colors

This points to a larger, more fundamental issue cropping up with iOS as the platform becomes more mature: how do you add functionality and make it easily discoverable?

Some of the challenge here is simply because of iOS’s constraints: Where on the smaller screen can you add more features that would be easy to discover? But another challenge is how the OS is architected. The Mac nearly always treated the menu bar as a “safe” zone to which you could always retreat if you needed to find a command. There’s no real analogue to that on iOS, with the exception perhaps of the status bar, which isn’t, aside from the aforementioned “jump to the top” feature, an interactive element.

For Apple Users Without Latest Security Updates, The Letter 'D' Is Not Always The Letter 'D', by Catalin Cimpanu, , ZDNet

This might sound like a non-issue, but it's actually a very important problem that all Apple users who don't run the latest OS software need to be aware of, as they could fall victims to what security researchers call "IDN homograph attacks."

IDN homograph attacks happen when someone registers a domain using Unicode characters that look like standard Latin letters, but they are not. For example, coinḃase.com is an IDM homograph attack for coinbase.com (notice the dot above the letter b).

Stuff

New iPad Pro Ad Hammers Home Apple's Ongoing Laptop Replacement Theme, by Roger Fingas, AppleInsider

The new ad would seem to be a reversal, embracing the "computer" label in order to be seen as serious hardware. That approach is also reflected to an extent in the new Pro's design, since it now uses USB-C instead of Lightning, opening up compatible accessories.

Google Photos For iOS Adds Portrait Depth Editing, by Chris Welch, The Verge

For any portrait images you’ve taken, you can adjust the blur and also tap to change the focus area of those shots.

Google seems to be doing its own processing when you move the depth slider around; the results are noticeably different — in some cases, better — than what I get with Apple’s Photos app.

RAW Power Is Even More Powerful For Editing Photos On Mac, iOS, by David Pierini, Cult of Mac

RAW Power 2.0 brings new adjustments for chromatic aberration, perspective, a monochrome mixer and a new set of features that deepen the richness of photos called Enhance.

Users of RAW Power for Mac will be especially happy to see a time-saving batch editing feature. Working in a grid of photos, the user can apply presets, paste adjustments and generate JPEG previews of RAW files for multiples photos at a time.

The Reason Tumblr Vanished From The App Store: Child Pornography That Slipped Through The Filters, by Lance Whitney, CNET Download.com

Through independent sources, Download.com learned that the app was removed due to child pornography that got past the site's filters.

Develop

Meetings Should Be Shorter, by Katie Heaney, The Cut

A meeting you don’t want to go to is a meeting you don’t want to go to, no matter how long, but I see Rogelberg’s point — applying just a little timed pressure makes what’s important rise to the surface. And in the all too common event of back-to-back meetings, building in a little break between allows employees to take a bathroom break, get a snack, or (as the case may be) make a quick trip to the wellness room to cool one’s temper in peace.

The Key To Workplace Productivity Is Not An App, by Simone Stolzoff, Quartz

When she thinks about the way that she manages productivity in her own life, the two “hacks” that come to mind are staying hydrated and making sure she moves around. In her mind, productivity apps are great—indeed, she’s spent the majority of her career building them—but real productivity comes from a healthy and balanced life.

“People talk about productivity like it’s all about numbers and lines of code, but real productivity is about the feeling you get when you close the laptop for the day,” says Moah. “I go home happy when I feel accomplished.”

Notes

How To Control A Machine With Your Brain, by Raffi Khatchadourian, , New Yorker

The human animal is a creature of movement. For each of us, the gift of consciousness resides in a cellular vehicle, made from bone and blood, skin and fat, and driven by muscles—a body, as Walt Whitman put it, “cunning in tendon and nerve.” One cardiac muscle and countless smooth visceral muscles operate automatically within—the unseen engines of life. They are joined by hundreds of skeletal muscles, which can be commanded to run marathons, to perform music, to write, to speak.

How the mind instructs the body to move is a mystery that has preoccupied Andrew Schwartz, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, for more than three decades. It might seem reasonable to expect that a relationship so fundamental would by now be known, but the chain of events that connect the firing of neurons to, say, a punch to the nose remains the subject of pitched scientific controversy.

Amazon, Apple And Facebook Once Led The Market. Now They Are Driving It Down., by Matt Phillips, New York Times

Investors’ faith has been eroded by slowing growth and a trade war with China, as well as a steady stream of revelations about privacy lapses, security issues and mismanagement. If tech stocks cannot shake the fears, the rest of the market could feel the pain.

Bottom of the Page

I broadly divided the list of podcasts that I subscribe to into three categories. Firstly, there are podcasts that I want to listen immediately when there are new episodes, either because I really enjoy the podcasts, or that, like news, the episodes only make listening sense when they are fresh.

Then, there are podcasts that I will want to listen eventually. And finally, there are podcasts that I will listen when there are nothing else to listen.

So far, I have not find a podcast player that fit my categrization.

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Thanks for reading.