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The Type-with-My-Thumbs Edition Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Why Is The Split Keyboard Not Available On iPad Pros?, by John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Why not allow it to be split and revert to the same split keyboard as on non-Pro iPads? What makes this more baffling is that the bigger the iPad is, the more likely it is that you need a split keyboard — and the iPad Pros are the biggest iPads Apple has made. I want to type with my thumbs, iPhone-style, and can’t, because my iPad is too big.

No, You Don’t Really Look Like That, by Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic

What’s changed is this: The cameras know too much. All cameras capture information about the world—in the past, it was recorded by chemicals interacting with photons, and by definition, a photograph was one exposure, short or long, of a sensor to light. Now, under the hood, phone cameras pull information from multiple image inputs into one picture output, along with drawing on neural networks trained to understand the scenes they’re being pointed at. Using this other information as well as an individual exposure, the computer synthesizes the final image, ever more automatically and invisibly.

The stakes can be high: Artificial intelligence makes it easy to synthesize videos into new, fictitious ones often called “deepfakes.” “We’ll shortly live in a world where our eyes routinely deceive us,” wrote my colleague Franklin Foer. “Put differently, we’re not so far from the collapse of reality.” Deepfakes are one way of melting reality; another is changing the simple phone photograph from a decent approximation of the reality we see with our eyes to something much different. It is ubiquitous and low temperature, but no less effective. And probably a lot more important to the future of technology companies.

How Amazon, Apple, And Google Played The Tax-Break Game, by Paris Martineau, Wired

It took about 30 minutes for Williamson County commissioners to unanimously approve a roughly $16 million incentive package for Apple Tuesday morning, bringing the total amount the tech giant is likely to receive in exchange for choosing Austin as the site for its newest campus to a cool $41 million. The new addition is set to be Apple’s second campus in the Austin, Texas area—located less than a mile from the company’s existing facility, established five years ago. It comes with the promise of a $1 billion dollar investment from Apple in the area and the addition of up to 15,000 new jobs.

But the details of the incentive package Williamson County whipped up to woo Apple tell a slightly different story. In the contract approved by county officials, Apple committed to spending at least $400 million on the new campus and creating 4,000 jobs over 12 years. The contract says the jobs don’t necessarily have to be on the new campus in order for Apple to receive the promised incentives, but rather anywhere within Williamson County.

Cracked It!

Apple TV 4K Is The Most Essential Product Apple Makes, by Chris Taylor, Mashable

No, the most irreplaceable Apple device in my house right now is the little streaming engine that could: the $179 Apple TV 4K. My wife and I were skeptics, but took the plunge and bought one this time last year, back when Amazon Prime (finally!) became available on Apple TVs. And for almost every day of the 365 since then, its smart features, accurate voice-based search and jaw-dropping visuals have surprised and delighted us — more than enough to make up for the price tag.

Apple Sent iPhone Owners Unwanted Push Notifications To Promote Carpool Karaoke, by Nick Statt, The Verge

But I’d be curious if Apple is actually helping itself with these plugs. Even if these notifications are easy to dismiss, people tend to hate unsolicited junk on their phone.

Stuff

Satechi’s New USB-C Hub Solves The iMac’s Backward Port Problem, by Chaim Gartenberg, The Verge

Satechi’s new Stand Hub looks like it might be a pretty good solution for anyone who struggles with the backward ports. Designed as a simple aluminum stand, the Stand Hub connects through USB-C and offers a USB-C port, three USB Type-A ports, SD and microSD slots, and a headphone jack — all within easy reach.

Darkroom 4.0: The MacStories Review, by John Voorhees, MacStories

Despite a couple of rough patches, I’m impressed with what Darkroom has become. There's a lot more to this app than fun filters. With RAW support, a wide range of tools, and iPad support, Darkroom is a full-fledged photo editor. Darkroom also scales nicely from the smallest iPhone screen to the biggest iPad and takes advantage of the unique hardware each iOS device has to offer. Especially on an iPad, Darkroom does an excellent job of offering the tools you’ll want to edit your photos without getting in the way, allowing the photos room to breathe as you edit.

Launch Center Pro 3.0 Review: Universal Version, New Business Model, NFC Triggers, And More, by Federico Viticci, MacStories

With version 3.0, Contrast has intelligently expanded the app's scheduling feature to support multiple scheduled triggers for date and time with repeat options. You can now add multiple schedules to trigger an action at different times during the day, week, or month. Each schedule will fire off a local notification on your device that, once tapped, will open Launch Center Pro and execute the action.

AutoSleep 6: Effortless Sleep Tracking More Accessible Than Ever, by Ryan Christoffel, MacStories

Today marks the debut of AutoSleep's latest major iteration: version 6.0, which introduces new wellness features, refined graphs and color schemes, sleep hygiene trends, Siri shortcuts, an improved Watch app, and more. It's an extensive update that simplifies some aspects of the app while branching out into fresh, innovative areas of health tracking.

Can A Smart App Encourage HIV-self Testing In Canada?, by McGill University Health Centre

“By promoting screening, HIVSmart! could help to reduce the number of people living with HIV who do not know their status and allow them to start treatment earlier,” adds Dr. Réjean Thomas, study co-author, who is also the founder and CEO of Clinique Médicale L'Actuel. ‘’An application such as HIVSmart! increases accessibility to testing, especially outside major cities, where it is sometimes harder to get tested because of confidentiality issues.”

Notes

NPR’s Move Into Podcasting Analytics Raises Privacy Concerns, by Mathew Ingram, Columbia Journalism Review

While NPR makes the argument that the data will make it easier to convince advertisers and sponsors to commit to backing podcasts, and possibly allow creators to bring in more revenue, skeptics say it will also make it easier for creators and advertisers to track and identify individual listeners. Marco Arment, who developed both the original platform for Tumblr and the document-saving service called Instapaper, created a podcast distribution service called Overcast. He says he has no plans to integrate the NPR standard into his product, and he’s not in favor of others doing it either.

‘It’s Been A Rout’: Apple Stumbles In World’s Largest Untapped Market, by Newley Purnell and Tripp Mickle, Wall Street Journal

At the heart of the issue is Apple’s reluctance to change its traditional business model for selling the iPhone. Rather than make a range of handsets, it has prioritized a limited number of coveted products, sold at high prices—a strategy that revived the company after near bankruptcy in 1997 and helped make it the first U.S. public company to reach a $1 trillion valuation. The iPhone’s margins have been the basis for three-quarters of the company’s gross profit in recent years, analysts say.

India’s market presents unique challenges. While competitors tweaked their phones to address local consumer concerns—increasing battery life, for example, and offering less expensive models—Apple took an inflexible stand on its pricing and products. Friction with the government hasn’t helped.

Bottom of the Page

On rare occasions, I do use the split keyboard on my iPad. (Most of the time, I am either on a physical keyboard, or am just watching television.) In my limited experience, the... er... experience of using the split keyboard is not good. Things will not covered under the keyboard, and I have to move the keyboard up and down, and the split keyboard will sometimes surprise me by 'joining' back up.

I have no idea why Apple didn't implement the split keyboard on the new iPad Pro, but perhaps Apple should rethink how to do thumb-typing on the iPad.

(There must be good thumb-typing keyboards available on the App Store, right?)

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Apple should pay more attention to India than China, in my opinion.

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Once upon a time, a single developer can create a web browser with its own rendering engine from scratch in a reasonable amount of time and maybe have a few customers. Today, I can't even begin to estimate the amount of effort to create a web browser and the rendering engine. So much so that even Microsoft has given up.

When I retire, I am going to start a movement to turn back the clock to the good old days of Mosaic and Netscape. Everybody should just layout their web pages using tables.

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I have more things to do after I retire than before I retire. I'll probably end up just watching Netflix all day, and then, one fine day, die.

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Thanks for reading.