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The More-Fulfilling Edition Sunday, January 27, 2019

The iPhone SE Is The Best Minimalist Phone Right Now, If You Use It Right, by Nick Statt, The Verge

Granted, many of these companies are just trying to sell you a second phone to keep you away from your main phone. But the core philosophy still revolves around the same tantalizing question: Can a smaller, less capable smartphone help you live a more fulfilling life?

Probably not, but it seems worth trying.

Private Messages Are The New (Old) Social Network, by Lauren Goode, Wired

For some people, larger social networking communities are lifelines as they struggle with health, with family, with job worries, with life. But right now, “private” messages are the way to share my life with the people who matter most, an attempt to splinter off my social interactions into something more satisfying—especially when posting to Facebook has never seemed less appealing.

Develop

Apple: Trust Us, We've Patented Parts Of Swift, And Thus Chunks Of Other Programming Languages, For Your Own Good, by Thomas Claburn, The Register

In the past day or so, developers working with the language have highlighted on Swift discussion forum Cupertino's intellectual property land-grab, expressing concern that the patents – which are assigned to Apple rather than the Swift project – may expose those writing Swift applications to future legal jeopardy.

[...]

Setting aside the problems with software patents – many developers, among others, believe they should not exist – and ignoring the fact that many of the features mentioned in Apple's Swift patents (eg: options chaining) can be found in other programming languages, there's no concrete cause for alarm.

Notes

Hands On With iOS 12.2’s HomeKit Support For Smart TVs, by Federico Viticci, MacStories

In this post, I'm going to share my first impressions of HomeKit's new TV features in the iOS 12.2 beta, describe how it all works in practice, and share some suggestions for changes I'd like Apple to implement by the final release of iOS 12.2.

[...]

The setup I'm going to cover in this article requires an unofficial, third-party plugin, but the user experience is the same you'd get if you were testing an upcoming smart TV with embedded HomeKit support. From an interaction standpoint, all the changes detailed in this post are built-in features of iOS 12.2 – the only caveat is that, in order to be enabled, they require "faking" HomeKit support for a television that doesn't officially support HomeKit yet. That's precisely the beauty of homebridge and one of the benefits of software-based HomeKit authentication, which is made available by Apple for developers to tinker with. That being said, let's take a look.

Proposed Changes To Chrome Would Hamper Ad Blockers, by K.Q. Dreger, Audacious Fox

At the end of the day, this change to Chrome is only a proposal. And if we’re giving Google any kudos, it’s that they’re still conducting sensitive changes to Chromium in the open. I’m also not suggesting that Apple and Google are wholly wrong here. The pursuit of enhanced privacy while still allowing users to have some control over their browsers is a path filled with compromises. And since browser makers aren’t going to not evolve their products, I think it’s important that you understand the motives that may be driving their decisions.

Bottom of the Page

Well, we've just had Mac mini and Macbook Air 'returning' to Apple's lineup, and we've just had rumors about new versions of iPad mini and iPod touch. Surely, we're going to get the iPhone SE 2 soon, right?

Of course, the iPhone SE is the one product that Apple has removed from sale, unlike the others. Offhand, I can't really think of any products that had returned to Apple's lineup after being removed from sale. (The one product I can think of, Apple display, hasn't return yet.)

Oh, oh, I know. The new iPod Touch is actually also a phone, isn't it?

:-)

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Just finished reading Becoming, by Michelle Obama. So good.

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There are too many politicians in this world whose definition of success is that others must lose. Instead of working with different people who have different priorities, these politicians set out to prove that anybody that is not 'with them' is wrong and need to fail.

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Thanks for reading.