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The Well-Qualified Edition Monday, April 1, 2019

Signing Up For Apple Card? Here's How You Check Your Credit Score, by Katie Conner, CNET

With the new Apple Card coming out this summer, it may be time to do a checkup on your credit score before you apply. You need to be a well-qualified customer to be approved for the new credit card. Apple hasn't exactly explained what that means, but knowing your standing is never a bad thing.

Credit checks aren't just important when you're considering opening a new credit card. You may also want to check your credit score if you're in the market for a new home or vehicle, or to make sure your identity hasn't been stolen. Note that looking into your credit score will not affect your credit.

Apple News+ Could Lead To A Massive Value Destruction For The Magazine Industry, by Frederic Filloux, Monday Note

By joining Apple News+, the US magazine industry will lose 50 percent of its revenue per reader.

[...]

To put it differently, for each magazine reader switching to Apple News+, the platform would need to recruit one additional subscriber, only to preserve the size of the sector. The real uncertainty here is the ability of Apple to nearly double the number of people paying for a magazine in the United States where most subscriptions are already dirt cheap (only 13 percent of the magazines’ circulation revenue come from digital).

Stuff

Reading Eggs App Covers Reading Fundamentals And More, by Mike VanderBorght, Common Sense Media, Pocono Record

This broadly based reading curriculum is both varied and complete enough to be worth the relatively high subscription price. The developer makes a lot of lofty claims about all the great ways Reading Eggs — Learn to Read can help your kids become confident and competent readers. Though some claims may be slightly exaggerated, the program is robust enough to support the idea that it can truly be a great tool for teaching kids to read, and it adapts and levels automatically as kids learn and grow.

7 Mac Apps For A Better Spotify And Apple Music Experience, by Shubham Agarwal, MakeUseOf

The Mac apps for the two most dominant music streaming services—Spotify and Apple Music—have come a long way. Since they released, both have pushed several updates to sustain their growing user bases.

But for power users who listen to music all the time, there are still a lot of features absent. So we’re looking at some great third-party Spotify and Apple Music add-on apps for Mac that you should try.

This Singapore-made App Will Tell You If A Product Is Halal Or Not – Just By Scanning Its Barcode Or Ingredients List, by Sean Lim, Business Insider

“When we go to a supermarket, the first thing we do is look at the ingredients list. As a Muslim, we’re sure that some ingredients are halal, but not so sure of others. So we’ll check online, and that’s a lengthy process sometimes, given that each product has, say, 10 ingredients,” Azman said.

“So what happens with our system is we actually just speed up the process and make it easy. All the information is at your fingertips,” he added.

Develop

Productivity Is About Attention Management, by Adam Grant, New York Times

But the truth is that I don’t feel very productive. I’m constantly falling short of my daily goals for progress, so I’ve struggled to answer the question. It wasn’t until that conversation with Michael that it dawned on me: Being prolific is not about time management. There are a limited number of hours in the day, and focusing on time management just makes us more aware of how many of those hours we waste.

A better option is attention management: Prioritize the people and projects that matter, and it won’t matter how long anything takes.

Attention management is the art of focusing on getting things done for the right reasons, in the right places and at the right moments.

How Not To Hire A Software Engineer, by Nikita Prokopov

Now, if you only select people who made no mistakes during the interview you won’t magically get a squad of programmers who always write perfect code. You just don’t know how they will behave when they will—inevitably—make their mistakes.

So mistakes are actually good because you get to learn how that person mitigates them. Don’t judge the errors, judge how interviewee handles them:

“Can We Talk?” How To Survive When Your Boss Utters The Office’s Most Dreaded Phrase., by Alison Green, Slate

Most of the time, though, a simple “I want to talk with you about X” will go a long way toward mitigating the anxiety of mysterious meetings.

And on the employee side, it helps to pay attention to what you know about your manager. Is she one to spring terrible feedback on you out of nowhere? What about other times when she’s asked to meet with you without any context? Has that typically led to bad news, or has it generally turned out to be more mundane, like “Can we look at the figures for the Johnson account?” Rather than letting anxiety have its way with you, it makes far more sense to look at what you actually know about your manager and how similar meeting requests have gone in the past.

Notes

Who’s Minding The Macintosh Store?, by Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note

Apple’s defensiveness and lack of transparency breaks several damage control rules.

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