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The Wherever-and-Whenever Edition Monday, April 15, 2019

A Book Addict's Defense Of The Smartphone, by Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

My point is not that I don’t think that smartphones can cause problems for attention, focus, and interpersonal relationships. I’ll stipulate that we have not adjusted to the downsides of having the internet - and everything that comes along with the web - in our pockets.

What I am saying is that the advantages of being to store, listen to, and read books - wherever and whenever - outweigh all the smartphone negatives.

Cracking The Code: A Toddler, An iPad, And A Tweet, by Evan Osnos, New Yorker

Like so much of our lives with technology, the episode could be read as a reason for either optimism or gloom. In an instant, people had raged and imagined conspiracies; most did not. Many helped. Above all, the scenario, in all its ridiculousness, seemed to satisfy the low-grade anxieties that have become our universal predicament, the feeling that we’re rarely more than a few clicks away from becoming captive to the tech we love. And, when it came time to share that angst, we did it online, of course. By the end of the week, the tweets were slowing down. The Internet had moved on. And the iPad was on a high shelf.

Stuff

Safari: macOS Browser Now Autosubmits Logins. Here’s How To Disable It, by Glenn Fleishman, Macworld

The only way to disable autofill is site by site, and then only by removing the keychain entry. If you use iCloud Keychain, this removal is synced across all your connected iOS and macOS devices.

Machine Learning Helps You Organize Your Photos, And It's Really Weird, by Amanda Kooser, Koamando

We’re all capturing more digital photos than ever. It’s an incredible feeling to know we can keep track of all the celebrations and important moments in our lives, but the challenge is how to find the photos we want to see later on.

Apple’s iOS Photos app is smarter than ever. It can recognize people and group them together. It just needs a little help from you to make searching easy.

Mac Owners Still Aren't Pleased With iCloud Photos, by Times Square Chronicles

Keeping track of countless files is not an easy task for any photographer which is why they rely on photo enhancement software with DAM, or Digital Asset Management technology that lets them store their photos on their systems with much more ease. This is something that Apple’s iCloud storage still struggles with and users get frustrated as a result.

Zagg Slim Book Go Keyboard Case For 9.7-inch iPad Review: Pressing All The Right Buttons, by Leif Johnson, Macworld

The Zagg Slim Book Go isn’t the prettiest case for the 9.7-inch iPad, but it’s one of my favorites. It’s tough enough for daily use at both school or work, and I love how I can switch it between tablet and "laptop" modes without the awkwardness I tend to endure with other cases.

Develop

Whither Native App Developers?, by Jon Evans, TechCrunch

But I’d still feel at least slightly uneasy about going all-in as a specialist app developer if I was early in my career. Not because the market’s going to go away … but because, barring some new transcendent technology available only on phones (maybe some AR breakthrough?) the relentless growth and ever-increasing demand of yesteryear is, in mature markets like the US, apparently gone for the foreseeable future. There’s still some growth, but it seems that’s being sopped up by the rise of non-native development.

Notes

'Basically Playing Favorites': Apple News+ Gets Off To A Rocky Start For Some Publishers, by Max Willens, Digiday

A small team of Apple designers, led by former Wired editor Jason Tanz, fields pitches from participating publishers hoping for design help on specific articles or packages, sources said. All participating publishers were given an email address where they were encouraged to send pitches, and sources said that by and large, Apple’s representatives were responsive to their outreach.

But a smaller, select group of publishers were invited to join a private Slack channel where they could connect with Apple more directly, a move that exasperated several sources when they were informed of the channel’s existence. “They’re basically playing favorites,” that first source said. “It always seems to be good for the big guys, but not for the rest of us.”

Bottom of the Page

The good thing is that, yes, I do have all the books I want to read (with my eyes or with my ears) with me all the time. And, so long as I am willing to use my mobile data for downloads, I'm never without a book at hand, even when I've just finished all the books with me.

The bad thing is that I also do have all the ganes I want to play with me all the time.

~

Thanks for reading.