MyAppleMenu

The Fighting-the-Change Edition Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Getting Your Medical Records Through An App? There’s A Catch. And A Fight., by Natasha Singer, New York Times

Americans may soon be able to get their medical records through smartphone apps as easily as they order takeout food from Seamless or catch a ride from Lyft.

But prominent medical organizations are warning that patient data-sharing with apps could facilitate invasions of privacy — and they are fighting the change.

Significant iOS Vulnerabilities Used Against Uyghur Muslims In China, by Rich Mogull, TidBITS

Unfortunately, apart from staying up to date with security fixes, there’s nothing we as users can do to protect ourselves from these and similar sorts of attacks. Stories like this show why sticking with an old version of an operating system can result in unanticipated problems. Using recent devices will also help, since Apple continually improves hardware defenses.

However, if you’re in a sensitive situation due to a government or corporate job, or due to your political activity, you should get security advice from professionals, not from articles you read on the Internet.

Apple Watch Sleep Tracking Revealed: Sleep Quality, Battery Management, More, by Guilherme Rambo, 9to5Mac

While asleep, the Apple Watch will track the user’s quality of sleep using its multiple sensors and inputs, including the person’s movement, heart rate, and noises. Data about the user’s quality of sleep will be made available in the Health app and a new Sleep app for the Apple Watch.

[...]

When wearing the Watch during bedtime, if the user wakes up and starts their day before their alarm goes off, it will automatically turn off the alarm. The alarm will also play only on Apple Watch, using the iPhone as a backup.

Stuff

When Photos Are Not Enough And Videos Are Too Much, Try A Cinemagraph, by Jackie Dove, Digital Trends

When a mere photo just isn’t enough, a video seems like too much, and nothing seems quite right, it’s time to contemplate creating a cinemagraph. This medium combines still photos and video in a particular way that isolates and animates certain parts of the scene while the rest of the tableau remains static. Cinemagraphs are popular on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media, and put a creative spin on your visuals. And you can create them right on your smartphone with the best cinemagraph apps.

Develop

Those People Starting Successful Tech Companies? Most Are Middle-Aged, by Seema Jayachandran, New York Times

The Nest thermostat had a sleek and intuitive design, smartphone connectivity and the ability to learn its owner’s temperature-setting habits. The product was a big hit, and within a few years Google acquired Nest for $3.2 billion.

Mr. Fadell’s deep experience and relatively mature age when he started Nest are typical of superstar entrepreneurs, who are rarely fresh out of college — or freshly dropped out of college. That’s what a team of economists discovered when they analyzed high-growth companies in the United States.

On My Funny Ideas About What Beta Means, by Brent Simmons, Inessential

But why these rather strict definitions?

It’s part of our commitment to quality. What matters is the end result — the shipping app — and these definitions make sure we don’t get to beta, or even alpha, with the app up on the table with wires sticking out and pieces missing.

Notes

How Much Titanium Is Really In The Titanium Apple Card?, by Mark Gurman, Bloomberg

To find out, a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter sent his card to a mineralogist, University of California, Berkeley professor Hans-Rudolf Wenk. Professor Wenk used what’s known as a scanning electron microscope, or SEM device, to determine the card’s atomic makeup. He found that the answer is about 90%. The rest of the card is aluminum, according to the analysis.

Why The iOS 13.1 Beta Is A Good Thing, by David Sparks, MacSparky

I hope Apple doesn't take their inability to get all the features in the initial release as a sign that they need to scale back next year. Keeps pushing, Apple.

IBM's Power-ful Open Source Gift: China Wins Big, And These Are The Losers, by Jason Perlow, ZDNet

For starters, Power architecture is a highly versatile, high-performance microprocessor systems architecture that scales from embedded systems to the most powerful supercomputers -- such as the IBM Watson-based expert system that wiped the floor with Ken Jennings in 2011. It's the basis for IBM's System Z and Power 9 big iron, but it also has been used in the past in set-top devices like the Xbox 360, the Nintendo Wii, and the PlayStation 3. In previous decades, it even has been hardened for vertical markets like automotive, medical equipment, and military/aerospace.

All this intellectual property for creating reference designs, which includes the patents themselves, is going to be royalty-free. Linux already runs on Power, as do many other real-time operating systems (RTOS) for embedded systems development. The Power platform is tailor-made for IoT, network and wireless, industrial and environmental control systems, personal computing, enterprise servers, and handhelds and mobile.