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The Optimality-Philosophy Edition Monday, May 18, 2020

Apple Begins Reopening Some Stores With Temperature Checks And Other Safeguards In Place, by Brian Heater, TechCrunch

[F]ace covers will be required for both employees and customers alike — already a legal requirement in many locales. More unusual for many retail establishments is the addition of temperature checks now conducted at the store’s entrance, coupled with posted health questions. Apple has also instituted deeper cleaning on all surfaces, including display products.

Pointer Control, by Matt Gemmell

There are two main ways to design something: make it optimal, or make it familiar. You can almost always incorporate elements of both, but you get to (and should) choose which one is your guiding philosophy. For Apple, it’s optimality. The iPad was created according to a philosophy, and whatever expansions of functionality it has undergone since then, they’ve been in the service of broadening its utility — but always within the context of its designed identity.

What I like about pointer control on the iPad isn’t that it’s now available, but rather that I only have to use it when I want to.

Stuff

Edison Mail Rolls Back Update After iOS Users Reported They Could See Strangers’ Emails, by Kim Lyons, The Verge

Edison Mail has rolled back a software update that apparently let some users of its iOS app see emails from strangers’ accounts.

[...]

The company said it was a bug, not a security breach, and that the issue appeared limited to users of the iOS app.

HBO Now App Removed From 2nd And 3rd-gen Apple TV As HBO Ends Support, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

As announced earlier, the HBO Now app has been removed from the home screens of older Apple TVs (2nd- and 3rd-gen models) this weekend as HBO has ended support for the devices. The company will also be removing the HBO Go app soon.

Develop

How To Sleep When The World Is Falling Apart, by Brian Barrett, Wired

It is extremely understandable if you have cut yourself some slack during these sheltered-in-place times. Maybe your diet has gone a little snack-heavy. Maybe you shifted your work hours to make way for childcare or self-care. Maybe you stopped flossing. Only natural. But sleep is something worth preserving—even though that’s harder than it may sound.

Dump On Your Office All You Like. You’ll Miss It When It’s Gone., by Jennifer Senior, New York Times

Offices are often the very place where professional identities are forged — an especially valuable thing in an age of declining religious engagement and deferred marriage and childbearing. Yes, perhaps that’s slightly ominous, just another depressing sign that work has replaced religion as a source of meaning, as Derek Thompson argued so beautifully in The Atlantic last year.

Unfortunately, technology has already collapsed the boundary between work and home. The office, at least, was a solid membrane between the two. And it may possibly be the last.

Notes

It’s Time To Get Back To RSS, by Daniel Miessler

By curating the feeds in your reader, you were curating your view of the world. And that was made up of hundreds or thousands of individual voices.

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Here's wishing you have a good night sleep. And may you find joys and meanings when you wake up every morning.

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Thanks for reading.