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The Privacy-Conscious Edition Wednesday, July 22, 2020

The Great Coronavirus-tracing Apps Mystery, by Rory Cellan-Jones & Leo Kelion, BBC

Germany and Ireland have both trumpeted their success in rolling out contact-tracing apps.

But is there any evidence that they are doing what they are designed to do - warning people they could be infected with the virus?

Not yet - and the privacy-conscious way in which they are designed could mean we will never know how effective they have been.

How Apple And Its Employees Gave Irish Healthcare A Boost, by Mark Kavanagh, Buzz.ie

The benefits that the Triage app brought to patient care led to the hospital setting up a think tank. The aim is identify how technology can play a further role in improvement clinician-patient engagement.

The implementation of the project also prompted Apple to donate dozens of iPads to the hospital. This was to support communications between patients and their families during the COVID-19 crisis when hospital visits were not allowed.

How Flipping Bacon Lead To An ADA For Song Of Bloom Dev, by Lory Gil, iMore

Stollenmayer is one of those rare game developers whose design esthetic is so iconic that they have a loyal following. People know when they're playing a Kamibox game. "I think it's because, when you play my games, you really know when you're playing that I'm making them while not being bored or doing something that I don't want to do. It's those tiny details that make a difference."

Develop

Big Sur Is Both 10.16 And 11.0 – It’s Official, by Howard Oakley, The Eclectic Light Company

For apps built with Xcode, the version returned depends on which version of its SDK they were built with. SDK 10.15 and earlier will consistently respond that Big Sur is major version 10 and minor version 16. This ensures that all existing apps should see Big Sur as simply an incremented minor version, as we had expected before WWDC this year.

Build an app with a new release of Xcode which features the macOS 11 SDK, and the major version will be 11 and the minor version 0. For those porting their apps now to Xcode beta-releases, that is again a consistent target to work to.

Notes

The App Of The Summer Is Just A Random-Number Generator, by Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic

It took me a week to find a plastic water bottle full of what could only be pee.

That was after the abandoned house taped off with gas leak warnings, but before I spun around on an unfamiliar block deep in Brooklyn to see three dalmatians wiggling toward me. When I saw the bottle lying in the middle of the sidewalk, it felt like a rite of passage.

This is my summer activity: walking around, or “randonauting” in internet parlance. Water bottles full of pee are known as “piss bottles” in the randonaut community, an inside joke that has inspired T-shirts. It’s pretty simple, as jokes go: If you spend enough time exploring the world at random, you will stumble upon a bottle full of pee.

Bottom of the Page

Now that Apple has moved on from macOS 10 -- sorry, X -- will Microsoft also move on from Windows 10?

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Thanks for reading.