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The Good-Enough Edition Saturday, October 3, 2020

iPad (2020) Micro-review: Battle-tested And More Than Fast Enough, by Samuel Axon, Ars Technica

The 2020 iPad is more of the same, and few will complain about that. It combines an older-iPad-Air-like chassis with the A12, a two-year-old chip that Apple has identified as the baseline for its most cutting-edge apps, features, and content.

While the design looks a little dated now, it's good enough for the price—and it doesn't hurt that you can use the trackpad-less Smart Keyboard with it, as well as the first-generation Apple Pencil.

Apple Watch SE Review: Pay A Lot Less To Give Up Only A Little, by Dan Seifert, The Verge

All of that means you aren’t giving up a good smartwatch experience if you opt for the SE. You do compromise on some ancillary features, but for the core smartwatch things of getting notifications, tracking your fitness, paying for things, and well, checking the time, the SE does an excellent job, just like any other Apple Watch.

Apple Says Apple Card Billing Mixup Fixed, But Tax Firm Still Inundated With Phone Calls, by Mikey Campbell, AppleInsider

Apple on Friday said it fixed an apparent backend Apple Card issue that caused certain AT&T charges to show up as billings from "Waters, Hardy & Co.," though the small Texas tax firm continues to see a deluge of calls from confused customers.

Stuff

Stream Is The 'River Of News' RSS Reader You Didn't Know You Needed, by Oliver Haslam, iMore

Articles appear in a scrollable list, similar to a Twitter timeline, waiting to be read. If you don't read them, the move down the stream. Eventually, they're gone. And that's just fine.

'El Trackpad' Is A New App That Turns Your iPhone Or iPad Into A Real Mac Trackpad With Gestures, by Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac

You can tap with two fingers to perform a right click, zoom in and out with the pinch gesture, slide with two fingers, rotate elements, drag and drop, and much more.

Function101 Offers An Apple TV Remote Replacement With Delightful Buttons, by Glenn Fleishman, TidBITS

With the Function101 remote, you can press honest-to-goodness buttons for skipping 10 seconds forward or back, as well as separate buttons for fast forward and rewind—which advance as you hold them. A four-arrow compass design near the top manages navigation and other features, with an OK button nestled in the middle to make selections or confirm actions.

Notes

When Fonts Fall, by Marcin Wichary

These little transgressions can be confusing, but not frustrating enough to spend time dissecting. They seem like small bugs that permeate everyday interaction with our tasteless machines.

But these are not bugs, at least not in the traditional sense. All of these examples can be explained. Moreover, all have one common underlying cause—an important and in some ways very impressive mechanism of computer typography many of us might be completely unaware of. That mechanism helps fonts when they run out of characters, and it’s called font fallback.