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The Old-Type Edition Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Adobe Is Dropping PostScript Type 1 Font Support. Be Prepared For The Change, by Glenn Fleishman, Macworld

A technology invented at the dawn of the desktop-publishing age is about to expire. Developed by Adobe way back in the early 1980s, PostScript Type 1 fonts—a way of encoding vector-based type designs into a particular file format—will lose full support in Adobe Photoshop this year, and gradually disappear from other Adobe products by 2023 as well as from other companies’ products. If you have a long history in design or using a Mac, you might find yourself unable to use some old type standbys you didn’t realize relied on outdated technology.

How A Hacking Group Did Apple Repair Professionals An Accidental Favor, by Damon Beres, Motherboard

The threat to Apple, such as it is, centers on the idea that Quanta's documents would reveal the design of an unreleased product, giving some rival a competitive edge or impacting consumer expectations. But the PDFs viewed by Motherboard contain no such information: Anyone hoping for a tantalizing render of a sleek new device would be sorely disappointed, and you couldn't possibly use these to engineer a MacBook clone.

You could, however, use them to understand how all of the MacBook's parts fit together.

Coming Soon

iOS 14.6 Lets You Use An Email Address To Put AirTag And Other Items Into Lost Mode, by Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac

Users will now see an option to choose whether to use a phone number or an email address to enable Lost Mode for an item. Just as with the phone number, the Find My app tells the user that the email will be visible to anyone who finds the AirTag or other item with Lost Mode enabled.

Stuff

Apple Merging 'iCloud Documents And Data' Service With iCloud Drive In May 2022, by Sami Fathi, MacRumors

As Apple explains, starting in May of next year, users who are using ‌iCloud‌ Documents and Data will have their accounts automatically migrated to ‌iCloud Drive‌. However, users must manually enable ‌iCloud Drive‌ to view their files once the merger occurs.

PDFpen And PDFpenPro 13.0, by Agen Schmitz, TidBITS

The company beefed up the PDFpen 13 toolbar with essential markup tools, a font and text formatting section, and improved color controls. Smile also redesigned the icons to be more intuitive.

Standard Ebooks Makes Classic Texts Beautiful, by Josh Centers, TidBITS

The volunteers at Standard Ebooks take selected books from Project Gutenberg, carefully proofread them, and put them in a prettier package to read on your favorite device.

Logitech Circle View Doorbell Review, by Christian de Looper, TechRadar

The Logitech Circle View Doorbell doesn’t offer all the bells and whistles and smart home support that you’ll get from some rival video doorbells, but what it does do, it does well.

Notes

Apple Just Made A Major Hire On Its Ad Platforms Team, And It's The Latest Sign Of The Company's Growing Advertising Ambitions, by Lara O'Reilly, Business Insider

Apple recently hired former Facebook ads product manager and "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio Garcia Martinez to join its ad platforms product engineering team, another sign of the technology giant's growing ambitions in the advertising space.

Apple Suppliers Linked To Uyghur Forced Labor In New Report, by Jacob Kastrenakes, The Verge

Several Apple suppliers may have used forced labor in China, according to The Information. Working with two human rights groups, the publication identified seven companies that supplied products or services to Apple and supported forced labor programs, according to statements made by the Chinese government. The programs target the country’s Muslim minority population, particularly Uyghurs living in Xinjiang.

The Good Times May Be Over For Apple, by Dan Moren, Macworld

More to the point, as big, successful, and rich as Apple is, it isn’t without challenges, many of which seem to be rearing their heads at this exact moment. The company faces threats that are outside of its control, as well as those that are mainly of its own making. Despite the huge war chest on which the company sits, not all of those problems are ones that it can easily fix by the liberal application of money.

Bottom of the Page

Ever since we 'lost' iTunes + iPod + AppleScript, I have not find a perfect (for me) podcast player.

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Thanks for reading.