“It’s inspiring to see the ways developers continue to build incredible apps and games that are redefining the world around us,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “This year’s winners represent the limitless potential of developers to bring their visions to life, creating apps and games with remarkable ingenuity, exceptional quality, and purpose-driven missions.”
This year’s winners showcase the scope of creativity, technical innovation, and design possible across the App Store and Apple’s ecosystem.
Castro owner Tiny and the Castro team aren’t addressing Mamoria’s comments or responding to my emails. When I asked around, a couple of knowledgeable people told me that they’d heard Castro had been put on life support a few months ago and was unlikely to get any technical attention going forward. I can’t independently verify those secondhand comments, but they don’t contradict Mamoria’s statement.
On one hand, that's a good thing: If something happens to your phone, tablet, or laptop, that doesn't mean you lose all your messages, photos, and documents—assuming all that info is properly backed up to the cloud. When you get your device fixed or replaced, you can sign back into your account and pull all that data down from the cloud without losing anything in the transition. In fact, I suspect that our collective data has never been more secured than it is today, thanks to the abundance and simplicity of cloud storage.
However, that's not to say that our backup situation is perfect—far from it. Relying solely on the cloud for data storage can have disastrous consequences.
If you have anxiety, you know more than anyone that it makes you your own worst enemy. The irrational sense of dread and doom can be unbearable as you battle incessant restlessness, stress, and worry.
However, while playing "Pok Pok," an Apple App Store gem that Apple itself named one of the best of 2023, all of that disappeared — just for a minute or two — while interacting with its wide variety of multi-sensory stimulation games.
Although the goal is to create a bustling town, everything about this app feels deliberate and considered, from the super minimal design stripped of clutter to the ambient sounds and relaxing music that both do a great job at getting you into a flow state.
If you use Chrome on Mac, it’s strongly recommended to update it immediately, as a security flaw discovered by Google is being actively exploited by attackers. It could potentially allow personal data to be extracted from your Mac (the same issue also affects Chrome on Windows and Linux).
BBC Basic did a lot of things, and often quite well. During the early 1980s, it extended the BASIC languages with easier loop structures, like IF/THEN/ELSE, and ran faster than Microsoft's version. It taught an entire generation of Brits how to code, both in BASIC and, through an inline interpreter, assembly language. And it's still around to teach newcomers and anybody else—except it's now on far, far more platforms than a mail-order computer from the telly.
The statement could be interpreted in multiple ways. In one reading, Apple is saying the deal is still on and nothing has changed until Apple announces it has. In another reading, Apple wants to simply sow doubt around any negotiations it may have underway in order to not cause its existing customers to worry that their Apple MasterCards will suddenly turn into Amex’s, for example.
The authors focused on Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which by default opts out users on Apple’s iOS platform from sharing their data. They found that a 10% increase in the number of iOS users in a given zip code results in a 3.21% drop in financial fraud complaints from that location. The study also found that “the effects are concentrated in complaints related to lax data security and privacy.”
The drop in financial fraud complaints could grow tenfold if tight privacy laws are universally applied. “If the whole population of [cell phone] users on both the iOS and Android platforms were subject to a policy like the ATT, then the number of financial fraud complaints should drop to 32%, assuming the effect scales up linearly,” Tang said.
An example he gives: “Sometimes you’ve got a browser window open with a schedule on it, and you just want to say, ‘add this to my calendar,’ and somehow, there’s no way to do that… We think that language models and AI give us the ingredients to make a new kind of software that can unlock this fundamental power of computing and make everyday people able to use computers to actually solve their problems.”
A podcast client shouldn't need to have a server component. If the developer decided to stop developing, the client app on my iPhone should be able to continue to work as a podcast client... at least until a new operating system updates rendered the app incompatible.
But, that's not the case for so many podcast apps out there. Including the one I am using currently.
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Thanks for reading.