Not that there haven’t been a plethora of efforts over the years to claw back that focus and attention. Both Android and iOS have a swath of digital wellbeing tools that can limit app permissions and restrict the amount of time you spend in places you’d rather not. Older “dumb” phones have passionate adherents, as does the rise of efforts to deliberately hobble your smartphone. There are even whole devices, like the Light Phone, which offer only the bare necessities (i.e. no internet browsing capabilities) as a way to keep you from getting sucked into a device.
Some of these efforts work better than others, but an art studio in London thinks it has found an even better way to help keep you from staring into your rectangular glass abyss: Just cover the damn thing.
You might not be able to go completely MIA after the daily 9 to 5. But you can insist that anyone who wants to reach you after-hours make a telephone call. Let your supervisor ring you at 7:45 p.m. and hear your frazzled tone as you balance your phone on your shoulder while trying to give your unruly kids a bath. Let your boss hear the clanking of silverware on dishes when he interrupts dinner with your roommates. Employers should stop pretending that doing business at all hours isn’t an imposition on employees, even if it is sometimes a necessary one. Let the person delivering the message bear some of the cost, too.
Apple today released new 7E101 firmware for the AirPods Max with USB-C, addressing an issue that made the previously released firmware unable to be downloaded.
Before now, the only way to pause a download was to stop it entirely, thus forcing you to restart from scratch when you’re ready to continue.
But in iOS 18.4, there’s a new pause button to temporarily halt an app or update’s download, then resume it without losing your original progress.
Text Lens lets you select any part of your Mac's screen and automatically copy all of the text from that part. This makes it easy to copy text from images, videos, scanned pages, settings menus, and other types of text that are otherwise impossible to grab.
Rumors of the ongoing death of software development — that it’s being slain by AI — are greatly exaggerated. In reality, software development is at a fork in the road: embracing the (currently) far-off notion of fully automated software development or acknowledging the work of a software developer is much more than just writing lines of code.
The decision the industry makes could have significant long-term consequences. Increasing complacency around AI-generated code and a shift to what has been termed “vibe coding” — where code is generated through natural language prompts until the results seem to work — will lead to code that’s more error-strewn, more expensive to run and harder to change in the future. And, if the devaluation of software development skills continues, we may even lack a workforce with the skills and knowledge to fix things down the line.
Apple’s chief security executive was acquitted Wednesday of charges alleging he tried to broker a large iPad donation with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office to speed up his employees’ concealed-carry weapons licensing, ending the latest trial borne from a corruption scandal that upended the previous sheriff’s administration.
[...]
Moyer and his attorneys had long argued that no bribery motive existed because the permits eventually issued to four Apple security employees in early 2019 had already been approved by the sheriff’s office by the time he proposed donating 200 iPads to the agency’s training division.
Speculations on Apple's first foldable device seem to always pair iOS, when folded, with iPadOS, when unfolded.
I propose the second foldable device should pair watchOS with iOS. Small is also beautiful.
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Thanks for reading.