Steven Sinofsky:
[…] we deliver on the plan, deliver on time, and ship with ever-improving quality. I don’t mean to make your head explode by asking for too much, and so the trick is how do we really pull this off.
§Saturday, March 31, 2018
When submitting a request to verify an account, we ask for additional information that can help us evaluate it. Here are some tips to keep in mind:
- We’ll ask you to tell us why we should verify an account. If the account represents a person, we want to understand their impact in their field. If it represents a corporation or company, let us know their mission.
§Wednesday, July 20, 2016
John Gruber interviews SVP Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller and SVP Software Engineering Craig Federighi live from WWDC 2016. There is a full transcript by Serenity Caldwell from iMore and an audio only version.
§Monday, June 20, 2016
§Wednesday, June 15, 2016
The new features are valid for all Apple OSes (macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS) and are set to begin this fall. After a new subscription based business model was introduced, new features are announced for application developers as well:
The post is a must read as it is full of details on each of these features.
§Thursday, June 9, 2016
Lauren Goode writing for The Verge:
In a rare pre-WWDC sit-down interview with The Verge, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said that Apple would soon alter its revenue-sharing model for apps. While the well-known 70 / 30 split will remain, developers who are able to maintain a subscription with a customer longer than a year will see Apple’s cut drop down to 15 percent. The option to sell subscriptions will also be available to all developers instead of just a few kinds of apps.
§Thursday, June 9, 2016
And, “native” means that the ad blocking happens at the web engine level, making page loads much faster, while consuming much less memory than extension-based ad blockers.
§Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Craig Hockenberry is writing a book about color management for “A Book Apart”. If you want to understand what makes the latest Apple screens (iMac 5K, 9.7” iPad Pro) stand out of the crowd:
Apple is in a unique position with regard to color management. They own a technology called ColorSync that first saw the light of day in 1993 with System 7.1 on the Mac. It’s also been integrated at a system-level for all of the OS X releases. It’s a very mature technology that recently made its way to mobile in the iOS 9.3 release.
On the other side of the coin, Android has no color management. Companies like Samsung are going to find it impossible to pull off something like True Tone and DCI-P3 without the aid of color management.
Brandon Chester from AnandTech also wrote a comprehensive piece on what to expect from the new DCI-P3 gamut of the 9.7” iPad Pro:
With a larger color gamut, my biggest question was how Apple was handing color management. A simple explanation of color management is that it’s the process through which a device should transform the original colors of a piece of content into a display’s target color space. Effective color management is critical for dealing with content that doesn’t match a display’s color space, in this case of course ensuring sRGB content is rendered correctly on a DCI-P3 display.
§Friday, April 22, 2016
Ina Fried writing for Re/Code:
Grove’s personal story is also one of tenacity and resilience. He was born in Budapest and moved to the United States in the mid-1950s, after enduring both Nazi occupation and Soviet repression. It’s a story Grove kept largely to himself for decades, but eventually shared with the world, including in his 2002 memoir, “Swimming Across.”
“Only the paranoïd survive.”
§Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Benjamin Mayo writing for 9to5mac:
Apple is finally rolling out its Apple News Format to all publishers, after an initial announcement at WWDC 2015. The format lets anyone, big or small, create rich multimedia stories within the Apple News app, featuring panoramas, videos, animations and more.
§Friday, March 18, 2016
From the Wall Street Journal:
The company mistakenly has been underestimating the number of readers using the News app since its launch, and passing that inaccurate information on to publishers.
A lot of problems have to be addressed: Getting content fast, aggregating, sorting and ranking it. Then synchronizing it to the customer’s device as fast as possible. Then getting the customer’s usage informations in an anonymized way, then provide it back to the publishers. Then there is advertisement, matching the right ad to the right audience. Then there is billing...
The News app is still in its infancy, but from my experience, Apple really listens to the (small) publishers.
§Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Gregg Keizer writing for ComputerWorld:
On Jan. 12, Microsoft will serve up the final security updates for all instances of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and IE8 and for most of the copies of IE9 and IE10 now on customers’ PCs.
From the Microsoft Blog, a year and a half ago:
After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates. For example, customers using Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, or Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 SP1 should migrate to Internet Explorer 11 to continue receiving security updates and technical support. For more details regarding support timelines on Windows and Windows Embedded, see the Microsoft Support Lifecycle site.
§Tuesday, January 5, 2016
The Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched, carrying 11 satellites to low-Earth orbit. The flight marked SpaceX’s first successful landing of the first stage booster. Eric Berger writing for Ars Technica:
However, it is worth noting that on Monday night the Falcon 9 rocket descended from about twice the altitude as the New Shepherd vehicle, and at about twice the speed, approximately Mach 7.5. It did not simply drop back to Earth from a vertical launch; rather, the Falcon 9 flew hundreds of kilometres away from the coast before turning around and flying back. By doing so it became the first orbital rocket ever to achieve such a feat, and presumably the first of many.
New Shepard is Blue Origin’s reusable rocket which successfully returned to earth after flying into suborbital space on November 23, 2015.
UPDATE: SpaceX has published the full video of the flight (45:27), with Tim Urban as special guest.
§Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Facebook:
We’re also testing a new tool that will let people provide more information about their circumstances if they are asked to verify their name. People can let us know they have a special circumstance, and then give us more information about their unique situation. This additional information will help our review teams better understand the situation so they can provide more personalized support. This information will also help inform potential improvements we can make in the future.
I understand the motivations behind this for some users. My guess is, as usual, you will have to provide even more information about yourself to Facebook and it will keep it, even if your situation changes.
§Friday, December 18, 2015
Owen Williams reporting for TheNextWeb:
To fix the bug Google needed to switch to a new pseudo-random number generator called xorshift128+ which fixes the not-quite-random problem found in the older MWC1616 algorithm.
xorshift128+ results in random numbers that are actually random and offers significant performance improvements, however is not cryptographically secure, so shouldn’t be used to create GUIDs or other secure hashes.
§Thursday, December 17, 2015
Vindu Goel reporting for The New York Times:
The change in Yahoo’s strategy, which follows deliberations by the board over the last week, is the latest effort by Marissa Mayer, the chief executive, to assuage shareholders. Ms. Mayer, who was hired in 2012 to turn around Yahoo, had planned to spin off the company’s 15 percent stake in Alibaba, bundled with a small-business services unit, into a new company called Aabaco. She then planned to focus on improving the company’s core business, the sale of advertising that is shown to the roughly one billion users of Yahoo’s apps and websites.
Ms. Mayer is now effectively back to square one. Yahoo’s core Internet operations are struggling, even though the chief executive has made dozens of acquisitions, added original video and magazine-style content, and released new apps. The shares in Alibaba remain Yahoo’s most lucrative asset, with the company’s $8.5 billion stake in Yahoo Japan a distant second. The rest of Yahoo is worth $3 billion to $8 billion, according to analysts’ estimates.
I wonder what David Pogue thinks about this.
§Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Owen Williams reporting for TheNextWeb:
Chakra is the engine used to execute JavaScript that was developed from scratch in 2008 and has the most compatibility with the ECMAScript 6 standard over other engines, including Google’s V8.
Peter Bright concluding for ArsTechnica:
The broader plan is to ensure the engine is useful for more than browser scenarios. The V8 engine developed by Google for Chrome has a whole parallel existence on the server, courtesy of the Node.js server-side JavaScript platform. ChakraCore could easily move into a similar space. Internally, Microsoft uses Chakra to run services such as Cortana and Outlook.com. Externally, Microsoft has already developed a version of Node.js that uses Chakra instead of V8, something that can now be fully open source too.
I would add this excerpt from the Microsoft Edge Blog (May 18, 2015). The post is well worth a read:
Starting in Windows 8.1/IE11, Chakra added support for a new set of public hosting APIs called the JavaScript Runtime (JSRT) APIs, which shipped as part of the Windows SDK. While these APIs allowed hosting of Chakra outside the browser, the set of functionality exposed by these APIs during Windows8.1/IE11 was mainly focused on specific server side scenarios across Microsoft products and services like Outlook.com and Azure DocumentDB.
§Tuesday, December 8, 2015
With the launch of the open source Swift project, we are also releasing a port that works with the Linux operating system! You can build it from the Swift sources or download pre-built binaries for Ubuntu. The port is still a work in progress but we’re happy to say that it is usable today for experimentation. Currently x86_64 is the only supported architecture on Linux.
It is hosted on GitHub.
§Thursday, December 3, 2015
Michael Gorman writing for Engadget:
The code that powers Engadget has been completely rewritten from the ground up to reduce load times and increase efficiency. The responsive design is equally at home on a desktop as it is on a smartphone (and all screen sizes in between).
§Thursday, December 3, 2015
Adobe announces Animate CC which will replace Flash Professional in 2016. From the Adobe blog:
For nearly two decades, Flash Professional has been the standard for producing rich animations on the web. Because of the emergence of HTML5 and demand for animations that leverage web standards, we completely rewrote the tool over the past few years to incorporate native HTML5 Canvas and WebGL support.
§Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Mitchell Baker writing on the mozilla.governance newsgroup:
Given this, it’s clear to me that sooner or later paying a tax to support Thunderbird will not make sense as a policy for Mozilla. I know many believe this time came a while back, and I’ve been slow to say this clearly. And of course, some feel that this time should never come. However, as I say, it’s clear to me today that continuing to live with these competing demands given our focus on industry impact is increasingly unstable. We’ve seen this already, in an unstructured way, as various groups inside Mozilla stop supporting Thunderbird. The accelerating speed of Firefox and infrastructure changes -- which I welcome wholeheartedly -- will emphasize this.
I did not know that Thunderbird was still alive.
§Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Dave Mark writing for The Loop:
As a user, I would much prefer to buy my apps through the App Store, to rely on the scrutiny of a solid malware/counterfeiting screening. I imagine that Apple is hearing the klaxon calls from the developer community, reading blog posts like this one from Daring Fireball.
§Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Bohemian Coding, developer of the award winning application Sketch:
There are a number of reasons for Sketch leaving the Mac App Store—many of which in isolation wouldn’t cause us huge concern. However as with all gripes, when compounded they make it hard to justify staying: App Review continues to take at least a week, there are technical limitations imposed by the Mac App Store guidelines (sandboxing and so on) that limit some of the features we want to bring to Sketch, and upgrade pricing remains unavailable.
The whole Apple blogosphere is relaying the event, insisting on the fact that it is another top indie developer that is leaving the Mac App Store (Federico Viticci, Michael Tsai, Dan Moren, Milen Dzhumerov, etc.) I like how John Gruber sums up the problems with the Mac App Store:
The Mac App Store should be designed to make developers like Bohemian Coding (and Bare Bones, and Panic, etc.) happy. It should make developing for the Mac better, not worse than selling outside the App Store. These are among the best apps on the platform, from developers who have been loyal to Apple and the Mac for decades.
The Mac App Store is rotting, at least for productivity software. There’s no other way to put it. If this hasn’t set off alarm bells within Apple, something is very wrong.
§Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai writing for Motherboard:
The personal information of almost 5 million parents and more than 200,000 kids was exposed earlier this month after a hacker broke into the servers of a Chinese company that sells kids toys and gadgets, Motherboard has learned.
The hacked data includes names, email addresses, passwords, and home addresses of 4,833,678 parents who have bought products sold by VTech, which has almost $2 billion in revenue. The dump also includes the first names, genders and birthdays of more than 200,000 kids.
Troy Hunt provided some insight on the VTech process to gather the data: informations are sent over plain HTTP, no SSL involved. Passwords are digested with MD5, not even salted. The information of the children and their parents are easily linkable.
§Monday, November 30, 2015
From the Wordpress developer site:
The new WordPress.com interface is built from the ground up as a single JavaScript application that relies on the WordPress.com REST API to communicate to the WordPress core.
The source is open and hosted on GitHub. A desktop Mac App is available that lets you manage all your WordPress.com and Jetpack-enabled sites in one place.
§Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Stacey Higginbotham writing for Fortune:
Nvidia announced two new graphics accelerators Tuesday, which are aimed at helping large companies like Facebook, Baidu and Google develop new deep learning models and then deploy those models at a massive scale without requiring huge, expensive banks of servers all hooked up to their own power plant.
The article references the new Tesla M40 and Tesla M4 chips. It also points to IBM’s synaptic chip, which, I think, is much more interesting than building AI on top of a CUDA architecture.
§Monday, November 23, 2015
Tom Warren writing for The Verge:
The PC revolution started off life 30 years ago this week. Microsoft launched its first version of Windows on November 20th, 1985, to succeed MS-DOS.
§Monday, November 23, 2015
Scott Gilbertson writing for Ars Technica:
The most exciting thing in Ubuntu 15.10 is probably the updated kernel, which is now based on the upstream Linux Kernel 4.2.
The 4.2 line brings support for recent Radeon GPUs and some new encryption options for ext4 disks. There’s also support for Intel’s new Broxton chips, which just might be finding their way into an Ubuntu Mobile device at some point. 15.10 marks the first time that the new live kernel patching has been available in Ubuntu, and this release adds a new kernel for the Raspberry Pi 2 as well.
§Friday, November 20, 2015
Less than a month after unveiling RankBrain, Google now open sources TensorFlow the second generation of its general purpose machine learning algorithm DistBelief. From the white paper:
TensorFlow is an interface for expressing machine learning algorithms, and an implementation for executing such algorithms. A computation expressed using TensorFlow can be executed with little or no change on a wide variety of heterogeneous systems, ranging from mobile devices such as phones and tablets up to large-scale distributed systems of hundreds of machines and thousands of computational devices such as GPU cards.
BTW, it looks like Apple has trouble getting top AI researchers working for the company.
§Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Alexander Repty is a seasoned iOS developer who never had a chance to code a video game. After having published his first game to the Apple TV app store (Cosmos — Infinite Space), he is now telling his story: learning spritekit, putting his hands on an Apple TV Developer Kit (eventhough he was not picked by Apple to get one in the first place), having some people to test his game, setting the price, passing the app store review process (which was painful), providing some sales figures and the lessons he learnt.
§Monday, November 9, 2015
Alistair Barr reporting for the Wall Street Journal:
Google engineers have been working for roughly two years to combine the operating systems and have made progress recently, two of the people said. The company plans to unveil its new, single operating system in 2017, but expects to show off an early version next year, one of the people said.
§Friday, October 30, 2015
Apple has put online all the reference documentation so anyone is now able to publish rich articles in its News application (via the Apple News API) :
Apple News Format is the custom JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format for News content. With Apple News Format, you can create beautiful layouts with iOS fonts, rich photo galleries, videos, and animations—all optimized for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
I was really expecting this one.
§Thursday, October 29, 2015
Among the last annoucements from Medium, the publishing API is the most interesting to me. The documentation is on GitHub. Daniel Jalkut, the guy behind the Mac blog editor MarsEdit took a look at it:
The extent to which the API supports working with posts boils down to a single mechanism for submitting a post to the service. It’s not possible to enumerate the list of existing drafts or published posts, e.g. to crosspost to another service or backup your posts to a local archive.
§Friday, October 9, 2015
Jeff Atwood reminds us that Eric Raymond in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” has been proven wrong with his “Linus’s Law”:
The idea is that open source software, by virtue of allowing anyone and everyone to view the source code, is inherently less buggy than closed source software. He dubbed this “Linus’s Law”.
The Heartbleed SSL vulnerability went unnoticed for two years. The post is worth a read if you think open source is the best answer to fix all bugs in a software.
§Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Terry Myerson writing for the Windows Blog:
From the very beginning, we designed Windows 10 with two straightforward privacy principles in mind:
- Windows 10 collects information so the product will work better for you.
- You are in control with the ability to determine what information is collected.
You are warned: You have the right not to provide any personal information until you make a mistake.
§Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Linda Dong writing on her blog:
I was experimenting with Keynote’s animation tools and decided for fun to make a short animated motion graphic to showcase what the app can do. It’s pretty impressive how much Keynote can stand up to pro animation apps like After Effects and Motion and how fast it makes process. Honestly the most time consuming part of this was trying to get an adequate screen recording (video codecs blah).
§Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Andrew Cunningham & Lee Hutchinson on the new “System Integrity Protection” feature:
Rather than adding yet another superuser account, SIP provides the concept of an additional file system and process flag, and file system objects and in-memory processes so flagged cannot be altered by processes not signed with Apple’s own code signing key.
There’s more, too—the file system protections are only the start. SIP consists of four major features:
- Protected locations cannot be written to by root.
- Protected system processes cannot be attached to with a debugger and cannot be subject to code injection.
- All kernel extensions must now be signed (and old methods for disabling kernel extension signing are gone).
- SIP cannot be disabled from within the operating system, only from the OS X Recovery partition.
§Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Zoltan Szabadka:
While Zopfli is Deflate-compatible, Brotli is a whole new data format. This new format allows us to get 20–26% higher compression ratios over Zopfli. In our study “Comparison of Brotli, Deflate, Zopfli, LZMA, LZHAM and Bzip2 Compression Algorithms” we show that Brotli is roughly as fast as zlib’s Deflate implementation. At the same time, it compresses slightly more densely than LZMA and bzip2 on the Canterbury corpus.
The code is opensourced on GitHub. Via Nate Swanner for TNW.
UPDATE: Squash Benchmark has a table showing how Brotli fares compared to the other compression algorithms.
§Monday, September 28, 2015
Apple developer News:
App slicing is currently unavailable for iOS 9 apps due to an issue affecting iCloud backups created from iOS 9 where some apps from the App Store would only restore to the same model of iOS device.
§Friday, September 25, 2015
Microsoft, however, regards Office 2016 as a major release. Not because of any significant changes to the core functionality or interface, but because of collaboration. This too should be familiar; the company was banging the same drum with Office 2013, too.
§Wednesday, September 23, 2015
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