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
Brent Simmons reaction, following Marco Arment’s decision to pull Peace from the App Store:
But here’s the thing: we don’t love indies because they can do and say things that upset other people — we love indies because they can do and say things that upset anybody. Even you, even me.
§Monday, September 21, 2015
Peace required that all ads be treated the same — all-or-nothing enforcement for decisions that aren’t black and white. This approach is too blunt, and Ghostery and I have both decided that it doesn’t serve our goals or beliefs well enough. If we’re going to effect positive change overall, a more nuanced, complex approach is required than what I can bring in a simple iOS app.
R.I.P. (couldn’t help it)
§Saturday, September 19, 2015
Earlier this year Facebook open-sourced React Native for iOS. During @Scale developer conference, the company introduced React Native for Android, providing a Javascript based multi-platform native framework allowing developers to craft applications for iOS and Android with only one codebase.
Daniel Witte and Philipp von Weitershausen explain how they built the first cross-platform React Native app.
At Facebook we’ve been using React Native in production for over a year now. Almost exactly a year ago, our team set out to develop the Ads Manager app. Our goal was to create a new app to let the millions of people who advertise on Facebook manage their accounts and create new ads on the go. It ended up being not only Facebook’s first fully React Native app but also the first cross-platform one.
§Friday, September 18, 2015
Nilay Patel writing for The Verge (I guess in response to John Gruber):
This is the dynamic to keep in mind — especially when you see Apple bloggers like Gruber forcefully discount the notion that Apple’s decisions will affect small publishers. The Apple vs. Google fight has never been more heated or more tense, and Facebook’s opportunity to present itself as the savior of media has never been bigger — through hey-it’s-just-about-speed Instant Articles, which will almost certainly be featured higher in the News Feed, and huge things like its massive video initiative, which is a direct assault on YouTube. And oh — Apple’s new tvOS, that huge bet on bringing apps to TV? Doesn’t support WebKit at all.
So it’s Apple vs Google vs Facebook, all with their own revenue platforms. Google has the web, Facebook has its app, and Apple has the iPhone. This is the newest and biggest war in tech going today.
§Thursday, September 17, 2015
A very nice piece by Casey Johnston that explains what situations the editors and publishers have to cope with given the predictable success of adblocking software:
A few months ago, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford released its Digital News Report 2015. One of the products of the current online ad environment, according to the report, is “significant consumer dissatisfaction with online advertising, expressed through the rapid take up of ad blockers.” Another, recent report from Adobe and PageFair, a service that attempts to monetize users who block ads, estimated that sixteen percent of people in the US block ads. In some pockets of the internet, the rate of adblocking has always been high — according to Adobe and PageFair, 26.5 percent of people who visit gaming websites block ads, and at a tech website I used to work at, even five years ago, the rate hovered around thirty percent — but according to the Adobe report, usage of adblocking software has grown forty-eight percent in the US over the last year.
§Thursday, September 17, 2015
Federico Viticci:
The big advantage of Peace over most Content Blockers based on crowdsourced blocklists, in fact, is that the Ghostery database is constantly optimized for the latest trends in web tracking and its performance is valued by avoiding duplicate rules and purging old entries which are no longer relevant.
§Thursday, September 17, 2015
Eugene Kim writing for Business Insider:
During the keynote speech at Dreamforce Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was put in a situation where he had to use Apple’s iPhone to do a demo — a sight that would’ve been unimaginable just a few years back.
Nowadays, even Steve B. uses an iPhone.
§Thursday, September 17, 2015
Comprehensive, didactic, all in one page for your reading pleasure (meaning almost uncluttered by ads.) The plan:
§Thursday, September 17, 2015
VLC lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf writes on his blog:
Finally, some code to build VLCKit for the new tvOS was merged. It’s very early though, but we have video playback! :)
§Monday, September 14, 2015
Android Official Blog (September 10, 2015):
Today, we’re beginning to roll out Android Pay -- the simple and secure way to pay with your Android phone at over one million locations across the US.
Almost a year after Apple Pay.
UPDATE: If you want a more in depth view of Android Pay, Megan Geuss from Ars Technica has got you covered.
§Friday, September 11, 2015
Bloomberg’s Josh Tyrangiel wrote a great article containing some insider details on the design of Apple’s latest innovation:
But 3D Touch is to Force Touch as ocean swimming is to a foot bath. Screen size makes a difference, but the software on the iPhone 6S has a liquid ease. Apply a tiny bit of pressure anywhere you want to explore something—a restaurant link inside a text, an 11 a.m. meeting invite buried in an e-mail—and a peek at the restaurant’s Web page or a window into your calendar hovers expectantly in the middle of the screen while everything else blurs into temporary opacity. Press a little harder, and what you’ve been peeking at pops fully into frame. Release your finger, and you’re right back where you started. Presto chango, no home button required.
Via Shawn King
§Friday, September 11, 2015
Brendan Donohoe, product designer at Twitter:
Our development of a new iPad experience reflects a responsive philosophy, which led us to develop a framework accommodating a multi-device ecosystem. We call this framework “adaptive UI.”
I think his developer team did not tell him where the “Adaptive UI” framework came from.
Also, this approach lets us design beyond the present. When new devices or features come along — like multitasking in iOS 9 (which allows two apps to run side-by-side), or the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus — thanks to this system, we can support them with almost no additional effort immediately upon their release.
So now, the iPad version should not lag behind the iPhone one. They just could have said they followed Apple’s development guidelines.
§Wednesday, September 9, 2015
This release contains both the Node.js project and the io.js project now combined in a single codebase and the same version of the V8 Javascript engine shipping with the Chrome web browser today.
As always with a major release, we don’t expect the adoption of Node.js v4 to be painless. It will take time to adapt, particularly as compiled add-ons catch up with the new version of V8 (hint: see NAN for our official solution to the compatibility problem). Thankfully, the io.js v3.x series of releases have given many add-on authors a chance to prepare their code for Node.js v4, so much of the npm ecosystem is ready today.
An initial list of breaking changes between v0.12 and v4 can be found on the LTS wiki, in the coming days we will continue to populate both this wiki and the core wiki with documentation regarding the changes you should be aware of.
Via Owen Williams
§Wednesday, September 9, 2015
From the Windows Blog:
Our implementation of VP9 will support software decoding and, when supported by the device, hardware decoding. Since decoding video is computationally complex, the best experience with the software decoder will be seen on more powerful desktop and laptop computers.
Given this, VP9 will initially be implemented behind an experimental flag in Microsoft Edge as we continue to work with industry partners on broader support for hardware decoding, and as we evaluate support for additional audio formats. Users can view their current experimental flag settings and change the defaults by navigating to “about:flags” in the browser. A setting will be available that alternatively enables or disables VP9 support.
VP9 is the native encoding for YouTube UHD videos.
§Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Michael Tsai:
It still has the “lite” feature set, nothing like my beloved NetNewsWire 3. There are no smart folders. There’s no meaningful AppleScript support. It doesn’t support the system share menu.
NetNewsWire 4.0 is finally available for OS X and iOS (iPhone only, it is not a universal iOS application yet), and feeds are synchronized between both applications. To my knowledge, it is the only RSS feed reader application that provides this feature without relying on a subscription model.
UPDATE (September 15, 2015): I checked Feedly, and it provides a basic cloud based service for free. For a more advanced use, you have to upgrade to the Pro service for a monthly fee.
§Tuesday, September 8, 2015
I agree with almost everything written in this article:
Choosing an off-the-shelf component is almost always not the optimal way to solve a problem. You’ll suffer through having that pre-fabricated solution only solve your problem the first 80%. And then suddenly there’s no configuration option for that little thing that should be so easy to do. And then you have to start refactoring and fixing bugs in that library. And then you fork it. And you probably need to figure out how to run and adopt the tests. And then you find out there are no tests. And then…
§Monday, September 7, 2015
Calvino Noir is a point and click side-scrolling adventure game, available on Steam, iOS and Playstation 4, where architecture and lightning gives a “film noir” atmosphere. It is created by a former architect, Dan Walters:
“In terms of architecture, an influence for the visuals were architectural perspective drawings, which are often drawn with a diagrammatic, sculptural quality,” says Walters. “This, when mixed with the theatrical romance of noir, gives the game its visual identity.”
Some levels are inspired by the new theatre of the Comédie-Française designed by Charles de Wailly.
Via Curbed.
§Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Copyright © 2015-2018 Selected Links | RSS | Twitter | Linked list