1. Daring Fireball Using Dynamic Scripting Languages For Machine Translation

Consumer Reports: New Apple software fixes a battery issue found in CR tests. The software, now in beta, will be part of a broad update soon. This makes it sound like CR found a problem with the batteries. They found a bug in a Safari developer mode. It’s a real bug, but it’s clear now that it didn’t justify the initial sensational “ Wow, first ever Apple laptop not recommended by Consumer Reports!” report. There’s no way they would’ve published that rushed initial report for a laptop from any brand other than Apple. Clickbait, pure and simple.

Daring Fireball Using Dynamic Scripting Languages For Machine Translation

Good piece by Hamilton Nolan, writing for The Concourse, on Trump’s press conference yesterday, which had the tone and substance of a professional wrestling promotion: These things are not normal. These things are not okay. These are actions that flout well-established ethical and civil norms.

Admittedly, there is something thrilling about watching him do this. What will he do next? It always keeps us tuning in, in the same way that a violent alcoholic father will always keep his children on his toes. But we should not fool ourselves about what is happening in front of our eyes. We are all coming to realize that our civil society institutions may not be strong enough to protect the flawed but fundamentally solid democracy that we thought we had. We are witnessing the rise to power of a leader who does not care about norms.

Since these norms were created to prevent political, social, economic, and cultural disasters, we do not need to wonder how this will end. It will end poorly. Matthew Yglesias, writing for Vox: now floating around range from the salacious (Russia has Trump sex tapes made at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow) to the serious (using intermediaries, Trump and Russia agreed to an explicit quid pro quo in which Russia would give him electoral help and in exchange he would shift US foreign policy). None of this is proven, and much of it is unprovable (if the FSB has a secret sex tape, how are we going to find it?) but the truth is that these kind of allegations, though difficult to resist, simply shouldn’t matter much compared to what’s in the public record. Maureen Dowd: He recalls a story from his and Mr.

Musk’s PayPal days, when Mr. Musk joined the engineering team’s poker game and bet everything on every hand, admitting only afterward that it was his first time playing poker. Then there was the time they were driving in Mr. Musk’s McLaren F1 car, “the fastest car in the world.” It hit an embankment, achieved liftoff, made a 360-degree horizontal turn, crashed and was destroyed. “It was a miracle neither of us were hurt,” Mr. “I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, which is not advisable. Elon’s first comment was, ‘Wow, Peter, that was really intense.’ And then it was: ‘You know, I had read all these stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them.

But I knew it would never happen to me, so I didn’t get any insurance.’ And then we hitchhiked the rest of the way to the meeting.” Peter Thiel may well be smart, but he’s also dangerously foolish and solipsistic. You have to be a reckless fool to be that smart and get into any car without wearing a seatbelt, let alone a McLaren being driven by a daredevil like Musk. On whether Thiel is concerned about Trump’s upcoming nominee (singular, I hope) for the Supreme Court: “I don’t think these things will particularly change. It’s like, even if you appointed a whole series of conservative Supreme Court justices, I’m not sure that Roe v. Wade would get overturned, ever. I don’t know if people even care about the Supreme Court.” Like I said: Peter Thiel may well be smart, but he’s also dangerously foolish and solipsistic. Dan Provost: The math works out perfectly.

This new 10.5” iPad would have the exact same resolution as the 12.9” iPad Pro (2732 × 2048), but the same pixel density of the iPad mini (326 ppi instead of 264 ppi). Crunch the numbers, do a little Pythagorean Theorem, and you end up with a screen 10.5” diagonal (10.47” to be precise, but none of Apple’s stated screen sizes are exact). In terms of physcial dimensions, the width of this 10.5” screen would be exactly the same as the height of the iPad mini screen. Can’t believe I didn’t think to do this regarding this rumor. The math works out. Ben Fritz, Tripp Mickle, and Hannah Karp, reporting for the WSJ: Apple Inc.

Is planning to build a significant new business in original television shows and movies, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that could make it a bigger player in Hollywood and offset slowing sales of iPhones and iPads. These people said the programming would be available to subscribers of Apple’s $10-a-month streaming-music service, which has struggled to catch up to the larger Spotify AB. Apple Music already includes a limited number of documentary-style segments on musicians, but nothing like the premium programming it is now seeking.

Interesting, but I don’t get why they’re framing this in the context of “offsetting slowing sales of iPhones and iPads”. I think Apple would be pursuing the exact same original content course regardless of whether iPhone and iPad sales were booming, stagnant, or falling. It’s just the obvious thing to do. Wednesday, 11 January 2017 Sal Soghoian, writing for MacStories (there’s a byline I never expected to write — it’s going to take a while to get used to Sal as a civilian): Here’s a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that Apple decided to combine their engineering resources to form app teams that delivered both iOS and macOS versions of applications. In such a scenario it may seem logical to retain application features common to both platforms and to remove those that were perceived to require extra resources.

Certainly Automation would be something examined in that regard, and the idea might be posited that: “App Extensions are equivalent to, or could be a replacement for, User Automation in macOS.” And by User Automation, I’m referring to Apple Event scripting, Automator, Services, the UNIX command line utilities, etc. Let’s examine the validity of that conjecture, beginning with overviews of App Extensions and User Automation. It’s a great article, and I think Sal’s case is very strong. App extensions are great, but they’re no replacement for automation. His conclusion: But let’s take a step back, and think about this topic differently. Why not have both? Perhaps it is time for Apple and all of us to think of User Automation and App Extensions in terms of “AND” instead of “OR.” To embrace the development of a new cross-platform automation architecture, maybe called “AutomationKit,” that would incorporate the “everyman openness” of User Automation with the focused abilities of developer-created plugins.

App Extensions could become the new macOS System Services, and Automator could save workflows as Extensions with access to the Share Menu and new “non-selection” extension points. And AutomationKit could even include an Apple Event bridge so that it would work with the existing macOS automation tools. Must-read piece for anyone who cares about the Mac as a power user platform. I’m OK with the current situation, where the Mac has these automation capabilities and iOS does not.

I’d prefer to see iOS gain serious automation capabilities — even if it’s an altogether new technology. But I’m dreadfully afraid of a future where MacOS is devolved to iOS’s state, with no supported automation technologies. Tuesday, 3 January 2017. The whole piece is worth reading, but his comments on two particular products stood out to me. First, the AirPort lineup: Apple has products it has let languish without any significant update for long periods of time.

If you look at how Apple’s treated their AirPort line, you’d think Wi-Fi was a mature technology where nothing was really changing. In fact, a lot is happening including a big shift to mesh networks, and Apple has seemingly ignored all of that. It used to be you bought Airports because they were some of the best Wi-FI devices out there. Today, the only reason to buy them is you want easy, and because it has the Apple brand.

They’re woefully out of date (and in fact, I just replaced mine with a set of Eero devices, which are Apple easy to use, and blow Apple’s products away in terms of performance). Rumors have come out that Apple has cancelled future development of these, but they’re still for sale. Something is clearly wrong with the AirPort line.

Either it should have been updated long ago to remain state-of-the-art, or it should have been discontinued. Whether or not Apple should still be in the Wi-Fi router game is a reasonable argument. I think they should, but I can see the other side of the argument (that other companies do it well, and Apple should focus on areas where they stand alone). But there’s no reasonable argument for the current AirPort state of affairs. And on the Mac Pro: To put the Mac pro in context: This was the “Can’t Innovate my Ass” product that Apple produced to counter criticism that it wasn’t innovative any more and that it was letting the Mac product line languish (hey, this isn’t a new complaint). They came out with something that was visually distinctive and they build a really interesting set of guts inside the trash can.

But here’s the problem: in retrospect, what they built was a device based around their own ego needs of proving their critics wrong, not a device that served the purposes of their power users. It’s not configurable, it’s not upgradeable, it’s not expandable: It’s pretty, and full of (for 2013) innovative hardware design, but is that really what Apple’s power users needed? “What the hell happened with the Mac Pro?” is the most interesting question about Apple today. Because something clearly went way wrong with this product.

I’m not convinced the basic idea for the design is unsound — the idea is that expansion would come in the form of external peripherals, rather than things you install inside the box. I still think that’s probably the future of “expandable” computing. If Apple had updated the Mac Pro on a roughly annual basis, we wouldn’t be calling this a disaster. I’m sure there would still be people who would wish that Apple had stuck with the traditional tower form factor, but we wouldn’t all be saying “What the fuck?” If Apple were going to update this Mac Pro, we should have seen it two years ago.

If Apple were going to scrap this design and replace it with something else (like they did with ), we should have seen the replacement a year ago. And if they were planning to abolish the Mac Pro, that should have happened this past year — or at least we should have seen prices drop significantly on these three-year-old workstations. Updates to the same basic design would make sense. An all-new design would make sense. Getting out of the Mac Pro game would make sense. Selling 1000-day-old pro workstations at the same prices as in 2013 makes no sense. Whatever the explanation is, this situation is an unmitigated disaster.

Spotiamp (spotify with winamp skin and plugins for mac). The user interface is lifted directly from the classic Winamp skin, and the program lets you play all your Spotify playlists. In honour of Winamp, Spotify has made a tribute app available that is fully compatible with songs from the music-streaming service.

Other computer makers raise and lower prices as component prices change. Apple comes out with a price and sticks with it. One reason for that is branding. Stable prices at “round” numbers — $1499 instead of $1427 or whatever — are a sign of a premium quality brand. And they don’t lower prices on older products unless they keep them in the product lineup after their replacements have been introduced. What they almost never do is lower the price of a product just because it’s old, without a replacement. Thus, if Apple were to announce price drops on the Mac Pro lineup, without releasing updated models, I would take that as a very strong sign that they’re getting out of the standalone pro desktop market.

But they haven’t done that — they’re still selling these Mac Pros at the same prices as when they were announced over three years ago. I take that as a sign that they plan to replace them, or at least hope to replace them, but have failed for whatever reason(s). Tuesday, 3 January 2017 Interesting analysis of Trump’s tweet style from Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak.

In a nut, he uses speech-like language, not written language. Puschak puts it well: “Instead of asking us to read, he forces us to hear.” It’s no secret I do not like the guy, but there’s no denying that his use of Twitter is masterly. Tim Hardwick, writing for MacRumors: On Tuesday, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News (EDN) claimed the next iteration of the wearable device will be manufactured by Taiwan-based Quanta, which was also responsible for the production of Apple’s first and second-generation smartwatch. Citing market watchers with knowledge of Quanta’s plans, the paper said improving battery life is the manufacturer’s “main task”, but beside general performance improvements, the device’s other hardware would not see much change. Quanta declined to comment on the report, calling it “market speculation”.

I’ve been testing the Nike Plus Apple Watch, and it gets much better battery life than my original series Apple Watch. With WatchOS 3.1 it can go two days without a charge, even wearing it to sleep. If Series 3 improves battery life even further, it could turn Apple Watch into a “charge once or twice a week” device, which would be nice. Update: Or even better, perhaps with increased battery life, Apple could give Series 3 an always-on display? That’s still my biggest gripe about Apple Watch. Monday, 2 January 2017 When I was an incoming freshman at Drexel University in 1991, the school had a program, in collaboration with Apple, that allowed students to buy Macintosh computers at a significant discount. I had narrowed my choices to two: a Mac LC and a Mac SE/30.

The SE/30 was significantly faster. But I wound up choosing the LC for one reason: the LC came with a color display, and the SE/30’s display was black and white. Even today, I love the original Mac’s 9-inch black and white display, but even then, just seven years after the Mac debuted, that love was nostalgic. A color display was, for me, an irresistible draw.

The display on that Mac LC now sounds quaint. It measured only 12 inches diagonally (common for notebooks today, but the LC was a desktop), with 512 × 384 pixel resolution. A retina display it was not. And it could only display 256 colors at a time. Today that sounds ludicrous. In 1991 it sounded luxurious — most Macs were black-and-white and many PCs with color support could only show 16 colors at a time. Macs that could display “thousands” of colors cost thousands of dollars more.

For a while, I was obsessed with. (Exciting, right?) As a computer nerd and budding designer, I noticed immediately that the game’s graphics seemed too good to be true — the scenery on the golf courses was clearly better looking than what was possible with the system’s 256 color palette. I delved into it and learned that while my LC indeed could not display more than 256 colors at a time, the OS provided APIs that allowed an app to specify which 256 colors to display. The golf game, for obvious reasons, used a custom palette with way more greens than the system’s standard palette. “That’s clever”, I remember thinking.

I also remember thinking that 256 colors no longer seemed like “a lot”. A few years later, after I’d immersed myself in the online indie Mac developer/power user community, I became aware of a design studio that specialized in a delightfully specific niche: software icons. Their name said it all:. Soon, The Iconfactory started making their own apps, too, the user interfaces for which were just as exquisitely pixel-perfect as their icons. The Iconfactory’s developer was a very tall fellow named Craig Hockenberry. Craig’s long been a good friend.

So, when he asked me last year if I’d consider writing the foreword to a book he was writing about color management, I was honored. Came out last month. It is an excellent book — useful for both designers and developers who are trying to, well, make sense of the state of the art in color management. Here’s an example. You specify a certain exact RGB color in your CSS for a web page. Then you make a graphic for that web page, with the exact same RGB value for the background color. But when you put the graphic on the web page, the background colors don’t match up.

But only in some browsers, on some platforms. What the hell is going on? In this book, Craig tells us not just what to do, but why. It’s not merely a checklist of steps to follow blindly, but rather a foundation of knowledge. The famed physicist Richard Feynman believed that if he couldn’t explain a complex subject to an audience of first-year students, that meant he himself didn’t truly understand the subject.

This book is proof that Craig now truly understands how modern color management works. A few salient facts:.

It’s an e-book, and it costs only $8. You can read it in iBooks, Kindle, and as a PDF. You only have to buy it once. It’s only 91 pages long. It contains everything you need to know, and nothing you don’t. It’s published by A Book Apart, so unsurprisingly it’s well-edited and exquisitely-designed. Color graphics have never been easy.

As our technical capabilities have expanded (e.g. Wide color gamut displays), so has the complexity involved in understanding how it all works. If you work in design or graphics, you should read this book.

See also: Craig’s blog post of the book,. Last but not least, Craig and I discussed the book. Back in the System 7 era of the 1990s, you could change the number of colors used by your display in the Monitors control panel. There were options like “Black and White” and numbers like 4, 16, and 256. After that, though,.

It’s one of those little details that made me love the Mac. 256 is a manageable number. 65,536 is not. This preference for humane descriptions over technical descriptions lives on today in MacOS 10.12 Sierra’s Displays System Preferences panel. You can’t change the number of colors, but you can change the scale of the interface.

If you have a retina display, rather than a list of pixel resolutions (e.g. 2560 × 1440), side-by-side example icons, with “Larger Text” on the left, “More Space” on the right, and “Default”. I even remember the 4-character code for the resource type that specified the custom color palettes: “clut”, for “color look up table”. I don’t think there’s any classic Mac app that I have stronger nostalgia for than ResEdit. I probably haven’t used ResEdit in 15 years, but I feel like I could sit down in front of it and be right at home.