Stephen Hackett reviewed for the Sweet Setup different WordPress clients for the Mac, and came to the correct conclusion:
If you’re like me and would rather use a desktop application than a web app to manage your WordPress site, MarsEdit is the best route. It’s full of features, easy to use, and feels right at home on macOS.
There really is no contest. I only wish I could find something as good as MarsEdit for my iPhone and iPad.
For the Atlantic, Anna Wiener reviewed Alexandra Wolfe’s new book about Thiel Fellowship recipients from 2011 until 2016:
[Wolfe] also undercuts her own point about the disruptive ethos of the place. “Today’s uber-nerds are like the robber barons of the industrial revolution whose steel and automobile manufacturing capabilities changed entire industries,” she writes. “But instead of massive factories and mills, they’re doing it with little buttons.” Portraying Silicon Valley’s powerful as “uber-nerds” who struck it rich is as reductive and unhelpful as referring to technology that integrates personal payment information and location tracking as “little buttons.” The effect is not only to protect them behind the shield of presumed harmlessness, but also to exempt them from the scrutiny that their economic and political power should invite.
The sort of mythology that celebrates a small handful of visionaries and co-founders blurs important social realities. Technology has always been a collective project. The industry is also cyclical. Many failed ideas have been resuscitated and rebranded as successful products and services, owned and managed by people other than their originators. Behind almost every popular app or website today lie numerous shadow versions that have been sloughed away by time. Yet recognition of the group nature of the enterprise would undermine a myth that legitimizes the consolidation of profit, for the most part, among a small group of people.
This is a recurring trope I’ve seen amongst those who report on Silicon Valley — even from technology-centric reporters.
Max Rudberg:
When iOS 10 was introduced, I had hoped to see more borrowed from watchOS, because it does a great job of providing animated feedback to taps of buttons and other elements.
[…]
In comparison, iOS feels stiff to the touch.
This is, as always, a great post from Rudberg. I think his proposed example shows promise, but I wonder if it’s something that would complement 3D Touch actions or distract from them.
Dr. Drang:
The biggest problem for the iPad is Apple’s unwillingness to let it become its own thing. Development of iOS is driven by the iPhone, which probably shouldn’t have the tools of a regular computer. But the iPad needs at least some of those tools if it’s to fulfill Apple’s promise to be a laptop replacement. Being yoked to the iPhone is holding it back.
This feels exactly right to me. The biggest news in iPad in recent years was the introduction of split screen multitasking and picture-in-picture video, neither of which are available on the iPhone.
Apple has long said that the iPad’s big display provides the opportunity to create a completely different app experience. At the first Retina iPad event, Tim Cook even spent stage time mocking Android tablet apps that looked like large phone apps.
But now, five years after that event, it’s not so much the apps that are scaled-up versions of a smartphone, but rather that the operating system seems largely driven by what the iPhone can do. This was an early criticism of the iPad, but I felt it was unwarranted at the time — a larger version of a familiar interface is a great way to introduce a new product category.
Five years on, I wish it felt a little more like the iPad got to be true to itself. I’m not saying that it needs its own operating system or anything, but when I see a screenshot of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro’s home screen that looks broadly identical to an upscaled version of my iPad Mini, I see a less compelling rationale for upgrading.
In my confused coverage of the definitely not new “Ultra Accessory Connector” that appeared on the confidential MFi partner site earlier today, I wrote:
Amidst the migration of Mac peripherals to USB-C, and the replacement of wired headphones with wireless models, I’m a little confused about how this fits into the bigger picture.
The short answer is that the UAC connector just another option for accessory makers, in addition to USB-A, USB-C, and Lightning. I don’t know how many manufacturers will end up using it over other connector options, but there’s one company I’m surprised hasn’t made the commitment towards a newer connector: Apple. Every new iPhone and iPad is sold with a USB-A to Lightning cable, which means they can’t be connected to a new Mac without an adaptor.
Even Apple’s latest and greatest accessories come with a USB-A Lightning cable. Jack Slater:
The AirPods charging case uses a USB-A to Lightning adapter. It’s kind of odd that for $159 you don’t get an AC adapter, although you do get the cable in the box.
To be fair, I suppose the AirPods and iOS devices aren’t explicitly designed as Mac accessories, though I expect a lot of people will use their Mac to charge those products.
So what about products that are explicitly designed as Mac accessories? All three of Apple’s Magic accessories are also bundled with — you guessed it — USB-A-to-Lightning cables. I just called my local Apple Store and they told me that there’s no way to simply swap the bundled cables; a USB-C Lightning cable would be a separate purchase.
I don’t think it’s odd that an AC adaptor isn’t included with a set of AirPods. I do think it’s wrong that you don’t get a USB-C-to-Lightning cable in the box for any of these products, especially since Apple has now sold millions of units of the MacBook and new MacBook Pro. iPods used to include FireWire and USB cables so you could pick what you wanted to use; why not do the same for USB-C? It would cut into the margins for each of these products, but I think it would send a strong message that Apple is truly committed to it as the connector of the future.
The signatories are a who’s who of tech giants: Apple, Autodesk, Dropbox, eBay, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, Square, Twitter, and Uber. The inclusion of the latter signee dovetails nicely with the news that Travis Kalanick left Trump’s advisory council late last week.
Notably absent from the list: Amazon. Even SpaceX and Tesla are signatories to the amicus brief, despite Elon Musk’s somewhat warm relationship with the Trump administration. It turns out that Amazon supported the Washington state legal case that caused a judge to issue a restraining order to prevent enforcement of Trump’s executive order, but they apparently can’t sign onto this amicus brief, according to JP Mangalindan:
That’s because Seattle-based Amazon had already filed a declaration in the same case explaining how the ban negatively affects the e-commerce giant. Washington’s attorney general advised Amazon not to join the amicus brief since it’s a witness in the original lawsuit, according to a source familiar with the matter.
It turns out that Microsoft, also absent from the amicus brief, filed a declaration in the original case brought by Washington, as well.
Here’s the thing: Microsoft is not absent from the amicus brief — they’re right there on page 41, the sixtieth signee. I’ve reached out to Mangalindan to ask how that squares up.
In November 2015, Julia Angwin of ProPublica explained how Vizio was quietly monitoring everything that was watched on its televisions, and selling that recorded data to advertisers. Worse still, this creepy feature was turned on by default and users weren’t told about it.
The FTC got involved and today announced that they would be fining Vizio the paltry sum of $2.2 million. Libby Watson, Gizmodo:
While the court order requires Vizio to delete all data collected prior to March 2016, it doesn’t require them to stop tracking data—just to more adequately get consent for doing so. So don’t expect smart TVs to stop at least trying to track your Real Housewives binging any time soon.
Vizio is privately owned, but their annual revenue was estimated by Forbes to be about $2.9 billion. It will take them less than seven hours to earn enough money to pay their fine.
Lesley Fair of the FTC:
What did Vizio know about what was going on in the privacy of consumers’ homes? On a second-by-second basis, Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content. What’s more, Vizio identified viewing data from cable or broadband service providers, set-top boxes, streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts. Add it all up and Vizio captured as many as 100 billion data points each day from millions of TVs.
Vizio then turned that mountain of data into cash by selling consumers’ viewing histories to advertisers and others. And let’s be clear: We’re not talking about summary information about national viewing trends. According to the complaint, Vizio got personal. The company provided consumers’ IP addresses to data aggregators, who then matched the address with an individual consumer or household. Vizio’s contracts with third parties prohibited the re-identification of consumers and households by name, but allowed a host of other personal details – for example, sex, age, income, marital status, household size, education, and home ownership. And Vizio permitted these companies to track and target its consumers across devices.
When I linked to Angwin’s story, I mentioned that I was then in the market for a television. I was initially leaning towards Vizio, but after hearing about this and the similarly intrusive practices of Samsung and LG “smart” TVs, I ended up buying a plain LCD TV and hooking it up to a fourth-generation Apple TV. I don’t regret it.
Here’s something straight out of left field. Jordan Kahn, 9to5Mac:
Apple is planning to adopt a new connector type for accessories for iPhone, iPad and other Apple devices through its official Made-for-iPhone (MFi) licensing program. Dubbed the “Ultra Accessory Connector” (UAC), Apple has recently launched a developer preview of the new connector type to prepare manufacturing partners for the component that in some cases will replace the use of Lightning and USB connectors, according to sources familiar with the program.
[…]
Apple’s specs for the Ultra Accessory Connector through the MFi program currently specify use of the UAC connector (both male and female) for cables used on headphones. Apple will allow accessory manufacturers to make Lightning to UAC, USB-A to UAC, and 3.5mm headset jacks to UAC, which would allow headphones with a UAC port to connect to various Apple devices. For instance, Apple’s Beats by Dre headphones currently use a slightly larger micro-USB port, while other brands have adopted use of Lightning ports for the cable that connects to Bluetooth headphones for charging or in some cases optional wired listening.
This is a curious development. My Spidey sense is that this isn’t a port in addition to Lightning on new iOS devices, but I can’t see it replacing Lightning either. Amidst the migration of Mac peripherals to USB-C, and the replacement of wired headphones with wireless models, I’m a little confused about how this fits into the bigger picture.
Perhaps it’s an interoperable standard for all Apple devices, primarily designed for charging wireless headphones and passing audio while plugged in. Or perhaps it’s not Apple proprietary; maybe it will become micro USB-C. Apple, after all, reportedly had a leading role in the design of USB-C.
Update: This connector isn’t new. Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica (via Adam Selby):
In reality, the UAC is just Apple’s name for a port that is already used in some digital cameras and other accessories — Apple has just given it a new moniker. Currently, it goes by a few different titles: Mitsumi calls it an “Ultra Mini Connector” and Nikon calls it a “UC-E6” cable. In any case, it appears to be just another connector for the regular-old USB spec. When contacted for comment, Apple told us that it was adding the port to the MFi program at the request of licensees, not because it’s trying to push licensees to support a new kind of connector.
Well that’s certainly obscure.
Professor Susan Crawford spoke with Tom Wheeler at Harvard Law School:
In the Trump administration, people are talking about stripping regulatory power from the FCC, and essentially taking the agency apart (including moving jurisdiction over internet access to the Federal Trade Commission [FTC]). “Modernizing” the FCC is the lingo being used. What’s your thought about that?
It’s a fraud. The FTC doesn’t have rule-making authority. They’ve got enforcement authority and their enforcement authority is whether or not something is unfair or deceptive. And the FTC has to worry about everything from computer chips to bleach labeling. Of course, carriers want [telecom issues] to get lost in that morass. This was the strategy all along.
So it doesn’t surprise me that the Trump transition team — who were with the American Enterprise Institute and basically longtime supporters of this concept — comes in and says, “Oh, we oughta do away with this.” It makes no sense to get rid of an expert agency and to throw these issues to an agency with no rule-making power that has to compete with everything else that’s going on in the economy, and can only deal with unfair or deceptive practices.
Because we’re talking about one sixth of the economy. More importantly, we’re dealing with the network that connects six sixths of the economy.
Wheeler’s response to Crawford’s question about new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai does not paint Pai in a positive light:
The FCC is a five-person commission and the chairman sets the agenda, but there’s four other commissioners and it takes three votes to do anything. When I came in, I set up with each commissioner a date every other week — an hour for the two of us just to sit without staff and talk. For the last 18, 24 months [Pai] canceled every meeting. It’s hard to work for consensus when you won’t sit down with each other.
Relentless, childish obstruction is a shitty way to govern.
At the beginning of December, the FCC said that AT&T and Verizon were violating net neutrality rules with “zero-rating” data policies.
Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:
With Sponsored Data, AT&T charges other companies for the right to bypass customers’ data caps on AT&T’s wireless network. At the time same, AT&T lets its subsidiary DirecTV stream on the mobile network without counting against data caps. DirecTV technically pays AT&T for the privilege, but the money is just shifting hands from one part of AT&T to another. AT&T is using DirecTV’s data cap exemption to market the new DirecTV Now streaming service.
[…]
The “primary participant” in Verizon’s zero-rated data program is Go90, a video service offered by Verizon itself, the FCC said. Ars wrote about Verizon’s treatment of Go90 compared to competing video services 10 months ago.
Seems pretty clear-cut, right? AT&T and Verizon both advantaged their own services by not counting data consumption used by those services, thereby putting competitors at a disadvantage.
Turns out that the new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai didn’t like this investigation at all.
Brodkin reports:
The FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau sent letters to AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA notifying the carriers “that the Bureau has closed this inquiry. Any conclusions, preliminary or otherwise, expressed during the course of the inquiry will have no legal or other meaning or effect going forward.” The FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau also sent a letter to Comcast closing an inquiry into the company’s Stream TV cable service, which does not count against data caps.
The FCC issued an order that “sets aside and rescinds” the Wheeler-era report on zero-rating. All “guidance, determinations, and conclusions” from that report are rescinded, and it will have no legal bearing on FCC proceedings going forward, the order said.
You would be shocked — shocked, I tell you — to know that Chairman Pai used to be the associate general counsel for Verizon. As a result of this decision, the web is now, more than ever, a “pay to play” environment. More power than ever will be in the hands of the few biggest players on the web: large tech companies and American ISPs.
Ingrid Lunden and Brian Heater, TechCrunch:
Make way for one more pivot from Jawbone. The fitness band maker that originally started out in headsets and later made speakers, has abandoned selling and supporting consumer hardware following a deluge poor reviews and media reports that it has run out of money.
TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Jawbone is preparing to shift its business yet again — moving from a focus on low-margin fitness bands sold directly to consumers, to a high-margin business to business to consumer model: a health product and accompanying set of services sold primarily to clinicians and health providers working with patients.
Jawbone has always seemed to make only one type of product for a few years at a time. They have always been, in my mind, synonymous with over-loud Business — with a capital “b” — people on a train. It’s pretty astonishing how fast and how far they’ve fallen from having such a ubiquitous product.
Mikey Campbell, AppleInsider:
Seemingly spawned from internal Apple documents disclosed during the VirnetX patent infringement lawsuit, which found Apple on the hook for $302.4 million in damages, the California action claims Apple intentionally broke FaceTime for devices running iOS 6 and earlier to avoid high monthly data relay charges from Akamai.
[…]
Citing internal emails and sworn testimony from the VirnetX trial, the lawsuit alleges Apple devised a plan to “break” FaceTime on iOS 6 or earlier by causing a vital digital certificate to prematurely expire. Apple supposedly implemented the “FaceTime Break” on April 16, 2014, then blamed the sudden incompatibility on a bug, the lawsuit claims.
The optics of this are bad, but this will likely be — amongst other things — a test of a typical software EULA. For instance, here’s section 7.41 from the one that came with iOS 6 (PDF), with emphasis:
Apple does not warrant against interference with your enjoyment of the iOS software and services, that the functions contained in, or services performed or provided by, the iOS software will meet your requirements, that the operation of the iOS software and services will be uninterrupted or error-free, that any service will continue to be made available, that defects in the iOS software or services will be corrected, or that the iOS software will be compatible or work with any third party software, applications or third party services. Installation of this software may affect the usability of third party software, applications or third party services.
Since the iOS 7 was provided free to users — and, in the course of that update, making iOS 6 officially outdated — does that mean that the above section can hold and Apple has no obligation to maintain the functionality of their older software? Furthermore, if Apple didn’t fully disclose why FaceTime stopped working on older devices, is that problematic from a legal perspective?
I guess the biggest question of all is whether the discontinuation of a single nonessential feature is tantamount to requiring users to upgrade to the newest version of the software. I doubt it.
The section that follows this is the infamous one that advises you not to use Apple software to operate a nuclear facility. ↥︎
Ina Fried, Recode:
An LG spokesman told Recode that the company is adding additional shielding to newly manufactured models.
“LG apologizes for this inconvenience and is committed to delivering the best quality products possible, so all LG UltraFine 27-inch 5K displays manufactured after February 2017 will be fitted with enhanced shielding,” the company said in an email.
Existing models will be able to be retrofitted with the enhanced shielding, which will allow the monitor to be placed near a router.
If you own an UltraFine 5K display, it doesn’t sound like you can simply bring your display into an Apple Store to have it taken care of; you’ll have to deal with LG directly. I’ve asked for clarification and will update this post if I hear back.
A thought experiment: do you think that an Apple-designed 5K Thunderbolt Display would have these issues? If it did, do you think it would be such a pain in the ass to get your display fixed?
Here’s a weird one. Jason Leopold of Buzzfeed made a FOIA request for any talking points that the FBI had on encryption, Apple, ISIS, and similar topics. They got back to him at the end of December and stated that they couldn’t provide any of the 487 pages they said were relevant. That’s weird for at least three reasons:
Leopold is asking for talking points which, by their very nature, are wont to be publicized;
the FBI included a CD of blank pages in their response; and,
the FBI had already released those documents to Mike Masnick of Techdirt.
I didn’t add up all the pages sent to me, but I can tell it’s probably closer to about 100 pages than 487, so clearly the FBI is likely lying to me as well in terms of how many “responsive” documents there really were, but I’m confused as to why the FBI couldn’t release these kinds of documents to Leopold.
Masnick, naturally, did the right thing and posted everything that he received from the FBI online for all to see.
Joseph Cox, Vice:
In January, Motherboard reported that a hacker had stolen 900GB of data from mobile phone forensics company Cellebrite. The data suggested that Cellebrite had sold its phone cracking technology to oppressive regimes such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia.
Now the hacker responsible has publicly released a cache of files allegedly stolen from Cellebrite relating to Android and BlackBerry devices, and older iPhones, some of which may have been copied from publicly available phone cracking tools.
In addition, back in December, a group calling themselves the “Shadow Brokers” dumped a bunch of older NSA tools that had been left on a server. Between these two leaks alone, it’s extremely clear that Apple was completely correct when they defended themselves last year against the FBI: it’s never “just one phone”.
Mark Gurman and Ian King, Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is designing a new chip for future Mac laptops that would take on more of the functionality currently handled by Intel Corp. processors, according to people familiar with the matter.
The chip, which went into development last year, is similar to one already used in the latest MacBook Pro to power the keyboard’s Touch Bar feature, the people said. The updated part, internally codenamed T310, would handle some of the computer’s low-power mode functionality, they said. The people asked not to be identified talking about private product development. It’s built using ARM Holdings Plc. technology and will work alongside an Intel processor.
This rumour is curious because Power Nap seems to be Apple’s implementation of Intel’s Smart Connect feature. If the Bloomberg report is right, Apple is apparently moving key Intel-specific functionality off of the CPU. Interesting.
Jeffrey Johnson recently released his new encrypted chat app Underpass on the Mac App Store, and noticed something funny — it was charting:
That’s right, 1 unit sale for $0.99, giving me $0.70 after Apple’s 30% cut. The 18th top paid social networking app sold 1 unit, and the 29th top grossing social networking app made $0.70 for the developer.
If one sale puts a developer’s app reasonably high on the Mac App Store charts, that doesn’t say a lot for the Mac App Store. Of note, most of the apps ahead of Underpass are third-party implementations of popular iOS apps like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. And, at number thirteen in the Top Grossing chart, Apple’s long-outdated FaceTime app. That doesn’t sound like a healthy ecosystem.