Linked List: January 31, 2014

Friday, 31 January 2014

Sunrise Calendar App No Longer Sends iCloud Credentials Over Network 

Remember the kerfuffle last week about iOS calendar app Sunrise asking users for their iCloud user name and password? Scary news travels faster than good, so I thought it worth pointing out that they’ve implemented a nice improvement:

Update: since our 2.11 version, we are not sending iCloud credentials to our servers, the app generates the secure token client-side. We use them to generate a secure token from Apple. This secure token is the only thing we store on our servers, we never store your actual iCloud credentials.

Two Months Ago 

Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang, in an interview with Fortune’s Miguel Helft:

Right after Google bought Motorola [in 2012], I invited [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt to have a dinner at my house. I told him, “If you think you want run the hardware business, you can keep the business; but if you are not interested in the hardware business, we definitely can handle that, take over that.”

He remembered that, and two months ago, he sent me an e-mail. I called him back, and he asked me, “Are you still interested in Motorola?” I said, “Definitely.” We started to discuss it. I went to Silicon Valley many times. [Google CEO] Larry Page invited me to his house to have a dinner. Very quickly — in just two months — we closed the deal.

In other words, right around the time when they started dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on the deal to acquire Nest.

Nokia ‘Here’ Maps Confirmed to Support Tizen 

This is old news from November, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Samsung partner with Here Maps on Android, too. If they’re not planning for a divorce from Google, they should.

CleanMyMac 2 

My thanks to MacPaw for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote CleanMyMac 2. CleanMyMac is a utility that helps you find and remove unnecessary apps and data stored on your Mac, potentially freeing up gigabytes of space. Uninstall unwanted apps and remove the corresponding data — CleanMyMac uses a “Safety Database” to identify files that are safe for you to remove. Read the reviews, and download the free demo.

For a limited time, Daring Fireball readers can save 30 percent off the regular price using coupon code “DF2014”.

ABI Research: ‘Is Google Losing Control of the Android Ecosystem?’ 

Interesting market share trend:

ABI Research reports that Android once again dominated the Q4 2013 shipment numbers for smartphone advanced operating systems with 77% market share of over 280 million smartphones shipped in Q4 2013. Nearly one billion smartphones were shipped in 2013, Android accounting for 78% across the year.

Android’s dominance is not quite as rosy as it seems though, with most of the growth coming from forked Android operating systems (137% year-on-year), mainly in China, India, and adjacent markets. Forked Android or AOSP accounted for 25% market share with 71 million unit shipments, as opposed to certified Android’s share of 52%, of a total of 77% market share.

In other words, one-third of Android smartphones don’t ship with any of Google’s services or apps installed.

TSA Agent Confession 

Former TSA screener Jason Edward Harrington, writing for Politico:

Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group — a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security.

There I was, an aspiring satire writer, earnestly acting on orders straight out of Catch-22.

I quickly discovered I was working for an agency whose morale was among the lowest in the U.S. government. In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds.

Resurrecting a Prototype ‘Twiggy’ Mac 

This great story by Adam Rosen from August is a good postscript to my “Special” piece the other day. Note the pre-release version of the Finder, which had the following menus: @, File, Edit, Arrange, and Interim. And dig those “Steve Sez…” dialog boxes.

Google Plus Claim Chowder 

Dave Llorens, one year ago:

But I’m willing to stake my reputation on the following statement: If Google Plus doesn’t have a staggering number of active users by the end of 2013, you can all come over to my office and pie me in the face.

Sounds like fun.

Typeset in the Future: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ 

Dave Addey has started a new site, Typeset in the Future, dedicated to the typography in science fiction films. His first subject, no surprise, is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

(Re: those curious Gill Sans-like M’s in the otherwise Futura titles — I asked Jonathan Hoefler about that, years ago, and he replied, “A number of 20th century faces — Futura and Gill Sans among them — were outfitted with all kinds of ‘alternate sorts’ that could basically turn them into better approximations of their competitors. (Nothing ever changes.)” So it’s not that Kubrick or his title designer swapped in the M from Gill Sans, but rather that they chose a version of Futura that came with Gill Sans-like M’s. It’s a good look. But it’s never quite sat right with me that some of the titles are set in Gill Sans, and the rest in Futura.)

Brent Simmons: The Point of View of the Mouse 

I thought this was going to be another “30 years of the Mac” remembrance. I was wrong.

The Super Bowl, in Which the Machine Bleeds to Death 

Jon Bois, writing for SB Nation:

For this, the season finale of Breaking Madden, there will be bitter cold and heavy snowfall. There will also be, Lord willing, the most one-sided result in the history of sports. In the greatest American football rout of historical record, Georgia Tech beat Cumberland College, 222-0. I want to multiply that. I want a thousand points in one game.

This is how we’re going to try.

You know it’s bad when the computer loses track of the score.