Linked List: December 14, 2015

Monday, 14 December 2015

The Talk Show, With Special Guests Craig Federighi and John Siracusa ★

Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi joins the show for a wide-ranging half-hour discussion about Swift. (With transcript.)

Next, John Siracusa returns to the show to follow up on Federighi’s segment. Other topics include Apple’s new Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6/6S, and our mutual (and perhaps futile) desire to head into this week’s premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens knowing as few spoilers as possible.

Brought to you by:

Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code “GRUBER” for 10% off your first order.
Harry’s: High-quality shaving products; great gift ideas. Use promo code “TALKSHOW” to save $5 off your first purchase.
Casper: Obsessively engineered mattresses at shockingly fair prices. Save $50 with this link.
Wealthfront: An intelligent, automated investing service. They’ll build you a free personalized investment plan in 2 minutes.

13 Million MacKeeper Users Exposed ★

Brian Krebs:

The makers of MacKeeper — a much-maligned software utility many consider to be little more than scareware that targets Mac users — have acknowledged a breach that exposed the usernames, passwords and other information on more than 13 million customers and, er … users.

That there are 13 million Mac users who’ve fallen for the MacKeeper scam is just heartbreaking. It’s bad enough they were ripping people off in the first place — now they’ve exposed their passwords.

New DF T-Shirts ★

A new batch of DF t-shirts, including two new designs from the inimitable Jon Contino, are going into production this week. If you want them in time for Christmas, order now.

Traveling Indonesia With an iPhone 6S ★

Nick Heer’s travelogue of a three-week trip to Indonesia is one of the best iPhone reviews I’ve ever read.

Slide ★

Fun new $2 iPhone camera app by William Wilkinson and Deepak Mantena. Slide lets you make brief “3D” animated photos. Don’t miss the FAQ. Here’s one I made a few days ago.

Adobe’s Record Revenue Proves Successful Business Transformation Is Possible ★

Ron Miller, writing for TechCrunch:

As we watch organizations like IBM, HP and EMC struggle to transform, Adobe is an interesting contrasting case. It went from selling boxed software to a cloud subscription model in shorter order, and judging from its financial report that came out last week, it’s done quite well making that leap.

First, let’s have a look at the numbers. Adobe reported a record $1.31 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 22 percent year over year increase. It disclosed record annual revenue of $4.8 billion. Mind you these are significant, but the big number to me is that recurring revenue from subscriptions now represents 74 percent of Adobe’s business. What’s more, just under $3 billion in revenue in 2015 came from digital media-related annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Adobe is making this switch to subscription pricing look easy. It’s not.

Apple Pushes Ads Promoting iPhone 6S to Users on Older iPhones ★

Very strange decision on Apple’s part to do this. It’s uncouth.

Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred Upholds Lifetime Ban on Pete Rose ★

Reading Manfred’s report, it seems like he gave Rose a fair shake. Rose’s only chance was to be completely honest, and he wasn’t.