Linked List: September 17, 2018

Monday, 17 September 2018

Former White House Photographer Pete Souza Releases the First Pictures Taken Using iPhone XS ★

The Daily Mail:

Former White House Photographer Pete Souza has released the first images taken using the new phone, showing off its new camera capabilities. He took these shots exclusively for Dailymail.com around Washington DC, and any editing was done on the phone using Apple’s tools.

“Smart phones have turned everyone into a photographer but they haven’t necessarily turned everyone into a ‘good’ photographer,” he told Dailymail.com. “At the same time, the smart phone has also turned everyone into a visual journalist giving us at times an eyewitness account from breaking news events.”

Inspiring images. (Via Shawn King at The Loop.)

Safari Now Supports Favicons on Both MacOS and iOS ★

My favorite new feature today, of course, is the ability to show website favicons in Safari tabs — a feature now available in Safari 12 and iOS 12. They’re off by default, but the way they work on Mac, iPad, and iPhone is just perfect.

I heard from a lot of DF readers earlier this year who said they use Chrome instead of Safari just for favicons in tabs — if you’re in that boat, I highly encourage you to give Safari a try. Your MacBook battery will thank you for it.

I probably should’ve used a finally in the headline for this item.

iOS 12 Highlights ★

Ricky Mondello on Twitter:

Big day! iOS 12 is out! I hope y’all love it.

I’m going to highlight a few iCloud Keychain, Safari, and WebKit features and improvements that mean a lot to me.

This thread is a terrific collection of little things here and there. I’ve been running iOS 12 betas full-time since mid-July and I learned a bunch of things just from this thread.

Marc Benioff and Wife Buy Time Magazine for $190 Million ★

Martin Crutsinger, reporting for the AP:

Time Magazine is being sold by Meredith Corp. to Marc Benioff, a co-founder of Salesforce, and his wife, it was announced Sunday. [...]

The Benioffs are purchasing Time personally, and the transaction is unrelated to Salesforce.com, where Benioff is chairman and co-CEO and co-founder. The announcement by Meredith said that the Benioffs would not be involved in the day-to-day operations or journalistic decisions at Time. Those decisions will continue to be made by Time’s current executive leadership team, the announcement said.

Sounds like a great landing spot for a great magazine. Hopefully it works as well for Time as Jeff Bezos’s acquisition has for The Washington Post.

An Oral History of Apple’s Infinite Loop ★

Absolutely fantastic piece assembled by Steven Levy for Wired:

Twenty-five years ago, the computer revolution’s marquee company was in decline. Back then, it was just settling into shiny new headquarters, a campus of six buildings that formed a different kind of ring. Called Infinite Loop, the name is a reference to a well-known programming error — code that gets stuck in an endless repetition — though no one seems to know who applied it. Infinite Loop was the place where Apple’s leaders and engineers pulled off a historic turnaround, and it will always be the source of stories and legends — many of them untold. Until now.

There’s so much quotable stuff in here. Here’s just one, which I’ve heard before but which still made me laugh out out reading it again:

Forstall: Whenever I ate with Steve, he insisted on paying for me, which I thought was a little odd. Even if we went in together and he selected something quick like pre-made sushi, and I ordered a pizza in the wood-burning pizza oven, he would wait for me at the cash register for 10, 15 minutes. I felt so awkward. Finally, I told him. “Seriously, I can pay for myself, so please don’t stand there and wait for me.” He said, “Scott, you don’t understand. You know how we pay by swiping your badge and then it’s deducted from your salary? I only get paid a dollar a year! Every time I swipe we get a free meal!” Here was this multibillionaire putting one over on the company he founded, a few dollars at a time.

As my friend John Siracusa quipped in a Slack group, “This is the most Steve Jobs quote ever.” Jobs enjoyed pulling one over on The Man even after he became The Man. That free lunch scam delighted him the way free long distance phone calls did with Woz and their blue boxes.

This whole history is simply terrific. Do not miss it. (That story from Tim Cook about the meeting with Gateway — oh my god.)

Sonny Dickson on What Went Wrong With AirPower ★

Sonny Dickson:

We have managed to obtain several pieces of exclusive information that shed some light on what challenges Apple is currently facing with the project. According to our sources, the broad feeling of many working the project at Apple is that the device may be doomed to failure, and may not be viable at all unless significant advancements can be made.

More details than what I’ve heard, but very much along the same lines. Todd Haselton at CNBC picked this up following Dickson’s report, and now it’s a bit of a news firestorm.

I’ll just emphasize that what I’ve written about AirPower’s problems is all filed under “this is what I’ve heard from people I trust, but none of them are directly involved”. My report is not filed under “this is what I can state as fact happened or is happening”. I literally wrote “what I’ve heard, third-hand but from multiple little birdies”.

I’ll add one new thing. After I published what I’ve heard, a wise and knowledgeable little birdie told me that it’s not at all uncommon for a project at Apple to have massive resets multiple times. [Cough, Titan.] What is unusual regarding AirPower is that it’s happened in the open, for the world to see. That is to say, the real mistake may not be a flawed coil design or whatever, but rather the decision to announce it when they did, before those problems were solved.

Linus Torvalds: ‘I Need to Change Some of My Behavior, and I Want to Apologize to the People That My Personal Behavior Hurt’ ★

Linus Torvalds, announcing that he’s taking a break from Linux kernel development:

This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn’t come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don’t realize (for years) how badly I’ve judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good.

This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.

The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.

I find this both encouraging and inspiring — a counter to the notion that people can’t change. Here’s just one example of Torvalds’s infamous style, which until now he was unapologetic about.