Linked List: November 30, 2018

Friday, 30 November 2018

I don’t recommend games often because I don’t often find games I enjoy, but here’s one I like a lot. Super minimalistic both in gameplay and visual style, but that’s what I tend to like on iOS. What graphics there are are animated joyfully. It works really well on iPad too. Free to play, a mere $2 to remove ads.

One gripe: there’s no syncing between devices. Seems to me the level you’re on ought to sync through iCloud. Another gripe: if you lose by a single point, the game gives you an option to replay the final point if you watch an ad for another game. This feels cheap, both commercially and sportsmanship-wise. When you lose you lose, I say.

One tip: keep your eyes on the table, not your avatar, because sometimes you need to hit Left when the ball is coming to your avatar’s right, or vice versa, and I find it easier to avoid getting mixed up by concentrating only on the table.

(Via this feature story in the App Store, which, I shit you not, you can only read from iOS device because there’s no fallback to a web page.)

Apple Releases New iPhone XS Case and Apple Watch Band Color Options ★

Still no first-party cases for the iPhone XR though. That’s just baffling to me. I know most iPhone owners buy third-party cases, but it seems like Apple is leaving money on the table by not offering their own.

Also, this new “Pacific Green” is more blue than green, right? That’s what my eyes and my MacBook’s color picker say.

Marriott Hacking Exposes Data of Up to 500 Million Guests ★

Amie Tsang and Adam Satariano, reporting for The New York Times:

The Marriott International hotel chain said on Friday that the database of its Starwood reservation system had been hacked and that the personal details of up to 500 million guests going as far back as 2014 had been compromised.

The hotel group, which runs more than 6,700 properties around the world, was informed in September about an attempt to access the database, and an investigation this month revealed that unauthorized access had been made on or before Sept. 10, Marriott said in a statement.

The hotel chain said that personal details including names, addresses, dates of birth, passport numbers, email addresses and phone numbers for hundreds of millions of guests may have been compromised. […]

Hackers also obtained encrypted credit-card information for some customers, but it was unclear if the hackers would be able to use those payment details.

Just awful, particularly the part about passport numbers, dates of birth, and the possibility of credit card numbers being exposed. I’m almost certainly included in this breach — I’m a longtime SPG rewards member, and definitely stayed at a few Starwoods hotels since 2014.

Mashable on Pixel Slate: ‘An Average and Very Buggy 2-in-1 Tablet’ ★

Raymond Wong, writing at Mashable:

Where the Pixel Slate stumbles the most is software polish. It doesn’t seem finished and I experienced quite a few bugs and crashes that brought Chrome OS and Android apps to their knees.

My review unit’s kitted out with a very capable Intel Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM. But even so, little things like seeing jitters when scrolling on some of Mashable’s media-heavy reviews (like the iPhone XS and Pixel 3), or the slight lag when opening the recent apps window, or the inconsistencies of the colors of videos displayed in the Netflix Android app versus the Netflix website (colors looked way more faded in the app) were frustrating.

Getting colors right is just table stakes.

Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all trying to crack the same nut: to make a device that can work well both as a handheld tablet and as a notebook docked to a keyboard. It really comes down to the operating systems. iPad is a tablet first, and trying to evolve into an ever-better notebook. Chrome and Windows are designed for traditional notebooks, and are trying to evolve into ever-better systems for tablet. Where you start matters.

Apple Music Coming to Amazon Echo Devices December 17 ★

Amazon’s Day One blog:

Apple Music subscribers will be able to enjoy Apple Music’s 50 million songs on Echo devices. Customers will be able to ask Alexa to play their favorite songs, artists, and albums — or any of the playlists made by Apple Music’s editors from around the world, covering many activities and moods. Customers will also be able to ask Alexa to stream expert-made radio stations centered on popular genres like Hip-Hop, decades like the 80s, and even music from around the world, like K-Pop. Just ask Alexa to play Beats 1 to hear Apple Music’s global livestream including in-depth artist interviews — all completely ad-free. Simply enable the Apple Music skill in the Alexa app and link your account to start listening.

Fascinating. It’s still an open question whether Apple sees subscription content (mostly music now, with more original shows and movies coming soon) as something for its own devices, or cross-platform. Making Apple Music available to Echo devices sure sounds more like the latter.

I wonder how well Apple Music is doing on Android?