Linked List: May 6, 2020

Wednesday, 6 May 2020

Rick LePage:

It is, quite honestly, hard to fight it all. There is a reason that Monday seems like Tuesday, which seems like last Thursday, or Sunday. I can’t — and don’t care to — remember what happened then.

One recent night, during a bout of insomnia, I was hit with a stark thought. Actually, it was really more of a command:

“Get your mind working again.”

‘Unseen Is What Fuels the Imagination’ ★

Om Malik:

The mysterious is what makes a great image for me. And perhaps that is why I end up making images, which leave a lot of room for others to imagine. It is why I like fog — because it creates room for all of us to get lost, in our own self, and go someplace, without leaving this place we call home.

Go full screen with these.

Facebook Server Update Causes iOS Apps That Use Their SDK to Crash on Launch ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

There are multiple complaints about apps crashing continually on iOS devices on the MacRumors forums, and a wide range of apps appear to be impacted. Google’s Waze app, for example, won’t launch, and there have been complaints about apps that include Pinterest, Spotify, Adobe Spark, Quora, TikTok, and others.

Multiple developers on GitHub have attributed the problem to a Facebook software development kit used by the apps for sign-in purposes. Apps are failing to open even when users do not use the Facebook login options included.

No sympathy from me for any of the companies whose apps have been rendered useless by this bug. Facebook’s longstanding motto (and rare instance of corporate honesty from them) put it right on the tin: “Move fast and break things.”

Facebook themselves are no dummies. None of their iOS apps ever break because of a bug from Google or Adobe, because they’re not foolish enough to bake in a dependency they don’t control.

Matthew Panzarino: ‘How Apple Reinvented the Cursor for iPad’ ★

Matthew Panzarino, writing at TechCrunch:

Even though Apple did not invent the mouse pointer, history has cemented its place in dragging it out of obscurity and into mainstream use. Its everyday utility, pioneered at Xerox Parc and later combined with a bit of iconic* work from Susan Kare at Apple, has made the pointer our avatar in digital space for nearly 40 years.

What a great lede. The best way to understand the breakthrough that was the 1984 Mac interface is that the on-screen pointer was the user’s avatar. That’s you. And you use the mouse to navigate around what you see on the screen.

Then, a few weeks ago, Apple dropped a new kind of pointer — a hybrid between these two worlds of pixels and pushes. The iPad’s cursor, I think, deserves closer examination. It’s a seminal bit of remixing from one of the most closely watched idea factories on the planet.

In order to dive a bit deeper on the brand new cursor and its interaction models, I spoke to Apple SVP Craig Federighi about its development and some of the choices by the teams at Apple that made it. First, let’s talk about some of the things that make the cursor so different from what came before … and yet strangely familiar.

I suspect what Apple has done with the mouse pointer on iPadOS is going to get ripped off far and wide. It’s too natural, too obviously correct.