MyAppleMenu - Wed, May 27, 2015

Wed, May 27, 2015The Apps-For-Cats Edition

Were There Any Doubts That This Day Will Come?

My Cat Spends More Time On The iPad Than I Do, by Omar Mouallem, Metro

There’s now a cottage industry of tailor-made videos and apps for cats.

Review: Voyce Is The Wellness Monitor For Dogs That Makes Wearables Vividly Relevant, by Jon Phillips, PCWorld

Yeah, it’s another canine wearable. But instead of merely recording pawsteps, the Voyce band also tracks resting heart and respiratory rates, two biometrics that can provide deep insights into a dog’s health.

Your Friends Can Crash Your iPhone

New iOS Bug Crashing iPhones Simply By Receiving A Text Message, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

If the Messages app was opened to the conversation with the person who sent the offending message, the Messages app can be reopened to this conversation. Sending a reply message fixes the problem.

If Messages was opened to the conversation list view, the app will crash when you attempt to open it. You can fix this by having someone send you a message or by sending a message to yourself.

Stuff.

Keep Your Mac Desktop Orderly With Magnet, by Matt Elliott, CNET

Whether you want neatly tiled windows on a luxuriously large display or help juggling windows on a cramped MacBook display, Mac app Magnet can help multitaskers maintain order.

Hands On: Monodraw 1.0 (OS X), by William Gallagher, MacNN

What Monodraw 1.0 does it let you produce ASCII art - and already if you're blinking at that, you're not the market for this - like those images you've seen that are made up entirely of letters.

Rename Your Mac Screenshots Into Something Useful With Tiny For Mac, by AMber Leigh Turner, The Next Web

The free app is installed in your Applications folder and works in the background every time you take a screenshot. It takes information from the window that is at the very top and saves it in the file name. For browsers, it also will save the URL too.

PrintCentral Pro (For iPad), by Tony Hoffman, PC Magazine

The PrintCentral Pro iPad app is a versatile solution that offers a way to print to printers from multiple manufacturers, including non-AirPrint models and ones limited to USB connectivity.

From Lilly Pad To iPad, Scientists Develop Frog Finding App, by NewsMail

Queensland scientists have developed an app that can identify nearly every species of frog found in Australia.

Develop.

Constraints & Transformations, by Vlas Voloshin, Reveal App

Building frameworks is hard, we all know that. It’s even harder when you’re building and maintaining a behemoth like UIKit and you have to make sure client code doesn’t break when a new version of your framework is released. Backward compatibility allows existing apps to keep functioning on newer versions of iOS, even if they are built for an older version. However, sometimes implementing new features with backward compatibility means introducing inconsistent behaviour between different versions of the framework.

Unicode Is Kind Of Insane, by Ben Frederickson

The real craziness with Unicode isn't in the sheer number of characters that have been assigned. The real fun starts when you look at how all these characters interact with one another.

How Not To Crash #5: Threading, Part 2, by Brent Simmons, Inessential

Which MacBook Should I Use For Writing Code?, by Peter Cohen, iMore

Let Oracle Own API's, Justice Dept Tells Top Court In Surprise Filing, by Jeff John Roberts, Fortune

Notes.

Those Motherfucking Printers, by Ben Brooks, The Brooks Review

My new plan: setup that laser printer on the network and automate a daily print job to it. If it prints, great, if not fix it right then. I may not need that printer again for a month, but when I do need it again I will really need it. No sense waiting until then to try and figure it all out.

Apple Drops Discoveryd In Latest OS X Beta Following Months Of Network Issues, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

After many complaints from the developer community about poor networking performance on Yosemite, the latest beta of OS X 10.10.4 has dropped discoveryd in favor of the old process used by previous versions of the Mac operating system. This should address many of the network stability issues introduced with Yosemite and its new networking stack.

A Murky Road Ahead For Android, Despite Market Dominance, by Farhad Manjoo, New York Times

Collect 'Em All

The Paradox Of Apple Watch Choice, by Jason Snell, Six Colors

This is all a long way of saying that I wonder if Apple Watch sales have been suppressed, even a little bit, by the large number of buying options.

See Also:

Is The Paradox Of Choice Not So Paradoxical After All?, by Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics

Does Having Choice Make Us Happy? 6 Studies That Suggest It Doesn’t Always, by kate Torgovnick May, TED

Streams.

Speaking of choices -- if I were to be required to purchase a new mobile phone today, I will have a hard time deciding between the Plus and non-Plus version.

Choosing between the different versions of iPhones, or, to some extent, the different watch bands, involves tradeoffs where the simple equation of a higher price equating a better product is not true.

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I wonder if Apple has tested the Apple Watch under the weather conditions in Singapore.

(For those who are not aware of the weather conditions in Singapore: there are bascially two types of weather in Singapore: hot and humid, or hot and raining.)

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I have three subscription lists that keeps me entertained through the day: my newsfeed, my podcasts, and my Twitters. The first two lists are private to me, obviously, but that last list is a public list.

So, let me tell you a little about me. When I am happy, I tend to add subscriptions. When I am sad, I tend to do a lot of 'housecleaning' and unsubscribing. Therefore, if you can plot a graph of number of subscribers over time, you can guess my general mood.

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Nobody reads this little web page of mine, so my secret is still safe with me. :-)

Parting Words

OK, I Lol'd pic.twitter.com/RUBaziIbqf

— Stuart Leitch (@stuartleitch) May 25, 2015

Thanks for reading.