MyAppleMenu - Fri, Oct 16, 2015

Fri, Oct 16, 2015The Documents-From-2008 Edition

Apple Updates iWork Mac And iOS Apps With Support For OS X El Capitan And iOS 9, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

Keynote and Pages have gained support for opening presentations and documents from 2006 and 2008 versions of the software, while Numbers is now able to open Numbers '08 spreadsheets. [...] Apple has also updated its iWork apps for iOS, notably adding split-screen multitasking support on the iPad and support for 3D Touch on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.

Thanks To Microsoft, iPhone 6s Plus Is Now A Great Enterprise Smartphone, by Matthew Miller, ZDNet

If Microsoft did not provide all of these tools for iOS, then I could not use the Apple iPhone 6s Plus as my primary smartphone. I would probably be using a Windows Phone instead, but am thankful that Microsoft has developed these applications since the iPhone is a better smartphone than current Microsoft offerings and I now get the best of both worlds.

Stuff

Yahoo Mail Eliminates Passwords As Part Of A Major Redesign, by Casey Newton, The Verge

Seven months after replacing traditional passwords with single-use SMS codes, Yahoo is taking the next step toward blowing up the password altogether. The company today announced Yahoo Account Key, which links your account to a mobile device and then asks you to approve new logins through push notifications.

SuperSync Comes In Handy For Managing iTunes On Multiple Macs, by Dennis Sellers, Apple World Today

Pixelmator For Mac Gets El Capitan Optimizations, Metal-Based Photos Extension, by Roger Fingas, AppleInsider

Pandora Joins Shortlist Of iPhone Apps Ready For Apple's CarPlay, by Roger Fingas, AppleInsider

Ask The iTunes Guy: Genius Playlists, iTunes Match And CDs, Identifying Purchased Content, by Kirk McElhearn, Macworld

Managing your music is supposed to be easier in iTunes, but readers have lots of questions about this. In this installment of Ask the iTunes Guy, I help a reader create a Genius playlist based on a song in iTunes 12.3. I also take a look at how Apple uses Various Artists for artists in a compilation. And then I take a look at two questions relating to ripping (or not ripping) CDs.

Why Bookmark Logo Icons Disappear In Safari, by Glenn Fleishman, Macworld

"When I logged in at the CPH [Copenhagen, Denmark] airport for their free Wi-Fi, many of my Safari icons were changed to the airport logo. How do I change them back?"

Develop

Default Alive Or Default Dead?, by Paul Graham

The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory?

Notes

Apple Shares New iPhone 6s Ad Focused On 3D Touch, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

Cops Don’t Need A Crypto Backdoor To Get Into Your iPhone, by Andy Greenberg, Wired

As a reminder that the crypto backdoor debate isn’t the beginning and end of digital privacy, here are a few of the de-facto backdoors that still leave private data open to any law enforcement that seize a locked, encrypted iPhone.

iCloud, iTunes, Siri, TouchID.

Apple Is Learning An Expensive Lesson About Universities, by Brian Fung, Washington Post

Just because universities spin the patent licensing question by claiming it's part of their mission doesn't make it untrue. There are clear arguments for why WARF is not trolling or engaged in the kind of abusive litigation that the tech sector has implored Congress to act upon. WARF is a real thing, in the real world, and not an entity that merely exists on paper. Even though it doesn't make anything itself, the money WARF donates to UW-Madison indirectly produces new graduates, new facilities and sometimes directly to new breakthroughs in science, research and development. And importantly, in the case against Apple, it's not pushing for maximum damages.

But the strongest piece of evidence is that, according to Reuters, Apple tried and failed to convince the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate WARF's patent. Here's why that matters.

Modern Life Is Rubbish? Sleep Is Just The Same As Ever, Say Scientists, by Ian Sample, The Guardian

But according to new research, modern life has done nothing to rob us of sleep, despite the invention of the electric lightbulb, the TV, the internet, smartphones and social media.

Scientists who studied three hunter-gatherer and hunter-horticulturalist societies in Africa and Bolivia found that they stayed up for hours after sunset and got no more sleep than people in the industrialised world. None had access to electricity and their only source of light after dark was a campfire.

My Menu Bar

Microsoft has been transiting Windows from using menu bars to ribbons. Mac OS X now allows you to auto-hide the menu bar. And, obviously, there are no menu bars on iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and all the different flavors of Androids.

The whole WIMP interface popularized by the Macintosh may be losing the M part, it seems.

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Thanks for reading.