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The Young-Developers Edition Sunday, June 12, 2016

This Nine-Year-Old Little Girl Is WWDC's Youngest Attendee, by Leena Rao, Fortune

Seven-year-old Anvitha Vijay had a dream of building a mobile app. With only $130 in her piggy bank (which took her entire lifetime to collect), she realized that she didn’t have enough money to pay a developer to build the app for her. So she spent a year watching free coding tutorials on YouTube and the web, and learned how to program. [...]

This year, Vijay, who lives in Australia is fulfilling another dream of hers. She is the youngest attendee at WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference. Like many of her fellow attendees, Vijay has created a handful of apps for Apple’s iPhone and iPad. But the biggest difference between her and the thousands of other developers who will flock San Francisco’s Moscone Center on Monday is that Vijay is now only nine years-old.

From Struggles To Scholarship: All In An App, by Troy Wolverton, San Jose Mercury News

Most kids who are struggling in math might study harder or find a tutor. Some give up.

Amit Kalra had a different idea -- he decided to make an app. But first he had to teach himself how to code.

Apple Starts To Woo Its App Developers, by Vindu Goel and Katie Benner, New York Times

Developers say they still hope Apple will make more improvements. They want the company to continue to improve search in the App Store and let developers respond to user comments. They also say that communication with Apple is still largely one-way.

“You can’t fix overnight all of the grievances that piled up,” Mr. Ryu said.

Speak To Me

Siri And Context, by And Now It's All This

It’s failure to handle my request had nothing to do with big data or privacy concerns—things that are often cited as reasons Apple can’t compete with the data-hoovering Google. Siri knew everything it needed to know to answer my question. It just wasn’t smart enough to put it all together.

Siri Spilled The Beans, Siri Is Coming To MacOS X!, by Brian Roemmele, Medium

Today (June 10th, 2016) Siri has been responding to basic OS X top of navigation questions with answers like “I need Finder to do that” or “I can’t find the Finder App”.

How Apple Taught The World To Smartphone, by David Pierce, Wired

Yes, iOS, like the hardware on which it runs, has changed a lot. But far more interesting is what hasn’t changed. The most impressive thing about iOS is how much Apple got right on its very first try.

Natural Ventilation

Spaceship Apple, by Xavier Harding, Popular Science

Campus 2 will run entirely on clean energy, powered by renewable sources. But what’s really grabbed our attention are the thousands of panels of curved window panes—the largest pieces of structural glass ever made—that will encase Apple’s mothership. Equally cool are the 60,000 pounds of hollow concrete slabs that allow the building to “breathe,” bolstering its eco-friendly qualities. With so many futuristic features, we wanted to get a closer look. Here’s what we found.

Stuff

LiveRotate Brings Rotation To Live Photos, by John Voorhees, MacStories

LiveRotate is a terrific iPhone photo utility from Becky Hansmeyer for rotating Live Photos without eliminating the 'live' aspect of the photo. Becky created LiveRotate out of frustration with the limitations of Apple's Photos app.

Review: Philips Hue White Ambiance Kit Delivers Bang For The Buck In HomeKit Lighting, by Roger Fingas, AppleInsider

Philips' latest entry into the Hue smartbulb line should strike a good balance between cost and features for most people, even if there are some rough edges the company could stand to polish.

Develop

Multichannel Text Processing, by iA

In the classic era of word processing, text was born between MS Word, and a printer. Today, it is written and edited on multiple devices and apps, then mailed, printed, copied, pasted, annotated, published, RSSed, shared and re-shared, using all kinds of tools and platforms. Stubborn proprietary file formats fail in this frantic new environment. Plain text does better, but lacks Rich Text’s formatting. Markdown could be our golden gun. If only it looked a little shinier!

Notes

Why Planning Ahead Is Dead, by Jon Gorey, Boston Globe

An expanding collection of apps and services will get you what you need right now.

The Cat Guardians Of Singapore, by Anna Jones, BBC

Every city has its strays, but here in Singapore, they are little different. Not scrawny and vaguely whiffy, but glossy and groomed and known affectionately as "community cats".

Bottom of the Page

iMessage in iCloud.com, wireless earpod, and Xcode on iPad. These are a few of my favorite (yet to be invented) things.

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Thanks for reading.