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The Memory-Corruption Edition Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Security Update 2016-004 (Mavericks And Yosemite), by Agen G. N. Schmitz, TidBITS

The update resolves multiple memory corruption issues in CoreGraphics, ImageIO, and libxml2, which could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code.

Safari 9.1.2, by Agen G. N. Schmitz, TidBITS

The update addresses a number of vulnerabilities in WebKit, including multiple memory corruption issues.

More Shots

Apple Shares Two More 'Shot On iPhone' Videos Showcasing Photographic Capabilities Of iPhone 6s, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

The first video features a young woman with her hair flowing in the wind, shot in slow motion to highlight the slo-mo feature that captures video at up to 240 frames per second.

The Stories Behind These Incredible Shots From India That Won At The iPhone Photo Awards This Year, by Adrija Bose, Huffington Post

"I realized how the people were getting smaller and smaller and at some point the people below just appeared as a random gathering, giving a bird's-eye view," he said. He put his hand out and stretch a little to take the picture. That is how he got his perfect shot.

The iPad Upgrade Cycle

Apple Is About To Make A Bunch Of iPads Obsolete, And It Could Benefit Shareholders, by Sam Mattera, Motley Fool

To date, Apple has released 12 different iPad models, of which 8 will be compatible with iOS 10. The original iPad, the iPad 2, the iPad Mini, and the third-generation iPad are not compatible. If Localytics' findings are accurate, those four models represent a massive 42% of all the iPads currently in use. That means almost half of all iPad owners could be prompted to purchase new models sometime in the near future.

Art In A Screen

Canva Designs New iPhone App, by David Swan, The Australian

Canva was previously just available for desktop and iPad but is today available on iPhone, allowing users to create designs on the go from a library of over a million images and hundreds of layouts.

PaintCode: How To Make iOS-Ready App Graphics With Sketch App, by Daniel Schwarz, Sitepoint

PaintCode 2 is a desktop application that turns vector drawings into Objective-C or Swift code, as opposed to exporting them to standard image formats such as PNG or JPG.

Readers' Digests

Apps Can Cram An Entire Book Into A 15-minute Read – But Are Readers And Authors Being Short-changed?, by Rob Garratt, The National

Ever picked up an interesting-looking book, and wished you could just transfer the story or knowledge it contains directly into your brain, without the graft of actually spending hour after hour reading the thing?

You are not alone, it seems, given the recent arrival of a number of apps that claim to condense the major points of existing titles into bite-sized summaries – to be consumed by busy readers in 15-minute bursts, on the go, on a smartphone or tablet.

Develop

Stateful Loops And Sequences, by Erica Sadun

If you think about it, a repeat-while loop really is just a sequence written in a different form.

Art Everywhere

There Is No Difference Between Computer Art And Human Art, by Oliver Roeder, Aeon

In industry, there is blunt-force algorithmic tension – ‘Efficiency, capitalism, commerce!’ versus ‘Robots are stealing our jobs!’ But for algorithmic art, the tension is subtler. Only 4 per cent of the work done in the United States economy requires ‘creativity at a median human level’, according to the consulting firm McKinsey and Company. So for computer art – which tries explicitly to zoom into this small piece of that vocational pie – it’s a question not of efficiency or equity, but of trust. Art requires emotional and phrenic investments, with the promised return of a shared slice of the human experience. When we view computer art, the pestering, creepy worry is: who’s on the other end of the line? Is it human? We might, then, worry that it’s not art at all.

Bottom of the Page

Have we settled whether programming is art or science?

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Thanks for reading.