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The Enduring-Influence Edition Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Apple Park Opens To Employees In April, by Apple

Apple today announced that Apple Park, the company’s new 175-acre campus, will be ready for employees to begin occupying in April. The process of moving more than 12,000 people will take over six months, and construction of the buildings and parklands is scheduled to continue through the summer. [...]

Steve would have turned 62 this Friday, February 24. To honor his memory and his enduring influence on Apple and the world, the theater at Apple Park will be named the Steve Jobs Theater. Opening later this year, the entrance to the 1,000-seat auditorium is a 20-foot-tall glass cylinder, 165 feet in diameter, supporting a metallic carbon-fiber roof. The Steve Jobs Theater is situated atop a hill — one of the highest points within Apple Park — overlooking meadows and the main building.

Why Some Apps Use Fake Progress Bars, by Kaveh Waddell, The Atlantic

But as I watched one particularly slick animation, which showed a virtual tax form lighting up line by line—yellow or green—I wondered if what I was seeing actually reflected the progress of a real task being tackled in the background. Did it really take that long to “look over every detail” of my returns, which is what the page said it was doing? Hadn’t TurboTax been checking my work as we went? [...]

It’s not because TurboTax delights in messing with its clients. Instead, the site’s artificial wait times are an example of what Eytan Adar, a professor of information and computer science at the University of Michigan, calls “benevolent deception.” In a paper he published in 2013 with a pair of Microsoft researchers, Adar described a wide range of design decisions that trick their users—but end up leaving them better off.

iPhone Addiction, by Harrison Malone, Medium

I think my solution needs to be hiding my phone at 11PM. Away from me where I can’t reach it from my pillow. This might also be good when my alarm goes off in the morning as I have to automatically stand up and walk across the room to turn it off.

Stuff

Keyboard Inconsistencies & Oddities Plaguing Some 2016 MacBook Pro Users, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

As detailed by a number of users on Apple’s Support form, the new MacBook Pro suffers from keyboard issues such as non-functional keys, weird sounds, inconsistent travel, and more.

Memory By Timely, by Preshit Deorukhkar, Beautiful Pixels

Timely is a brilliant, elegant and beautifully crafted time-tracking service that’s designed for freelance individuals, teams and even big companies.

The Best Location-logging App For iPhone, by Joe Caiati, The Sweet Setup

Swarm by Foursquare has the best check-in experience on iOS. It’s fast, fun, and very accurate. It is the culmination of seven years of groundwork laid down by Foursquare.

Notes

Apple Quietly Bought iCloud.net Domain, Shuts Down Eponymous Social Network, by Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch

It looks like Apple has finally picked up one of the last remaining pieces of internet property linked to one of its key service brands: the iPhone and Mac giant has quietly taken over ownership of iCloud.net, TechCrunch has learned. Subsequent to that, the small-time Asian social network that existed at the site has informed its users that it will be shutting down by the end of this month.

Apple's 'Secret' Cambridge Siri Lab Is No Longer Quite So Secret, by Matt Gooding, Cambridge News

The tech giant has repeatedly refused to confirm it is operating out of 90 Hills Road, next to the entrance of the Botanic Gardens. But now its iconic logo has appeared on signage outside the building, [...] It is thought more than 30 people, including former VocalIQ staff, are now working at the Hills Road office, developing new versions of Siri to compete with the likes of Amazon and Google, both of which are marketing their own AI-powered personal assistants.

Bottom of the Page

How to lose your place in your audiobooks in two simple swipes:

Swipe 1: When listening to your audiobook in iOS 10, you suddenly has the sudden urge to launch calculator in order to, I don't know, find out the value of 23 x 41. So, step 1 is to swipe up from the bottom of the screen to get to Control Center.

Swipe 2: Now notice that the Control Center is showing you the second page, but your calculator icon is on the first page. So, swipe right from the left of the screen so that you can get to the first page -- but, 'accidentally' place your finger on the audio scrubber while swiping.

Position lost.

(Yes, despite scolding myself after each time I've done this, I continue to forget to not place my finger anywhere near the audio scrubber while doing this.)

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Apple really should do a public tour of Apple Park this WWDC.

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Thanks for reading.