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The Water-Guns-And-Buckets Edition Wednesday, April 19, 2017

How Photographers Use iPhones To Get Gorgeous Shots Of A Massive Water Festival, by Victoria Ho, Mashable

The Thai new year marks the arrival of spring, but visitors to the country also know it as a weekend-long water fight, as major streets get closed, and people arm up with water guns and buckets.

It's also a terrific opportunity for dramatic shots, as these photographers' iPhone shots show. With the likes of Apple, Samsung and other big smartphone makers putting out waterproof models as a default these days, it's easy to capture the splashes up

The Great iPhone Naming Opportunity Of 2017, by Ken Segall

This is the Great iPhone Naming Opportunity of 2017. As the family of iPhones becomes more diverse, this is the perfect moment to cast off the complexity and give customers an easier choice.

Apple’s recent burst of honesty about the state of the Mac proves that the company can own up to its mistakes. Compared to the ugly Mac situation, re-inventing iPhone naming would be a walk in the park.

iMac's Terrible Code Name Was An In-joke Between Steve Jobs And Phil Schiller, by Luke Dormehl, Cult of Mac

“Actually it was a joke between Steve and I,” Schiller tweeted over the weekend. “It started after he said he wanted a name as great as Walkman.”

Apple Music & iCloud Users Receive Unexpected Subscription Discontinuation Alerts, by Roger Fingas, AppleInsider

A number of Apple Music and iCloud users reported sudden problems with their subscriptions on Wednesday, including cancellations, or an inability to change plans.

Stuff

Apple Makes iMovie, GarageBand, And iWork Apps For Mac And iOS Free For All Users, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

Previously, all of these apps were provided for free to customers who purchased a new Mac or iOS device, but now that purchase is not required to get the software.

Google Maps For iOS Now Lets You Retrace Your Steps With Timeline, by Darrell Etherington, TechCrunch

What is Timeline? It’s basically a browser history but for IRL navigation. Google frames it as a great way to look back and find that restaurant you thought was terrific during your most recent vacation, or to find out what day you actually dropped off your dry cleaning (vs. when you’re pretty sure you did).

Original StarCraft Is Finally Free-as-in-beer After Delayed Patch, by Sam Machkovech, Ars Technica

Last month, the game makers at Blizzard announced a remastered, 4K-friendly version of the original StarCraft, set to launch this summer. That announcement also teased a much sooner release of the original StarCraft that would be completely free. After a delay, that free version is finally available to download worldwide.

Develop

The Case For Being Grumpy At Work, by Meredith Bennett-Smith, Quartz

In 2017, there’s no reason for us to grin and bear it. For one thing, researchers from Munich’s Technische Universitaet have found that women were less likely to be promoted to management positions if they appeared too cheerful. (Welcome to another great example of the catch-22s that women face in the workplace everyday.) And research has also shown that a pessimistic outlook can lead to higher productivity, fewer mistakes, and better communication skills. In other words: Grumpy workers of the world, unite.

The Art Of Writing One-Sentence Product Descriptions, by Dave Bailey

The format of both descriptions is the same: “You do X and Y happens.” X is the input and Y is the output. This input-output pair matches our intuition about how software works. Simplifying the product as a straightforward input and desirable output creates the sense that it’s an ingenious idea.

Facebook and Uber have thousands of features, yet Mark and Travis elevate a single feature above the others, making the product easy to understand, easy to remember, and, most importantly, easy to talk about.

Notes

Beijing Cyber Regulators To Summon Apple Over Live Streaming: Xinhua, by Matthew Miller and Catherine Cadell, Reuters

Beijing Internet regulators in China's capital plan to summon Apple Inc to urge the American firm to tighten its checks on software applications available in its Apple Store, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday.

That Time A Customer Reported An Error In The Map Used By Flight Simulator, by Raymond Chen, The Old New Thing

The Flight Simulator team went back to the geographers and asked them to re-check their information. The geographers re-checked their maps, looked at the internationally-recognized border between the two countries, searched for any information that would suggest that there was an active border dispute between the two countries, but they couldn't find anything that would indicate that the map included in Flight Simulator was incorrect.

The product team called the customer back to get some more information. "As far as we can tell, the map in Flight Simulator respects the current internationally-recognized border. It is in agreement with the XYZ Treaty and is consistent with United Nations map number 31415. Can you tell us what specifically is wrong with the map?"

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Has anybody started coding a new Workflow-like iOS app?

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Thanks for reading.