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The Force-Quit-Habit Edition Thursday, July 20, 2017

Apple Swats Bugs In macOS Sierra 10.12.6, iOS 10.3.3, And watchOS 3.2.3 Updates, by Valentina Palladino, Ars Technica

Apple released a slew of software updates today for nearly all of its systems: now you can download macOS Sierra 10.12.6, iOS 10.3.3, watchOS 3.2.3, and tvOS 10.2.2 to any of your compatible devices. The updates appear to be minor as most of them focus on bug fixes.

Public Service Announcement: You Should Not Force Quit Apps On iOS, by John Gruber, Daring Fireball

The iOS system is designed so that none of the above justifications for force quitting are true. Apps in the background are effectively “frozen”, severely limiting what they can do in the background and freeing up the RAM they were using. iOS is really, really good at this. It is so good at this that unfreezing a frozen app takes up way less CPU (and energy) than relaunching an app that had been force quit. Not only does force quitting your apps not help, it actually hurts. Your battery life will be worse and it will take much longer to switch apps if you force quit apps in the background.

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An awful lot of very hard work went into making iOS work like this. It’s a huge technical advantage that iOS holds over Android. And every iPhone user in the world who habitually force quits background apps manually is wasting all of the effort that went into this while simultaneously wasting their own device’s battery life and making everything slower for themselves.

Blogging And Web Development With An iPad, by Jordan Merrick

I've been catching up with Matt Gemmell's series of articles about his experiences of going iPad-only. Like Matt, I also use an iPad to manage a site that uses Jekyll, a popular Ruby static site generator. My approach is somewhat different, though the outcome is the same; I can fully update, develop, and maintain my website from the comfort of my iPad.

Apple Launches Machine Learning Research Site, by Romain Dillet, TechCrunch

Apple just launched a blog focused on machine learning research papers and sharing the company’s findings. The Apple Machine Learning Journal is a bit empty right now as the company only shared one post about turning synthetic images into realistic ones in order to train neural networks.

Stuff

How To Secure Your Kid's iPhone, by Eric Griffith, PC Magazine

Apple built a lot of tools and features into iOS that can help a beleaguered parental unit get through the day with fewer worries. Nothing beats a frank, face-to-face talk with kids about what is good for them online and what isn't. But when that doesn't help, here's how you can lock down their iPhones for your piece of mind.

Things 3 Is Great At Helping You Get The Job Done, by Pranay Parab, NDTV

If you value good design and you need a GTD app for your Apple devices, Things 3 is an absolute must-have.

iMazing Mini Simplifies iOS Device Backups, by John Voorhees, MacStories

iMazing is a macOS utility for transferring files to and from iOS devices and backing them up. This week, DigiDNA, the maker of iMazing, introduced a menu bar app called iMazing Mini that offers the core backup features of the full iMazing app for free.

Develop

Designing Better Touch Bar Experiences, by Joe Cieplinski

Where Touch Bar really shines is in giving you quick access to a few commands that otherwise force you to switch from the keyboard to the trackpad or mouse, will take more than a click, or that require an obscure keyboard shortcut that customers are unlikely to ever memorize. The more things you cram into Touch Bar at once, the better the chance the customer becomes overwhelmed with options and stops trying to use Touch Bar altogether.

Notes

Apple’s Oregon Wind Farm Cleared For Super-sized Turbines, by Pete Danko, Portland Business Journal

Regulators have cleared Apple’s Oregon wind power project to use the biggest turbines ever deployed in the Pacific Northwest.

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Longer blades give turbines a greater “swept area,” increasing energy capture for each watt of installed capacity. That translates to power production at closer to full capacity on a more consistent basis. The longer blades are becoming more commonly used in the industry, especially at sites with low-to-medium wind speeds.

Apple On Collision Course With Governments Seeking Access To Encrypted Messages, by Tim Hardwick, MacRumors

While Apple's position is clear, the Turnbull government has yet to clarify exactly what it expects tech companies to give up as part of the proposals. A source familiar with the discussions said that the government explicitly said it did not want a back door into people's phones, nor to weaken encryption.

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Apple is moving in the same direction as WhatsApp and Telegram to make encryption keys entirely private. As announced at WWDC in June, macOS High Sierra and iOS 11 will synchronize iMessages across devices signed into the same account using iCloud and a new encryption method that ensures the keys stay out of Apple's hands.

Where Is Hollywood Looking For The Next Hit? Podcasts, by Charley Locke, Wired

When television networks resort to adapting books that haven’t even been written yet, it’s time to start looking for new source material. Luckily, salvation might be as close as their smartphones. As the supply of books and comics ripe for adaptation dwindles, TV producers are looking to podcasts for fresh material—and finding stories with audiences as loyal as any book club's inner circle.

Like books, podcasts prove that a story works, that listeners like it and will keep coming back to follow it. More importantly, podcasts can prove an idea's viability at a fraction of the cost of producing a TV pilot.

Bottom of the Page

The only app I regularly force-quit is the YouTube app on Apple TV, because I have no idea how to otherwise force the app to refresh its pages.

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Thanks for reading.