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The Anti-Spam Edition Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Apple To Help India Develop Anti-spam App After Face-off With Regulator, by Aditya Kalra, Reuters

Apple Inc has agreed to give limited help to the Indian government to develop an anti-spam mobile application for its iOS platform, after refusing to do so based on privacy concerns, according to sources and documents seen by Reuters.

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Facing public criticism from the regulator, Apple executives flew to New Delhi last month and told officials the company would help develop the app, but only with limited capabilities, according to a government official aware of the matter.

How A Health App Could Change A Half-paralyzed 2-year-old's Life, by Elizabeth Schulze, CNBC

The winning team designed a dashboard in the form of an iPad mounted on Emerson's wheelchair. The app would monitor the toddler's body temperature, heart rate and sweat levels and send out alerts if there were any abnormal readings.

Dearsley said the app would allow her son to live a more normal life. "Emerson has complex needs but they're needs that shouldn't stop him from being a normal two-year-old or a normal child," she said. "So with an app it would allow him to continue to follow his peers."

Emerson's story is just one example of how apps are transforming the digital health industry. A 2015 report from Monitor Deloitte cited mobile health apps as the fastest growing segment in the industry. The report estimated that the U.K.'s mobile health app market will be worth roughly £250 million ($328 million) by 2018.

Adobe's iOS App Failure, by Jason Snell, Six Colors

It’s great that there are alternatives like Affinity Photo and Clip Studio and Procreate, so that iOS users can get work done despite Adobe’s lackluster efforts. But it’s frustrating that Adobe has failed its core design customers to such a degree—and it’s also a big risk for Adobe. Photoshop commands a lot of space in the brains of many creative professionals, but a lot of those people want to use iOS. If Adobe provided them with fulfilling tools for iOS—ones that are as capable as what’s available on macOS and Windows—it could keep its customers loyal.

But the longer Adobe fails to provide, the more creative professionals will seek out alternatives.

Clips As A Photo Booth Replacement< by Karan Varindani

Playing with the Selfie Scenes in Clips last week, I had the same feeling that I did playing with Photo Booth on my Mac many years ago. It was a little surreal, as someone with incredible front-camera shyness, to find myself having so much fun with it.

Stuff

Playground AR: A Physics Sandbox For Freeform Play, by Ryan Christoffel, MacStories

Playground AR is a new app from developer Marc Sureda that uses ARKit to bring the joys of childhood play to all ages – and with no mess to clean up either. The app provides a variety of toys that let you both build and destroy, with a physics system backing it all up to make the experience a delight.

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The physics engine is what makes Playground truly shine. Stacking blocks too high, for example, will cause your creation to topple over if the stack isn't well-balanced. Dominos can be strung together in an elaborate setup then knocked down by a rolling ball. Magnetized blocks will stick together even if gravity or another object forces them to fall. Balloons can be attached to objects, and depending on an object's weight and the number of balloons, the object will eventually be sent flying into the stratosphere. But I would be remiss if I didn't mention my favorite physics demonstration: placing bombs and TNT containers in your playground to blow everything up. It's brilliant.

SongShift 3.0 And Switching Between Apple Music And Spotify, by Federico Viticci, MacStories

As someone who regularly switches between two music streaming services, playlist auto-sync is the marquee addition in SongShift 3.0. Here’s how it works: after creating a shift on one device and enabling auto-sync, SongShift will keep checking for new songs added to the source playlist and automatically add them to the destination over time. In my tests, SongShift indeed sent me notifications alerting me of new songs found in Spotify playlists I previously configured in the app, successfully resuming shifts to process new songs when I launched the app.

Elgato Eve Degree Review: A Smart-but-spendy Way To Track Your Home's Climate, by Popular Science

The Eve Degree lets you track temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure inside your home or out. And if you have other Apple HomeKit-compatible devices, you can use those readings to trigger specific smart home actions, like turning off the heat or turning on a humidifier.

Best Budgeting Apps For iPhone, by Lory Gil , Luke Filipowicz, iMore

Keeping track of your expenses is only part of staying within a budget. You also need to keep an eye on how close you are to your limits. Personal finance apps are great for getting an overview of what you spend each month, but budgeting apps can help you save. Here's a list of our favorites.

Firefox 57 'Quantum' For macOS Released, iOS Version User Interface Refresh Coming, by Mike Wuerthele, AppleInsider

Mozilla claims that the new Firefox runs faster mostly because of the overhaul of the code base, and resultant performance improvements. The organization claims that the browser is twice as fast and uses 30 percent less memory than Chrome.