MyAppleMenu

The Well-Being Edition Monday, December 11, 2017

Apple Watch Relieves Cancer Patients Of A Major Burden, Study Finds, by Eileen Guo, Inverse

Traditionally, doctors use paper questionnaires to ask patients about their well-being, but these lengthy surveys can be burdensome for cancer patients to fill out and, on top of that, may be inaccurate. Wearable technology and emojis can make the self-reporting process easier, researchers announced this weekend in Atlanta at the American Society of Hematology’s annual meeting.

Researchers recruited 115 patients with two types of cancer (lymphoma or myeloma) and life expectancies of less than five years that also happened to own an iPhone5s. If selected for the study, they were given Apple Watches. Then, researchers used a special app to collect baseline health data — and to enable participants to use emojis to express their physical/emotional states through treatment. The study was created using Apple’s ResearchKit, described by Apple as a “software framework for apps that let medical researchers gather robust and meaningful data.”

Apple Let A Knockoff Version Of One Of The World’s Biggest Crypto Wallets Into The App Store, by Brian Heater, TechCrunch

An app masquerading as MyEtherWallet.com, one of the internet’s most popular services for storing ETH and other crypto coins, has made its way to the top of the iOS App Store charts.

The app rose to the number three spot in Finance category of the App Store this weekend as part of a bitcoin frenzy that saw bitcoin exchange Coinbase top Apple’s free download list in the U.S.. In this case, however, it is important to note this app is not official so users should avoid downloading it.

How Email Open Tracking Quietly Took Over The Web, by Brian Merchant, Wired

The tech is pretty simple. Tracking clients embed a line of code in the body of an email—usually in a 1x1 pixel image, so tiny it's invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts. When a recipient opens the email, the tracking client recognizes that pixel has been downloaded, as well as where and on what device. Newsletter services, marketers, and advertisers have used the technique for years, to collect data about their open rates; major tech companies like Facebook and Twitter followed suit in their ongoing quest to profile and predict our behavior online.

But lately, a surprising—and growing—number of tracked emails are being sent not from corporations, but acquaintances. “We have been in touch with users that were tracked by their spouses, business partners, competitors,” says Florian Seroussi, the founder of OMC. “It's the wild, wild west out there.”

Stuff

iPhone X Third Impressions, by Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note

Apple’s Face ID isn’t perfect, but, in my experience, it’s more reliable than Touch ID. With Touch ID I’ve had to register and re-register fingers when prints stopped working and wet digits are never welcome. Yes, with Face ID I have to crane my neck when the phone is on the table and I must turn away from direct sunlight when I’m outside, but otherwise it works without ifs and buts. (I might re-do the Face ID setup to deal with the phone on the table situation so it recognizes the area below my chin, but I’m lazy: It works well enough and it successfully dealt with the black eye I earned in Maui’s breaking waves.)

More important, I saw how my spouse, a normal, non-geek user took to Face ID. Set up was much easier than Touch ID’s lengthy, detailed registering of fingers. As my spouse’s tech “chauffeur”, I hear about it when things fail to obey; I have yet to hear a discouraging word about Face ID.

Hands On: Keyboard Maestro 8.0.4 Speeds Up Working On Your Mac, by Mike Wuerthele and William Gallagher, AppleInsider

This is an app you need to know about because if it's right for you, it will transform how you use your Mac. It can radically transform it by turning complex jobs into a single keystroke. It can remove repetitive chores entirely and it can make sure you don't forget steps in a job you only do once a month. The new Keyboard Maestro 8 is an update that brings more features and more ways to combine these tools.

CorelCAD 2018 Arrives For Mac And Windows—iOS Version Coming Soon, by Anthony Frausto-Robledo, Architosh

CorelCAD 2018 offers dozens of new features, but important in this release is enhanced 3D solid modeling editing. Users can now save design time by utilizing enhanced EntityGrips and Properties palette. Also along the lines of 3D modeling is the new Helix tool, which allows users to create 2D spirals and 3D helixes. This new tool makes it simple for architects and designers to create objects like spiral staircases and the manufacturer of springs, screws, and bolts.

Notes

Robot Cars May Kill Jobs, But Will They Create Them Too?, by Carolyn Said, San Francisco Chronicle

“We will definitely need drivers for the foreseeable future,” Peter Gigante, head of policy research at Lyft, said at a November conference. Eventually, a driver’s role could become one of aiding passengers who need extra assistance, such as seniors and children, he said. “The concerns (about job loss) are understood and valid, but I don’t think this is an immediate issue that requires big actions right now; we have a lot of time to understand what the role of the driver will be.”

So what are those roles?

Just as no one predicted that the horseless carriage would engender millions of jobs in everything from highway construction to drive-through fast-food chains, it’s hard to imagine what the advent of self-driving vehicles might spawn. But there are some inklings.

Bottom of the Page

The problems that I face day-to-day are not problems that I will care about when I am on my deathbed. But if I do not solve these day-to-day problems, I will not get to the level where I can solve the problems that I do care about when I am on my deathbed.

Life.

Can't we do better?

~

Thanks for reading.