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The Supply-and-Demand-Constraints Edition Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Apple Says It Won’t Meet Q2 Earnings Range Due To Coronavirus, iPhone Supply Constraints, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

Apple had forecast a wider-than-usual range revenue range for Q2, predicting revenue between $63.0 billion and $67.0 billion. Apple now says it won’t hit even the lower-end of that range due to the effects of the coronavirus in China.

[...]

Apple cites two main reasons for this: worldwide constraints for iPhone supply and demand for Apple products within China.

Apple’s Cook Outlines ‘Slower Return To Normal’ In Memo To Staff, by Mark Gurman, Bloomberg

In the email, Cook mentioned Apple’s teams working on the fallout from the virus and said that the safety of employees, partners and customers is the company’s central concern.

Growth-Hack-Style

The Paywalled Garden: iOS Is Adware, by Steve Streza

If you don’t subscribe to these services, you’ll be forced to look at these ads constantly, either in the apps you use or the push notifications they have turned on by default. The pervasiveness of ads in iOS is a topic largely unexplored, perhaps due to these services having a lot of adoption among the early adopter crowd that tends to discuss Apple and their design. This isn’t a value call on the services themselves, but a look at how aggressively Apple pushes you to pay for them, and how that growth-hack-style design comes at the expense of the user experience. In this post, I’ll break down all of the places in iOS that I’ve found that have Apple-manufactured ads. You can replicate these results yourself by doing a factory reset of an iPhone (backup first!), installing iOS 13, and signing up for a new iCloud account.

Stuff

Developer Crunchy Bagel Releases A Mac Catalyst Version Of Streaks, by John Voorhees, MacStories

The app is a fantastic way to track and establish new habits. When it was launched, Streaks was iPhone-only. Since then, however, the app has added iPad support, an Apple Watch companion, Health app and Shortcuts integrations, new customizations, and other features, all while maintaining its distinctive, brightly-colored UI and fantastic iconography.

Today’s update adds Mac support to the mix via a brand new Catalyst app.

Tired Of Web Sites Blocking Standard Browser Controls? StopTheMadness!, by Josh Centers, TidBITS

Have you been frustrated by Web sites that prevent you from copying text and images, add advertisements to copied text, add tracking junk to URLs, keep you from pasting in passwords, and block the Control-click contextual menu? Developer Jeff Johnson has created a browser extension called StopTheMadness that puts an end to these and other annoying practices.

How To Deal With Running Out Of iCloud, Google, And Dropbox Space, by Adam Engst, TidBITS

There’s no magic here, and you should be careful when actually deleting files, but it’s common to discover that you’re wasting a significant amount of space on files that don’t matter.

Develop

iOS Performance Tips You Probably Didn't Know (From An ex-Apple Engineer), by Rony Fadel

I have spent the past 6 years at Apple working on Cocoa frameworks and first party apps. I’ve worked on Spotlight, iCloud, app extensions and most recently on Files.

I have noticed that there was a pattern of low-hanging fruits, where you could make 80% of the performance gains in 20% of the time.

Here’s a checklist of performance tips that would hopefully give you the biggest bang for your buck:

Notes

'Hey Siri, Bring In The Cattle And Irrigate Field Four', by Jonny Evans, Computerworld

If you go down to the farm today, you’ll likely find it packed with sensors, drones and remote management systems run by iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices.

In fact, we’re only one or two Siri Shortcuts away from voice-controlled farms equipped with remotely controlled irrigation, livestock and crop management solutions and blockchain-based crop lifecycle analysis tools.

Learning To Run Without Headphones, by Talmon Joseph Smith, The Atlantic

By the end of that accidental silent jog over the holiday season, however, I was reminded of what clearing one’s mind must truly feel like: Things I suppressed or hadn’t given full reflection—like the appropriate guilt I felt for forgetting a promise to a friend or the warmth I still felt from a Christmas morning spent listening to B. B. King with my 89-year-old grandfather—had happily been processed or had mercifully floated away.

Better than the quotidian runner’s high I get when jogging with music, I felt reset. And I wondered whether this ancient practice of cardio in solitude—which was honestly a bit dull for the first few hundred steps—was, in fact, a key to easing postmodernity’s malaise. Long hailed as a stress release, much of exercising has been noisily swallowed back into the tech-laden productivity and self-help craze: how many steps, how many calories, how good compared with everyone else—on this app, in this gym, in this class. As The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino and others have mournfully written, wasn’t all of this supposed to help?

The iPhone At The Deathbed, by Penelope Green, New York Times

In a collision of technology and culture, of new habits and very old ones, we are beginning to photograph our dead again.

For families like Mr. Alexander’s who are choosing home funerals and following natural death practices — D.I.Y. affairs that eschew the services of conventional funeral parlors — photography is an extension and celebration of that choice.

Bottom of the Page

When I am dead, I will not be able to know nor care what you do with my body.

~

Thanks for reading.