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Channel: December 2016 – Michael Tsai
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Making Sense of Color Management

A Book Apart: Get clarity in the tricky endeavor of managing colors from initial design to final product. Learn why colors shift, the science behind the human eye and color profiles, and how to set up...

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Method Dispatch in Swift

Brian King: Compiled programming languages have three primary methods of dispatch at their disposal: direct dispatch, table dispatch, and message dispatch, which I explain below. Most languages support...

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How to Do XCTestCase tearDown Wrong (and Right)

Jon Reid (via Natasha Murashev): In other words, it builds up the entire set of XCTestCase instances before running a single test. […] setUp and tearDown were invented because the entire collection of...

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Super Mario Run

Andrew Webster: Now Nintendo is finally moving with them. Next week will see the launch of Super Mario Run on iPhone and iPad (an Android version is coming later), marking the first proper...

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iOS App Rejected for Using Pre-selected RSS Feeds

Mike Rundle: Now I know what was taking so long. Rejected because I use… public RSS feeds like 100 other apps. Thanks, Apple. Well, Apple denied my appeal. Interesting (simple news app with...

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How to Unit Test Private Methods in Swift

Bart Jacobs: While access control is a very welcome addition with many benefits, it can complicate unit testing, especially if you are new to unit testing. You probably know that you can apply the...

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Accidentally Quadratic Rust Hash Tables

Accidentally Quadratic: I enjoy this bug for at least two reasons: One, it’s fun technically, allowing us to take a brief deep dive into hash-table implementation – something most of us are normally...

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Which Macs Are People Using?

I’ve been thinking about the Mac lineup lately. When will Apple updates its desktop computers? And, when it does, should I switch back to using a desktop as my primary computer? There’s been a lot of...

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Mac Users Switching to Surface

Brian Hall (9to5Mac, MacRumors, Hacker News): Our team gets so excited about meeting new Surface users and hearing their feedback, and we get to meet a lot more this holiday season! From Surface Pro,...

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Sourcery: Template-Based Code Generation for Swift

Krzysztof Zabłocki (tweet): Swift is a beautiful language that powers a lot of great iOS apps. Unfortunately it features very limited runtime and no meta-programming features. This has led our projects...

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The Opportunity of Swift on the Server

Stephan Knitelius (via Chris Lattner): Java and other languages that compile to Java byte code run on the JVM. In a world of Docker containers the JVM is just yet another layer eating up resources. The...

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macOS 10.12.2 Removes Battery Time Remaining Estimate

Jim Dalrymple (MacRumors, Hacker News, 9to5Mac, Slashdot): Some users have reported problems with battery life, but Apple told me that after a lot of testing they stand behind the 10 hour battery life...

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Uber Whistleblower on Location Privacy

Will Evans (via Christopher Soghoian, Hacker News): “Uber’s lack of security regarding its customer data was resulting in Uber employees being able to track high profile politicians, celebrities, and...

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The Discrete GPU and You

Chris Liscio: The combination of a dGPU and lower-capacity battery means that the practical battery life of these machines gets cut in half (or worse) when the dGPU is active. I’m not sure that...

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Evernote Privacy Policy

Evernote (via Ragnar Tørnquist, Rob Price, Hacker News): To get there, Evernote data scientists need to do spot checks as they develop the technology. If you choose to participate, they’ll see random...

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The Businesses Apple Has Left Behind

Stephen Hackett: This year, Apple has exited the external display business and is rumored to be discontinuing its AirPort wireless routers. These developments have left a bad taste in many users’...

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eBay Is for Suckers

Matthew Sag (via Jeff Atwood): The wonderful thing about eBay when it first arrived was that it freed so many people from the tyranny of small markets. eBay provided a marketplace where trust was built...

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macOS 10.12.2 Impedes Safari Bookmarklets

Daniel Jalkut: Safari Bookmarklets that invoke a custom scheme yield a warning like this in 10.12.2. There’s a Cancel/Allow confirmation alert each time you invoke the bookmarklet, even multiple times...

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Another Git Catastrophe Cleaned Up

Mark Dominus: At that point I realized that git-filter-branch also provided a less peculiar way out of the pickle once we were in: Instead of using my merge driver approach, I could have filtered the...

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Touch Bar Crash Protection

Daniel Jalkut: I wrote previously about crashes related to Apple’s Touch Bar. These crashes seem to affect all apps that were built with a certain toolchain. Most likely it affects all apps that were...

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Replacing Auto Layout With LayoutKit

Nick Snyder (via Dave Verwer): Here’s an example of a layout in the LinkedIn app. It has two labels: there’s a multi-line label on the left, and a single line label on the right. For the right label,...

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GitHub’s Business

Eric Newcomer (Hacker News): Though the name GitHub is practically unknown outside technology circles, coders around the world have embraced the software. The startup operates a sort of Google Docs for...

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“Untranslocating” an App

Patrick Wardle: So, now imagine an attacker has found an legitimate signed application that attempts to load or execute some relatively external content (i.e outside it’s app bundle, but within the...

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Hiding Your Action and Share Extensions In Your Own Apps

Aditya Krishnadevan: In PDF Viewer, we use a UIActivityViewController to share PDFs. This means that our Action extension shows up in the list of actions as well! So a user would see an "Import to PDF...

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NSRegularExpression and Swift

Nate Cook: Well, many NSRegularExpression methods use NSRanges, as do the NSTextCheckingResult instances that store a match’s data. NSRange, in turn, uses integers for its location and length, while...

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Golang’s Real-Time GC in Theory and Practice

Will Sewell (via Hacker News): In this blog post, we’ll look at Go’s garbage collector. We’ll see how it works (the tricolor algorithm), why it works (achieving such short GC pauses), and most...

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macOS 10.12.2: SSH Starts Asking for id_rsa Passphrase

I have an id_rsa file set up so that I can SSH and Git into my servers. The SSH keys are protected by a passphrase. ssh-agent remembers the passphrase so I don’t have to keep entering it, and it can...

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Swift: Challenges and Opportunity for Language and Compiler Research

Chris Lattner (PDF, tweet, Hacker News): That said, many of the things we talked about earlier are actually powered by the LLVM JIT, including the REPL, #! scripts, Playgrounds, and the LLDB debugger....

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User Automation Blog

Sal Soghoian (tweet): This website is dedicated to informing individuals about the tools at their disposal that can be used by them to control the devices they engage with and rely upon every day. I...

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LG 5K UltraFine Display Delayed

Ben Lovejoy: LG has confirmed that the 5K UltraFine monitor Apple recommends for use with the new MacBook Pro models has been delayed. A company representative told us that LG does not yet have a...

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Stroustrup’s Rule and Layering Over Time

Dave Herman (via Ehud Lamm): One of my favorite insights about syntax design appeared in a retrospective on C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup: For new features, people insist on loud explicit syntax. For...

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DTrace at Home

Adam Leventhal: I’m not the first person to hit this. The problem seems to have existed since CS6 was released in 2016. None of the solutions was working for me, and — inspired by Sara Mauskopf’s...

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How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

Matthew Panzarino (Hacker News, MacRumors, 9to5Mac, Slashdot): “Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops,” Cook wrote. “If there’s any doubt about that...

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Farewell to the Apple Watch

Matt Gemmell: My usage pattern was ludicrous, given what the thing can do. To me, it was a wristwatch with some notifications, and I was charging it every night. The notional benefit of long-term...

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More macOS Preview PDF Trouble

Brooks Duncan (via Eddie Smith): In the comments to my blog post about ScanSnap on Sierra, awesome DocumentSnap reader Alex writes this: Since updating to macOS 10.12.2 I have found that Preview...

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PyPy’s Hash Table Implementation

Maciej Fijalkowski (via David Smith): One surprising part is that the new design, besides being more memory efficient, is ordered by design: it preserves the insertion order.[…]Here, compact_array...

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My AirPods Experience

I’ve only been using them for about a day, but so far it seems like Apple got this one right. The AirPods seem to be exactly what you’d expect: OK audio, easier pairing and device switching, a bunch of...

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What Y2K Was Like at Microsoft

Kareem Anderson (via Hacker News): However, in 1999, a large intersection of people were clearly preparing for the worst in the following year as the Y2K scare ran rampant across the globe. As the Y2K...

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CwlSignal and Reactive Programming

Matt Gallagher: The careful separation of “input” and “output” and the modelling of reactive programming as a channel is a distinguishing feature of CwlSignal. Other common implementations treat...

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Fixing AVPlayer Playback Transparency

Ashley Nelson-Hornstein: To test this theory, I downloaded one of the videos made in the client’s app, dropped it into Apple’s example project, and made a couple of quick changes so that Apple’s...

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App Transport Security Requirement Delayed

Apple (Slashdot): At WWDC 2016 we announced that apps submitted to the App Store will be required to support ATS at the end of the year. To give you additional time to prepare, this deadline has been...

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Consumer Reports on the New MacBook Pro’s Battery Life

Jerry Beilinson (Hacker News, MacRumors, 9to5Mac): The laptops did very well in measures of display quality and performance, but in terms of battery life, we found that the models varied dramatically...

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Investigating ChronoSync 4.7 for Cloud Backup

Glenn Fleishman: We at TidBITS were excited to see ChronoSync add options to use Amazon’s Simple Storage System (S3) and Google Cloud Storage as sources or destinations. ChronoSync 4.7 also added...

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Mac and iOS Trajectories

Riccardo Mori: I have a hard time believing it, but for the sake of argument, let’s say the Mac has reached the end of the line. Let’s say there’s little room left to innovate on the hardware side, and...

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Goodbye Mint, Goodbye Fever

Shaun Inman: As of today I’m officially suspending sales and support of Mint and Fever. But! As self-hosted software, absolutely nothing changes and you can continue using both Mint and Fever as you...

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PHPMailer Security Bug

Tom Spring: A critical PHPMailer bug tied to the way websites handle email and feedback forms is leaving millions of websites hosted on popular web-publishing platforms such as WordPress, Drupal and...

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Amazon Could Be More International

Dave Winer: I bought a gift card for a friend who lives in the UK, but I bought it on amazon.com, thinking that would be great because they’re so international. But it turns out you can’t use an...

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Christmas Card Mail Merge

Casey Liss: If you’re willing to make precisely zero edits to the address labels that are created from the Contacts app, it’s actually quite easy to print labels. […] For me, I wanted to address...

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MacBook Pro Ethernet Adapter Benchmark

Paul Haddad notes that Apple’s Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter is slightly faster than Belkin’s USB-C to Ethernet adapter and uses much less CPU. Unfortunately, the former must be chained with the...

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Amazon Echo Privacy

John Gruber: There’s an argument that we’re still in the very early stages of voice-driven personal computing. That, for example, Apple is not too late in putting out an Echo-like dedicated appliance....

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