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Archive for May 13, 2020

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Taking It Back to the Matte

Rob Griffiths:

Many many years ago, Apple made glorious laptops with matte screens. Sadly (for me, at least), these gave way to brighter, shinier, and much more reflective glossy displays. These same glossy screens are found on iOS devices as well, including my new iPad Air.

But on iOS devices, glossy screens are even more annoying than they are on laptops, because of fingerprints. It sometimes seems I spend almost as much time cleaning my iPad as I do using my iPad. But what if there were a product that could solve both the glossy issue and the fingerprint issue?

A friend of mine clued me in to just such a thing…the Moshi iVisor iPad screen protector.

Profanity-Blocking Font

Scunthorpe Sans (via John Gruber):

Modern fonts can combine letters into a single ligature, usually for things like fi or fl but you can pick anything so we’ve done it for swears.

App.net Archive Now Available

Manton Reece:

In the final week before App.net shut down, I whipped up a few scripts to download every post on the platform via the API. After that finished, I also attempted to download small versions of many of the photos, but ran out of time.

[…]

I took some time this weekend to make the posts available. It’s the bare minimum to find a list of posts for your username, then download them. There’s no HTML interface; the data is meant for apps or scripts to access.

Previously:

Nested Property Wrappers in Swift

Noah Gilmore:

The Swift Evolution Proposal details how composition of property wrappers works - the wrappedValue access goes two levels deep.

They work inside out, like Python decorators, but with more ceremony from the type system.

The wrappedValue of the outer property wrapper isn’t String, it’s actually Appending, and therein lies the problem. If we want one level of wrapping, Appending needs to take a String, but for two levels of wrapping it needs to take another Appending.

This might seem like a Catch-22, but we can actually use protocolization to solve this issue. Instead of Appending operating on Strings, we can make it operate on “anything that is appendable” by using a protocol.

Previously:

Monkey’s Push Notifications

Lester Coleman:

Monkey app is one of the top downloaded and used online video chatting app to make new friends. The app is targeted towards the Gen Z audience and is climbing uphill in terms of concurring and new users.

Monkey app was removed/deleted from Apple App Store recently over child safety complaints. Although the app is available on the Android app store and can be downloaded on Apple devices as well done via direct file download from third party sites, we do not recommend that.

[…]

After the app was removed/deleted from the store the company started receiving tons of DMs from Apple users. To respond company released a message on Instagram which read “We know the quarantine has you stuck at home and bored beyond belief. We’re about to announce some exciting news that’ll help keep you socially connected and entertained during these uncertain times. Enable Monkey notifications to be the first to find out⚡️”.

I don’t really understand what the rules are here. Obviously, there are lots of social apps in the store that, like Monkey, have reporting systems that don’t work 100% of the time. Plus, if there’s end-to-end encryption, it’s not even possible for the app to look at the content to police it.

Apps Exposed (via Jeff Johnson):

How to get on #1 Top Charts (Social Networking) after @Apple removes your other app from @AppStore for being used by predators for child p*rnography.

[…]

After his successful app called “Monkey” was removed from App Store this guy got to work and made a new one called “Yee - Group Video Chat” which was basically a clone of Monkey. But how could he make it go up on Top Charts so quickly?

[…]

A brilliant idea got to him. He send a couple of push notifications (APNs) on a daily basis to his old users on Monkey (mostly kids & predators) by notifying them that if they didn’t download his new app their account would get closed in 24h.

It makes sense to allow push notifications (and other iCloud services) for apps that are no longer for sale, so the installed copies don’t break. I can’t see any reason not to turn them off for apps that are scams, and the like. But it sounds like this was a legit app that just couldn’t control its user-generated content. Perhaps there was no reason to suspect they would be abused.

I wonder whether the call to “enable Monkey notifications” refers to adjusting the Notification Center settings or to opting into marketing notifications within the app.

Previously: