Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

The feature is part of Apple’s Do Not Disturb at Bedtime mode, which prevents notifications from being displayed on your iPhone’s Lock Screen when you’re supposed to be sleeping.

Many users don’t realize you can get the weather forecast to show on the Lock Screen because of the odd way that Apple has implemented the feature. Regardless, here’s how to get it working.

Coincidentally, I posted this on Twitter this morning:

I’d love it if Apple would add customizable complications to my iPhone lock screen.

Would love to see the outside temp, or my ring status, or my next meeting, all on the lock screen.

— Dark Mode Dave (@davemark) December 6, 2018

As is, getting the current temp on your lock screen is a bit of a one-off. I’d love something like an Apple Watch complication on my lock screen, something I can feed from one of my apps, something I can customize.

Some might argue that with the advent of Face ID, the lock screen is dead. Perhaps, but I would argue for the usefulness of the lock screen as a status page before you move on to the busy, populated Springboard interface. And the lock screen requires no gestures, it is effortless. Just raise to wake.

Be warned, this is a rabbit hole of a read, a real time suck. But so, so fascinating.

John Gruber, on the iOS App Store story about Procreate Pocket:

The whole story is only seven paragraphs long, and one of them is devoted to explaining how to invoke Undo and Redo. This is — inadvertently on the part of the App Store editorial team — a scathing indictment of the state of iOS’s user interface standards.

Not sure scathing indictment is quite right, but I do get the point. Part of what makes a Mac a Mac is that dogged consistency that has held up over many years of evolution. Command-Q to quit an app, Command-P to print, Command-C and Command-V to copy and paste and, in this instance, Command-Z to undo.

John’s point carries much further than undo. Look at the way iOS gestures have evolved from generation to generation. As we move from a home button to none, from typing a passcode, to Touch ID, and on to Face ID, the bedrock gestures have changed as well. Move from one generation of device to another and the basic interactions have changed.

Part of this is, Apple is still tinkering with some foundational iOS underpinnings. But part of this is also a testament to the genius of the designers who crafted that early Mac interface. Such insight, such vision.

From Apple’s official product page:

Thin, light, and easy to grip — this case lets you enjoy the look of iPhone XR while providing extra protection. It’s also crafted with a blend of optically clear polycarbonate and flexible TPU materials, so the case fits right over the buttons for easy use. On the surface, a scratch-resistant coating has been applied not only to the exterior, but also to the interior. Need to wirelessly charge? Just leave the case on your iPhone and set it on your Qi-certified charger.

Puzzling why it took this long. Available for delivery Monday December 11, for pickup Tuesday December 12.

Vulture:

More than 20 years later, Scream is still scary. And everything that makes it great is on display in its electric opening scene: a twisted game of horror trivia, a beautiful girl, a pair of gruesome murders, a telephone ringing in an isolated house at night.

For Vulture’s package on the 100 Scares That Shaped Horror, Williamson shared the story behind how he conceived of the film’s iconic opening scene.

We watched Scream in October for Halloween with the 13-year-old. It was wonderfully scary for him.

From this Reddit post, watch the video, see if you think one copied the other (hint, one of these product videos made its first appearance last month).

For me, the big “wow” moment was at about 1:20 in.

Another one of those tip lists where you’ll likely know most of what’s presented. But there’s that one tip that makes the read worthwhile. Take a look.

Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, The Daily Dot:

Tumblr and Twitter are already full of screencaps showing random posts mislabeled as explicit material. In some cases, you can kind of see how the mistake happened (for instance, art with partial but non-sexual nudity, or images that a bot might mistake for a human body), but there’s also a ton of content that appears to have been flagged at random.

Some are G-rated or abstract art, which suggests an immediate problem for the many illustrators who use Tumblr as a portfolio site. Others are everyday photos like this person’s gallery of dinosaur pics.

Just scroll through the article, look at all the examples of innocuous posts labeled NSFW.

Hard to see this as anything other than a self-made disaster for Tumblr. Not too late to reverse course.

Just start reading. A terrific story about Google’s very first employee, and the likeminded friend he made in the early days of Google.

This is one of those, grab a beverage, put your feet up, relax and settle in kind of reads. Enjoy.

Gimlet Media:

Twenty years ago, Steve Jobs had an idea: he wanted to build an Apple store. Something sleek and iconic and unlike anything else in retail. But he had no idea how to do it. So he called someone who might: retail genius Ron Johnson. Ron tells Alex the story of what it was like to work with Steve and help transform Apple into a household name. And Ron talks about life after Apple—which included a huge and humbling failure.

And:

The story of how Ron Johnson built the Apple store into the iconic institution it is today is a fascinating one. First, because of the way Ron Johnson came to Apple. It wasn’t the usual route, through computer engineering and Silicon Valley. He came by a very different path, and nevertheless ended up forming a deep, and fascinating partnership with Steve Jobs, which he talks in very candid detail in our interview. But I also wanted to talk to Ron because of what he did after his time at Apple.

Terrific interview, lots of Steve Jobs sprinkled throughout.

You can listen to the interview via the embedded Megaphone stream, or read the transcript embedded below that.

Side note 1: I am a big fan of Gimlet Media. If you are interested in starting a business, or just startups in general, I’d strongly recommend the StartUp Podcast. StartUp is both the first Gimlet podcast and the actual story of how Gimlet came to be. A fascinating listen. If you’ve ever heard of This American Life, you’ll be surprised at the origin story.

Side note 2: The link to this interview came from Michael Tsai’s blog. I check this one every day. Terrific.

Patently Apple:

There’s a common misunderstanding among business owners that songwriters are only compensated by the purchase of their CDs, so that a business owner can freely play copyrighted music for customers. Not so, and Apple’s new trademark filing for ‘Apple Music for Business’ indicates that Apple will be entering this new business avenue for Apple music in the future as the company seeks to expand their services businesses.

An Apple Music for Business subscription, assuming it turns out to be reasonably priced, would be good for small businesses, give them an easy way to play music for their customers that is properly copyrighted.

And, presumably, it would be good for artists, who would be compensated by the service, getting something, rather than the nothing they get when a business plays a playlist.

Fraser Speirs, in a post titled On Switching from an iPad Pro and a Macbook to a Pixelbook (via Michael Tsai’s excellent blog):

Fast forward to 2018 and virtually all of the work I do at school is now in Google Docs. I don’t think I’ve created anything new outside Google Docs for a couple of years now.

I do use Google Docs, and most of the simple documents I create live either there, or in some form of Markdown editor (almost always in BBEdit).

But I do a lot more creating than simple documents. I take lots of photos, mark them up, screenshots, too. I share these images in all sorts of social media. I draw pictures, though quite inexpertly, and share those as well. And there’s programming. Most of that is done on a Mac in Xcode.

And most of my communication is via apps. And a lot of that communication involves “creating”, since I consider writing to be creating. And, of course, there’s music, via Garage Band or Logic.

I find it interesting that though Google Docs does own a ton of mindshare for simple documents, once creativity enters the picture, the more I rely on my Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

Peter Bright, Ars Technica:

Oath, the Verizon subsidiary that owns the Yahoo and AOL digital media brands, has announced that as of December 17, all adult content will be banned from the Tumblr blogging site. Any still or moving images displaying real-life human genitals or female nipples and any content—even drawn or computer-generated artwork—depicting any sexual acts will be prohibited.

Here’s a link to the Tumblr Help Center post that lays all this out.

On how much of Tumblr is dedicated to porn:

Nowadays, pornography represents a substantial element of Tumblr’s content. A 2013 estimate said that around 11 percent of the site’s 200,000 most-visited domains were porn, and some 22 percent of inbound links were from adult sites.

Supposedly, the porn detection will all be automated. That’s an oddly specific machine learning problem to solve. I can’t help but think that oddly specific knowledge will wind up getting used outside of Tumblr. What could go wrong?

I really miss the custom holiday cards (iCards) and photo books the Apple used to offer. They made some very special gifts.

If you are looking for a special gift idea for this holiday season, 9to5Mac’s Michael Potuck has your back. Be sure to check out the ratings for each solution. Some of these solutions seem much better than others.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Apple now offers a way to view and download all of the data it has collected from you over the years. Australian developer Pat Murray has created an incredibly interesting tool that is able to visualize your Apple Music year in review.

Interesting article. And the tool to which Chance refers is web-based. Follow the instructions, download your music history, submit the file to the web tool, dig into the results.

Apple:

The typical audio environment for HomePod has many challenges — echo, reverberation, and noise. Unlike Siri on iPhone, which operates close to the user’s mouth, Siri on HomePod must work well in a far-field setting. Users want to invoke Siri from many locations, like the couch or the kitchen, without regard to where HomePod sits.

This is both a detailed and fascinating look at how Apple uses machine learning to get your HomePod to recognize that Siri trigger phrase (which I would love to be able to change, someday.)

Yes, there’s a lot of detail, but if you just skip through the dense stuff, I found some interesting nuggets, like:

The corruption of target speech by other interfering talkers is challenging for both speech enhancement and recognition.

And:

When “Hey Siri” is detected, each stream is assigned a goodness score. The stream with the highest score is selected and sent to Siri for speech recognition and task completion.

And on testing HomePod:

We evaluated the performance of the proposed speech processing system on a large speech test set recorded on HomePod in several acoustic conditions:

• Music and podcast playback at different levels
• Continuous background noise, including babble and rain noise
• Directional noises generated by household appliances such as a vacuum cleaner, hairdryer, and microwave
• Interference from external competing sources of speech

Bottom line, HomePod is ever-vigilant, constantly solving, in real-time, an incredibly difficult problem, and doing it really well.

These are some great lists. There’s truly something here for everyone: Great music, apps, movies, games, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

I’m bopping to the Song of the Year, I Like It by Cardi B, and downloading the Mac Game of the Year (The Gardens Between) and the iPhone Game of the Year (Donut County).

Apple:

The Veterans and Military Purchase Program is a benefit provided by Apple Inc. to current and Veteran members of the U.S. Military, National Guard and Reserve. The Program is also offered to their immediate family members who also reside in their same household. The Program is intended for personal use only.

Good to see Apple doing this. We do far too little for our veterans and military personnel. I’d like to see Apple offer this in all of its sales regions. And frankly, a 10% discount is the bare minimum. It should be much larger.

Toronto Life:

I started sculpting in 1991, working only with natural materials. My studio housed a collection of dead things.

I spent up to 12 hours a day grinding and sanding the shells to fit into the shape of Adam’s body.

After a few months working on Adam, I began to feel unwell. I was agitated all of the time. I had constant headaches, and I vomited often, sometimes a few times a day. I visited a never-ending assortment of specialists—neurologists, rheumatologists, endocrinologists—hoping to figure out what was wrong with me. When they asked me if I worked with anything toxic, I said no, that I only used natural materials.

The symptoms worsened.

What an awful, terrible story. My heart goes out to this artist.

It’s May, 1985. Jean-Louis Gassée is Apple’s newly appointed VP of Product Development.

May, 1985: Apple ][ sales are falling; the Mac has yet to take off. We need to make some changes, pronto, that will attract new customers and keep the old ones coming back.

This is Jean-Louis’s take on the path from the Apple ][ and the early Mac to the first open Mac, the Macintosh II.

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Despite Apple’s strict review process for software distributed through the App Store, it’s still possible for malicious actors to take advantage of loop holes in the system to scam customers.

The latest example is a rather sophisticated and devious trick used by an app that claims to read your heart rate through your fingertip using Touch ID. In reality, the app (which is currently on the App Store) uses your fingerprint to authorize a transaction for $89.99 while dramatically dimming the screen to fool you.

And:

Apple requires approval for in-app purchases during app review, but not for changing the amount (from 99¢ to $89.99, for example). The malicious app may also be flying under the radar as it largely targets Portuguese speaking customers, but does support English as well.

The app has been removed, but you have to wonder how the app made it past the app review process. Even if the app charged 99¢, to me that’s no less devious. This feels like it slipped through the cracks.

I’m assuming Apple will refund any fraudulent charges and will use this example to harden that review process.

National Geographic:

Now that its solar panels are set up, it’s time for InSight to get to work. Over the course of one Martian year (or at least two Earth years), it will do something a bit different from most other Mars missions, which have focused on the planet’s flashy rift valleys, mammoth volcanoes, or signs of ancient running water on the surface.

Instead, this mission aims to get at the heart of Mars, to measure the size of the planet’s core and other interior layers. To do this, it will rely on marsquakes—or tremors that are often produced by the same tectonic activity that crafts those beautiful mountains and valleys.

One of InSight’s primary goals is to figure out how seismically active Mars is, says Renee Weber of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

I was lucky enough to watch the landing live with a couple of 12-year-olds. I was as excited about it as they were.

Prop Store:

The Prop Store and The Comisar Collection invite you to an auction 60 years in the making. From Gotham City to the Twilight Zone, join us for a live auction event featuring over 400 lots of props, costumes, stop-motion puppets, spaceships, and more, curated by The Comisar Collection.

I saw this tweet from my friend Andy and checked out the PDF he’s talking about. He’s right – the Star Trek memorabilia alone will get you drooling and wanting to bid. Luckily, the prices are out of reach for the vast majority of us.