Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple will reopen 21 of its 22 retail locations in Australia on Thursday, May 7, according to Apple’s dedicated websites for each of the stores. All of the stores that are reopening will operate on limited hours for the time being.

And:

Apple’s sole Australian store that will remain closed is the Apple Sydney store. As noted by 9to5Mac, this store closed in January for major renovations, and it is possible that the global health crisis caused a construction delay.

If you jump to this Bloomberg post, scroll about halfway down, you’ll see a picture of the line to get into the Gangnam neighborhood Apple Store in Seoul that opened a few weeks ago. Packed line, people standing close together, no social distancing.

The key to South Korea’s success in this bit of a return to normal is testing and exposure response. Will this same experience be mirrored in Austria? Australia? Will each Apple Store reopen be a unique experience, or will they all mirror the Seoul, South Korea approach? I am definitely curious.

Reuters:

Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google on Monday said they would ban the use of location tracking in apps that use a new contact tracing system the two are building to help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

And:

The Apple-Google decision to not allow GPS data collection with their contact tracing system will require public health authorities that want to access GPS location to rely on what Apple and Google have described as unstable, battery-draining workarounds.

And:

Software company Twenty, which developed the state of Utah’s Healthy Together contact tracing app with both GPS and Bluetooth, said on Monday the app “operates effectively” without the new Apple-Google tool.

“If their approach can be more effective than our current solution, we’ll eagerly incorporate their features into our existing application, provided it meets the specifications of current and prospective public health partners,” Twenty said.

At some point in time, I’d expect Apple and Google to build their contact tracing exposure notification solution into the OS, in addition to providing access to third party apps via an API.

I’d expect that the concerns of adoption (getting the system to be actually used by the public) and battery drain are cornerstones of the teams doing the testing of the system.

And not sharing location tracking data? Seems a logical, and necessary, restriction.

Ohio State:

Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered a virtual commencement address today to thousands of graduates of The Ohio State University.

In light of COVID-19 restrictions on large gatherings, Ohio State announced plans on April 3 to hold the virtual commencement.

Cook advised graduates to “build a better future than the one you thought was certain.” The following is a transcript of Cook’s address.

Man, I bet all the Auburn and Duke alumni are feeling awfully queasy seeing Cook decked out in OSU gear.

Smithsonian Magazine:

Test your mettle with this puzzle created exclusively for our readers. This is the first in a series of four puzzles of a pilot program designed for Smithsonian magazine readers.

I love crossword puzzles and this one was a blast to do.

MacRumors:

If you’ve just picked up Apple’s new Magic Keyboard for your 2018 or 2020 iPad Pro, here’s a list of our favorite tips and tricks that you need to know.

For those of you lucky enough to snag one of the new keyboards, this may be of use to you.

CNET:

When the Apple Watch launched in 2015, it had 3,000 apps available to download. Today, there are more than 20,000 apps — 21 of which are built into the wearable. While watches weren’t an in-demand accessory in general back in 2015, the Apple Watch proved to be a useful tool for checking messages, the weather, and reminders, Wang added — all of which are already built into the device.

Here are several native Apple Watch apps that you may not already be using.

Unlike the Mac, iPhone or iPad, I don’t use any third-party apps on my Apple Watch 3. That might mean I’m not using it to its full potential. Anyone else use very few apps on their Watch?

New York Times:

If power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, how can we best describe the kind of power Big Tech will wield when the coronavirus crisis is over?

How about this: The tech giants could have all the power and absolutely none of the accountability — at least all the power that will truly matter.

In a column about a month ago, I wrote about a problematic trend that would develop after the world had been turned upside down by the pandemic. “There will be a culling of most competitors of these giants that will only strengthen the power and reach of the behemoths, eliminating pesky roadblocks to their further domination,” I wrote about tech’s leading companies, who have the money and the means to wait out the storm. “This is obviously not a good thing in the long run.”

I don’t think Swisher is being overly pessimistic in this piece.

Macworld:

By essentially taking an iPhone 8 and swapping out its processor for the company’s latest-and-greatest A13 Bionic, Apple is able to profitably sell a $399 phone that gives a lot of bang for the buck.

How good of a value is it, really? Perhaps a few charts will make everything more clear. By taking performance metrics and dividing it by the base starting price for every new iPhone you can buy, we are able to get a measure of performance-per-dollar.

This is an interesting but odd way to look at the “value” of the iPhone SE. Sure it may show the iPhone SE in a good light, but it also shows that looking at data this way may skew your opinions about purchasing the latest iPhone.

Apple:

Apple today updated the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the new Magic Keyboard for the best typing experience ever on a Mac notebook and doubled the storage across all standard configurations, delivering even more value to the most popular MacBook Pro. The new lineup also offers 10th-generation processors for up to 80 percent faster graphics performance1 and makes 16GB of faster 3733MHz memory standard on select configurations. With powerful quad-core processors, the brilliant 13-inch Retina display, Touch Bar and Touch ID, immersive stereo speakers, all-day battery life, and the power of macOS, all in an incredibly portable design, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro is available to order today, starting at $1,299, and $1,199 for education.

The base model:

1.4GHz quad‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz, with 128MB of eDRAM

And the top of the line:

Configurable to 2.3GHz quad‑core 10th‑generation Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.1GHz, with 8MB shared L3 cache

Note the range from 8th-gen i5 to the 10th-gen i7.

Storage goes from 256GB all the way up to 4TB. Memory goes from 8GB up to 32GB.

Be aware that the lower end models have 2 Thunderbolt 3 (USB‑C) ports, the high end models have 4 such ports.

The base model supports:

• one external 5K display with 5120-by-2880 resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors, or
• up to two external 4K displays with 4096-by-2304 resolution at 60Hz at millions of colors.

The high end model supports:

• one external 6K display with 6016-by-3384 resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors, or
• one external 5K display with 5120-by-2880 resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors, or
• up to two external 4K displays with 4096-by-2304 resolution at 60Hz at millions of colors

This is about the quickest way to switch your AirPods from the device to which they’re currently connected to another.

You’ll likely know most of these shortcuts, but worth a scan. The first one is especially worth a look, using a quick tap in the Control Center AirPlay icon to quick-switch your AirPods to your iPhone or iPad.

Of course, you can also shorten this up a bit more with a Shortcut, but not sure that would be any quicker, time wise.

See also:

• http://www.mackungfu.org…
• https://c-command.com/toothfairy/
• https://gumroad.com/l/airbuddy

European Heart Journal:

An 80-year-old lady with a work history as engineer presented with typical angina symptoms Canadian Cardiovascular Society Class III in our chest pain unit (CPU).

And:

The initial 12-channel ECG revealed no evidence for ischaemia. High-sensitive troponin I was also negative. The patient also complained about previous frequent episodes of ectopic beats which were recorded with her Apple watch. Further, Apple watch recordings included tracings with marked ST-segment depression.

And:

Based on this evidence of ischaemia, further diagnostic in the CPU was omitted and the patient was transferred to the catheterization laboratory, where a left main stem stenosis and a left anterior descending/diagonal bifurcation lesion. Accordingly, the patient was treated with coronary artery stenting and left the hospital a day later.

In a nutshell, the Apple Watch picked up a pattern because it had much more access to the patient’s heart data than a single visit to even the best hospital could capture.

This is still early days for Apple Watch and heartbeat irregularity detection. New heartbeat patterns that indicate a specific underlying condition are still being discovered. Some are known, but impossible to detect without constant heart monitoring. Apple Watch, and the underlying ECG pattern matching software are an incredibly valuable resource, one that continues to evolve. There’s way more here than AFib detection.

Tim Bray, now formerly a key part of Amazon Web Services:

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I’ve ever had, working with awfully good people. So I’m pretty blue.

And:

VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.

That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

Patience loading the page. Tim’s post made it to the front page of Hacker News over the weekend, big demand. It’ll load though.

A few additional links:

• Tim Bray’s Wikipedia page. Note the mention of Tim as one of the co-authors of the original XML specification.

• The Hacker News comments on this post. If you found the post interesting, you’ll no doubt appreciate the comments, likely representing some of your own thinking.

This is a great read for a number of reasons. There’s the whole “birth of shareware” aspect, which was a fantastic slice of history.

But beyond that, there’s the amazing picture of Microsoft, circa 1978, all 9 principals, with a very young Bill Gates in the lower left.

And then there’s this:

The PC World issue with the landmark review of PC-File was still on newsstands when Andrew Fluegelman had his next life-changing encounter with a computer: he was one of a select few invited to Apple for an early unveiling of the new Macintosh. He was so smitten by this whole new way of operating a computer that he immediately began lobbying for a companion magazine to PC World, to be named, naturally enough, Macworld. Its first issue appeared in time to greet the first Macintosh buyers early in 1984.

And:

People [say the Macintosh is] more of a right-brain machine and all that. I think there is some truth to that. I think there is something to dealing with a graphical interface and a more kinetic interface; you’re really moving information around, you’re seeing it move as though it had substance. And you don’t see that on [an IBM] PC. The PC is very much a conceptual machine; you move information around the way you move formulas, elements on either side of an equation. I think there’s a difference.

Wonderful read.

[By way of this Six Colors post]

I love Rogue Amoeba and have used their audio software for years on my Mac. Thank you for sponsoring The Loop this week. Their new app, SoundSource, gives you powerful control over all the audio on your Mac, right from your menu bar:

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I find the transcript much easier to process than the audio. Plus, this is searchable/quotable.

This AppleInsider piece by William Gallagher is a semi-long read, so I’ll cut to the Message-editing specifics. Apple has a new patent application, and part of it concerns editing a Message that has already been sent:

“The first message can be edited, despite the fact that it has already been sent,” it starts. “To initiate the editing of the first message, the user selects the first message with a predefined touch input (e.g., a tap gesture, long press gesture, light press gesture, or deep press gesture) on the first message or the message region for the first message.”

Of course, just a mention in a patent does not mean the concept will ever see the light of day. So grain of salt there.

But the section in the AppleInsider piece titled Editing Messages is worth reading. It does a great job laying out the problem with editing messages and syncing those edits. Makes the patent mention that much more intriguing.

And if Apple does work out a system for doing this, maybe they can share the technique with Twitter.

In a nutshell, the camera of AnandTech’s iPhone SE review unit produced less than spectacular images. When they contacted Apple, Apple replaced the phone and AnandTech saw what everyone else is seeing, great images, especially for a camera on a $399 phone. Jump to the article and you’ll see the before and after. Clearly a huge difference in camera quality.

Here’s the curious part:

The bad news is that we still don’t exactly know what went wrong with the first unit – what I don’t doubt is confirmed is that it suffered from a manufacturing defect in the optical system of the camera.

The problem with confirming such a scenario is that it’s very unlikely that I was extremely unlucky in being the sole person receiving such a sample, as usually one-off faults like these are insanely rare, with the more likely scenario being some sort of systematic failure for a whole batch of units.

The upshot? If you get an SE and are not happy with the images, it might be that your camera is part of the same batch that went to AnandTech. Check it against the before and after images in the article. This is the first such issue I’ve heard of, so it is possible it was just a single faulty unit, though that seems unlikely.

ICANN:

On 13 November 2019, PIR announced that ISOC, its parent organization, had reached an agreement with Ethos Capital, under which Ethos Capital would acquire PIR and all of its assets from ISOC. Under the agreement, PIR would also be converted from a Pennsylvania not-for-profit corporation to a for-profit Pennsylvania limited liability company.

This was disappointing news. But yesterday:

Today, the ICANN Board made the decision to reject the proposed change of control and entity conversion request that Public Interest Registry (PIR) submitted to ICANN.

After completing extensive due diligence, the ICANN Board finds that withholding consent of the transfer of PIR from the Internet Society (ISOC) to Ethos Capital is reasonable, and the right thing to do.

Huzzah. And due diligence well done.

Popular Mechanics:

Every year, hundreds of people travel the world just to glimpse one particular airplane. This isn’t some experimental aircraft or even a fancy fifth-generation stealth fighter. This is a cargo plane—the largest one in the world and the only one of its kind in existence.

This is the Antonov An-225 Mriya.

And all these thronging crowds of planespotters are understandable. Mriya is a freight plane with cargo best described as ‘atypical,’ including giant turbines, entire rail locomotives, or ready-to-eat meals…for an entire army. The An-225 also makes only a couple of flights per year and just finished an 18-month-long stint off the runway.

But why would you need a plane that’s so monstrous? The short answer: Rockets.

Really interesting article if only for the pics of the Russian version of the space shuttle.

National Geographic:

Here is a story, for quarantined times, about extremely tiny organisms that do some of their best work by burping into uncooked dough. In the end, if things go well, there is good bread. If things go poorly, there is bad bread, or a mass of gluck you heave out so you can try again. This is the nature of yeast, which in its most familiar packaged version started vanishing from markets sometime in March, right after toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

Yeasts are single-celled creatures so complex and diverse that scientists have named only some of the many thousands of varieties living all around us. Yeasts live and reproduce in our homes, in our compost and sidewalk weeds, in our air, on our produce, on our skin.

And all the multiplying yeast bodies are eating sugar molecules they encounter in their surroundings. Yeasts like sugar. As they digest sugar, though, they discharge gases pungent enough to lift your bread dough, ferment your drink, and allow the kid in your household to examine a jarful of belching and flatulence.

I still remember as a kid my mother, a very accomplished baker, explaining what yeast was. “It’s alive!?” I exclaimed in horror. “I’m never eating your bread ever again!” That ultimatum lasted until the next delicious loaf came out of the oven.

Todd Haselton, CNBC:

In the new iOS 13.5 beta 3 code, which was released to developers for testing on Wednesday, Apple simplifies the unlock process for folks wearing masks by bringing the passcode field to the main screen. All you need to do is swipe up if you’re wearing a mask, and you’ll skip the Face ID display and enter in a code instead.

Smart.