Jason Del Rey, Recode:

Amazon announced earlier this week that it would start prioritizing the most in-demand essential items in its warehouses, as the e-commerce giant struggles to keep up with customer demand during the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

Now the other shoe has dropped.

To be clear, there are definitely long shipping delays on certain items, but most Prime items I checked (as of this writing) still deliver in a few days. This is about demand and Amazon’s attempts to keep essential goods flowing.

One thing to keep in mind: Some delays don’t show up until checkout. On the product page, it might say 2 day shipping, but verify the arrival date on the checkout page before you complete your purchase.

Bradley Chambers, 9to5Mac:

Earlier today, the Apple Books app sent out a push notification offering a free Apple Book to users. The notification mentioned read-alongs for kids, cozy mysteries, and audiobooks for the whole family.

Welcome timing and worth checking out.

To get a sense of what’s free (limited time or not):

• Fire up the Books app on your iOS device
• Tap the Book Store tab
• Side scroll that first section to find “Free books for everyone, from kid…” (that’s what it says on my iPhone)
• Tap the image to take you to the Free Books collection
• Scroll down for other free content

TidBITS:

One of the best features of the Apple TV is its Aerial screen saver. That’s not hyperbole—Apple always makes a big deal out of the new scenes it adds to tvOS, often promoting them as a marquee feature of major tvOS updates. If you have liked these screen savers on your TV, you can get them on your Mac, thanks to the free and open-source app Aerial.

I’m not sure how the development team gets away with it (Aerial is currently maintained by Guillaume Louel), but Aerial has been available for five years without interference from Apple. Which is a good thing!

Many of these screen savers are spectacularly beautiful.

Ars Technica:

Microsoft Edge received the lowest privacy rating in a recently published study that compared the user information collected by major browsers. Yandex, the less-popular browser developed by the Russian Web search provider Yandex, shared that dubious distinction. Brave, the upstart browser that makes privacy a priority, ranked the highest.

The rankings were revealed in a research paper published by Trinity College Dublin computer scientist Doug Leith. He analyzed and rated the privacy provided by Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave, Edge, and Yandex. Specifically, the study examined the browsers’ sending of data—including unique identifiers and details related to typed URLs—that could be used to track users over time. The findings put the browsers into three categories with Brave getting the highest ranking, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari receiving a medium ranking, and Edge and Yandex lagging behind the rest.

Not exactly surprising.

CNN:

Netflix and YouTube will reduce streaming quality in Europe for at least the next month to prevent the internet collapsing under the strain of unprecedented usage due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Both companies said the measures will affect all video streams for 30 days.

The changes follow appeals from EU officials for streaming services and individual users to ditch high definition video to prevent the internet from breaking. With so many countries on forced lockdowns to fight the spread of the virus, hundreds of millions working from home and even more children out of school, the officials were concerned about the huge strain on the internet.

I’ve noticed this “slow down” (reduced quality) with YouTube videos here in Canada.

PPA:

Make the most of your downtime; over the next few weeks we are unlocking all of our education.

Times are tough – we need to be at our best. More kindness. More patience. More giving. And we at PPA want to pitch in to make things a little easier. What better way to spend your time at home than preparing your business for when things kick back into high gear?

That’s why PPA is opening ALL of our online education to ALL photographers and small business owners worldwide for the next two weeks.

All you need to do is create a free account to access over 1,100+ online classes. If you already have a PPA account, login to access all of PPA’s education.

More and more organizations are stepping up and helping out like this.

Oh You Pretty Things:

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit is streaming his documentaries free worldwide during the global COVID crisis. Each week we’ll be posting another film here. We hope you enjoy them, and please stay strong.

Helvetica is a feature-length documentary about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.

It’s a bit dated but still a great film to watch.

Affinity:

With all that’s going on right now due to the COVID-19 pandemic and in response to the many stories we’re hearing from the creative community about how they’re being severely impacted, we felt it was our responsibility to try to offer as much support as possible during this incredibly difficult time.

That’s why we’ve put in place three new measures which we hope will help at least some of you out there. These are:

A new 90-day free trial of the Mac and Windows versions of the whole Affinity suite

A 50% discount for those who would rather buy and keep the apps on Mac, Windows PC and iPad

A pledge to engage more than 100 freelance creatives for work, spending the equivalent of our annual commissioning budget in the next three months (more details of this will be announced soon).

Your move, Adobe.

Audible:

Stories entertain. They teach. They keep young minds engaged. And they bring us together.

That’s why, for as long as schools are closed, we will be open. Keeping to our founding belief that the spoken word can be inspiring and transporting in deeply intimate ways, we have created Stories.Audible.com—a place where anyone, in any country, can enjoy unlimited streaming of hundreds of titles for kids and families for free.

The stories were hand-picked by our Audible editors and offer a mix of education, entertainment, and general-interest titles, from the classic to the contemporary, with a focus on stories that are suitable for children. The collection includes favorites like Winnie the Pooh, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Aladdin, Jane Eyre and The Call of the Wild.

What a great move by the folks at Audible.

The Verge:

The 50th anniversary of NASA’s infamous Apollo 13 mission is almost here, and a new website just went live today that will let you relive the heart-wrenching journey as if it were happening live. The website, called Apollo 13 in Real Time, provides transcripts, video footage, and audio recordings surrounding the historical flight, posting the material at the exact times they were created half a century ago.

The website is the creation of Ben Feist, a contractor at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston who did a similar project for the Apollo 11 anniversary last summer. It took a team of people eight months to gather all of the historical material for the mission, he says. All in all, the website contains about 90 percent of the documents and footage that exist surrounding Apollo 13. Every word that was spoken by the astronauts on the mission is reproduced in a transcript form, and there are 7,200 hours of audio from NASA’s mission control, much of which was digitized for the first time for the website.

We posted a similar story about Apollo 11’s real-time website. It’s an incredible resource. Take the time to poke around the site and see the wealth of details in it. Amazing work.

Fascinating read. Be sure to click the “View Entire Discussion” button, then focus on Bill’s responses, labeled with the user name thisisbillgates.

John Gruber, referring to this new ad Apple released with their new iPad Pro:

It’s impossible to miss that MacBooks are just as much the butt of the jokes as any PC. “Do not touch the screen.” “Your computer comes with a standard arrow cursor.” “You must stay within reach of a Wi-Fi signal.” “It does not have a camera; to connect one, refer to your instruction manual.”

And:

I get it, all of these are things that make iPads fun and useful. The Mac can take it — it’s the mature workhorse platform. But it’s a little incongruous coming on the same day Apple launched its best-ever MacBook Air.

Fair point. Until Apple releases their version of the the Microsoft Surface that replaces both the Mac and iPad (a mighty big if), they could have kept some distance between the MacBook Air and iPad Pro releases. Odd choice to have that ad drop on the same day as the new MacBook Air.

Well, no, Apple never said any such thing.

The Verge article paints the path that Microsoft took to bring the touch screen Surface to market, while Apple maintained the chasm between the Mac and iPad.

That chasm has been bridged, first by enabling a mouse on the iPad via Accessibility settings, and now by the trackpad support in iPadOS 13.4.

But, to me, rather than being an admission that Microsoft was right all along, the 13.4 addition of trackpad support is more like the emergence of Apple Watch (and a very different approach than the glued on feel of mouse support via Accessibility). As they do, Apple took their time bringing Apple Watch to market, creating something different than the rest of the electronic watches in the market. And, as history has proven, Apple got it right.

Microsoft Surface is, in effect, a touch-screen laptop, with little UI difference between mouse on the tablet and the mouse on a laptop or desktop. To me, the finger is a second class citizen on the Surface and in Windows 10. Apple took a different path here.

With your finger, the elements on your screen are passive. Until you tap on an element, the screen waits for input, with no sense of where your finger is, or is going, until it makes contact with the screen.

With a trackpad, there is context. As you slide the trackpad cursor, and it approaches an element, the cursor animates to give you a sense of context, and the object being approached by the cursor might animate as well. This is a hybrid approach. While it might not be ready for prime-time (time will tell), this shows how carefully Apple is considering this problem, how much they care about creating something that works well, without losing responsiveness.

Looking forward to watching this new hybrid model evolve. Also wondering if the new hybrid model will cross the chasm as iPad apps make their way to macOS via Catalyst.

A fun little machine learning exercise. Upload an image, the site will tell you if it’s a cat (a la the hot dog identifying app from a few years ago on HBO’s Silicon Valley).

This is a rock-solid example of augmented reality.

Get on your iOS device (no rear-facing camera on your Mac) and tap this link.

This is a lot of fun to play with, feels very real, though it is filtered through a screen. It’ll be interesting to see this through some sort of heads up display or goggles.

Mel Magazine: >For an expert opinion, I reached out to the world’s leading water sommelier, Martin Riese. Turns out, he’s not much of a Dasani fan either. > >Dasani, he explains, along with Smartwater, Aquafina and “any other bottled water that doesn’t say ‘spring water’ on the bottle,” is a capitalistic abomination. They take tap water and filter out all of the minerals and chemical contaminants before inserting some combination of minerals until the combination creates a flavor profile people like. “It’s the biggest lie on planet Earth,” Riese says. > >“So when you go to the grocery store, look at the labels: If it says spring water, that means it comes from a naturally occurring source and they cannot do anything to it, it’s 100 percent water created by nature. If it’s a purified water like Dasani, you know it’s nothing else than filtered tap water created in a factory,” Riese says.

I used to drink bottled water like Dasani, but I’ve since moved away from it entirely. Instead, I focus on more sustainable options, especially for larger needs like filling up water storage. That’s why services offering water delivery for tanks have become a fantastic solution. It’s not only convenient but also a great way to ensure a steady supply without the environmental impact of single-use bottles. Interestingly, even when shelves are cleared of most bottled water, you can still spot cases of Dasani lingering behind—it always makes me chuckle! If you are avoiding bottled water altogether, you may check this link here to find services that can help improve your home’s drinking water through the installation of water filtration systems.

AppleInsider:

Apple has set limits on the number of new iPad Pro and Mac devices, as well as current iPhone models, that users can order from its online storefront across the globe.

The Cupertino iPhone maker has occasionally implemented order limits in the past to help curb the gray market, but these new restrictions seemed to be aimed at mitigating lingering supply issues due to COVID-19.

Currently, there appear to be limits on new MacBook Air and Mac mini models with customers restricted to five per order total. For iOS and iPadOS devices, the limits appear to be a bit more stringent, with customers only able to buy two units each of 11-inch iPad Pro and 12.9-inch iPad Pros. The two-per-order limit also applies to every iPhone model Apple currently sells, from the iPhone 11 Pro to the iPhone 8.

Hopefully, people aren’t thinking of hoarding iPads like they’re hoarding toilet paper.

Pointed out by Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac, this was tucked at the end of Apple’s MacBook Air announcement:

Mac mini Also Updated Today

Whether they are using it as a desktop computer, a music and movie storage hub for the family, or as a code compile server for Xcode, customers love Mac mini. The standard configurations of Mac mini now come with double the storage capacity. The $799 configuration now comes standard with 256GB, while the $1,099 configuration features 512GB of storage, and every Mac mini is made from 100 percent recycled aluminum.

Good to know.

Check ’em out. Looking forward to the day when I can browse these in my Apple Store.

Mel Magazine:

“Could something like this really happen?”

This was the question posed by President Ronald Reagan on June 8, 1983, to a room full of cabinet members and congressmen in the White House. As author Fred Kaplan explains in his book Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, Reagan had recently viewed the movie WarGames and “he couldn’t get that movie out of his mind. At one point, he put down his index cards and asked if anyone had seen it. Nobody had… so he launched into a detailed summary of its plot.”

As Reagan recounted the film, the room full of defense experts sat uncomfortably, suppressing smirks, as the leader of the free world described to them the plot of a Matthew Broderick movie about a teenager who hacks into NORAD, thinking it’s a computer game, nearly kicking off World War III. At the conclusion of his synopsis, Reagan turned to General John Vessey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and asked if such a thing were possible. Unsure, Vessey promised to look into it.

A week later, when Vessey returned, Reagan got his answer. Vessey said, “Mr. President, the problem is much worse than you think.”

Still a great movie that holds up well 30+ years later.

AppleInsider:

Let’s say that you have a ceiling of $1,500 to spend, and that what you need to buy is something you will work on. You could spend less and get something to just watch movies on, or write emails, but if we aim for something more powerful and cap it at this price point, we can really see where Apple’s new lineup stands or falls.

For the same reason, let’s further assume that you’re doing enough with this device that you need to have a keyboard. And also that whatever you buy now is either going to be your primary computing device, or it at least needs to sometimes be capable of being that.

If it weren’t for one single problem, you might be able to stop your search before it even began. On paper, the 13-inch MacBook Pro wins hands down.

I imagine there are a lot of people going through this thought process right now.

Uncrate:

The current situation dictates that the majority of us stay home. While that makes ideal conditions for binge-watching, that also means you might not have anyone to binge with. Enter Netflix Party.

This clever Chrome extension lets you create private “parties”, complete with chat rooms, that allow you to invite friends to enjoy Netflix shows and movies together over the Internet in real-time. Not as fun as meeting up IRL, but certainly better than getting sick risking a trip to make that happen.

If I had any friends, I’d definitely try this Chrome extension.

PetaPixel:

The photography industry has gotten hit hard by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and Adobe recently responded to widespread school closures by offering students free access to its Creative Cloud. But the company is now going a step further and is apparently giving every subscriber two months of free subscription during this economic downturn.

The company hasn’t announced this promotion anywhere, and you’ll need to follow a few steps to take advantage of it. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to get your free two months in just a few minutes.

I just did this and it worked. But you should hurry. These kinds of deals tend not to stick around long.

Business Insider:

In an unprecedented move for US retailers, stores across the country are opting to indefinitely shut their doors to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus in the US.

Though companies like Walmart have taken steps to reduce hours, several major retailers are electing to fully cease physical store operations as confirmed coronavirus cases in the country continue to rise.

In most cases, employees are being compensated for the lost shifts, pointing to how the global pandemic has led to seismic shifts in paid sick-leave policies for retail workers on the front lines.

Like Apple, many of the listed companies are going to continue to pay workers.

The Verge:

Apple made it official: trackpad and mouse support is coming to the iPad. You can get it on an iPad Pro by spending $299 or $349 on Apple’s new Magic Keyboard, get it on a regular iPad with Logitech’s $150 keyboard case, use your existing Bluetooth mouse or trackpad, or presumably use any number of forthcoming accessories.

So the mouse support is there, but how will it work? The iPad and iPadOS are touch-based operating systems meant to be used with your big fat fingers, not tiny little pointers. Even when the Apple Pencil was introduced, they have stayed that way. Plus, more recently, iPadOS has increased the level of complexity for multitasking to 11 with support for multiple windows, split screens, slide-over windows, custom gestures for text editing, and more. Adding another input method to that mix could result in chaos.

We can answer some of your questions about how trackpad support will work today and we’ll get a chance to actually use it ourselves in the public beta. In the meantime, here’s what we definitely know about how it will work based on videos Apple has released publicly and on a video presentation given to reporters this morning.

Apple’s new Magic Keyboard is not cheap but the mouse and trackpad support looks great.

Billboard:

As the nation adjusts to the new reality of life under self-quarantine in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a number of artists and musical institutions are taking the show online to share some musical joy during these trying times.

While sites like Stageit have been offering up live-stream shows for less-known artists for years, the loss of road time has inspired some acts to look for a new, temporary way to bond with fans until a return to normal.

Check out our ever-expanding list of shows and musical events to stream from the comfort of your home.

It’s obviously not the same as being there live but maybe your favourite artist is doing a little something you can watch from home.