Usually it is much faster to read through some bullet points instead of watching a 50 min session video. Then if you find something interesting you can still watch it.

As I said on Backstage after the keynote, I’m particularly interested in the Sign in with Apple details.

We talked about privacy standing out at Apple’s special event back in March and again at WWDC 2019.

According Darrell Etherington writing for TechCrunch, “Apple is now the privacy-as-a-service company.” Just look at that larger-than-life billboard-style ad and apple.com/privacy.

What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.

Apple launched a new section to their website for the App Store. According to The Verge, this new page titled “Principles and Practices” is believed to be a defensive response to recent criticism of the App Store.

Chris Welch writing for The Verge:

Apple’s new site puts a big spotlight on the App Store’s unrivaled success and reach, but in some ways, it also brings more attention to how difficult it can be to compete against Apple.”

Apple from “Principles and Practices”:

Since the launch of the App Store, an entire industry has been built around app design and development, generating over 1,500,000 U.S. jobs and over 1,570,000 jobs across Europe.

We’re proud that, to date, developers have earned more than $120 billion worldwide from selling digital goods and services in apps distributed by the App Store.

84% of apps are free, and developers pay nothing to Apple.

For all our #applenerds out there — a key feature in iPhone has Mozilla worried. According to Ashley Boyd, VP of Advocacy at Mozilla, this key feature is making “their latest slogan ring a bit hollow.”

Each iPhone that Apple sells comes with a unique ID (called an “identifier for advertisers” or IDFA), which lets advertisers track the actions users take when they use apps. It’s like a salesperson following you from store to store while you shop and recording each thing you look at. Not very private at all.

You can turn the feature off, but “most people don’t know that feature even exists.” Mozilla has an idea of “privacy by default” though…

Definitely one of my favorite announcements from Apple at their special event this week — the physical version of Apple’s new credit card, Apple Card.

As is expected from Apple, the card is unlike any other. At a close glance, the minutest details set it apart from the rest. Of course, the physical card hasn’t been released yet, but we can learn a lot from what Apple has shown in promotional material.

If you haven’t yet, tune in to Backstage #3 for our hottest of hot takes right after Apple’s special event.

Is Apple trying to own paradigms of a computer language or are they trying to keep the patent trolls away? Here’s a link to the patent in question, and here’s the patent’s abstract:

In one embodiment, an improved programming system and language for application development is provided that combines elements of the C and Objective-C languages without the constraints imposed by a requirement to maintain compatibility with the C language. The language provides the functionality of the C language compatibility in certain areas to improve the inherent safety of software written in the language. The new language includes default safety considerations such as bounds and overflow checking.

When was the last time you got REALLY EXCITED about the latest iPhone announcement? It’s been awhile for me too…I mostly get excited about improvements made to the camera. We generally expect newer models to get faster and better, right? So, progress alone makes that an expectation. Everything else is just kinda, meh.

From The Economist on Medium:

Smartphones revolutionized everything from shopping and dating to politics and computing itself. They are some of the most popular products ever put on sale. But after a decade-long boom, devices once seen as miraculous have become ubiquitous and even slightly boring.

Federico Viticci on MacStories didn’t understand why Apple Music doesn’t offer a “Year in Review” feature, so he built his own:

But Apple doesn’t seem interested in adding this feature to Apple Music, so I decided to build my own using Shortcuts. The result is the most complex shortcut I’ve ever created comprising over 540 actions.

I just tried out the shortcut last night, and it’s incredible. But as Federico himself points out, doing something this complex pushes the boundaries of Shortcuts and iOS:

Apple Music Wrapped pushes the limits of what is possible to achieve with the ‘Find Music Where…’ and ‘Open URLs’ actions of the Shortcuts app. In the past few weeks, I (and other testers) have run into limitations and inconsistencies worth pointing out both for MacStories readers and Shortcuts engineers at Apple.

It’s nothing short of a programmatic feat, and if you use Apple Music, I recommend you give it a shot.

For all of our #applenerds out there — I haven’t read this fully (though it’s probably a ~3-5 min read) Brad touched on some key sticking points we didn’t fully cover on our recent Spotlight episode on Apple’s Fall 2018 Mac/iPad event.

Here’s one pro that stood out to me:

The bevel is back, baby. — one of the best things about this machine is the nice slope that doesn’t hurt my writs while typing. This was one of the biggest things I noticed when I switched from my original MacBook Air to a MacBook Pro, and I’m happy to return to a comfortable typing environment.

If you’re a MacBook Pro user, have you been considering the switch to a MacBook Air?

We don’t nerd out much here in the newsfeed about Apple hardware on the regular. We mostly save that for behind the scenes in #applenerds in Slack — join in.

BUT — I’ve been on the fence about the new iPhone. I currently use an iPhone 7 Plus, which is a great phone, and has a decent camera. I take lots of photos, so the camera on the iPhone is one of the main reasons I have it in my pocket. I’ve been resisting the upgrade mainly due to the sheer cost of the newest models. However, the camera may be what gets me to make the move.

After seeing this video from Unbox Therapy, I decided to wait for the next rev or more details on the camera to surface. Then I read this post from Sebastiaan…the camera and image science behind the new XS (and XS Max) is giving me some serious FOMO.

Tanner Villarete asked himself, “How far can JavaScript take us?” Then answered:

Turns out, pretty dang far. This web app was my attempt at mimicking Apple’s iOS music app, and I think I’ve come pretty close!

I have to admit, he did a pretty good job. The frontend is built on React and Redux. The backend? A Laravel-based API running on a Raspberry Pi!

Here’s the live demo, but be nice because Raspberry Pi.

WWDC 2018 is wrapping up. Use this script to grab all of the sample code in one fell swoop. Johannes Fahrenkrug has been maintaining this as a Ruby gem since 2011, but he says he’s working on a Swift port. 😁

(A nice companion to this would be a script to download all of the videos. But I’m not sure how feasible that is.)

No other details were shared in this tweet, but this image from the stage of WWDC says all it needs to.

In a post-Microsoft + GitHub world — it has been a crazy 24 hours for GitLab.

More than 2,000 people tweeted about #movingtogitlab. We imported over 100,000 repositories, and we’ve seen a 7x increase in orders. We went live on Bloomberg TV. And on top of that, Apple announced an Xcode integration with GitLab.

Here’s an interesting exchange between Emily Chang and Sid Sijbrandij on Bloomberg Technology:

Emily: I spoke with Satya Nadella earlier today, and he said “he promises to put developers first.” Do you not believe him, or do you think it’s not possible for a company with so many objectives to really put developers first?
Sid: I believe him. Microsoft has shown that it is the new Microsoft, and they’ve done great. The new CEO, Nat Friedman, shows he really understands developers. So I believe him when he says they are going to be good maintainers of GitHub.
Emily: So, then what’s so bad about GitHub?
Sid: There’s nothing bad about GitHub.
Emily: What’s so much better about GitLab?
Sid: It’s a fundamentally different product. It’s open core, so a lot of it is open source. You can host it yourself. But second and I think most importantly, it’s not just code hosting. With GitHub you host your code. GitLab is the entire DevOps lifecycle. So all the way from planning something to rolling it out, container registries, monitoring — all in a single product. That allows you to get the whole organization on the same page. And that’s why people are flocking to it.

They go on to talk about being a sustainable business, financials, etc.

Want developers of great software to be able to make a living doing it? Want free trials in the App Store? Join The Developers Union!

Dear Apple, We believe that people who create great software should be able to make a living doing it. So we created The Developers Union to advocate for sustainability in the App Store.

Today, we are asking Apple to publicly commit — by the tenth anniversary of the App Store this July — to allowing free trials for all apps in the App Stores before July 2019. After that, we’ll start advocating for a more reasonable revenue cut and other community-driven, developer-friendly changes.

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

FoundationDB is a distributed datastore, designed from the ground up to be deployed on clusters of commodity hardware.

And:

The key-value store supports fully global, cross-row ACID transactions. That’s the highest level of data consistency possible. What does this mean for you? Strong consistency makes your application code simpler, your data models more efficient, and your failure modes less surprising.

They say it’s “actively developed and has years of production use”. I wish they’d say exactly how it’s being used in production. (Maybe they do and I haven’t found it yet?) Also, if you’re getting hung up on “key-value store”, the vision is much bigger than that.

Straight outta Cupertino:

a low-level tool for building high-performance networking applications in Swift. It particularly targets those use-cases where using a “thread-per-connection” model of concurrency is inefficient or untenable. This is a common limitation when building servers that use a large number of relatively low-utilization connections, such as HTTP servers.

Could this be a first step toward Swift-powered servers running all around the globe? Maybe Apple will finally be able to ditch WebObjects… 😉

Love seeing people find creative ways to scratch their own itch and then sharing the results with the rest of us.

MKBHD has had the new iMac Pro for a week now. In this video, he lays out his first impressions and provides many eye candy shots.

Will this be Adam’s next computer? Stay tuned to find out… 😉

a SSH Agent that allow users to authenticate to UNIX/Linux SSH servers using the Secure Enclave

My Touch Bar Macbook Pro may have just found its killer app.

Volker Chartier, the first to alert WIRED to the issue with Apple’s patch:

It’s really serious, because everyone said “hey, Apple made a very fast update to this problem, hooray!” But as soon as you update [to 10.13.1], it comes back again and no one knows it.

You should pay close attention to this if you’re on MacOS High Sierra. Also, the story behind the “anyone can login as root” tweet is quite interesting as well.

Lemi Orhan Ergi:

The infrastructure staff noticed the [root] issue and used the flaw to recover my colleague’s account. On Nov 23, they informed Apple about it. They also searched online and saw the issue mentioned in a few places already, even in Apple Developer Forum from Nov 13. It seemed like the issue had been revealed, but Apple had not noticed yet.

Yesterday the infrastructure staff informed me that they had to set-up a root password on my Mac so that I wouldn’t have the issue. I saw the issue with my own eyes and thought that it was unbelievable!

Also, here’s how to set root password if that’s the route you want to go.