Myke returns with many comments about last week’s show and a surprise Black Friday purchase. Meanwhile, Stephen has installed Windows 10.
I wasn’t on the show this week, but I enjoyed the discussion about voice assistants and icons for professional task managers, among other topics. You can listen here.
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Yesterday a serious security flaw in macOS High Sierra was discovered that let someone with access to a Mac running Apple’s latest OS gain root access to the its data. Today, Apple released Security Update 2017-001, which fixes the issue. The release notes to the update describe the issue as follows:
Impact: An attacker may be able to bypass administrator authentication without supplying the administrator’s password
Description: A logic error existed in the validation of credentials. This was addressed with improved credential validation.
In a comment to Rene Ritchie of iMore.com, Apple said:
https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/935909201821478914
Needless to say, this is an important update that should be installed as soon as possible.
Greg Barbosa, writing for 9to5Mac:
A newly discovered macOS High Sierra flaw is potentially leaving your personal data at risk. Developer Lemi Orhan Ergin publicly contacted Apple Support to ask about the vulnerability he discovered. In the vulnerability he found, someone with physical access to a macOS machine can access and change personal files on the system without needing any admin credentials.
Users who haven’t disabled guest user account access or changed their root passwords (likely most) are currently open to this vulnerability. We’ve included instructions on how to protect yourself in the meantime until an official fix from Apple is released.
Incredibly embarrassing and dangerous screwup for a company as devoted to security as Apple. They’re working on a fix, and in the meantime you should follow these steps to change your root password (thankfully, I had guest user access disabled, so the bug didn’t affect my machine).
See also: Rene Ritchie’s explainer.
A cautionary tale by Serenity Caldwell on smart home devices and having physical backups:
Two days after I installed my latest smart lock experiment, I jokingly said to my husband “We’re going to be in trouble if our internet goes down. I don’t know where the key is to this lock anymore.”
“Worst case, we’ll get our parkour on and break a window,” he responded.
As I sit at my kitchen table writing this story after having to crawl through said window, I find his reply far less funny.
I’d like the moral of the story I’m about to tell you to be “Don’t joke about things you don’t want to happen.” In reality, it is this: Your smart home devices can fail or make mistakes, and when they do, you better have an alternative.
I locked myself out of my apartment a couple of times (I’m terrible at remembering keys), but we have no smart locks installed. While the idea of Siri unlocking the door for me is tempting, I’m afraid I’d end up in a worse situation than Serenity somehow.
Fair and balanced take on the iPhone’s Portrait mode by Khoi Vinh, who generally prefers a DSLR to capture special moments:
More to the point, quibbling over the finer points of photographic effects is somewhat (though not entirely) pointless. What really matters here is that there will be tens if not hundreds of millions of these cameras in the hands of countless people everywhere before too long, and those people will take billions of pictures with them. Only a vanishingly small number of these people will ever object to the details I’ve listed here; most will be incredibly pleased with how portrait mode performs and will share the fruits of their labors avidly.
Just on the merits of sheer volume alone, portrait mode will become a part of our collective visual vocabulary.
On this week’s episode of AppStories, we talk about the Apple Watch apps we use and how our use of the Watch has changed as the product has evolved.
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In this episode, we wrap up our look at long-form editors with a look at the honourable mentions for other interesting apps on iOS.
In the final episode of our long-form writing mini-series on Canvas, we take a look at Editorial, 1Writer, Pages, and more. You can listen here.
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The folks at iA have been looking for new font to use in their iA Writer app (version 5.0 for iOS was launched just a couple of weeks ago), and they settled on the idea of a duospace font:
This year, again, we set out exploring our own writing font. We started from scratch, moved from proportional to monospace to three spaces (50% for i and j) and ended up with duospace for MWmw. Progressively, we came to realize that the right question is how to make a proportional font look like a monospace, but how many exceptions you allow until you lose the benefits of a sturdy monospace.
With Latin characters you need to free the m’s from their obsolete mechanical straight jacket. What about the w’s then? And if you give room to lower case letters, what about their parents? The M and the w look alright in mono, no? They almost look better, even… Well, not next to a free m. In Cyrillic, there are a couple of characters more that need breathing room. If you give 150% to the letters w, W, m, and M, you get a text image that has almost all benefits of a monospace font, but the text flows nicely. And born was the duospace concept.
Duospace is a notion familiar from Asian fonts where there are single and double width characters. Our candidate is a bit different. It offers single and four 1.5 width characters.
I’ve always loved the thought and care that goes into iA Writer’s typography. In fact, I like iA Writer’s approach so much, I bought the Nitti family last year and have been using it as my writing font in Ulysses since. Standard Nitti looks terrific in Ulysses, but the new iA Writer Duospace (which is based off the recently released IBM Plex) is gorgeous as well. I mean, just take a look at this.
I’m going to experiment with iA Writer Duospace as my writing font in Ulysses for a few weeks. Installing custom fonts in Ulysses for iOS is easy: go to the GitHub page, download each one, and open them in Ulysses (with the share sheet) to install them. Alternatively, I recommend using AnyFont to make custom fonts available system-wide in any native font picker for iOS.
Dan Provost of Studio Neat (makers of the excellent Glif) ran some tests to analyze the low-light performance of the iPhone X’s telephoto lens:
Last year, when the iPhone 7 Plus was released, Glenn Fleishman wrote a terrific piece for Macworld about how the dual lens camera system works. In short, when you zoom-in to 2X, the camera does not always switch to the telephoto lens. In some cases (typically in low light scenarios), you will be presented with a cropped image from the wide angle lens instead. This was sacrilege to camera nerds, but Apple would argue that if the cropped image looks better in those low light situations, then that is the correct approach.
Results are impressive:
As you can see, the iPhone X required very little light before it decided to use the telephoto lens. The iPhone 7 Plus required quite a bit more. I used the app Light Meter to measure the light at each interval, which I denote in the video. The app measures the lux, which is a measure of illuminance equal to one lumen per square meter. (I measured from both devices and averaged the results, as the readings were slightly different. I wouldn’t expect an app to function as well as a true light meter, but this probably gets us in the ball park).
Make sure to check out the video to see the lens switching in action. The difference between the iPhone 7 Plus and the X is substantial when it comes to the amount of light required for the system to pick the telephoto lens.
