Richard Chirgwin (via AndrewMohawk):
In the same month Microsoft announced its alpha WebRTC-based Skype for Linux client, Redmond has put that native app and the native OS X Skype client on an end-of-life list.
This is because Skype is being rebuilt to replace its peer-to-peer architecture with cloud-centric code that supports Windows, iOS, Android and web browsers.
Microsoft has not given Mac and Linux users a date to dread. For now you can still get latest versions for all supported platforms – but it’s clear that full-fat Mac and Linux native clients aren’t something on which Microsoft wants to spend money forever.
Microsoft:
The pace of change in our industry means that the devices and operating systems used by the majority of people shifts with time. Our commitment to deliver the best possible cross-platform experiences requires that we continually assess when it’s time to increase our focus on the platforms of the future. Sometimes this means that we must end support for some devices and operating systems.
Mac Microsoft Skype
Adam C. Engst:
There is one other problem that my friend Will Mayall alerted me to recently, which is that resetting NVRAM disables Find My Mac. Will discovered this on his own, but it turns out that others have run across the same fact over the past few years, as evidenced by a quick Google search. In essence, Apple stores the Find My Mac data in NVRAM, which is good for keeping it around even if the hard drive is removed, but bad in the sense that it’s easy to reset NVRAM — just restart while holding down Command-Option-P-R. A quick
test confirmed the problem in OS X 10.11 El Capitan, and nothing has changed in the public beta of macOS 10.12 Sierra.
The only way to prevent Find My Mac from being disabled is to set a firmware password, which you must enter whenever you start up from a disk other than the usual startup disk. Plus, if you try to reset NVRAM, you’re prompted for the firmware password, and when you enter it, the Mac instead boots into Recovery mode. In fact, when you lock your Mac via Find My Mac, what it’s doing is setting a firmware password.
I still think Find My Mac is not worth the risks.
Find My Mac Mac Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan macOS 10.12 Sierra macOS Recovery
Olivier Halligon:
One important thing to note though is that in Swift the captured variables are evaluated at the closure execution’s time. We could say that it captures the reference (or pointer) to the variable.
For those of you who know Objective-C, you can notice that the Swift behavior is unlike Objective-C’s default block semantics but instead somewhat like if the variable had the __block modifier in Objective-C.
[…]
To capture the value of a variable at the point of the closure’s creation (instead of a reference to the variable itself), you can use the [localVar = varToCapture] capture list.
Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) Blocks Language Design Memory Management Programming Swift Programming Language
Martin Conte Mac Donell:
I took ~50 (rather sloppy) photos of the wall and wrote a program to do image stitching using a cylindrical projection.
[…]
With the flat image and using OpenCV again I detected all the contours (letters) and created a (inverse) mask to remove the blue-ish background and only keep the letters.
[…]
This image was already good enough to run tesseract. In order to get the best results I trained tesseract with the San Francisco Mono font before running it.
[…]
Go find your app phrase here: http://wwdcwall.com you can also get the JSON representation of the wall from here.
Graphics iOS JSON Mac Open Source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Python WWDC
