Archive for December 11, 2020

Friday, December 11, 2020

Swift Concurrency Interoperability With Objective-C

SE-0297 (via Doug Gregor):

The proposed solution provides interoperability between Swift’s concurrency constructs and Objective-C in various places. It has several inter-dependent pieces:

  • Translate Objective-C completion-handler methods into async methods in Swift.
  • Allow async methods defined in Swift to be @objc, in which case they are exported as completion-handler methods.
  • Provide Objective-C attributes to control over how completion-handler-based APIs are translated into async Swift functions.

The detailed design section describes the specific rules and heuristics being applied. However, the best way to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the translation is to see its effect over a large number of Objective-C APIs. This pull request demonstrates the effect that this proposal has on the Swift translations of Objective-C APIs across the Apple iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS SDKs.

Previously:

Lightroom Classic 10 Slowness

Alexander S. Kunz:

In my review of Lightroom 10’s new features I concluded that it was perhaps put together in a haste to be ready for the Adobe Max conference release date, and that some problematic bugs remained. The worst one affects some Mac OS users, who saw incredibly poor performance, in particular in the Library module.

As it turned out, that performance hit only occurs in a color managed environment – in other words, when you have a calibrated screen and use a custom display profile (which should be most serious photographers, of course; if you haven’t calibrated your display, you don’t know if what you’re seeing and editing will actually look that way when printed). When those users switch their display profile to sRGB, the UI instantly becomes fast and responsive. Except that this is utterly useless for editing photos, of course.

Now Lightroom Classic version 10.1 has been released. And it does NOT contain a fix for this bug. The thread in Adobe’s help forums now contains pages upon pages of comments[…]

He recommends using the Get Info window to turn off Retina support, which reduces the number of pixels that must be processed. Of course, that makes it harder to see the details in your photos.

Even before this, the number one thing I wanted from Lightroom was for it to be faster.

Path Finder 10

Cocoatech:

New Features In Path Finder 10:

  • Airdrop Integration! For devices discoverable by “Everyone”
  • Share to AirDrop, Messages, Mail, Notes, etc.
  • Fully redesigned for macOS Big Sur.
  • Native support for Apple Silicon.
  • Improved Dark Mode.
  • File Browsing on and file operations on USB connected iOS devices.
  • Improved Drop Stack
  • Improved Batch Renamer
  • Brand new Big Sur style icon
  • Lots of miscellaneous fixes, tweaks and improvements all over the app.

Previously:

Apple Retiring Music Memos App

Juli Clover:

Apple is planning to retire its Music Memos app, which was first released in 2016 as an app designed to allow musicians and songwriters to capture song ideas on the fly. Since its launch, the app received few updates from Apple, and going forward, the app will receive no more updates.

According to an Apple Support document, Music Memos will no longer be available for download after March 1, 2021, but the app will still be available for use and can be downloaded from the App Store purchase history.

Update (2021-03-02): Tim Hardwick:

As noted by The 8-Bit, as of today Music Memos no longer shows up in App Store searches. Nevertheless, users who installed the app prior to March 2 can still use it and re-download the app if necessary using their App Store purchase history.

[…]

Exporting Music Memos to Voice Memos requires an iPhone with iOS 14 or an iPad with iPadOS 14, along with the latest versions of Voice Memos and Music Memos. Exported content will appear in Voice Memos in a folder titled “Music Memos.”

Cydia Sues Apple

Juli Clover (Hacker News):

Cydia is joining a growing cadre of developers accusing Apple of anticompetitive behavior, reports The Washington Post. Cydia on Thursday sued Apple, accusing the company of using anticompetitive tactics to “nearly destroy Cydia” ahead of the App Store launch, which Cydia’s lawyers say has a monopoly over software distribution on iOS devices.

According to Cydia, if Apple did not have an “illegal monopoly” over iOS app distribution, users would be able to choose “how and where to locate and obtain iOS apps,” and developers would also have alternate distribution methods.

[…]

According to his estimations, more than half of early iPhone customers were jailbreaking their iPhones to use Cydia, and in 2010, 4.5 million people were searching for apps weekly.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Considering so many iOS features first appeared as jailbreak tweaks via Cydia, this is going to be a very tangled mess for Apple to prove that it didn’t unfairly copy/steal feature after feature from the jailbreak community before a court system unprepared for that kind of nuance

It’s not clear to me that’s relevant to this case, however.

Jesper:

I had the original iPhone, and could not have used it if Cydia and jailbreaking wasn’t around.

Previously:

Update (2020-12-16): John Gruber (tweet):

The whole opening presents Cydia as straight up legit, as though being an “app store” on iPhone in 2007 had any means of working other than exploiting security vulnerabilities.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

On any other platform, Cydia would be ‘straight-up legit’. The fact that it’s “not”, on iOS, is the whole thrust of this antitrust lawsuit. And the original iPhone OS ‘security’ model involved paperclips and string.

FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization

FTC (PDF, TidBITS, NBC, NY Times):

The Federal Trade Commission today sued Facebook, alleging that the company is illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct. Following a lengthy investigation in cooperation with a coalition of attorneys general of 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam, the complaint alleges that Facebook has engaged in a systematic strategy—including its 2012 acquisition of up-and-coming rival Instagram, its 2014 acquisition of the mobile messaging app WhatsApp, and the imposition of anticompetitive conditions on software developers—to eliminate threats to its monopoly. This course of conduct harms competition, leaves consumers with few choices for personal social networking, and deprives advertisers of the benefits of competition.

The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp; prohibit Facebook from imposing anticompetitive conditions on software developers; and require Facebook to seek prior notice and approval for future mergers and acquisitions.

John Gruber:

Investors clearly don’t think they’re actually going to bust up Facebook, but investors are often totally wrong. The thing I’d be really worried about, if I were Zuckerberg, is the broad bipartisan nature of the regulators behind this. It’s hard to believe you could get 48 attorneys general behind any major initiative today.

Om Malik:

I am not a lawyer or an antitrust expert, but as someone who has observed the technology industry for a long time, it seems important to note that things in the industry are speeding up. The government watchdogs need to be mindful that the time it takes from being an upstart to a giant is getting shorter and shorter.

[…]

What we need — and soon — is a new framework that thinks about monopolies from a more future-oriented perspective. Market share is such an industrial metric to think about in this digital age.

Update (2020-12-16): Nick Heer:

The rest of the Times paragraph makes other arguments that Wu and Hemphill end up refuting in their piece: the government does not necessarily have to prove that acquisitions would have been significant competitors, nor should this case have a chilling effect on smaller acquisitions. It is worth reading as a preface for much of the reporting that will undoubtably be published over the next several years as this case is argued.

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