Eli Budelli (MacRumors, Hacker News):
We’re excited to welcome Day One to the Automattic team. Day One is a private journaling app that makes writing for yourself a simple pleasure. A beautifully designed user experience has earned the app prestigious awards including App Store Editor’s Choice, App of the Year, and the Apple Design Award, along with high praise from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Wired, and more.
Paul Mayne:
By joining Automattic, I’m now more confident than ever that the preservation and longevity of Day One is sure. This acquisition will provide Day One access to the same technological, financial, and security benefits that WordPress.com, Tumblr, and other Automattic entities enjoy.
[…]
I’ll be remaining at the helm of Day One, leading the same passionate team that has been responsible for the development and design behind the app today.
Matt Mullenweg:
For many years I’ve talked to anyone who will listen about my vision of making Automattic the Berkshire Hathaway of the internet, and Paul’s decision to continue to grow his amazing business as part of Automattic is a great validation of the way we’ve been building our culture and long-term orientation in our business.
Acquisition Business Day One Journal iOS iOS 14 iOS App Mac Mac App macOS 11.0 Big Sur WordPress
Feross (Hacker News):
Ran into a spectacularly awful Safari bug in the latest Safari (14.1.1 on macOS and iOS 14.6).
Opening an IndexedDB database fails 100% of the time on the first try. 😩
This was apparently introduced about three weeks ago in iOS 14.6 and macOS 11.4 and has been fixed in the current preview version of Safari.
Previously:
Bug Database iOS iOS 14 Mac macOS 11.0 Big Sur Safari WebKit
Martin Pilkington:
By setting these NSTextLists, you can give NSTextView enough information to let users make changes to the list through regular text editing. However, NSTextView will not actually respond to any changes you make in code (for example, adding a list). That requires a LOT more work…
Cocoa Mac macOS 11.0 Big Sur Programming
Mitch Stoltz and Lara Ellenberg:
In going after internet service providers (ISPs) for the actions of just a few of their users, Sony Music, other major record labels, and music publishing companies have found a way to cut people off of the internet based on mere accusations of copyright infringement. When these music companies sued Cox Communications, an ISP, the court got the law wrong. It effectively decided that the only way for an ISP to avoid being liable for infringement by its users is to terminate a household or business’s account after a small number of accusations—perhaps only two. The court also allowed a damages formula that can lead to nearly unlimited damages, with no relationship to any actual harm suffered. If not overturned, this decision will lead to an untold number of people losing vital internet access as ISPs start to cut off more and more customers to avoid massive damages.
Be careful if anyone on your network is running a file server or downloading/uploading copyrighted content using BitTorrent.
Copyright Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Internet Service Provider (ISP) Lawsuit Legal Sony
Christian Zibreg:
By running speech recognition directly on the device rather than continuing to rely on the cloud for speech-to-text processing, Siri now runs much faster simply because you don’t have to wait for it to finish talking to the cloud just so she could understand what you’re saying.
Now Apple’s digital assistant is much snappier for requests that don’t require online sources! Also, Siri on iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 takes advance of on-device personalization, which lets its speech-recognition engine and understanding improve as you use your device.
[…]
With Siri’s speech-recognition engine processing the audio of your request without uploading it to Apple’s servers, your privacy actually increases when using offline Siri.
Finally we get back offline voice control, which—since Siri was added in 2011—has only worked when Siri was disabled. Aside from improving performance and reliability, this should also reduce cellular data usage. Unfortunately, one of the main things I do with Siri is make reminders, and despite seemingly not requiring any Internet data lookup, that is apparently not one of the features available for offline use.
Mitchell Clark:
Apple processing Siri requests on-device should help its users be more confident about the privacy of their data: back in 2019, we learned that contractors were listening to some Siri requests, something that wouldn’t happen if those requests were being handled by your phone alone. While Apple eventually tried to make that situation right by being more transparent and making Siri recordings opt-in, handling more Siri requests on the phone is a good way to make the service a little more trustworthy.
Previously:
Cellular Data iOS iOS 15 Optimization Privacy Reminders Siri Speech Recognition Voice Control
