Archive for June 14, 2022

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

ACM Makes Research Articles Freely Available

Association for Computing Machinery (not the other ACM, via Hacker News):

ACM has opened the articles published during the first 50 years of its publishing program. These articles, published between 1951 and the end of 2000, are now open and freely available to view and download via the ACM Digital Library.

ACM’s first 50 years backfile contains more than 117,500 articles on a wide range of computing topics. In addition to articles published between 1951 and 2000, ACM has also opened related and supplemental materials including data sets, software, slides, audio recordings, and videos.

Ernie Smith (via Hacker News):

Over that time, the educational and scientific group representing nearly 100,000 members across 190 countries has collected a number of published works within its archives, many of which discuss fundamental work within the world of computers—for example, the first mention of UNIX, a groundbreaking operating system that has deeply influenced modern computing, in 1973, or an in-depth interview with Steve Jobs from 1989.

Previously:

Clarus Is Back in Ventura

Shadowfacts (Hacker News):

Did you know that with macOS Ventura, Clarus the Dogcow has at long last returned home? Recently, while doing something else, I accidentally hit Cmd+Shift+P which opened the Page Setup dialog. I was greeted, surprisingly, with a new high-resolution version of the classic Clarus icon that I’d never seen before.

[…]

Using the system assetutil program, one can list all of the files in a compiled asset catalog. And sure enough, there she is[…]

[…]

Lastly, if you’re writing a Mac app and would like to hide Clarus somewhere, you can load the bundle yourself and then pull the image out like so[…]

[…]

It would be very cool to see Clarus return as an SF Symbol some day. If hundreds of icons for various Apple products can go in, so too can everyone’s favorite dogcow.

Jason Robinson:

In iOS 16, the 🐕 🐄 emoji suggestions now appear in the correct order when typing Clarus’ name.

Update (2022-06-16): Dr. Drang:

Nowadays, you can go years without using Page Setup. Many apps, including the editor I’m typing this in and the web browser behind it that has all my links open, don’t even include a Page Setup item in their File menu. As you can see, much of what it did has been rolled into Print.

And here’s the thing about Clarus and Page Setup: although Stephen’s history—and the screenshot above, which I nicked from him—puts her in the LaserWriter’s Page Setup, my memory is that she started in the ImageWriter’s Page Setup. And she did a lot more than just stand around inside a page-shaped box.

In addition to the rather dull options for portrait or landscape printing, the ImageWriter’s Page Setup gave you checkboxes for more exciting options. And Clarus would do tricks when you selected these other options.

Firefox Total Cookie Protection

Mozilla (Hacker News, MacRumors):

Starting today, Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection by default to all Firefox users worldwide, making Firefox the most private and secure major browser available across Windows, Mac and Linux. Total Cookie Protection is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.

[…]

Total Cookie Protection works by creating a separate “cookie jar” for each website you visit. Instead of allowing trackers to link up your behavior on multiple sites, they just get to see behavior on individual sites. Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to only that website. No other websites can reach into the cookie jars that don’t belong to them and find out what the other websites’ cookies know about you — giving you freedom from invasive ads and reducing the amount of information companies gather about you.

John Wilander:

Firefox finally gets full third-party cookie partitioning. I don’t know why tech media got it wrong up until now, saying Firefox had strong cookie protections by default. But now they got it done! 🥳❤️

Brendan Eich:

Glad Mozilla is joining best-in-class @Brave by shipping Firefox storage partitioning by default. Brave has shipped these protections by default, on all platforms, for 6+ months. More browsers shipping more on-by-default privacy protections benefits everyone who uses the Web.

Previously:

[Private Click Measurement] is already available as part of iOS 15, but it needs websites to use its API in order to function.

[…]

As fine as that sounds, an in-depth report claims that the mechanisms used by PCM aren't sufficient to protect users in the ways Apple is trying to, while making it more difficult for advertisers and removing any incentive for web publishers to use it.

[…]

Mozilla goes so far as to say that if Firefox included support for PCM in lieu of its own Toral Cookie Protection, it would actually make it less private.

Swift Charts

Hello Swift Charts:

Say hello to Swift Charts — a flexible framework that helps you create charts entirely in SwiftUI that look and feel right at home on all Apple platforms. Discover how you can use compositional syntax to make informative, delightful, and accessible charts with less code. We’ll share the building blocks for making visualizations with Swift Charts, and explore how you can change your charts’ design with a simple modifier. We’ll also take you through the latest updates to Xcode Previews to help you chart a path toward an engaging experience.

Swift Charts: Raise the bar:

Dive deep into data visualizations: Learn how Swift Charts and SwiftUI can help your apps represent complex datasets through a wide variety of chart options. We’ll show you how to plot different kinds of data and compose marks to create more elaborate charts. We’ll also take you through Swift Charts’ extensive chart customization API to help you match the style of your charts to your app.

Matthaus Woolard:

From my quick look over the API, the framework can provide a lot more than the basic graphics generated by apps like Numbers etc. In this post I would like to share my initial experiments with the APIs.

[…]

You can find the code for this chart in our GitHub project, this includes the code to download and parse the CSV file.

Ron Avitzur:

I’ve worked on math & data visualization for 35 years, and the simplicity and power of the Swift Charts API is truly a thing of beauty, as are the visualizations it creates.

It does not include pie charts.

Update (2022-06-24): Matthaus Woolard:

To build a histogram, I need to group my data into bins and count how many samples are within each bin.

He also demonstrates a 2D density plot.