posts

If you’re looking for an easy way to clean up cruft on your Mac, the new version of CleanMyMac is a great app to check out.

John Voorhees at MacStories:

CleanMyMac has worked reliably for me for years, and I’m glad to see MacPaw continue to refine it. The new features and the redesign should help broaden the app’s appeal, especially to new users, but I’m also pleased to see that CleanMyMac X is focused on the fundamentals like running its scans faster because as a utility app, that counts as much anything else as far as I’m concerned.

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Matt Novak, writing at Gizmodo:

Americans have soured on Facebook in the past year, as more people come to terms with the toxic role that the social media platform plays in their lives. A new Pew Research Center survey shows that a large percentage of the population has taken extended breaks from Facebook in the past year, with 26 percent of American users saying that they’ve deleted the app from their phones completely.

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been on some sort of laptop vision quest.

In college, I used a 15-inch PowerBook G4, followed by an early 15-inch MacBook Pro.  Then, I bounced between the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the 13-inch MacBook Air, depending on what machine I was assigned at work. When I left my job, I bought a 15-inch MacBook Pro. It was my only Mac, and I wanted as much power as I could put in my backpack.

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This week on Connected:

New iPhones are just around the corner, so it’s time to talk about rumors and solidify predictions.

Don’t miss the part where we try to guess the name of Apple’s next iPhone SoC.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code CONNECTED at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
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Shawn C. Steiner at B&H, writing about Canon’s newest camera:

It’s mirrorless. It’s full frame. It has a new mount, of course. The RF mount is Canon’s latest, and its engineers have created a versatile design with a 20mm flange distance and 54mm inner diameter, both of which will lead to more advanced optics and some brilliant new lenses.

If I were still living the Canon life, this would be a great upgrade from something like the 70D that I used to carry, but I’m really happy with my Sony a7R II. Sony is simply killing it in this space, and even with the EOS R, Canon has some catching up to do.

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Dani Deahl, The Verge:

Evernote is currently offering a sale on its Premium membership, slashing its yearly subscription price from $70 down to a much more reasonable $42. The company offered the same deal earlier this year. If you’re interested in grabbing the deal, it’s available now on Evernote’s site. It only applies if you pay one lump sum for the annual subscription.

When Evernote drastically raised it prices, many people I know finally left the service. It was just one more blow against an application that feels like it’s on the ropes. Then there is this news, as reported by Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch:

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Ellie Powers and Chris Beckmann, writing on the Google Chrome blog about the browser’s new look:

You can see it across all platforms—desktop, Android, and iOS—where you’ll notice more rounded shapes, new icons and a new color palette. These updates have a simpler look and will (hopefully) boost your productivity. Take tabs, for instance. Are you a secret tab-hoarder? No judgment. We changed the shape of our tabs so that the website icons are easier to see, which makes it easier to navigate across lots of tabs. On mobile, we’ve made a number of changes to help you browse faster, including moving the toolbar to the bottom on iOS, so it’s easy to reach. And across Chrome, we simplified the prompts, menus, and even the URLs in your address bar.

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Apple Support, from 1995:

In the early days of the Macintosh operating system, new objects like icons and windows had to be stored and managed somewhere by the operating system. Information such as the bit mapped representation of the icon picture to display and the association of documents to the application that created them was saved in a database. This file was called “Desktop” and was an invisible file at the top level of every diskette. Information was placed in this file by the action of the Finder making calls to the Desktop Manager. The Desktop Manager, in turn, made calls to the Resource Manager, creating resource items within the Desktop file.

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This week on Ungeniused:

From its origins after The Civil War to its mysterious ingredient list, we tackle all the Coca-Cola questions that have bubbled up since our previous episode.

My thanks to our sponsor:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code UNGENIUSED at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.

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Samuel Axon at Ars Technica:

It will deliver an improvement in graphics performance for most use cases if you’re using any current Apple machine but the iMac Pro or the top-spec 27-inch iMac. But with no upgrade potential, it’s a tough sell for almost everyone. The whole point of an eGPU enclosure for many prospective buyers is to provide an upgrade path for the GPU you’re using with your MacBook Pro or iMac.

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It’s nice that they are marking the upcoming 10th anniversary of 512 Pixels with an event the same day. gets phone call

Oh, just new iPhones.

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Stephen Nellis at Reuters reports that Apple has purchased Akonia Holographics, a Colorado company that has done work on lenses for AR glasses:

Akonia said its display technology allows for “thin, transparent smart glass lenses that display vibrant, full-color, wide field-of-view images.” The firm has a portfolio of more than 200 patents related to holographic systems and materials, according to its website.

Apple has been rumored to looking at AR glasses some time now. Maybe I just lack imagination, but I cannot get excited about this sort of technology when I think about it in my life. There’s no doubt, AR has uses in various industries, but I don’t think anything like this would be for me.

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