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Amazon Associates is an affiliate program that earns you commissions when you link to Amazon products that result in a sale. The trouble is, creating those links is a hassle on iOS. Associate, by Squibner, fixes that with easy-to-use search and link conversion.

Associate’s search functionality puts Amazon’s entire store at your fingertips. Run a search and tap the result you want. Associate does all the hard work of generating an affiliate link that includes your Amazon Associates credentials. Associate also has an extension for generating links from within Amazon’s own app or any other app where you find an Amazon link. Associate grabs the link and converts it into an affiliate link in just one tap.

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Well, this is adorable.

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Unlike the other three books I’ve looked at recently, AppleDesign was not published by Apple.

Put out by Graphis, Inc in conjunction with Apple in 1997, AppleDesign is 287 pages of wonderful photography not only of finished Apple hardware, but prototypes, design mockups and more. The first third of the book is dedicated to an in-depth retelling of the processes and decisions that went into what Apple had made up to this point. The Apple II to Snow White grace the early chapters, then the book shifts to things like early Power Macs and the Newton line.

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Syambra Moitozo:

I grew up in Silicon Valley two decades before it was cool enough to be the title of a show on HBO. My parents were conventional hippies who drove Volvos donned with “Save Tibet” and “Question Authority” bumper stickers. The public elementary school I went to in the Santa Cruz Mountains had only 30 kids in the 5th grade.

No matter their livelihoods or income levels, whether they were on food stamps or had enough money to get their kids their own miniature drivable Power Wheels Jeeps for Christmas —the parents would help out in whatever ways they could. My dad would take our class on nature walks while another girl’s mom led our Girl Scout troop. In 5th grade, we’d stay after school so my friend Sara’s dad could teach us about computers.

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Displays and wireless routers aren’t the only things Apple has left behind over the decades. This month on MacStories, I wrote about all sorts of businesses Apple has exited. It was a lot of fun to write about old-ass scanners and more.

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Apple’s new Support app for iOS makes getting help with an iOS product a lot easier. Thumbs up.

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Astra is a new iPhone app that acts as a client to Amazon’s Alexa service. It’s like having an Echo right in your pocket. Everything that works on the stand-alone devices seems to work in the app.

I’m a big fan of what Amazon is doing in this space. I just bought an Echo Dot to put on my desk after loving the Echo we put in our kitchen earlier this year.

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I remember being impressed by this at the time:

Apple maintains a list of known malicious software that is used during the safe download check to determine if a file contains malicious software. The list is stored locally, and with Security Update 2011-003 is updated daily by a background process.

If you do not wish to receive these updates, you can disable daily update by unchecking “Automatically update safe downloads list” in the Security pane, in System Preferences. This option appears in Security preferences after Security Update 2011-003 is installed.

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Speaking of the iPad Pro, Jason Snell’s wish list for the device is spot-on.

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Federico Viticci has been using an iPad as his main computing device for years, but the 12.9-inch iPad Pro has unlocked a whole new world for the most handsome writer and podcaster I know.

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Most of the photos I take for this website are done with my DSLR, but sometimes I end up posting photos taken with my iPhone. Those images include geolocation data, which is not something I want to share with the world.

I used to use Photoshop for removing this information, but thankfully, Preview on macOS makes it easy to get rid of this information.¹

Open an image, then choose Show Inspector from the Tools menu.

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Designed by Apple in California and A Personal Guide to Personal Computers are not the only books Apple has published in the last 40 years.

So Far: The First Ten Years of a Vision was published in 1987, and celebrated the company’s tenth anniversary. Unlike *Designed by Apple in California," this book mixes text and photos nicely. It’s built on the premise that Apple is about far more than computers.

Chapter names include things like “Freedom,” “Courage,” and “Sharing.” The book is full of little stories about people making a difference in the world using Apple computers. It’s all very upbeat and touchy-feely. It even includes numerous page with the names of all past and present employees as of January 1, 1987.

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