Sarah Reichelt: In the WWDC video, they demonstrated how to track the navigation events. The code in the video does not work - it doesn’t even compile. But after some trial and error, I worked out how to track these events.[…]If you want your WebView to load custom pages, create a custom scheme. In my […]

Cihat Gündüz: I ended up running Claude Code in Cursor’s terminal instead – getting Cursor’s editor awareness with Claude Code’s superior tools like web search, planning mode, and the generous 5-hour usage window.[…]Request queuing was the first limitation I noticed in Xcode right away. When I’m developing, thoughts and questions come fast. Having to wait […]

Shelby Talcott, reporting under the euphemistic headline “White House Fires CDC Director Over Vaccine Disagreements”:

A showdown at the CDC culminated in the White House formally firing its director, Susan Monarez, on Wednesday night.

Monarez was ousted earlier in the day, after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked her to step down amid disagreements over changing vaccine policies, The Washington Post reported — and HHS confirmed her departure.

But Monarez’s lawyer, Mark Zaid, pushed back. Zaid said in a statement later that a White House staffer had delivered the news, and given that Monarez is a Senate-confirmed officer, “only the president himself can fire” her. “For this reason, we reject the notification Dr. Monarez has received as legally deficient and she remains as CDC Director,” Zaid said.

Four other top CDC directors also resigned Wednesday. “These high profile departures will require oversight by the” Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, panel chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., posted on X.

The “White House” didn’t fire Monarez. Donald Trump did. And while technically, she was fired over “vaccine disagreements”, yes, those disagreements weren’t scientific or medical. It was science on one side, and abject quackery on the other. We really needed the CDC five years ago. We’re in big trouble if we need them again before the US electorate ousts these wingnuts.

Here’s a headline, and coverage, from The Guardian that captures the situation with clarity and without mincing words: “CDC Chief ‘Targeted’ for Refusing to ‘Rubber-Stamp Unscientific, Reckless Directives’, Lawyers Say”

Truly phenomenal video from Real Engineering about a genuinely phenomenal product. In my review of the AirPods Pro 2 in 2023 — a year after they originally shipped, when the cases were changed to use USB-C — I called them “the best single expression of Apple as a company today”. That remains true. AirPods exemplify everything that sets Apple apart: miniaturization, “it just works” ease of use, opinionated design (you get them in any color you want, so long as it’s white), and, most of all, joyfulness.

It occurs to me that Apple doesn’t brag enough about its engineering accomplishments these days. Under their previous CEO, they’d spend more time in product introduction explaining how things work, like a lecture in a 101 college course. I miss that. This Real Engineering video fills in those gaps.

Christopher Yasiejko, reporting last week for Bloomberg Law:

CBP exceeded its authority in an Aug. 1 internal advice ruling that overturned its own January decision without notice or input from Masimo, the medical-device maker said in a complaint filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Masimo brought claims under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause.

The CBP ruling is available here. As I read the CPB ruling, Apple’s argument goes something like this:

Masimo’s patents (the validity of which Apple disputes, but that’s neither here nor there for this ruling) cover a non-invasive device worn on the user’s body, that reads blood oxygen levels by shining light of various wavelengths through the skin, computes the reading on the device, and shows the result on device. With Apple’s workaround for watches sold in the US, the computation and the display of results occur off-device (on the paired iPhone), and thus the “redesigned” blood oxygen feature doesn’t violate Masimo’s patents.

The CBP’s investigation centered around whether the Masimo patents were “limiting” — which seems to mean a device that does all these things: the sensors, the computation of results, and the display of results. Masimo argued that the patents weren’t limiting, and apparently made no argument for how the import ban on Apple Watches should stand if the patents were found by CBP to be limiting. The CBP asked the International Trade Commission — the outfit that instituted the import ban — whether they considered the Masimo patents to be limiting, and the ITC responded yes, they did, that that was the entire basis of the import ban.

Masimo’s new complaint against the CBP makes mention of Apple’s Trump-pleasing series of announcements related to investments in US manufacturing, leaving it to the reader to interpet the implication that there’s a quid pro quo at play with the CBP ruling. But the CBP ruling’s timeline makes clear that much of the investigation took place during the Biden administration in 2024. It reads to me like that same decision would have been made, at the same time, if Kamala Harris had won last year’s election. But that’s the problem with a pay-to-play corrupt government like Trump’s, and Tim Cook’s willingness to play along to any degree, no matter how mild. By currying favor with Trump, it now looks like any decision from the U.S. government that goes in Apple’s favor might be because Apple curried favored with Trump. I genuinely do not believe that’s the case here. The ITC ruling was based on an interpretation of Masimo’s patents that they were limited to user-worn devices that read, compute, and display blood oxygen levels non-invasively, and given that U.S. Apple Watches no longer compute or display the results, they no longer violate Masimo’s patents.