This is a "FINALLY!" app for me; something that I've talked about for years among friends, former Rdio colleagues, etc.
The soundcloud resolution is hit-or-miss, and I would be interested to see youtube in there, but the "auto-redirect" option is solid; if you managed to figure out a "cookie-dependent embed", where the auto-redirect setting also decides which service's player to embed in Twitter or Discourse, this would be magical.
Yeah Soundcloud has been tough, a lot of things aren't available via the API so I'm trying to scrape their site. I'm hoping to improve Soundcloud support soon.
That's a good idea, I'll investigate some sort of embedding strategy that would support that!
It is dramatically easier to send someone a bank transfer in Europe (and I'd imagine, the rest of the world) than it is in the US. All you need is the recipient's IBAN (and sometimes BIC, which is usually already in the IBAN), and boom, you can initiate a transfer from your bank to theirs, for free. It blows my mind that banks in the US still haven't figure out how to do this.
Well, with custom domain email addresses this is always true regardless of service provider.
If you ever abandon the domain, someone else could come along and buy the domain and create the same email address. They could then receive any mail intended for that email address (e.g. password resets). This is why I consider any domains purchased for email purposes to be lifetime investments.
Re: the gotchas, it's possible that this is due to how the app is architected in combination with how the phone and OS are architected. The input rate of 3D Touch, for example, is tightly coupled to the display output frame rate, which, in turn, is tightly coupled to the things you do on the main thread. I don't know off-hand if the camera input is coupled to anything in this way, but it's something to look into, and Apple's documentation should indicate this sort of behavior.
Having done this (/ currently doing it), I would say: follow your heart.
Taking time off to nurture your own projects is a fine and reasonable personal endeavor, but not necessarily an optimal business or financial one.
In many ways, the time and space can help you explore and expand your ideas into something in the middle of the venn circles between "your happy with it" and "the market is happy with it".
But, don't expect to be done with day jobs after burning through "a few $k".
Depending on where you live, and who's in your network, you may be able to move to part time, agency, or freelance work after burning through your runway in order to keep enough time to work on your thing.
My operating assumption with all of this is, your current day job is preventing you (in one way or another) from focusing on your own projects. This is ok. Not everyone can handle burning the candle at both ends with the day job and night-work. Figure out a way to make space for both until the personal project becomes sustainable.
Beyond this, the other advice about 10-15% tech and validating your idea before hitting the code is solid.
I have a single-time-purchase iOS app in the App Store, and a month or two after releasing the app, spending one day investigating blogs and websites, and one day sending tuned press release letters to them did more for my sales than any new feature I could have designed or coded in that amount of time.
To add onto this, in addition to the governmental threat, another point that Cook is trying to make is that security is hard. It's hard for the government, which he backs up by citing breaches, and it's hard for Apple (which he omits, but remember those iCloud breaches?).
I completely agree with your point about future governments and unchecked power, but there is also the point that, if Apple creates it, there is the possibility that organizations (or even just normal people) besides these anointed three-letter agencies may also have the same power to access a good chunk of your entire digital life (and the locations of your friends and family who use Find My Friends) if you were to lose your phone.
Good point. The thing Cook can't say publicly is that once Apple creates FBiOS, every government around the world, especially the most oppressive regimes, will block imports of iPhones until Apple gives them a copy or they steal it from the FBI.
I believe the FBI is asking for FBiOS to refuse to run if the IMEI doesn't match a compiled-in whitelist, but my understanding is that phone thieves routinely desolder a chip to change the IMEI on a stolen phone. The FBiOS is for use when they have physical access to the phone, so I don't believe the IMEI whitelist is a large hurdle to get over.
It's unclear if you're trolling, but assuming you're not, the analogy doesn't work because digital things and physical things behave in fundamentally different ways.
In the physical example, according to the FBI's "just this one iPhone" claim, one would reasonably expect that the company could then destroy the hypothetical master key as soon as it's used. This makes sense in a physical world, but the analogy breaks down completely in a digital world. [Returning your spider doesn't solve the problem](http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html).
In the digital world, you can't guarantee that the key hasn't been copied, and you can't guarantee that destroying the "original instance" of the key destroys all others.
The custom OS that the FBI is asking Apple to build will also take development time, and likely take more than one person to develop, meaning that if there's a security breach during the OS's development, any number of intermediate builds may also be stolen during development, before the FBI can even access the particular phone in question.
> It's unclear if you're trolling, but assuming you're not, the analogy doesn't work because digital things and physical things behave in fundamentally different ways.
I'm not trolling at all. Genuine question.
Assuming what Apple said in the open letter is true:
> Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.
Is like ask the Company to create a tool/masterkey able to open "just that safe".
I well know that in software you can make the OS to auto destroy itself (TTL) etc... but still imagine that after they get the OS they will copy it and start reverse engineering it.
>In the physical example, according to the FBI's "just this one iPhone" claim, one would reasonably expect that the company could then destroy the hypothetical master key as soon as it's used. This makes sense in a physical world, but the analogy breaks down completely in a digital world.
Why not? Can't apple just delete it?
>In the digital world, you can't guarantee that the key hasn't been copied, and you can't guarantee that destroying the "original instance" of the key destroys all others.
You can't do that in the physical world either. But you can be pretty damn certain that it isn't done.
>The custom OS that the FBI is asking Apple to build will also take development time, and likely take more than one person to develop, meaning that if there's a security breach during the OS's development, any number of intermediate builds may also be stolen during development, before the FBI can even access the particular phone in question.
Apple already takes this risk with every since iOS release.
Yes, but leaks of pre-release iOS software can't be installed on locked phones as a means of unlocking them, so the risk is not nearly the same.
If you really want to carry this analogy to term, fine, I'll concede that you can't be 100% sure that a physical key wasn't copied before you destroy it, but then you must take into consideration the complexity of manufacture and duplication - if the complexity of duplication is high, and you only make one, and guard it at all times, you can have a fairly high confidence (barring ridiculous film plots) that the key you're destroying is the only one.
With digital things, the complexity of duplication is beyond trivial. One copy leaks, and instantly there are tens of thousands, if not millions of copies in all corners of the internet. Physical objects simply do not behave this way.
Are you kidding? Law enforcement across the country wants to use this on thousands of phones.
Even if it were truly going to be used only on one phone, there's still a risk that the signed software gets out. That risk is exponentially increased when you realize that Apple will be required to retain this software for responses to law enforcement requests indefinitely.
>> It's unclear if you're trolling, but assuming you're not, the analogy doesn't work because digital things and physical things behave in fundamentally different ways.
I'm not sure I fully agree that things are different because it's physical over digital.
Lets say that the way a safe manufacturer could circumvent the lock on the safe is to build a custom tool that can rapidly try every combination much faster than any currently known method. Such a tool could be reverse engineered (i.e. copied) after returning it.
I agree that copying software is far easier than hardware, but it's the design of the tool that's important, not it's physical representation.
The only way I would agree with the FBI's "just this one iPhone" statement is if they got Apple to crack it and they just returned the data but not the method. Which of course they wont do.
> I'm not sure I fully agree that things are different because it's physical over digital.
...
> I agree that copying software is far easier than hardware, but it's the design of the tool that's important, not it's physical representation.
So you do understand that software is different. It is easily copyable, and all software is copyable.
> The only way I would agree with the FBI's "just this one iPhone" statement is if they got Apple to crack it and they just returned the data but not the method. Which of course they wont do.
I wouldn't even agree to that. Creating a signed copy of this software creates a vulnerability in iPhones worldwide that does not exist today.
The crux of the issue in the article's title assertion, that "US Expats are toxic" isn't because US Citizens personally have to deal with filing extra taxes; it's because the foreign institutions are also required to file paperwork and go through the hoops. I'm a US citizen living in Germany. When I open a bank account, the US doesn't "just trust" what I report to them, they also require the bank to validate my filings, creating extra paperwork and costs for the bank. Some banks in Germany will refuse to open accounts for Americans because the extra cost and paperwork tips the cost/benefit equation to the point where it doesn't make business sense to serve American customers -- they cost more to do business with than it's worth.
To address the "why should you keep US citizenship?" question: If you move abroad, you won't be able to get citizenship in the country that you reside in for a number of years (depending on where you go), and in many cases, your US citizenship is what makes it easy to get a work visa or residence permit in that foreign country in the first place. So, even if you actually intend to renounce your citizenship, you still have about 5-10 years of living abroad and dealing with the tax implications before you can become a naturalized citizen in the place that you move to.
I'm not trying to argue whether it's fair or unfair to impose the tax on citizens living abroad, just that the logistics don't make the proposal of renouncing ones citizenship so simple.
This sort of thing really depends on the application, and the nice feature provided with the new "force" property is that you can actually distinguish between a "whole finger pad" light touch, and a "thin, firm, almost just the finger nail" hard touch, and most things in betwee.
The soundcloud resolution is hit-or-miss, and I would be interested to see youtube in there, but the "auto-redirect" option is solid; if you managed to figure out a "cookie-dependent embed", where the auto-redirect setting also decides which service's player to embed in Twitter or Discourse, this would be magical.