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News+: Should Apple Leak the iPhone 11 Design?

Andrew Orr ·

In the latest issue of Macworld, Michael Simon says that Apple should leak the iPhone 11 design like Google did for the Pixel 4.

We already know it’s coming in September. And we kind of know what it will look like too. There have already been bountiful leaks that have revealed a giant square camera bump—which incidentally looks a whole lot like the Pixel 4—and it’s expected that all three models will be pretty much identical from the front. So what’s the harm in confirming what we already know?

If we accept two conditions: 1) Many Android phones tend to mimic iPhones; and 2) iPhone 11 mockups are close to or exactly the real design; Then I think the Pixel 4 was also the iPhone 11 leak.

This is part of Andrew’s News+ series, where he shares a magazine every Friday to help people discover good content in Apple News+.

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Apple Music Alternative Playlist Renamed 'ALT CTRL'

Andrew Orr ·

Apple is slowly rebranding Apple Music, and its latest efforts include renaming the Apple Music alternative playlist to ALT CTRL.

The playlist, which features 50 songs, will change every week. Each song is hand selected by a group of curators. The songs featured have less to do with genre, and more to do with overall feel and themes.

“ALT CTRL, formerly known as The A-List: Alternative, is where you’ll find the best of those new left-of-center tunes.” reads the Editors’ notes on the new ALT CTRL page, “Alternative is more an attitude than a sound—music that colors just a bit outside the lines.”

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Meet America's Phone Farmers That Commit Ad Fraud

Andrew Orr ·

People are setting up multiple phones to create a “phone farm” to fake engagement with ads to earn money from certain apps. Vice spoke to several farmers and built their own setup.

With a marketing strategy called “incentivized traffic,” app developers take advertisements or other content that companies want to get in front of an attentive audience, and pay that audience to watch or interact with them.

Rather than actually watch ads, these phone farmers use as many as a hundred phones and sometimes automate the process to make it seem like someone is watching the ads in order to generate income.

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What to Know About RTF vs. RTFD Files on a Mac

John Martellaro ·

The Eclectic Light Company writes:

Macs and iOS devices have the benefit of not one variety of Rich Text documents, but two: RTF and RTFD. This article explores some of their features and limitations, and considers the problems of working with them alongside one another.

This is a very readable and helpful article that explains the nature of RTFD files and their history going back to the origins with NeXT Corp.