I sat down yesterday with Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, and Beats Founder Jimmy Iovine to talk about Apple Music. I also started using the new service myself, so I wanted to give you my thoughts on what I found so far, good and bad.
[...]
I’m damned impressed. Apple Music is a quality service, with the right mix of human curation and algorithms to help users figure out exactly what they want to hear.
Apple has built a handsome, robust app and service that goes well beyond just offering a huge catalog of music by providing many ways to discover and group music for a very wide range of tastes and moods.
But it’s also uncharacteristically complicated by Apple standards, with everything from a global terrestrial radio station to numerous suggested playlists for different purposes in different places. And the company offers very little guidance on how to navigate its many features. It will take time to learn it. And that’s not something you’re going to want to do if all you’re looking for is to lean back and listen.
It's hard for me to over-stress how much I like For You. From the very beginning, the recommendations in playlists and albums that the app showed me were dead-on accurate, reflecting my various musical interests.
The guerrilla marketing campaign to drive awareness of Apple’s new service is a sign that a company accustomed to controlling every part of the narrative around its products is open to different thinking, said one ad industry executive who worked for years on Apple’s campaigns.
The last picture I took with my Palm Treo 650, eight years ago today. pic.twitter.com/je38pspmcs
— Chris Espinosa (@cdespinosa) June 29, 2015Well, here’s the stark reality: The Apple Watch has no killer app. And it will never have a killer app.
But anyone who hinges the success of the device on the idea of a killer app is living far, far in the past.
In continuing to support the MacBook Pro (Late 2008), Apple demonstrates one of the value propositions that fans clung to even during the dark times when Apple lurched toward bankruptcy and the Mac toward irrelevance: that Macs simply lasted longer than their PC cousins. You could hold onto your investment for one or two more years, upgrading not from necessity but by choice. Macs didn’t simply “just work,” they worked for much longer.
The free Pluto Safari iPad app provides a good way for anyone interested in Pluto or space travel to keep up on the latest from this mission through timely articles and news pieces filled with multimedia content. Material is presented in a lively and accessible way that should hold the interest of laymen or students.
Apple finally decided to double down on user interface testing at WWDC this year. Let’s take a deep dive into the API and see what we find.
Apple didn’t disclose sales for the Watch last quarter, and it seems unlikely that the company will do so this quarter either.
Beyond Apple, the numbers are important because they blow up the idea that the Chinese aren’t willing to pay a premium for what they perceive to be a superior phone.
Silicon Valley’s interest in meditation is, in some respects, adaptive. “We’re at the epicenter of being stimulated with digital stuff,” Mamood Hamid, a venture investor at Social Capital, told me. “Five years ago, it was just e-mail. Now if you’re not on Twitter, if you don’t know how to use social, you’re a Luddite. And then you add the Apple Watch that’s going to be giving you notifications every five minutes—text messages, e-mails. It’s going to drive you insane.” Stewart Butterfield, the C.E.O. of Slack, noted that this is a fate that awaits us all. “I feel like we’re in the early stages of a species-level change with devices,” he told me.
All of this has led to a strange but perhaps inevitable oxymoron: digital therapy. A new class of app has emerged on iPhone screens, promising to relieve the mental afflictions—stress, distraction—that have been exacerbated by its neighbors. A venture-funded company called Big Health is developing a suite of cognitive-behavioral-therapy apps. (Its first product, Sleepio, treats insomnia.) And though Hamid considers Headspace to be the best mindfulness-meditation app, in terms of its “content and sophistication,” there are many others, including buddhify, which collects data via daily “mood check-ins”; Calm, which offers meditation exercises set to soothing nature scenes; and Insight Timer, which provides Tibetan bell sounds. Huffington has an app, too, called GPS for the Soul.
I have nothing to say. Just waiting for the sky to fall.
we have come full circle. it all makes sense now. pic.twitter.com/fSsVsSIALR
— Grant Blakeman (@gblakeman) June 10, 2015Thanks for reading.
Great to celebrate with over 8,000 Apple employees, friends and families. Happy Pride everyone! #applepride pic.twitter.com/2A9YD9z95B
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) June 29, 2015Appropriate use of a selfie stick. pic.twitter.com/jRNjTmerhw
— James Glynn (@jamesglynn) June 29, 2015Version 2.0 introduces popover notes as a way to add more comprehensive information without additional screen clutter, while the new text outline option displays a more traditional breakdown alongside the mind map.
Overall, The Blade is a very clever solution for MacBook owners in need of adding a convenient way to secure their notebook and prevent theft. The Blade requires being permanently applied to completely work as a security solution. It’s not ideal if you’re dedicated to keeping your MacBook’s profile as thin as possible, but that’s necessary to ensure security and The Blade looks good at doing what it does.
@wayword I tried to type "Okey-dokey" to a co-worker, but was auto-corrected to "Okay, Donkey." The new version is much more endearing.
— Andy Tiarks (@HopivoreAndy) June 28, 2015Apple Music is coming to Sonos devices, spokespeople for both companies confirmed to BuzzFeed News.
“We’re working together to make Apple Music available on Sonos before the end of the year,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told BuzzFeed News.
IBM is now training Watson to be a cancer specialist. The idea is to use Watson’s increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence to find personalized treatments for every cancer patient by comparing disease and treatment histories, genetic data, scans and symptoms against the vast universe of medical knowledge.
Such precision targeting is possible to a limited extent, but it can take weeks of dedicated sleuthing by a team of researchers. Watson would be able to make this type of treatment recommendation in mere minutes.
Mr. Johnson’s company, called Enjoy, sends experts to deliver and set up tech products in homes and offices. But rather than requiring people to work as independent contractors, a practice championed by most so-called on-demand companies, including the ride-hailing app Uber, Mr. Johnson wanted to actually employ the people who would be working for him.
“I said there’s a good chance that one day there could be a change in how the law qualifies these contractor jobs — and I’d rather be taking the high road from Day 1 and not be subject to that business risk,” said Mr. Johnson, the executive who founded Apple’s retail division and later ran J. C. Penney.
Look like it hahaha. pic.twitter.com/L8flYd4nEl
— kristo (@cryptoster) June 28, 2015r Thanks for reading.
Former Beats Music CEO and current Apple Music senior director Ian Rogers made a brief blog post yesterday summarizing some of his background in music leading up to this week's debut of Apple Music while also revealing Apple's launch schedule for iOS 8.4 and the new Beats 1 radio station.
This will be another busy Tuesday for Apple.
Quick question: has any of the non-U.S. Apple web sites changed the "Coming Soon" tag to a specific date for the launch of Apple Music yet?
What I was scared about was that people would be like, “Oh, it’s the first computer-animated feature film.”
We made sure Disney, and all around the world, didn’t sell it as “The First CG film.”
You sell it as a great motion picture, because that’s how we made it.
Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco have launched an ambitious study of gay, bisexual and transgender men and women centered on that ubiquitous piece of technology many Americans carry on them at all times: the iPhone.
Called PRIDE for Population Research in Identity and Disparities for Equality, it aims to learn more about the attitudes, risk factors and outcomes for a diverse range of conditions and diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, cancer, obesity, and depression, for this group, by studying the tens of thousands of people, who, the scientists hope, will sign up.
Odds are you could probably improve your posture a bit while you work, and Nekoze is a fun little app that will help you do it. Nekoze takes the form of a cat that keeps an eye on your posture while you sit at your desk. If you slouch too much, the cat will flash a warning on screen, telling you to sit up straight.
🍍🐷 If all you have is a pizza, everything looks like a topping
— rstevens 3 dot pizza (@rstevens) June 28, 2015From a time when the labels held so much sway that they could decide the new formats music would take, from the LP to the CD, the industry has moved to an era when the companies that provide the output wield as much, or more, power than the labels.
One, we should push companies to offer encryption to everyone, by default. And two, we should resist demands from governments to weaken encryption. Any weakening, even in the name of legitimate law enforcement, puts us all at risk. Even though criminals benefit from strong encryption, we're all much more secure when we all have strong encryption.
Yanked out the power cord on my iMac while repositioning it during a podcast. dooooooom
— Jason Snell (@jsnell) June 28, 2015Thanks for reading.
— Kaleigh Rogers (@KaleighRogers) June 26, 2015
There will be cool photos of the White House w rainbow colors tonight but hard to top this one by Chuck Kennedy. pic.twitter.com/dnoWIeymRr
— petesouza (@petesouza) June 27, 2015Disney World tonight #LoveWins pic.twitter.com/VCmTCFKCas
— Angelica Roxas (@angroxas) June 27, 2015As Mr. Lowe sees it, radio’s nature as an audio feed in constant flux fits the always-on mentality of the social-media era. He wants Beats 1 to be a reflection of the rapidly changing world of pop, in which songs that have just been released can be rushed on the air with the same speed at which a hot new track shoots through Twitter.
[...]
“Part of the last three months has been desperately trying to come up with a new word that’s not radio,” Mr. Lowe said. “We couldn’t do it.”
Apple has updated the terms of its AppleCare+ Protection Plan for iPhone, iPad, iPod and Apple Watch to cover batteries that retain less than 80% of their original capacity within the extended warranty period, whereas it previously covered batteries that retained less than 50% of their original capacity.
When you look at it as a whole, though, iTunes U is clearly the most complete native mobile learning platform there is right now. Showbie has done stellar work for years on the document submission aspect of the problem. Google Classroom, too, has attacked the hill from that side.
iTunes U started with the courses, the materials and the learning content. Now it adds the assignment submission and grading components too. When you take that all together, nothing else comes close as a complete solution for delivering a course on iOS.
Just as its name suggests, the Disney Gif app puts hundreds of GIFs right inside your iOS keyboard. Choose characters and scenes from films including Star Wars, Lion King, Aladdin, Toy Story and Frozen. Disney also included support for Inside Out, which is a no-brainer decision since its main characters — each representing a feeling — work perfectly as GIFs.
WeChat and Magic are distant relatives. Both put conversation ahead of apps as the primary means of getting stuff done.
Patients hit with the news they have breast cancer don't have to wade online through overwhelming amounts of information -- some of it questionable -- to see what they're facing, she said. "What a nice way to be able to do this without them freaking out."
The iPad app is designed to help guide Mayo Clinic patients through the breast cancer diagnosis and treatment options and includes pictures and names of the health-care providers they may deal with along the way.
Apple has been extremely focussed on using as little power as possible. It goes to the level of the programming language allowed for developers to use to write apps for mac or ios. That is the amount of alignment within apple for design based thinking. Power consumption is an extremely important variable.
Yay, all unit tests passing! pic.twitter.com/ax2uxPsZqv
— Dave Hulbert (@dave1010) June 24, 2015So if Apple and Twitter and Snapchat and LinkedIn see the value of having human editors selecting news or curating content of various kinds, why wouldn’t Facebook and Google do the same? Because each of the latter two companies are involved in content that’s on a completely different scale than Apple or Twitter—and human beings don’t scale very well.
Now that food manufacturers have mastered the Holy Grail of lightness and shelf stability (Mountain House, a leading brand of freeze-dried meals, just introduced a 12-year guarantee for its pouched provisions), the big question remains one of taste. “If you can eat this and like it in the comfort of your home,” said Ms. Scism, “you’ll really like it in the woods. That’s the test.” Below, a few packable meals-for-two that we believe meet that mark.
Love is love.
— Heather Champ (@hchamp) June 26, 2015Thanks for reading.
In the past three years especially, technology that helps the blind navigate through their communities without assistance from others has blossomed. The emergence of apps such as Sendero GPS LookAround and BlindSquare are putting tech to work for the visually impaired. These innovations are not only changing the way the blind travel, but also creating a whole new market that still has plenty of room for fine-tuning.
That moment when bookstore employees just get fed up with customers. pic.twitter.com/0Pu5cVuFtP
— SFReviews.net/SFF180 (@SFReviewsnet) June 25, 2015With this latest version of Apple’s educational software, students will be able to turn in homework from their tablets; these documents will carry a timestamp recording when the student submits term papers, book reports and other work. An integrated grade book will alert teachers when a student’s work is complete and ready for review, or if it’s time to send a reminder.
The simplicity and elegance of the design appeals to me as much as the fluidity of using it. I’ve become somewhat dependent on having the weather alongside my daily events and it has been surprisingly accurate.
Microsoft launched its newest Office program, Sway, last October as a way to easily publish full webpage stories for whatever is on your mind. Up until now though, it’s only been available on the Web and iOS, so Microsoft today released an iPad version of the app and detailed an upcoming Windows 10 version.
This may feel like a big change for the platform, but in reality, Apple has been laying the groundwork for multitasking apps since at least iOS 6. Developers have had to change their apps a lot in the last two years, between iOS 7’s new aesthetic and the introduction of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. If they’ve been making those changes according to Apple’s best practices, then they’re already done most of the work to make their apps multitasking-capable.
We’ll take a quick look at the existing technologies Apple is using to enable multitasking on the iPad, and then we’ll look at what developers need to do to their apps to get them ready. Don’t expect every app in the App Store to support multitasking on the day iOS 9 drops, but it should at least be a pretty easy process for anyone maintaining a universal iPhone and iPad app that plays by most of Apple’s rules.
We’ve spoken to Apple more extensively about the removals now. The company says it’s working with developers to quickly get their games reinstated to the App Store.
“It seems to me that pulling Civil War games might be an extreme response to the flag controversy, as if the Civil War didn't exist,” said Bob Brinkmeyer, a professor of Southern studies at the University of South Carolina. “As these games remind us, the South lost.”
The company claims it’s only zapping apps that feature the flag “in offensive or mean-spirited ways.” But when you look at some of their targets, including many games about the Civil War itself, that doesn’t hold up. A different, stupider explanation — that the company is treating the flag as if it were no less dangerous than the eyes of Medusa — makes more sense.
“We have removed apps from the App Store that use the Confederate flag in offensive or mean-spirited ways, which is in violation of our guidelines,” an Apple spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “We are not removing apps that display the Confederate flag for educational or historical uses.”
Ever since writing about my WordPress-based microblog and linking to similar solutions from Seth Clifford and Ben Brooks, I’ve been hearing from more bloggers about their interesting microblog workflows. Everyone has a slightly different spin on the basic idea, but all of them achieve some independence from Twitter by having the primary copy of each post live on their own site.
For now, let's just focus on fixing it quickly...
6 months later... pic.twitter.com/06nxj2sMqj
— Rik Schennink (@rikschennink) June 25, 2015Real life Xcode for when the computer crashes. Runs natively on your desktop @sorinc03 pic.twitter.com/S0p3iipqNW
— Eric Appel (@ericspaceappel) June 22, 2015For typography fans, electronic books have long been the visual equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard.
The fonts are uninviting. Jarring swaths of white space stretch between words. Absent are all the typesetting nuances of a fine print book.
Now Amazon and Google are doing something about it.
So, how do we answer the question if we cannot easily count all members of a given population?
Did you send me that high res image? pic.twitter.com/SPQ93ksBjO
— Siavash Mahmoudian (@siavash) June 24, 2015Thanks for reading.
For years, I’ve eschewed using the default iOS apps in favor of third-party offerings, because maaaan, I always knew better. Apple’s apps are for regular people, and I’m a PowerUser™, maaaan. I’d configure all kinds of workarounds and extra steps because I wanted to wring every last bit of functionality out of my devices, and the basic starter apps just weren’t ever enough.
Something’s changed though–well, two things–in the past few years. I’ve lost my taste for fiddling a little bit, and the default apps Apple ships with its devices have gotten, well, better. Better than other things I could use? Not in all cases. But better… enough. I’ve been increasingly focused on reducing friction in my life, and having a simpler computing experience that works together with its component parts–as much as any multi-device connected computing experience can work without hair-pulling these days.
Apple's apps have always gotten better with each iOS release, but I wonder if this year's additions – most of them featured under the Intelligence banner – will make me reconsider third-party apps I thought I'd never change again. It'll be interesting to check back once iOS 9 ships.
Apple may have named the next version of Mac OS X after El Capitan, but Google has tackled the 3,000-foot granite monolith in person. The search giant has added Yosemite Valley's El Capitan to its list of Street View conquests, partnering with legendary climbers Lynn Hill, Alex Honnold, and Tommy Caldwell to capture mapping data thousands of feet up in the air.
For iPhone owners, all the docks in this roundup are fine choices, at least in terms of compatibility with many third-party iPhone cases. [...] In the end, though, Apple’s own iPhone Lightning Dock has the cleanest and simplest design, and that makes it my favorite of the bunch.
Transit App is a free Android and iOS app which helps out with a host of tools for planning journeys around and across your local city. The app covers around 100 metropolitan areas, including most North American cities, and a scattering in France, along with London, Rome, Milan, Berlin, Mexico City and Nairobi.
Apple is introducing a Safari View Controller on iOS 9. Created with the goal to let developers stop writing miniature web browsers, Safari View Controller enables apps to delegate the responsibility of showing web content to Safari itself, avoiding the need to write custom code for built-in browsers.
Swift 2 brings updated support for SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data). What exactly does that mean?
China has been the world's top smartphone market since 2011 but not everyone in the fast moving country can afford an expensive iPhone or similar such status symbol, an economic reality that Shanghai-based Omni Prime hopes to up-end.
Through its Paymax app, the start-up is offering small loans to blue collars in China who want to buy an Apple phone, Apple Watch, MacBook or another gadget from the California-based company’s ever-evolving catalogue.
There's no question that the expansion of the information technology industry has often come at the cost of the displacement of its neighbors --and while Silicon Valley might be its epicenter, tech-driven gentrification is by no means an issue confined to the Bay. But there are also fault lines within the tech industry itself, whose surface appearance often belies the depth of the conflicts, potential and actual.
The five-second rule won’t save you from germs and the blue whale isn’t actually the earth’s largest living organism.
*Round of applause for the Smithsonian* (via Reddit) pic.twitter.com/aBKiuvJK3u
— Ewa S-R (@EwaSR) June 24, 2015Thanks for reading.
One of the real shortcomings of the Reminders app on iOS is the fact that you can’t share your to-do lists directly from your iPhone or iPad. If you want to collaborate with someone else on a Reminders list, you have to use the iCloud Web page or the app on your Mac. Thankfully, though, there are a few excellent programs out there that allow you to share your to-do list with other people, and they’re free to download on the App Store.
My guess is that labels who are allowing their music to be streamed will take advantage of this Apple Music Start Date to ensure sales in the first months after an album is released. But this highlights the fact that Apple Music users may not be able to stream new releases; it will depend on each label, and each album.
Apple's Safari is a great web browser, but there are many reasons why you may want to use another one on your iPhone or iPad (or even on your Mac). You may use Google services a lot, and find that Chrome helps you be more efficient; or you might want to use another browser because it's faster, or because it offers more privacy.
We'll surely delve into these major new components in the weeks and months to come. For now, however, let's take a look at some of the smaller changes that iOS 9 brings to the APIs we already know and love.
Too many companies run interviews the way they always have, with resumes, white boards and gut calls. We described our initial ideas about how to do better than this in our manifesto. Well, a little over a month has now passed. In the last 30 days, we've done 300 interviews. We've started to put our ideas into practice, to see what works and what doesn't, and to iterate on our process. In this post, I'm going to talk about what we've learned from the first 300 interviews.
Ah. I finally get it. User Experience vs. Design. pic.twitter.com/QS2OurHXKX
— Arjun Sethi (@arjunsethi) June 23, 2015I call these notifications "deletion reminders." pic.twitter.com/6cflopYGXx
— Ben Sandofsky (@sandofsky) June 22, 2015When did the meaning of 'workshop' change from a place where things are made and crafted, to where Post-it notes full of shite multiply.
— Joel Avery (@Joel_Avery_UK) June 18, 2015Remember: when someone calls you a resource, call them overhead
— Sean Cribbs (@seancribbs) June 24, 2015A new iOS 9 feature added in beta 1 was only discovered when users attempted to update to beta 2 earlier today. This new feature will allow the operating system to intelligently delete applications if you don’t have enough free space to perform a software update. Once the update is complete, the apps will automatically be reinstalled and your data will remain intact.
Apple Music, the hardware giant's soon-to-launch streaming service, has landed an eleventh-hour coup, striking deals with the independents’ digital rights organization Merlin and with Martin Mills’ indie powerhouse Beggars Group, sources tell Billboard.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which oversees the development of the wireless communication standard, announced Tuesday that Apple has become a “promoter member” of the group, giving the company new power to guide Bluetooth’s development. Promoter members are given a continual seat on the group’s board of directors, and are also the only membership class that can vote on its corporate matters.
Lisa Jackson, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and Apple's top executive on environmental issues, will become the company's lead on all policy initiatives, including the environment, education and accessibility. Her new title will be the vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives.
In a memo to employees, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said that Jackson's new role is in line with the company's dedication to "leaving the world better than we found it."
IBM and Box plan to work together on three key initiatives: transformation of enterprise work, international reach and security and new content rich apps and solutions. This latter area of focus will impact IBM's MobileFirst for iOS apps. Moving forward, the MobileFirst initiative is expected to lean on Box's cloud APIs for content management and storage.
An experimental algorithm out of Facebook's artificial intelligence lab can recognise people in photographs even when it can't see their faces. Instead it looks for other unique characteristics like your hairdo, clothing, body shape and pose.
This is going to totally impact the Hollywood stunt-double industry.
I don't have any luck in using any of Apple's Bluetooth mouse. Honestly, I wish there is a wired-version of the Magic Mouse.
A number of studies suggest that much pleasure can be derived from actively anticipating a vacation: looking at photos of the places you plan to visit, reading about the culture, making dinner reservations, or simply imagining yourself enjoying your time there.
Maintaining pleasure after a great vacation is more challenging.
I just ignored a problem and it went away. Don't let anyone tell you that it doesn't work.
— Matthew Baldwin (@matthewbaldwin) June 23, 2015Thanks for reading.
The fact that your backup strategy is stupid does not imply that you are stupid. It only means you may not have given careful thought to what disasters could harm your data (theft, fire, hurricane, malware, software bugs, user error, and so on) or exactly what steps you would take if something did go wrong. I don’t want you to have stupid backups; I want you to have such excellent backups that you’re justifiably confident of being able to recover from any sort of data loss. In that spirit, here are ten stupid backup strategies I urge you to avoid.
This is a computer for those privileged enough to be able to use it.
I’m not talking about money, but rather the freedom to not care about the areas where it might be suboptimal for others. It’s for people who are lucky enough that this kind of machine doesn’t demand compromise.
That’s me. I have modest performance needs; the battery lasts all day; I don’t care about ports and connectors. The screen is gorgeous, and more than big enough. The keyboard suits me well.
But the real shame was that without the commerce features, the ComiXology iOS app was completely out of balance. It had been designed as a shop-and-read experience, but was suddenly reduced to “-and-read.” I kept using it for reading—I’d been buying most of my digital comics right on ComiXology’s website for a year—but what was once a smooth experience was now fractured and awful.
Today that all changes with the release of version 3.7 of ComiXology’s Comics app, which introduces a new interface (across not just iOS but also Android and Amazon) featuring customizable lists, improved library options, and the sense that there isn’t a blank space at the heart of the app anymore.
It's a minimal menu bar item that offers access to all of the screenshots you've taken. For the work I do, it's tremendously useful.
The app will showcase the top five things to learn from across the platform’s various topics each day, which are boiled down into a package of videos, memes, infographics, facts, quotes, and other visuals chosen by its team of editors.
Benjamin Lowy’s Walkscapes mash-up multiple images and leave you reeling in a sea of color and motion. With a few apps and clever editing, the series is like seeing a city street through a kaleidoscope (or after a wild night of drinking).
Thanks to apps like DaisyDisk, it’s pretty easy to track down where all your disk space is going, but if you also happen to be running close to full, here are a few culprits that I’ve found might be flying under the radar.
If something goes wrong where Safari either loads and runs slowly, crashes on startup, or is otherwise not functioning correctly, then you might find yourself in a bit of a frustrating situation. If you need to reset aspects of Safari in order to regain functionality, then even though the options for doing so are somewhat scattered, you can still use them to regain use of your browser.
Oh, hello irony. pic.twitter.com/DvEzeRjsJP
— Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur) June 23, 2015For classical labels to be on a level playing field, their streams need to be paid differently from “songs.” But the real problems go much deeper. The classical music industry is suffering for a number of reasons, and streaming is just another factor making their business more fragile. But as the shift to streaming continues, it’s a good idea to not penalize these labels because of the nature of their recordings.
The bigger issue here, however, is not about getting services to pay more – it’s about how that money makes its way through to the artists.
"Swift's letter and Apple's response is mostly theater," he writes. "Nothing here to suggest Apple treats artists more fairly than anyone else." Other services, like Spotify, YouTube, Pandora and others, all pay artists for their free tiers and trials too, he argues. Apple isn't going above and beyond in any way, it's just on the same level as everyone else.
The tech-embracing among us may actually use QR codes quite often — while boarding flights and trains, to get into music shows, to pay for sandwiches using LevelUp — but the interaction always involves holding up our codes to someone else’s scanner, never the other way around. Except for the occasional optimistic marketing campaign, the noisy grids have dissolved quietly into product packaging and subway ads.
In China, however, people scan QR codes all the time.
One of the biggest threats it faces is the rise of smartphones as the dominant personal computing device. [...] This is a challenge for Wikipedia, which has always depended on contributors hunched over keyboards searching references, discussing changes and writing articles using a special markup code. Even before smartphones were widespread, studies consistently showed that these are daunting tasks for newcomers.
Any restaurant that sells both fries and onion rings will put a ring in your fries, or a fry in your rings, to make u regret your choice
— drewtoothpaste (@drewtoothpaste) June 22, 2015Thanks for reading.
Cue says that Swift’s letter, coupled with complaints from indie labels and artists, did indeed prompt the change. He said he discussed the about-face with Apple CEO Tim Cook today. “It’s something we worked on together. Ultimately, we both wanted to make the change.”
Cue says Apple will pay rights holders for the entire three months of the trial period. It can’t be at the same rate that Apple is paying them after free users become subscribers, since Apple is paying out a percentage of revenues once subscribers start paying. Instead, he says, Apple will pay rights holders on a per-stream basis, which he won’t disclose.
Sure, there’s a valid argument to be made for this being a worthwhile way to win new ears and end up making more money overall. But that’s not an excuse to behave thoughtlessly or further marginalize the value of someone’s work. If there’s a burden of subsidy to driving the adoption of a new service, that burden is on Apple, right?
It seems like there’s a misunderstanding that you’re crying foul or accusing Apple of something shady, when I believe you’re just using your position to argue for the fairest possible deal.
Microsoft has done something that seemed inconceivable. Its latest mail app for iPhone and iPad beats Apple on its own turf. What were the chances that Redmond would spawn a mail client for iOS that's slicker, more usable and more powerful than Apple's nearly ubiquitous Mail? Well they've done it so convincingly that it surely isn't a fluke.
The lazy days of summer provide a great time to tempt the tinkerer out of kids. With this collection of apps, kids can "gear up" for summer engineering fun by playing games that turn them into inventors. By solving mechanical puzzles, they will learn how simple machines work. The digital wacky machines they build may spark the desire to design their own Rube Goldberg-type machines.
The latest OS X release, Tweetbot 2, is a welcome update with a more appealing design, but it still has some room to grow to feel polished and fully up to date. Given Tapbots’ ongoing development on both platforms, it’s easy to see where things are going, but they can’t get full marks for this version without further revisions.
The company considers details including color palettes to suit local tastes, Cook said in an interview in the June 17 Chinese-language version of Bloomberg Businessweek, published under license by Modern Media Holdings.
The decision to offer a gold iPhone last year reflects in part the popularity of that color among Chinese users, he added. Greater China, which includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, is now Apple’s second-largest market and has become a battleground for the company as it vies with Samsung Electronics Co. and Xiaomi Corp. for smartphone supremacy.
I will admit it. In my not–quite five months as NPR's Ombudsman, I've found one reliable source of joy: the Monday morning email—there's at least one each week—from a listener outraged by whatever bad taste joke Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! has told on its latest episode. This Monday, the inbox was overflowing.
German city of Karlsruhe just issued a parking ticket to artist Erwin Wurm for one of his bent car sculptures pic.twitter.com/PFugnxLJjt
— Sham Jaff (@sham_jaff) June 21, 2015Thanks for reading.
The iPhone maker confirmed that it was aware of the XARA weaknesses, and the potential exploits. "Earlier this week, we implemented a server-side app security update that secures app data and blocks apps with sandbox configuration issues from the Mac App Store," an Apple spokesman said in a statement. "We have additional fixes in progress, and are working with the researchers to investigate the claims in their paper."
Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing. I say this with love, reverence, and admiration for everything else Apple has done. I hope that soon I can join them in the progression towards a streaming model that seems fair to those who create this music. I think this could be the platform that gets it right.
But I say to Apple with all due respect, it’s not too late to change this policy and change the minds of those in the music industry who will be deeply and gravely affected by this. We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.
Apple Music syncs with iTunes, the largest digital music store on the planet. If for some reason you can't find the song you want in Apple's 30-million-track streaming library, you'll still be able to buy it through iTunes and listen to it in the same app.
Jeez, Apple Watch. It’s 11 minutes past midnight. Can’t you wait until morning to tell me I’m not making progress on Sunday's fitness goals?
— Andy Ihnatko (@Ihnatko) June 21, 2015
The new "let's publish our applications in places where users are actually going" Microsoft is easier to live with and, paradoxically, has gotten me to buy further into the Microsoft ecosystem than I ever would have done otherwise. For any person or group of people who needs to use the same tools on a diverse mix of hardware and software platforms, in the last year Office has gone from being a non-starter to a surprisingly viable option.
Normally I find the iPhone 6 Plus is fine for emails, admin and short bursts of text, but prefer something with a physical keyboard for longer writing jobs.
There were deadlines to worry about so I decided to push the technology beyond my comfort zone. I wrote a lengthy feature, two news stories and two detailed article outlines during the flight.
It's an app that creates a semi-opaque filter over a photo imported from the Camera Roll, this allows the lines drawn by the user to show up better.
Rudeness and bad behavior have all grown over the last decades, particularly at work. For nearly 20 years I’ve been studying, consulting and collaborating with organizations around the world to learn more about the costs of this incivility. How we treat one another at work matters. Insensitive interactions have a way of whittling away at people’s health, performance and souls.
The award was for Apple VoiceOver, assistive technology which comes pre-loaded on all iOS and OS X devices and turns the iPhone into a speaking and guiding device. Every app, icon and action is illustrated with words. The feature lives under Setting/General/Accessibility. Turn it on and your iPhone will turn into chatty Cathy, literally narrating its entire existence.
In short, it turns that “black piece of glass” into a fully usable device for someone who can’t see or is visually impaired.
They started using Linux at the fortune cookie factory because they heard they could save a fortune. pic.twitter.com/Pi4Z6ykzg0
— Command Line Magic (@climagic) June 19, 2015Thanks for reading.
Despite reports to the contrary, an Apple representative tells Rolling Stone that the company is not threatening to remove music from its iTunes Store by artists who do not sign up for its new streaming service Apple Music. "It will not be taken off," a spokesperson for the company says.
Although not mandatory, the Mastered for iTunes guidelines may be all but unavoidable for engineers and artists who hope to engage with Apple Music as the platform becomes the primary means of music playback on Apple devices.
This is shockingly poor design on Apple’s part, and I hope to see it fixed in iOS 9. The entire point of iCloud Photo Library is to transfer huge quantities of image data, and it’s disrespectful for Apple not to provide a switch to prevent iCloud Photo Library from chewing through cellular data.
Apple has stopped selling the original iPad mini, removing the particularly old hardware from its iPad lineup and standardizing the remaining models around Retina displays and 64-bit processors.
A slew of apps and services have attempted to cash in on the $4.5 trillion travel and tourism industry. Dissatisfied with the fare, Luke Groesbeck—cofounder of a Y Combinator-backed startup—decided to try his hand at creating a discovery and planning app. Groesbeck thinks he has finally cracked the code with Spot, an app that wants to be your go-to for finding the "best places in the world."
Before you hop a plane, train or load up the car this summer, consider adding apps that can make your vacation a little easier or at least more fun.
Totally right answer. Don't know why it was marked wrong. @msdevUK: Honest dev exam (via @imgur) #programmerhumor pic.twitter.com/OCRoCoP1FW
— ElisabethHendrickson (@testobsessed) June 19, 2015This is the most amazing illustration of Pythagoras' Theorem, ever. pic.twitter.com/W0YcLzVPL5
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) June 18, 2015Apple has just announced a replacement program for 3TB hard drives in 27-inch iMacs purchased between December of 2012 and September of 2013—approximately the lifespan of the 2012 iMac, though some of the first 2013 iMacs sold could potentially be affected as well. Apple says the drives "may fail under certain conditions."
This parental warning about Pixar's new "Inside Out" from @aoscott is the best. http://t.co/Ti07P7Wp0F pic.twitter.com/4g6dvqe2pS
— Sarah Pulliam Bailey (@spulliam) June 20, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple should bear the costs of marketing this service.
Only Swift’s back catalog, which is currently available on many streaming services that require users to pay for a subscription — including Rdio and Tidal — will be found on Apple Music, the Big Machine rep said.
They say in marketing that even bad publicity is good -- long term. But when the rich guy fleeces your pocket for pennies to add to his C-Notes, you will remember. They say an elephant never forgets; neither does the artist robbed of his creation.
I would love to say that these new products sound like they're going to be really great. But for those of us who still perversely prefer classical music to pop, these new services seem hopelessly mired in the same flaws that have plagued computer-based music distribution since its beginning.
Working with lists has been made more finger-friendly on OneNote for iPhone. In particular, checkboxes have been enlarged to make checking list items easier, and checking an item now moves it accordingly to the Completed section of the list.
Like NYT Now, BuzzFeed News presents a simple stream of the most important and interesting stories of the moment, most of which come from the app’s eponymous news site while others come from other sources from around the Web.
You can get LibreOffice on OSX with automatic updates, long-term maintenance, and optional professional support, for the first time.
“Inside Out,” the latest computer animated film from Disney and Pixar, comes out in theaters today. And Disney has not one, not two, but three iOS apps that tie in with the movie.
You’ve got some music files on your Mac, and they all look alike in the Finder. If you want to find which ones are AAC files and which are Apple Lossless, what do you do? Well, I’ve got the answer. I also discuss the Case of the Missing Audio Files, and look at some possible ways to view classical music in iTunes.
I have all those amazing toys now, but I still build software with text. What bothers me is that despite slightly improved auto completion, I cannot recall any enhancments to text editing. Refactoring doesn't work, there's no code generation or support for more test driven workflow.
I wrote at a high level how I improved my microblogging workflow before WWDC, but I’d like to use this post to show the surrounding details. I hope it’s useful to other folks who want to control their own content.
Again, the problem is Apple.
pic.twitter.com/REaMgt9j83
— Marko Karppinen (@markonen) June 18, 2015If Twitter does this right, Lightning will make Twitter more accessible, simpler, and friendlier. And it’ll work precisely because it dispenses with everything we currently know about Twitter.
So Nuzzel takes that feed (and feeds from Facebook and other social media) and only shows you the news stories your friends are sharing. The result is amazingly interesting, and requires zero effort: You get a feed of headlines that feel much closer and more relevant to what you're interested in, because they're being tweeted or shared by friends, family, and coworkers. Nuzzel's friends-of-friends feed is often even more interesting because it surfaces stuff from further afield, stuff you didn't even know was news but is buzzing on the outer edge of your social sphere.
The rumor-mill is claiming that there will be a video camera on the next version of Apple Watch. You know, just like Google Glass. Except on your wrist. Unlike your head, your wrist can face any which way. You know, like facing up somebody's skirt.
Not a good idea.
Well. That's not a good sign. pic.twitter.com/c4eX8MSwS0
— Eric Heisserer (@HIGHzurrer) June 19, 2015Thanks for reading.
The short-term fix for these exploits is a combination of new recommendations and requirements to app developers, and additional procedures in the App Store review. “What the App Store can do is run something similar at least to identify—not malicious apps, but at least those vulnerable as targets,” Wang said.
His colleague, PhD candidate Luyi Xing, noted that “Apple should do something to enforce scheme management” as well. However, Xing said that it boils down to being a design problem, rather than an app implementation issue. That will require some deep rethink at Apple, and put some burden on developers as new authentication and registration procedures make their way into App Store requirements.
Neither we nor Luyi Xing and his team have been able to figure out a completely reliable way to solve this problem. We thank them for their help and suggestions during these discussions. But, although there is no perfect solution, there are things that can be done to make such attacks more difficult.
On modern operating systems, applications under the same user are separated from each other, for the purpose of protecting them against malware and compromised programs. Given the complexity of today's OSes, less clear is whether such isolation is effective against different kind of cross-app resource access attacks (called XARA in our research). To better understand the problem, on the less-studied Apple platforms, we conducted a systematic security analysis on MAC OS~X and iOS. Our research leads to the discovery of a series of high-impact security weaknesses, which enable a sandboxed malicious app, approved by the Apple Stores, to gain unauthorized access to other apps' sensitive data. More specifically, we found that the inter-app interaction services, including the keychain, WebSocket and NSConnection on OS~X and URL Scheme on the MAC OS and iOS, can all be exploited by the malware to steal such confidential information as the passwords for iCloud, email and bank, and the secret token of Evernote. Further, the design of the app sandbox on OS~X was found to be vulnerable, exposing an app's private directory to the sandboxed malware that hijacks its Apple Bundle ID. As a result, sensitive user data, like the notes and user contacts under Evernote and photos under WeChat, have all been disclosed. Fundamentally, these problems are caused by the lack of app-to-app and app-to-OS authentications. To better understand their impacts, we developed a scanner that automatically analyzes the binaries of MAC OS and iOS apps to determine whether proper protection is missing in their code. Running it on hundreds of binaries, we confirmed the pervasiveness of the weaknesses among high-impact Apple apps. Since the issues may not be easily fixed, we built a simple program that detects exploit attempts on OS~X, helping protect vulnerable apps before the problems can be fully addressed.
Had a great time meeting customers and our team at the Apple Store Boylston St in Boston. Enjoy your Apple Watches! pic.twitter.com/7AOGyCSW9i
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) June 17, 2015First time controlling a Keynote from my Apple Watch. Weird to have both hands free.
— Robert Sharl (@Sharl) June 18, 2015There’s a “culture of walking and texting” on the Utah Valley University campus, according to conversations with students, but that’s not the main reason Matt Bambrough, the creative director at UVU, came up with an idea to paint a “texting lane” on a staircase leading up to the brand-new Student and Wellness Center. According to Bambrough, it’s first and foremost a design project—the texting lane was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the college-wide epidemic of kids walking around with their faces buried in their iPhones.
It will now enable magazine creators to add more of their own voice to their publications by allowing them to share thoughts and opinions on the news they’re sharing, as well as ask questions, quote text, customize their magazine with links or their own personal photos, and more.
Contrast might not have been the first developer to make one, but it was certainly the first to get it right, and nearly three years after its debut, Launch Center Pro is still the one to beat.
Dark Sky, a weather app specializing in hyper-local forecasts, has hit version 5.0, refreshing the layout, adding advanced alert options, and more. The app also packs advanced functionality for iPhone 6 owners, letting them opt in to sending pressure sensor data for better short-term forecasts.
The definition of insanity is typing the same word over and over again, and expecting autocorrect to not screw it up this time.
— Nick Arnott (@noir) June 18, 2015Back in 2003, software engineer Don Ho wasn’t satisfied with the source code editor he was using for work and decided to take on the challenge of crafting something better. Notepad++ has since become a staple of many users looking for richer features than your OS’s default text editor, and better performance than more bloated options. We caught up with Don to learn about what went on behind the app.
*breaks down in hysterical laughing fit* (from Apple's new "UI Design Dos and Don'ts" https://t.co/vdKLVXCSgu) pic.twitter.com/I9KFKJiFhf
— Sebastiaan de With (@sdw) June 15, 2015Mr Heath said: “If you are running a small label on tight margins you literally can’t afford to do this free trial business. Their plan is clearly to move people over from downloads, which is fine, but it will mean us losing those revenues for three months.”
The non-profit watchdog group has praised the company for its transparent policies regarding how it handles data requests from government agencies.
The announcement included a number of senior departures, as well as a reorganization of existing executives, but the most telling of these changes is, perhaps, the departure of Stephen Elop, Nokia’s ex-CEO. [...] His exit from the company seems to be as strong a sign as any that Microsoft is—at least in spirit—seceding from a crowded smartphone market that has become increasingly difficult to penetrate.
According to the email Apple just sent me, my iTunes Match subscription is due for renewal this June 30th.
Whether this timing is good or bad remains to be seen: the Apple Music web page on Apple Singapore's web site still says "Coming Soon" instead of promising a specific date.
~
Have we invented a new medical term for the condition of the weakening of the heart due to the dropping or potential dropping of one's iPhone onto concrete floor?
Why machines will never replace humans. They just don't understand us. pic.twitter.com/0qeMBxq5mt
— Simon Cobb (@s13mon) June 16, 2015Thanks for reading.
Researchers from Indiana University and the Georgia Institute of Technology said that security holes in both iOS and OS X allow a malicious app to steal passwords from Apple’s Keychain, as well as both Apple and third-party apps. The claims appear to have been confirmed by Apple, Google and others.
[...]
As ever, the best practice is never to allow either your browser or a password manager to store your most sensitive logins, such as for online banking.
This is where the review gets very personal for me. This is how I lost over 40 pounds using HealthKit and Apple Watch.
Some Apple Watch naysayers have predicted that users could become dangerously addicted to their new gadget. Over the last week, I discovered the exact opposite: My watch has helped me unplug from technology more frequently and more meaningfully.
Let me get this straight, Apple: you send me an e-mail outlining the terms under which you will redistribute my content, and you will just assume that I agree to your terms unless I opt out?
The world of RSS feeds and RSS clients is complicated when viewed through a lawyer's eyes.
With the launch of Apple Music exactly two weeks away (set to launch on June 30), indie music publishers say that they have had no contact from the company seeking licenses, leading many in the music publishing community to suspect that the Cupertino, Ca. giant will send a bulk email to publishers with an opt-in contract attached.
The world of education has become a rapidly expanding universe. Thanks especially to developments in technology, distance learning is now commonplace, both in and out of academia, and offerings in the arts are especially plentiful. Want to paint like Jackson Pollock? The Museum of Modern Art offers a course through its website. Interested in honing your skills in jazz and rock keyboard? Check out the online opportunities at the Berklee College of Music.
So it’s unsurprising that the Juilliard School—a brand with instant recognition—has joined the revolution. On June 11, the arts institution presented its recently launched subscription-based iOS app, “Juilliard Open Studios,” at the Apple store in SoHo. Yet, unlike most educational programs on the market, Juilliard’s interactive software is premised not on delivering instruction, but on offering the tantalizing prospect of peeking behind the doors of the school’s legendary studios. Viewers are invited in not to acquire skills, but to become witnesses to the intricacies of the creative process.
A new keyboard for those who use reading glasses or just need larger keys has arrived. Recently released, Viskey provides several features to make typing on your device much easier.
The solution here is to have another Mac handy, and then start the faulty one in Target Disk Mode. This mode starts the system to a basic hardware level that in essence turns your Mac into an external hard drive. From here, you can use a Firewire or Thunderbolt cable to connect your system to another to access your data.
The ability to solve interesting problems is an integral part of doing our best creative work. And doing work that matters means having the guts to try things that might not work.
If we’re a slave to every single new idea then we’ll never have the focus to finish a single thing. And if we’re afraid that our idea might be a bad one, we’ll never even get started.
When one is enervated by future ennui, there’s no vigor left even to ask if this future is one we even want. And even if we ask, lethargy will likely curtail our answers. No matter, though: soon enough, only a wrist’s glance worth of ideas will matter anyway. And at that point, even this short book’s worth of reflections on technology will be too much to bear, incompatible with our newfound obsession with wrist-sizing ideas. I’m sure I’ll adapt, like you will. Living with Apple means marching ever forward, through its aluminum- and glass-lined streets and into the warm, selfsame glow of the future.
"The biggest risk is to not go where your readers are," Times executive editor Dean Baquet said Monday night at Hunter College's Kaye Playhouse, "to not go to places where there are millions and millions of people who want to reach you, and I think that's why we felt we had to experiment with people like Facebook and Apple."
Monster said Apple revoked its authority to make licensed accessories for Apple devices after Monster and its chief executive sued Beats Electronics LLC in January. Monster said the move was retribution for the lawsuit against Beats, which Apple acquired last year for $3.2 billion.
"Apple limited telecoms from setting contract price for its 4, 4S, 5 and 5S models, which is against the law," commission spokesman Chiu Yung-ho told Reuters. The court noted that Apple can still appeal.
A variety of factors likely played a role in this explosion of growth, but it is mainly attributable to the NSA’s surveillance program, which was revealed two years ago, and Apple adding it as a default search option with iOS 8 and Safari 7.1 on the Mac.
Pick up your laptop. Actually, scratch that—read this paragraph first, then pick up your laptop. You are holding one of the most advanced machines ever built in the history of humanity. It is the result of trillions of hours of R&D over tens of thousands of years. It contains so many advanced components that there isn't a single person on the planet who knows how to make the entire thing from scratch. It is perhaps surprising to think of your laptop as the pinnacle of human endeavour, but that doesn't make it any less true: we are living in the information age, after all, and our tool for working with that information is the computer.
Tudor-Locke agrees that the 10,000-step target is "laudable". She says: "Go for it if you want to. In fact, go for 12,000 - go to 14,000. There is no limit we know of that is detrimental to health."
But, she warns, don't treat it as an absolute target. "Rather than be obsessed with a number," she says, "it's just important to not be sedentary."
In other news the quick brown fox FINALLY jumped over that lazy dog pic.twitter.com/yOaS0daygl
— iphone cat (@absrdst) April 29, 2015So what’s so great about Hagoromo chalk? I tried doing a little math with it on some chalkboards at UC Berkeley. The first thing you notice is a shiny, clear coating on the outside — it feels like a thin layer of enamel. That sounds like a minor design element, but it cuts down on the biggest annoyance with chalk: dusty fingers. The chalk is also a tad thicker and sturdier than your typical American sticks. But I’m no chalk connoisseur, and I’ll admit any subtler differences eluded me. “It’s hard to articulate but when I’m using it, I can feel it’s nicer,” said Conrad. “It both flows nicely and it lasts much longer, too.”
Found my section of the drugstore pic.twitter.com/CBLdV2snyH
— jersailles (@jersing) June 15, 2015Thanks for reading.
Developed by Berlin-based Ole Zorn, Editorial was the app that reinvented text automation in 2013 and that pushed me to start working exclusively from my iPad. Editorial is a powerful Markdown text editor that combines visual Automator-like actions with a web browser, text snippets, Python scripts, and URL schemes to supercharge text editing on iOS with the power of automation. I spend most of my days writing and researching in Editorial, and my workflow depends on this app.
It's a fantastic text editor, a superior task manager and a powerful scripting tool. Heck, it even has a terrific browser.
Still, one can’t help but wonder whether Apple backed into their position on privacy. As a cynic, I don’t think that Apple truly has a genuinely profound concern for the issue. Very little in their past would suggest that this is something they care about to the core. They’re a company that has always understood hardware, not software, and they’re fumbling as software becomes something defined by data and cloud and constant connectivity. Google’s view is a post-Internet ideology, and Apple, confused and slightly threatened, is falling back on an argument about privacy.
Here’s the thing: I’m not a fan of people holding up tablets in front of them shooting videos in the street or, heaven forbid, at concerts. It feels that they’re not present, they’re just recording it as a piece of video they may never look at again and distancing themselves from the event as it happens.
But this experiment has won me over. If you shoot judiciously and with a conscious eye to how you’ll use it afterwards, everything changes. Instead of slavishly filming everything, it works better when you deliberately take on the role of careful filmmaker for a few moments every now and again. And then return to enjoying the moment – to, you know, actually being there.
Marrero recommends choosing apps based on individual goals. For some people with diabetes, that’s weight control; others need help tracking blood glucose or remembering to take medication, while some turn to their apps to find community support. Most people I spoke with agreed there’s no one app that does all of that well — yet.
The updates bring new features and performance enhancements with "Adobe Magic" to all of Adobe's Creative Cloud apps, notably including Linked Assets that will allow assets within Creative Cloud Libraries to be updated whenever a change is made, ensuring the update is available to all team members in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.
Users can now pull in existing assets that they have stored in their Creative Cloud Library, which they can then edit in the app. This includes Photoshop documents, along with their individual elements like layers and masks.
Moments, an app launching today on Android and iOS, attempts to rescue the hundreds of photos on your camera roll that feature your friends and let you share them with a few taps. Using the face-recognition technology that powers the suggested tags you see when adding a photo of a friend, Moments scans your camera roll for familiar faces and lets you quickly "sync" them to the subject of the photo.
Three times per hour Look Up gives a gentle reminder to take a rest. It follows the 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes, look at least 20 feet away, for 20 seconds.
Camper’s Helpers by Gerard Guerin is designed to find over 55,000 camping accommodations for you to enjoy across the states and Canada.
Many of you have written in with questions about merging data, selectively printing or exporting data, or gaining access to options that you think should be there. In this column, I’ll try to help, and point you to previous Mac 911s that may offer more in-depth assistance.
Apparently you can put a MacBook to sleep using a magnetic iPad cover... https://t.co/TMJxYgC0FT #itjustworks
— John Johnson (@johnernaut) June 15, 2015Now’s the perfect time to start using QuickRadar. As its name suggests, this project run by Amy Worrall, makes creating or duplicating bug reports much quicker. You’ll also find that a native Mac user interface is much easier to deal with than some web form pretending to be iOS 6.
This repository demonstrates that Chrome will download huge favicon files to the point that they crash Chrome and bring the computer to a halt.
Safari has a similar bug too.
Prices for calling, texting and using data overseas continue to fall, but the larger system relies on a haphazard and incomplete set of agreements among wireless companies from every country on earth. That makes finding the cheapest option that will (mostly) satisfy your needs still a complex task, depending on where you’re going, for how long and with whom.
Apple hasn’t talked about it publicly, but the company is hiring human editors that will curate content for its upcoming News app and work with publications to quickly surface breaking stories.
Here are the real numbers, according to Robert Kondrk, the Apple executive who negotiates music deals along with media boss Eddy Cue: In the U.S., Apple will pay music owners 71.5 percent of Apple Music’s subscription revenue. Outside the U.S., the number will fluctuate, but will average around 73 percent, he told Re/code in an interview. Executives at labels Apple is working with confirmed the figures.
Those totals include payments to the people who own the sound recordings Apple Music will play, as well as the people who own the publishing rights to songs’ underlying compositions. That doesn’t mean the money will necessarily go to the musicians who recorded or wrote the songs, since their payouts are governed by often-byzantine contracts with music labels and publishers.
Everyday I stare at my iPhone, and my iPhone stares back at me, with an icon that has the following instructions: Find Friends.
~
Today is one of those days when I wake up and I decide that I really do not want to talk to any humans. I want a job where I only talk to machines. I want to only buy food from vending machines. And the bus driver of the public bus that I commute in shouldn't be looking at me at all.
Too bad today ended up not like one of those days.
Maybe when I retire.
~
No humans actually read this little web page of mine, right? Esepcially this far down in the page? Only Google Bots and Bing Bots hang out here, right? (Apple News bot probably doesn't know I exist.)
The characters from @DisneyPixar's Inside Out seem like they'd make good emoji. http://t.co/4HwwrQdXva pic.twitter.com/1RBsfZ62et
— Parakeet (@Parakeet) June 15, 2015Thanks for reading.
Because Siri and Google Now will get better over time by integrating apps and services controlled by Apple and Google, respectively -- and because we'll rely more on those virtual assistants -- users will be discouraged from using Google services on Apple hardware.
Because Apple is actively working to replace Google services for OS X and iOS users -- and integrate Apple's alternatives into Apple's operating systems -- Apple users will be increasingly discouraged from using any Google products at all.
In an email sent to paid members, Martin Hering says that all of Vemedio’s products will be ‘discontinued’, with Instacast being the most well known app affected by this. The company says they will keep the servers up for as long as possible so current users will not be left with non-functional apps immediately.
I am not familiar with Instacast, so I'm probably sprouting nonsense here, but a podcast client should not require a corresponding server in order to work. Sure, the app will not be getting new features and bug fixes if the company is no longer around, but the whole architecture of RSS and Podcasting is designed to be decentralized and the podcast client should continue to work.
David Bedford suffers from Parkinson’s disease and can sometimes forget to take one of the five different pills he needs to keep the condition in check. Worse, when he makes half yearly visits to the hospital for a check-up, he cannot remember the details of his daily routine.
Three years after he was diagnosed with the disease, he now uses a mobile phone app to remind him when to take the medication and to act as a diary of how his illness affects him. This attention to detail means that daily log is available before the short meetings he has with his consultant every six to nine months.
One of the newest entries in an increasingly crowded field, the very plain text editor marries minimalism with meticulousness, carving out a very nice concept built around a a clean, smart workspace. Serious writers will undoubtedly be frustrated by the lack of features, but for notes and short blog entries, Paragraphs proves to be a worthy client.
Revisions is a Mac utility that watches your Dropbox folder and keeps track of what is going on in it. Click its menu bar icon and you can see a timeline showing all the activity that has taken place in Dropbox, starting with the most recent.
The release adds support for browsing the Photos for Mac database.
This series — which will probably last a long time — is my attempt at writing about things without actually announcing what they are. I’ve decided I can eat this cake and still have it.
I can't wait to see what Mr Simmons is cooking up.
While Google wants developers to let it index app information wholly, Apple is cautioning developers against that.
Until you use it for a while, and then you start wondering why you didn’t recruit your feet for help years ago. It’s not like they had anything better to do all this time. Sewing machines have foot pedals. Cars have foot pedals. Airplanes have rudder pedals. Why not computers?
2015 saw thousands of shots submitted to the iPhone Photography Awards from over 120 countries around the world. Each shot was entered into one of 19 different categories, including: abstract, animals, architecture, children, flowers, food, landscape, lifestyle, nature, news & events, other, panorama, people, portrait, seasons, still life, sunset, travel, and trees. That covers an amazing range of life and experience, and the photographers really took advantage of it.
No doubt: We’re heading towards a new phase of massive re-intermediation, of reshuffling the layers between the news producers (traditional media houses or pure players) and readers. This raises important questions: What will publishers gain or lose in the process? Will they end up handcuffed to a cluster of gatekeepers or will they reap decisive gains for their business model.
Who becomes the dominant player in this new structure?
Whether it’s music, apps, podcasts, or, coming very soon, syndicated blog content, you’d have to be a fool not to try to get your work into their customer-facing channels. In the case of podcasts, and as it seems with “News,” doing so means providing a feed that points to content you own and which you store on your server. If Apple turns out to be a jerk about it? We can count on other apps and services rising to consume the content in a comparable or improved manner. That’s the way the web works.
The more competition, the better the products. The worst thing that could possible happen to each one of us would be for our favorite company to win, and for everybody else to stop competing.
Having said what I've said about the decentralized nature of podcasting, I have to also say that I use Twitter, a centralized micro-blogging platform that has caused a lot of people a lot of grief.
For now, all I have to say is I can't wait to see what Mr Manton Reece is doing.
~
When I am tired or stressed out at work, I'll take the bus home. I'll trade off with a longer commute over a shorter but more crowded and stressful commute via the subway.
For godsake, apostrophes are not closing quotation marks!
Byte's 1994 special report on software bloat revealed that Lotus 1-2-3 had ballooned to an appalling 5MB of space. pic.twitter.com/GrCcPL4wus
— Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken) June 15, 2015Thanks for reading.
McConnell says that the next phase of the project, which will use behavior-modification methods to encourage healthy behaviors, is about to be launched. App users will be given more personalized feedback about their individual behaviors and risk, based on the American Heart Association’s Life’s Simple 7 guidance. Future tips will include messages on everything from how to manage blood pressure, eat better, lose weight and control blood sugar. Part of the study is to determine whether these type of “pings” used through apps are actually successful at changing human behavior, McConnell told me.
The Upper East Side's new Apple store knows where it stands with the public. It strives to be as inconspicuous as possible, to humbly pay tribute to tradition. And everyone we spoke with outside the store on Thursday seem to think it succeeds.
The decor and showcasing is unique to this location with a new kind of recessed showcase, large chandeliers and black and white artwork.
Apple has finally delivered my dream machine with the new MacBook, for $1,299. It’s so close to perfect that it’s worth thinking about, even if it means getting a first generation product that forces you to make a few compromises.
There’s an underused gem of creative software installed on hundreds of millions of computers worldwide: iTunes. Yes, that’s right, iTunes. You may have thought it was just a media player, or perhaps a management utility for your iOS devices, but it has a little-used visualizer that can enable anyone to create stunning animations.
Deep linking has become one of the hottest topics in mobile over the past year as dozens of startups have launched around using, improving and discovering deep links. All of the big platform companies also have projects to own “the deep linking standard” or the search index for mobile. So, what are deep links and where did they come from?
“Did I look at my phone because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I looked at my phone?”
— Ryan Freitas (@ryanchris) June 13, 2015Apple will have to update its line of iPod nano and shuffle to work with Apple Music, right?
Even death is no excuse to stop marketing your book. pic.twitter.com/njaSVM4XSU
— Chris McCrudden (@cmccrudden) June 13, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple is clear in its belief that users are better off if personal data is stored locally as much as possible. The company makes settings for enhancing privacy relatively clear and easy for its customers. And some of this week’s new product demos were designed to show that local device data, like cloud data, can provide rich, helpful intelligence.
At Apple, your trust means everything to us. That’s why we respect your privacy and protect it with strong encryption, plus strict policies that govern how all data is handled.
The full video from Tuesday night’s live audience episode of The Talk Show, with special guest Phil Schiller.
The PrintCentral Pro iPhone app is a versatile solution that offers a way to output to printers from multiple manufacturers, including non-AirPrint models and ones limited to USB connectivity. It lets you print from a variety of sources, including saved email messages, a built-in Web browser, a number of cloud-based services, your iPhone's photo albums, and your clipboard.
Users must swipe up on the iPhone to show the quick settings menu, hit the AirPlay button, then turn on screen mirroring. After loading the presentation and hitting the play button, it’ll appear on the television, properly formatted to fit the TV screen.
One of the many superpowers of image editing apps that support layers is the ability to combine images into a collage. In this column, you’ll learn to create the ever-popular, oh-so-romantic, soft oval vignette collage in Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Pixelmator. (Sorry, you can’t do this workflow in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or Apple’s Photos, iPhoto, or Aperture.) This technique is perhaps the easiest—and most romantic—way to combine two images into a new and unique piece of art.
Get your apps ready with the latest beta versions of the San Francisco fonts for iOS 9, OS X El Capitan, and watchOS 2. To download, sign in with your Apple ID associated with your Apple Developer Program membership.
Some developers say that being able to use the Digital Crown to control an app would be helpful, while others want to tap into the watch’s Bluetooth technology. And some looked beyond software adjustments to call for hardware tweaks, like better battery life and more sensors.
My new language is great, but it has a few quirks regarding type.
Goodbye, old friend. pic.twitter.com/2SyEhaUW2d
— Casey Liss (@caseyliss) June 12, 2015Pop stars, live music, superlatives: The launch of Apple’s music subscription service at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier this week had it all. However, one thing suspiciously missing from the announcement was any mention of how you’re going to listen to Apple Music in the comfort of your own home. That’s because Apple’s home-audio strategy is in limbo.
According to "sources as well as information available on Linkedin and elswhere," Apple killed a Wi-fi speakers that Beats were working on. Lack of AirPlay support was not cited as a possible reason in this article.
Why so much interest? The music-streaming market is growing rapidly. More than 40m people currently pay to subscribe to a music-streaming service, and this number is increasing by 50 per cent each year. Outstanding questions about low royalty payments to artists persist, but for the customer, at least, the value proposition is obvious—for $120 a year, you get everything. Streaming services are pricey, but once you’ve subscribed to one, you know there’s no going back. Of the original subscribers to Spotify’s first premium offering in 2010, 70 per cent were still enrolled after four years.
This gap in coverage may only be a matter of seconds, but that's enough to expose valuable information like logon credentials.
In the UK, saying you’re “just joking” is how you kill a joke. A real joke comes from convincing people you’re serious, until they think it through themselves and conclude that what was said is so outrageous that it must be jest. The laughter is partly relief. Humor lies in the slim possibility that you might not be just kidding.
Apple introduces new font: “San Francisco.” Shoulda been called “Francisco Sans.“ http://t.co/gB0fDtBywj pic.twitter.com/yNDtZs4aZY
— Boing Boing (@BoingBoing) June 13, 2015Thanks for reading.
To create the newest Apple store to sell iPhones, smartwatches and other modern gadgetry, Apple took a look back at the 1920s.
The new store on New York's Upper East Side occupies part of a Beaux Arts building that originally housed the U.S. Mortgage & Trust bank. Apple sought to restore some of the building's old grandeur by reproducing the original chandeliers seen in old photographs, restoring marble floors and pilasters and turning a bank vault into a VIP showroom.
It’s only been a little over a month since the Apple Watch came out and it’s already changing people’s relationship with their iPhone. I call that is a huge success for the Apple Watch. I did not expect it to make such a difference, but maybe that’s the peruser in me talking.
On the iPhone, there's a new setting to move the tab bar to the bottom and display an extra icon slot in it, including a new My Tweets timeline. In my coverage of Twitter clients last year, I noted how the app's top-oriented design didn't work well with taller iPhones as it often forced me to use Reachability to quickly get to those buttons. The ability to switch to a bottom tab bar makes Twitterrific more comfortable to use, which I believe is essential in a Twitter client I open several times a day.
TextExpander 5 is a no-brainer for anyone who regularly types the same or similar chunks of text, and who wants to speeed up work while retaining flexibility. On an hourly basis, you'll recoup the cost in a matter of weeks; the savings from tedium are priceless. Despite the need for the suggestions feature to be tweaked, previous users should upgrade, as they will benefit from several minor improvements.
Terminology is based on the WordNet project from Princeton University, a large lexical database of the English language. In addition to providing the basics -- thorough definitions and synonyms for words -- WordNet examines word relationships in an effort to deliver a better understanding of a word.
Haven is for the artistic writer. It's for the writer who wants or needs to step away from everything but the writing at hand, most especially if you want to cut out distractions. At its most basic, Haven is a writing tool that presents you with a rather calming view of a landscape instead of that blank screen. It fills your ears with relaxing weather sounds like wind.
It does this by proving users with the option of broadcasting their availability to a select group of friends. You can choose from three options – “Going Out, Flexible, or Busy” – and users can customize who sees their availability, and for how long it’s visible.
Some people love this move. Commenters on Reddit and Ycomb were generally very happy with it. Nick Kolakowski, a technology writer for technology job site Dice, observed, "Apple is positioning the open sourcing of Swift as beneficial to all sorts of developers, not just those who work exclusively with iOS and Mac OS X."
[...]
The real question isn't the license for O'Grady. After all, Apple already has several significant open-source projects: Darwin, the BSD Unix that's OS X's foundation; the WebKit browser engine; and CUPS, the open-source printing system. What Apple hasn't done, however, is support these systems.
A general consensus is that while people are happy to donate their time to creating cool software for the community — and making Safari better! — that generosity understandably doesn’t extend to paying $US100 per year for the privilege.
Google senior software engineer Peter Kasting this week announced that his team has been working to address Chrome for OS X battery hog complaints by improving the performance of the browser on Mac, especially in areas where Safari appears to do better.
Foxconn Technology is in talks to manufacture Apple's iPhone in India, government officials said, in a move that could lower prices in the world's No.3 smartphone market where the U.S. firm trails Samsung Electronics and local players.
Lower production costs could also help Foxconn keep hold of Apple orders amid intensifying competition with nimble manufacturing rivals such as Quanta Computer Inc.
“So far very little is known about content blocking extensions, available in Safari 9 and iOS 9,” said Adblock Plus head of operations Ben Williams from developer Eyeo. “We look nervously at how powerful their block lists will be.”
In advertising, an old adage holds, half the money spent is wasted; the problem is that no one knows which half. This should be less of a problem in online advertising, since readers’ tastes and habits can be tracked, and ads tailored accordingly. But consumers are increasingly using software that blocks advertising on the websites they visit. If current trends continue, the saying in the industry may well become that half the ads aimed at consumers never reach their screens. This puts at risk online publishing’s dominant business model, in which consumers get content and services free in return for granting advertisers access to their eyeballs.
You may have noticed it the last time you went on a long journey -- by foot, by car or by plane: the outbound portion of your trip seemed to take a lifetime, while the (more or less identical) leg that brought you home felt like it flew by. Scientists have noticed this "return trip effect" too, and are beginning to hone their understanding of why we experience it.
On Wednesday, a team in Japan released a new report in the journal PLOS ONE detailing the latest effort to solve the mystery. This group's take? That the return trip effect is created by travelers' memories of their journeys -- and those memories alone.
#Milliondollaridea An app that lets me upload a photo of my kid’s puzzles and sends the missing pieces. PPaaS.
— Susie Ochs (@sfsooz) June 12, 2015Thanks for reading.
Starting cardiopulmonary resuscitation early and using smartphone alerts to increase rates of bystander CPR can save people with cardiac arrest, two new studies find.
"We have proved what has been thought before -- that early CPR is associated with improved survival," said lead researcher Dr. Jacob Hollenberg, from the department of cardiology at South Hospital at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
He said a mobile phone app that alerted laypeople trained in CPR that their help was needed nearby increased the rate of early CPR by 30 percent.
Apple’s biggest problem with News is that it may not be relevant to readers’ interests. By favoring curation and discovery, Apple may recapitulate both push and portals. Neither path is a good one to take. Tear down the garden wall, and make it a push-you-pull-me service, and Apple might just fill an empty spot in readers’ hearts.
We are here because the editor of this magazine asked me, “Can you tell me what code is?”
“No,” I said. “First of all, I’m not good at the math. I’m a programmer, yes, but I’m an East Coast programmer, not one of these serious platform people from the Bay Area.”
[...]
What I’m saying is, I’m one of 18 million. So that’s what I’m writing: my view of software development, as an individual among millions. Code has been my life, and it has been your life, too. It is time to understand how it all works.
Every month it becomes easier to do things that have never been done before, to create new kinds of chaos and find new kinds of order. Even though my math skills will never catch up, I love the work. Every month, code changes the world in some interesting, wonderful, or disturbing way.
FiftyThree, the company behind the popular Paper app and accompanying Pencil stylus, reveled today a partnership with the Guggenheim Museum that saw a group of students use the Paper app for a year. The goal of the program with Guggenheim was to implore kids to think more creatively.
beginning to wonder if dashboard isn’t a strategic priority for apple anymore pic.twitter.com/hcxORUedzP
— Ethan Marcotte (@beep) June 10, 2015Even if you think your app is crash-free, you need to collect crash logs — because there’s no such thing as crash-free: it can only be free of known crashing bugs.
I used to think that means I should write code that’s about 80% as clever as I am. Save a little bit for debugging.
But over the years I’ve come to think that I should write code that’s about 10% as clever as I am. And I’ve come to believe that true cleverness is in making code so clear and obvious that it looks like nothing at all.
With iOS 9, Apple has added a special case of extension for ad blockers. Apps can now include ‘content blocker’ extensions that define resources (like images and scripts) for Safari to not load. For the first time, this architecture makes ad blockers a real possibility for iOS developers to make and iOS customers to install and use.
If iOS users — the majority of mobile web users in the U.S., and disproportionately appealing demographically — can suddenly block all your ads with a simple free download, where is the growth going to come from?
If you thought that websites’ “Install our app” prompts were annoying before, imagine what’s going to happen when the only way to reliably show ads is via a native app?
Continuity is one of the best things about going all in on Apple hardware. With it, you can easily send and receive calls or text messages from your Mac or iPad — even when your iPhone is in another room. But one requirement of using Continuity is that both devices must be on the same Wi-Fi network. With iOS 9, that's set to change, and T-Mobile wants the world to know it's the first major US carrier to offer Continuity through its cellular network.
Hardware aside, lately Apple has had difficulty building the superior applications that truly excite.
The joint venture of DPR Construction Inc. and Skanska USA "will transition completely off the project in the next several weeks," according to an internal email sent to Skanska employees, which I reviewed this week. [...] The email from Skanska USA Chief Executive Richard Cavallaro said that the contractors "and our confidential client were unable to come to an agreement during negotiations for the revised scope of work for its research and development campus in California."
At least two Apple Inc retail store workers complained directly to Chief Executive Tim Cook that the company's policy of checking retail employees' bags as a security precaution was embarrassing and demeaning, according to a court filing made public on Wednesday.
IT’S THERE! IT’S THERE! IT’S THERE! IT’S THERE! IT’S THERE! IT’S THERE! IT’S THERE! IT’S THERE! IT’S THERE! IT’S THER pic.twitter.com/fJANZpbBfv
— Scott Williams (@swilliams) June 9, 2015Looks like the global radio station Beats 1 will not be available in Singapore. There's no mention of Beats 1 on Apple Singapore's web site, the "radio" tab is missing, and the "What you get with your membership" table has one line (i.e. Beats 1) less than other countries' versions.
I do not know whether to blame the record labels' licensing issues, or to blame Singapore government's censorship.
~
The Mac operating system was rebranded as Mac OS when the clone program was introduced. The iPhone OS was rebranded iOS when the iPad was introduced.
What can we look forward now that the Watch OS has been rebranded watchOS? The re-birth of iPod nano and iPod shuffle as pocket watches? The re-birth of iPod Hi-Fi as clock radios?
Most artificial watermelon fragrances and flavors end up smelling like a teenage girl’s shampoo, and tasting about as subtle as a Jolly Rancher candy. But scientists may be one step closer to solving that problem. Perhaps thankfully, there are several very long steps remaining.
We jeered when STAR WARS became all about trade routes but I'd watch a film about the regulatory agency that allowed Jurassic Park to reopen
— Adam Sternbergh (@sternbergh) June 10, 2015Thanks for reading.
Cue thinks that people will pay for Apple Music once they experience its features beyond that. As it turned out, despite rumours that it would undercut Spotify – $4.99 a month was being mooted in October 2014 then $7.99 in February 2015 – the service will cost $9.99 a month after a three-month trial.
Wouldn’t Apple have liked to go cheaper? “No. We always thought ‘$9.99 is the price of an album’, so on a monthly basis that’s great. Where we put all our energy behind was the family plan,” says Cue, referring to the $14.99 option that covers up to six people in a family.
The cost of the family plan sounds great. My daughter will now probably never leave our family plan, and will forever spend my money.
Gruber and Schiller talked about Apple’s desire for creating ultra-thin devices and the criticism it gets for perhaps focusing too much on thinness and not enough on battery life and performance. Schiller claimed that Apple has struck the perfect balance between battery life and thinness, noting that if you want a larger battery in a device, its “heavier, more costly, and takes longer to charge. We model every thickness, every size, every weight and try to figure out what the tradeoffs are. I think we’ve made great choices there.”
So far, I am on Apple's side. Yes, to conserve battery life, I sometimes do not use the devices when I am out and about. But, I also think of it this way -- if the devices are heavy, I will often not bring them out and about either.
(Disclosure: I use public transport, and don't drive. As they say: YMMV.)
As to whether Apple Music is really good, we’ll have to wait and see, but the signs aren’t pointing in that direction. The elevator pitch is that Apple Music is three things, an attempt to tie it to the 2007 introduction to the iPhone. But while the advantages of a multifunction device are obvious, the advantages of a multifunction app aren’t. The App Store’s success is largely based on tightly focused apps, not sprawling suites.
Imagine an alternate reality where the Watch had the exact same Watch face functionality (including complications), the exact same notifications and communications capabilities, the exact same performant Apple apps, the exact same unexpectedly strong battery life, but no apps beyond a promise they were “coming soon.” Surely reviewers would gripe, but with a “It’s already great, and it’s going to get better” sort of vibe. Yet Apple couldn’t bring themselves to say “no”.
The fake email in the iPad’s video picture-in-picture image reads like a one-act tragedy. http://t.co/etQs31Hlj3
— Dan Moren (@dmoren) June 10, 2015The new iPhone app does basically everything its existing online dashboard does, but brings it to an interface more suited for a mobile device. Businesses can also set up notifications for whenever a payment or purchase is made or set up a daily summary.
The latest version of Google Maps, now in the App Store, lets you send any place you search for with Google Maps on your desktop browser right to an iPhone or iPad. Your phone receives it as a notifcation, and once you tap on it, the mobile app will automatically take you to that spot.
The version of Safari that ships with OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’ allows web developers to build custom experiences that work with Force Touch input, similar to how native app developers have had access to that new hardware before now. That means that you can set custom actions for how content on your web page responds to deeper clicks on the trackpads that ship in Apple’s newest notebooks, including the MacBook and MacBook Pro with Retina Display.
App Transport Security allows developers to declare what domains they need secure connections to in a file in their apps, and encourages everyone to use HTTPS exclusively instead of the traditional, non-encrypted protocol HTTP. This is not a requirement yet, but rather a strong encouragement. It shows, however, what Apple wants developers to do in the near future.
If you are reading mail on your iPhone and iPad and a popup appears asking you to re-login to iCloud (or anything else), beware. Security researcher Jan Soucek discovered a bug in the iOS Mail app that allowed an attacker to run remote HTML code when an email is opened.
The attorneys general wanted to know whether Apple pressured the music labels — or whether the labels conspired with Apple and one another — to withdraw support for popular “freemium” services offered by companies like Spotify in favor of Apple’s paid music subscriptions.
Metal for OS X is huge — and it's going to be a much bigger deal on the Mac than it is on your iPhone or iPad. If you use a Mac to produce professional content, chances are, Metal is about to drastically speed up the professional apps you use like Adobe Illustrator and Autodesk Maya.
San Francisco may not be a daring choice for a design-led company, but when creating a font for small screens, variation takes a backseat to clarity. After all, typography isn’t just an element of user interface; on some type-heavy mobile apps, it is the user interface. As the renowned typographer Tobias Frere-Jones explains, type pervades so many user interactions, from the mundane choices like OK/Cancel, to sensitive content like personal data.
Apple is unbundling search, and we have lived for so long with centralised search engines, and Google in particular, that it’s hard to get the full extent of the implications.
The chief operating officer has long been the day-to-day operator, the heir apparent and the right-hand details whiz to the visionary CEO (think Tim Cook to Steve Jobs, back in the day). But, while not yet an endangered species, this breed of corporate executive is definitely seeings its numbers dwindle.
Will there be more radio stations from Apple? Beats 2, 3, etc for different musical genres?
And what will the Chinese radio station(s) be named?
(I am not sure if Apple Music will lanuch in China at the end of the month, but I am surprised that there aren't any Chinese radio stations announced.)
~
iTunes started with music. Then almost everything else -- TV shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks, apps -- were placed under the same brand. (The [curious] exception is iBooks.)
If (when?) Apple moves into buffet of movies and TV shows, or podcasts, or audiobooks, or e-books, will we see the same Apple Music app takes on addition media types too?
The universal symbol for a city’s Metro system is a big “M.” If you see one, wherever you are, you know what to do. It’s like the world got together and agreed on a Bat Signal for mass transportation.
But transit agencies also go to some great lengths to render the letter in a way that’s uniquely theirs. With the help of the Metrobits blog we’ve identified at least 77 different M logo designs that are currently (or were recently) in use—gathered here in no special order (and listed in full at the bottom of this post). Considering that an M consists of a mere four straight lines, the group is a pretty impressive feast of diversity.
I'm a lot more relaxed now that I stopped caring about things
— Jon Rosenberg™ (@jonrosenberg) June 10, 2015Thanks for reading.
Dubbed "Apple Music," the service is both an update to the company's iTunes Store as well as Apple's response to Spotify's industry-leading streaming service and Jay Z's fledgling, all-star Tidal. Apple Music's plan includes a "revolutionary music service curated by the leading music experts we helped handpick," a 24/7 worldwide radio station and "Connect," an "ecosystem" that allows for artists to communicate directly with fans.
It seems Apple is no more immune to the same annoying catalog holes that have nagged other streaming services. But it may prove better at navigating them thanks to people like Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine, and Trent Reznor. That said, hurdles are already coming up. For one, don't expect to stream The Beatles discography without paying for it separately.
So if Apple is launching its own version of radio, where does that leave a station such as Radio 1? And if Apple’s idea of radio doesn’t turn out to be radio as we know it, what does that mean for the very notion of radio?
In El Capitan Apple is applying the search functionality of Siri to text searches done via spotlight. You can ask for information on the weather, or on the scores from a hockey game. You can also ask for very specific items, such as the query in the image above where Spotlight is used to find a set of Keynote slides about a natural park that were sent by a certain person.
There are two areas of performance that need to be considered. The first is raw speed, while the second is the frame rate of animations. El Capitan tackles some of the issues with the first aspect, but Apple has definitely been focusing on the second aspect with their announcement that the Metal graphics API is coming to OS X.
In iOS 9, Siri can pull up photos and videos stored on your device. More impressively, Siri becomes a smarter assistant by looking at how you use your iPhone at any given moment and recommending ways for you to use it next, interpreting natural language into commands. For example, when you’re looking at a webpage on Safari, you can create a Siri reminder by saying “Siri, remind me about this later,” and Siri will then refer back to the webpage you are browsing.
On stage, Apple touted that iOS 9's new architecture allows the update to be delivered in a much smaller download than previous versions. The thinning of actual apps could also be a huge boon for those with limited storage space on their devices. It will likely allow developers to build their app packages with just the essential code and libraries needed to guarantee functionality. That would remove some of the legacy cruft that could fatten up an otherwise economically coded app.
The big change — or at least, the one with the most potential to change Apple Watch's use — is native apps. Apple says there are already "thousands of apps" that are Watch compatible (which represents just a small number of the App Store's current catalog). With the new SDK, developers will be able to access a number of Watch functions.
Newsstand required custom app development for each publication or the adoption of a third-party iOS publishing platform, such as those offered by 29th Street Publishing, Richie, or TypeEngine. The News app does away with that, relying on interpreting existing websites’ HTML as well as a new markup specification called Apple News Format that publications (and conceivably blog platforms) will be able to produce from their content-management systems. Apple’s preliminary News app site provides scant detail so far about the format, but quite a bit of information about everything else.
I’d like to know more about this news reader app Apple just announced, let me just search “Apple News” that should do it
— Jim Ray (@jimray) June 8, 2015Jennifer Bailey, a 10-year Apple veteran and vice president of Apple Pay, described the new changes to the company's mobile payments system (including support for the UK) and vice president of product marketing Susan Prescott outlined the company's News app.
Today, Apple announced that Swift 2 was on its way, with a number of new features and better performance. But perhaps the most striking thing is that the whole codebase—the compiler and standard libraries—would be open sourced, with code that works on Linux released later this year.
Apple has consolidated its developer program, bundling together access to developer tools and pre-release software builds for iOS, OS X and watchOS all under one umbrella.
So, could app developers get Connect pages where we could connect with our audiences?
Never mind, I zoned out.
— Greg Pierce (@agiletortoise) June 8, 2015Jott, a messaging app that works without a data plan or WiFi connection, has caught on among junior high and high school students, according to co-founder Jared Allgood. He says the app more than doubled to half a million active users in March, up from 150,000 active users previous.
Text messages usually travel by way of your phone to the nearest cell tower. Then they get routed to other cell towers to reach the person you are texting. However, Jott can send messages from one device to another without any cell service as long as those texting are within close enough proximity to each other.
OutlineEdit is a clean, easy to use outliner, which is ideal for those who want to make outlines, but don’t need a more powerful tool. Even if you don’t make outlines, OutlineEdit is the kind of app that can help you get started.
I watch the Apple WWDC to learn what new un-deletable apps will show up on my phone soon.
— Matt Haughey (@mathowie) June 8, 2015Easy: 18.
#wwdc pic.twitter.com/VxM1tjDS0P
— Aral Balkan (@aral) June 8, 2015Thanks for reading.
Rise and shine, developers! #WWDC15
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) June 8, 2015The windbreaker-style swag jacket lacks an Apple logo, instead simply stating "WWDC 2015" on the front with a large "15" on the back, nearly identical to the jackets Apple gave attendees last year.
There are a couple differences, principally the use of the San Francisco font that alludes to the company's new Apple Watch, which promises to get prime developer attention at the week-long conference.
Now that the language has been around in one form or another for about a year, we checked in with a wide swath of iOS and OS X developers to see just how things were progressing. Are there any other things about Swift that haven’t quite caught up to Objective-C? Are Apple’s promised improvements panning out? And what kind of things do developers want for future versions of Swift?
It seems to me that the list of things developers like and dislike about Swift has more or less remained constant throughout the year.
While Morris didn’t reveal any details about Apple’s pricing, he emphasized several times that he much prefers paid streaming services to ad-supported ones from a financial perspective. What’s more, he was clearly enthusiastic about the Apple launch, and said he expected it to represent a kind of “tipping point” that would accelerate the shift to streaming.
Watching Cook interact with some of the scholarship winners — including Kiera Cawley, a 12-year old from New York who has been coding since she was 9 — it was clear this was more than just a photo op for him. He talked with the winners about their apps and about their backgrounds, keenly interested in what made them tick.
I sat down with Cook, a relatively reclusive interviewee, and asked why it was important that Apple ramp up its efforts in diversity. His answer was unequivocal: "It's the future of our company."
You have an insane amount of choices for email clients on the iPhone and each does something a little differently than the rest. Shockingly, our pick for the best of these options goes to Microsoft Outlook. Yep, we’re surprised too.
The update improves automation capabilities, with automatic footnotes and endnotes, a faster table tool for Excel integration with table styles, and text variables for automatically populating reoccurring fields (such as running headers).
So the C-type USB connector that the current Macbook uses as a charger and data port is rapidly evolving into the One Ring to Bind Them All for data comms — or rather the One Cable (with an embedded microcontroller at each end to handle synchronization/protocol negotiation because this shit is about totally bonkers bandwidth). As TBolt also carries PCIe channels this means basically any CPU-accessing peripheral, like GPUs or disk interfaces, can present directly over it.
Apple Inc. is assembling a high-speed network and upgrading how it builds data centers, a push to be more competitive with Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in cloud services, people familiar with the plans said.
In old-fashioned 19th-century imperialism, the Christian evangelists made a pretense of traveling separately from the conquering colonial forces. But in digital imperialism, everything travels as one, in the form of the splendid technology itself: salvation and empire, missionary and magistrate, Bible and gun. For all that the world-changing talk of Silicon Valley gets parodied, it is not just empty rhetoric. Over the past decade, it has helped draw so many of the nation’s most driven college graduates to Silicon Valley, the one place in 21st-century America that promises to satisfy both their overweening ambition and their restless craving for social uplift. These unquiet Americans have gone on to design tools that spread values as they create value — a virtuous circle for all who share their virtues.
33 standing hours today. I’m glad I’m not the only one who has difficulty coding around time zones. pic.twitter.com/Bo70HdyeHb
— James White (@thecolourfool) June 7, 2015Thanks for reading.
Controlling the Ecobee3 with your iPad isn't as convenient as controlling it with your iPhone or Apple Watch, but it can be even more powerful!
Despite this, affected space bars will usually work when pressed in the center. This along with additional pressure activating the key suggests the issue is a mechanical one, meaning that it cannot be addressed by a software or firmware update.
The learning I now have is that freemium can certainly drive better downloads. But each app is different. Some app ideas simply don't lend themselves to a freemium model, financially speaking.
— Sam Thonis (@SamThonis) June 6, 2015
Am I surprised that young designers who haven’t suffered the ravages of presbyopia tend to have lots of closely spaced options at the small end of the scale and only big jumps at the large end? Of course not. But their time is coming, and when they can no longer read 12-point text comfortably, I’ll be laughing so loud my nurse will have to come in and sedate me.
Me too.
The tech industry's most influential company imparts powerful lessons -- with an emphasis on design and the customer experience that have bolstered its own phenomenal success and enhanced the prospects of some of its progeny. But it also seems to hobble the future opportunities for others, leading to this odd but undeniable fact: Apple, a seeming hotbed of creativity, has spawned surprisingly few high-profile startups.
What happens when you type #PRIDE into a new Google spreadsheet! h/t @ChristineCassis pic.twitter.com/1l1Be65Ar4
— Victor Ng (@victomato) June 5, 2015Thanks for reading.
Google isn’t getting transaction fees from bank issuers, said people familiar with the situation. That is because Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., which operate the dominant payment networks, recently standardized their “tokenization” card-security service and made it free, preventing payments services from charging fees to issuers.
The rules may prompt changes in Apple’s agreements with banks. Some bank executives said they are unhappy with sharing fees and may use Google’s no-fee arrangement to try to persuade Apple to alter its deals. One possible leverage point: As Apple Pay expands outside the U.S., Apple may need to negotiate terms again. The bank executives didn’t want to be identified.
The top reasons retailers cited for not accepting Apple Pay were insufficient customer demand, a lack of access to data generated in Apple Pay transactions and the cost of technology to facilitate the payments. Some merchants said they were holding out because they plan to participate in a new mobile payment system to be launched by a coalition of retailers later this year.
Originally, Apple Legal chose to pursue the matter with AltConf after they believed that the alternative conference was charging people directly to watch the Apple stream. After receiving clarification that this was not the case, Apple continued to prohibit AltConf from showing the stream until now. Apple will continue to not allow AltConf to stream individual developer sessions at WWDC through the week.
be a tech blogger for a few years and you accumulate 15,000 photos
of your struggle to take a photo of a phone pic.twitter.com/FUc9npFeHZ
— Casey Johnston (@caseyjohnston) June 4, 2015There’s no shortage of nit-picking gamers who feel they could easily make better video games than what’s being released every week. And thanks to a new iPad app called Toy Engine, they can put their money where their mouths are and design their own side-scrolling video game, even if they’ve never written a single line of code.
If you pluck someone off the street, whether in New York or Wichita or Seattle or Sacramento, and ask them how many steps people should aim for per day in order to get enough physical activity, they’ll probably tell you 10,000. In an age in which pedometers are cheaper, more accurate, and more feature-rich than ever, this number has taken on almost mythical proportions — a lofty-sounding goal (in reality, it’s approximately five miles, and a reasonably active person can pull it off fairly easily) that separates the active-lifestyle haves from the slothful have-nots.
But is there any medical reason to embrace this number? Not really. That’s because the 10,000-steps-a-day recommendation has nothing to do with sedentary, fast-food-drenched circa-2015 America. Rather, the recommendation first popped up in a very different food and environment: 1960s Japan.
who else looks up "mac keyboard symbols" on the regular because they don't speak fucking elf pic.twitter.com/IOJB8mw7Gr
— hellninjasatancrying (@jennschiffer) June 5, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple overnight removed the option to purchase a new iPhone on a two-year contract with AT&T on the Apple Online Store, eliminating the ability for customers to purchase an iPhone for a subsidized price of $199 or $299 through the carrier. Apple now sells iPhones on AT&T exclusively through the AT&T Next carrier financing program, while two-year contracts remain available through Verizon and Sprint.
Apple today shifted its messaging concerning Apple Watch try-on appointments, which were required in the early days following the wearable's launch to be able to interact with and size the various models of the Watch. The messaging of try-on appointments has now largely vanished from the Apple Watch's online storefront, with a notification encouraging customers to visit their local Apple Watch store for workshops on the device or "just walk in to try Apple Watch on."
Tweetbot 2 fully embraces the Yosemite aesthetic that was introduced in OS X last year while still maintaining much of the same functionality and layout with which users are already familiar. Everything has been flattened, and timelines that previously sported a light gray tone are now pure white.
Sunrise for Apple Watch, which I've tested over the past month, puts the focus on viewing what's coming up, with an elegant UI and a glance that make it easy to check and act on upcoming events.
Notes in Instapaper 6.4 are simple and well integrated with the rest of the app. As you're reading, you can select text to bring up a redesigned action menu with options to copy, define, highlight, add a note, and share. Notes are comments added to highlights: you can highlight text first and then tap the highlight to add a note, or you can add a note right away and the selected text will also be highlighted. Notes are a fantastic way to bring your own thoughts into an article while also ensuring they stay out of the way thanks to highlights.
I often get questions about managing audiobooks with iTunes, and this week I look at two of them. One is about replacing artwork on audiobooks downloaded from Audible, and the other looks at the new way iTunes 12 organizes audiobooks. I also talk about upgrading old iTunes Store music files, and finding all the tracks that iTunes says are not found.
If you’ve asked my advice for a technical question over the last few days, you might have heard the answer “Well you could do [some technical detail] but it’s probably better to just wait until Monday.”
The question isn’t so much “Will Swift change?” so much as “How much is Swift about to change?” It’s pretty much given that Swift isn’t approaching a full stop any time soon despite the 1.x name. As a friend put it, “Think of it as Swift X-1″.
All our mobile app navigation woes are over. Ladies and gentlemen, the backburger icon: pic.twitter.com/aFo9kixL0M
— Jeff Gilfelt (@readyState) June 4, 2015In a letter received by the leaders of AltConf, it was revealed that Apple is cracking down on the live streaming of its WWDC video content at events other than its own.
My family photos are the most important files I have on my computer, and I very rarely share any photos of my kids publicly. But ironically I’m willing to overlook some of the privacy concerns around this exactly because the photos are so valuable to me. I want multiple copies in the cloud, and I want the power of search that Google has built.
With the new version of Facebook Messenger for iOS and Android, users must choose to share their location manually.
Every time I link to a Macworld article, I feel bad. Auto-play videos.
I've really got to get out of the habit of crumpling up and discarding people's business cards while they're still talking to me.
— Max Temkin (@MaxTemkin) June 5, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple will begin selling some models of the Apple Watch starting in two weeks, according to a press release from the company today. Also, on June 26, we’ll see Watches go on sale in seven more countries, including Italy, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and Taiwan.
All orders for Apple Watch which were placed in May will ship to customers within the next two weeks, too – except for the 42mm Space Black Stainless Steel model, which has so far been the slowest to reach pre-order customers.
Apple today announced a voluntary recall of all Beats Pill XL speakers due to the rare possibility that the battery in the speakers may overheat and pose a fire safety risk. Apple advises all customers to stop using the Beats Pill XL speakers and will issue a $325 refund or Apple Store credit to affected customers. The recall does not extend to other Apple or Beats products.
Apple has added a new support document on its website that confirms the third-generation Apple TV or later can be used to control HomeKit-enabled accessories when you are away from home using an iOS device.
Sumoing, the company behind Camo and Repix, has released a new app called Relook, which is designed to enhance whatever native beauty subjects might possess. Its non-destructive retouching technology is engineered to diminish the appearance of pores, wrinkles, oil and highlights while at the same time preserving a natural look to skin tones. And of course, it’s not just for selfies.
It lets you scan your iMessages for photos and movies, and then download them to keep them along with the rest of your photos.
The new streaming service, simply called Showtime, will launch on July 12, coinciding with season premieres of Ray Donovan and Masters of Sex. It'll cost $11 per month, with full access to Showtime's catalog of TV shows, movies, documentaries, specials, and sports programming. It also includes access to Showtime's live TV feed on either the east coast or the west coast.
Pebble recently began sending very happy emails: It was telling backers of its Kickstarter campaign for the new Pebble Time smartwatch that their watches are on the way. But then Pebble dropped a bomb: The iOS software necessary to set up and use the Pebble Time watch with an iPhone is “still in review” at Apple. And it’s been “in review” for 43 days, says Pebble.
If Apple truly cares about our privacy then it should stop talking about how important it is and start building superior cloud-based services we want to use — then it can protect us.
I am wondering if I can blame discoveryd for my MacBook not detecting my Magic Mouse this morning.
~
Speaking of mouse, I do wish Apple will come out with a wired-version of the Magic Mouse. The bluetooth connection between my Mac and the Magic Mouse is often flacky and unreliable.
Of course, given that the latest MacBook has only one USB-C port, I don't think I should be holding out any hope for a wired Magic Mouse.
I don't know how kids these days will learn patience without VHS tapes.
— Nate Pruitt (@N8overflows) June 4, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple will be closing its official Company Store at its 1 Infinite Loop campus later this month and plans to relaunch a modernized version of it this fall, according to sources familiar with the plans.
If you are flying all the way to San Fracisco for WWDC next week, it may worth your while to pop over to the Company Store at Cupertino.
Last fall, however, Koeslag set off on a very different, decidedly 21st-century project: a smartwatch. In response to Apple’s plans to introduce a high-tech watch this year, the chief executive of Frédérique Constant, Peter Stas, decided the company would produce its own. It would not be a minicomputer with a screen, like Apple’s. Instead, it would combine the functions of a Fitbit, a device that tracks physical activity, with a traditional Swiss timepiece, a $1,200 entry-level Frédérique Constant watch. A Silicon Valley company would produce the tiny sensors that count steps and measure sleep cycles, and this information would be transmitted to a phone through a Bluetooth connection. The phone would also control the watch — resetting its hands in different time zones, for example. From the outside, the watch wouldn’t look “smart” at all, but it would be packed with electronics. Koeslag’s job was to bring to life this chimera of Swiss engineering and Silicon Valley wizardry.
Koeslag faced a significant problem, though: He had never worked with chips and sensors before. He didn’t even own a soldering iron. Swiss watchmakers don’t need them; their devices are put together with screws and screwdrivers.
This made my day: pic.twitter.com/gQEYjNMq4H
— Charly (@MenGherCharles) June 2, 2015When it comes to fitness, it’s important to think carefully about what your goals are, and where you find motivation. The Apple Watch will shine if your goals are simple and broad: move more. That’s particularly true if you’ve never looked to an iPhone app (like Move) or a Fitbit-like fitness tracker, or if, like many people, you stopped wearing a Fitbit after a while. The Apple Watch doesn’t innovate in this space, but its big advantage is that people will buy and wear it for other reasons.
For those who are interested in more flexibility or more analysis of their exercise data, Apple’s apps are currently disappointing. That shouldn’t be too surprising; Apple puts a lot of effort into marquee apps like Mail and Safari, but ancillary iOS apps like Reminders, Notes, Stocks, Weather, and Podcasts are basic offerings that many users replace with more-capable independent apps. I anticipate that happening in a big way with fitness-related apps over the next year.
The new Google Photos brings the company’s expertise in artificial intelligence, data mining and machine learning to bear on the task of storing, organizing and finding your photos. And that, combined with its cross-platform approach, makes it the best of breed.
Spark splits your emails up into three sections – important notes, “pins” or starred emails, and all the rest. It is also Apple Watch-ready and offers an excellent client for assessing the state of your inbox from your wrist.
Perhaps because it chooses and knows its own limits, I liked Blocs in spite of them. It’s lovely to look at and, once mastered, a pleasure to use.
Mozilla today updated Firefox 38 to version 38.0.5. A small bump like this usually indicates just a few changes here and there, but this time is different: A new Firefox Hello tab sharing feature and Pocket integration have been added.
To get more enterprises on board, Revel is launching wired ethernet connections, a move that it hopes will convince large retail businesses to replace their cash registers with iPads.
Your code solves a small problem perfectly, but it just isn’t fast enough for the real world. Sometimes the solution can be to just find a bigger computer. Luckily almost every computer has a bigger computer inside it: the graphics hardware. Where your computer’s CPU might have 8 cores, its GPU can have hundreds. OpenCL is a standard framework that gives you access to all that power.
"Like many of you, we at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security," Cook said. "We can, and we must provide both in equal measure. We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy. The American people demands it, the constitution demands it, morality demands it."
While Cook did not name companies specifically, he made a clear reference to Google’s recently-launched Google Photos service, to hammer home the intended targets of his comments.
“We believe the customer should be in control of their own information. You might like these so-called free services, but we don’t think they’re worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data-mined and sold off for god knows what advertising purpose,” he said. “And we think some day, customers will see this for what it is.”
On Monday, I was dubious about Thunderbolt’s future as an offered port on all but Apple’s highest-end Macs. Today, I’m guardedly optimistic that Thunderbolt 3 will be the main (if not only) connector on the Mac line in the near future.
Following last week’s discovery that receiving an obscure text string could cause the iOS Messages app to crash, a similar bug has been discovered in the Skype app on iOS, Android and Windows devices. On all these devices, chat history is loaded when the app re-opens, causing it to immediately crash again.
Remember the first time you discovered ‘View Source’ and it felt like you hit the jackpot but really your life was ruined forever after?
— .DS_Storoz (@brittanystoroz) June 2, 2015Thanks for reading.
Ahead of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, several of the company's HomeKit partners are today announcing the availability of the first HomeKit-compatible products. HomeKit is Apple's home automation platform, first introduced at the 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference.
The first three companies to announce completed HomeKit-compatible products that will be available for purchase shortly are Lutron, iHome, and Elgato. Lutron is debuting its Caséta Wireless Lighting Starter Kit with Smart Bridge, while iHome is announcing its iSP5 SmartPlug, and Elgato is launching its "Eve" connected home sensors. Ecobee and Insteon also announced new HomeKit-compatible products today.
Intel has chosen to join other companies who have embraced new USB-C technology. The company has announced that Thunderbolt 3 will be released with USB-C connections.
Apple includes seven short videos, each around 15 seconds long and set to a backing track, in a new section of its "Shot on iPhone 6" website that debuted in March. The World Gallery of films joins an existing section filled with photos taken by everyday iPhone 6 users.
Cool. I hope to see great panorama photos soon.
We've said before that if you spend your time at a Mac keyboard, then this is for you and you should get it. All we'd add now is the word "very."
Released with an initial set of compatible links/apps such as Twitter, Overcast, SoundCloud, Spotify, Kickstarter, and more, Opener allows you to avoid tapping buttons in web views to launch associated apps; Opener can automate the process by resolving links and launching them inside apps with an extension.
These mean that to be compromised, you will have to specifically download the installer from a malicious site, and then purposefully open it and then supply your administrative password when prompted. As such, there are several approaches for avoiding these requirements and keeping your system safe.
A fault in OS X may exist for some users, where external drives unexpectedly eject and cause the system to display a “Disk ejected improperly” warning message. This usually occurs when the system is idling, such as when it is asleep, but at times may happen in the middle of file transfers or when browsing the drive for various files. When this happens, the drive’s view will disappear and all activity from it will halt, interrupting the transfer process.
For those who are new to the Mac platform, zapping the PRAM is an age-old tradition that goes back to the classic Mac OS days.
Apple quietly made a number of changes to the way it features and organizes mobile applications in the iTunes App Store in May that are of particular interest to mobile game developers. Previously, developers relied on algorithmically generated sections highlighting new and trending titles as a way of having their games found, but now many of these lists are gone.
Now missing are lists like “New,” “What’s Hot,” and “All iPhone (Free & Paid),” for example. In their place, including for the first time ever in the Games’ subcategory pages, are editorially curated lists instead.
Your average scripter likely isn't writing a whole lot of proofs or going through the rigors of formal program verification, generally. Which is fine because your average scripter also isn't writing software for jet airliners or nuclear power plants or robotic surgeons. But somebody is—and the odds are pretty good that your life has been in their hands very recently. How do you know they're not a complete hack?
Well, you don't really. Which prompts the question: How is this sort of code tested?
So about 1 ½ years ago I decided to teach myself to code. Today I'm starting my first job in tech. Whoop!
— Lucie (@Autofocus) June 1, 2015Speaking of the imminent retail launch, Ahrendts told employees that “this is where the rubber hits the road, and now we need to make sure that we are above and beyond ready.” She added that Apple needs to “make sure that [it has] the best customer experience and that [this launch] is faster, smarter, and better than [Apple has] ever done before.” Because of the various Apple Watch models, Bean calls this a “different launch” in comparison to past products debuts.
Typo can no longer sell any keyboards for devices with a screen smaller than 7.9-inches as a result of a recent settlement with BlackBerry.
Apple will indeed reveal a new streaming music service next week, according to the Wall Street Journal, and said service will cost $10 per month and provide unlimited listening. The service will be similar to Spotify in features and function, but won’t offer a free, ad-supported on-demand tier across the catalogue, instead opting to leave that for iTunes Radio, which will gain human-hosted and programmed channels.
The Cupertino technology company has told network executives the planned unveiling will be postponed because Apple has yet to finalize the licensing deals. Industry executives predict Apple’s Web TV offering may not launch until later this year, or in 2016. Technology and money issues remain sticking points.
I've spend about five minutes wondering why one of the iPhone app I'm using simply cannot connect to the internet.
Five minutes later, I remembered I've turned off celluar data for this particular app.
Did the latest version of iOS removed that annoying dialog that helpfully let me know that I don't have celluar data turned on for the app everytime I use the app? Because, I don't recall seeing that dialog box.
Either that, or I have been so well-trained by Apple that I don't even recall seeing that dialog box anymore.
~
I don't really like a lot of the gestures on iOS.
On the Lock Screen, I often accidentally launch the camera when I just want to launch Control Center. Also, I often fail to go back to the previous screen by swiping from left to right. (This seems to work worse on some apps.) After a few tries, I usually just give up, shift my phone in my hand, and tap on the back button on the top-left corner. And the drag-to-refresh gesture just isn't satisfying, like how an headphone clicks satisfyingly into the headphone port on an iPod.
But drinking coffee shortly after waking up, as it turns out, is actually a bit counterproductive. Not only does it undermine the caffeine's effect, but it tends to lead people to build a tolerance for the drug, thereby diminishing its effect down the road.
That brief moment between accidentally hitting ⌘-Q and when the app actually closes, and you foolishly hope “maybe I didn’t actually hit Q.”
— Nick Arnott (@noir) June 1, 2015Thanks for reading.
To many users, it looks like Apple pulled a bait-and-switch, promising a certain feature and not delivering it. Apple needs to say whether the change is because of faulty heart rate sensors – which means they have a bigger issue – or because of battery life. And if it’s the latter, they should allow users to choose whether or not the Apple Watch checks their heart rate every ten minutes. Let users decide how they want their battery usage to work.
However, if the heart rate sensors are faulty, simply turning them off, after promising this feature, is a mistake. They should fix them, whether through a software update, or by exchanging the devices. They promised a feature, and they can’t simply pretend that they never did so.
A zero-day software vulnerability in the firmware of older Apple computers could be used to slip hard-to-remove malware onto a computer, according to a security researcher.
Vilaca found it was possible to tamper with an Apple computer’s UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface). UEFI is firmware designed to improve upon BIOS, which is low-level code that bridges a computer’s hardware and operating system at startup.
Available free for OS X and Windows, Encrypto wraps files with AES-256 encryption prior to you sending them on their merry way. Drag-and-drop one or more files onto a small window, add a password (and optional hint), click Encrypt, and within seconds the files are securely swaddled and ready for electronic delivery.
The basic idea behind Tally is to let you tap the screen to increment a counter.
SanDisk unveils new hard drives including Type-C portable SSDs.
It’s frustrating to see people complain about bad web performance. They’re often right in practice, of course, but what’s annoying is that it is a completely unforced error. There’s no reason why web apps have to be slow. The technology to make fast web apps is here — we just have to take advantage of it.
"the most exciting part of computer programming" pic.twitter.com/5aapjXmNZt
— Neil Williams (@neillyneil) May 31, 2015Don't read comments anymore.
I wonder if that also applies to Twitter.
I just want to be as happy as a character in the first half hour of a horror movie
— Megan Amram (@meganamram) May 31, 2015Thanks for reading.