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.