The subtle difference in El Capitan is that we’re actually seeing new features come to both iOS and OS X at the same time rather than existing on iOS first and then trickling down to the Mac later. Many of the biggest, most noticeable changes here are the same ones you saw in iOS 9 two weeks ago. The new Split Screen multitasking mode, tweaks to multitouch gestures, changes to services like Spotlight , and overhauled apps like Notes all fall into this category. Others, like System Integrity Protection, are merely iOS-inspired.
Really, this is the first time in several years that iOS and OS X have felt like they’ve gotten (and needed) the same amount of attention from Apple—both get to spend a release in the slow lane as Apple puts its marketing muscle behind newer platforms like the Apple Watch and the new Apple TV. Like iOS 9 (and Mountain Lion, and Snow Leopard), El Capitan is about refinement. Yosemite’s big statement was “This is what OS X looks like now.” El Capitan’s is a relatively meek “Hey, I have a couple neat tricks to show you.”
Some of the things I learnt from reading this review: the spinning pizza of death is now flat (Thin Crust!), mDNSResponder is present and discoveryd has not made a return, and the menu bar -- one of consistent things since the original Mac System Software 1.0 -- can now be hidden all the time.
In a broader, more hold-hands-and-think-about-the-world sort of way, though, El Capitan is important. It’s a big step toward an inevitable unification, when OS X and iOS combine their powers to become the Captain Planet of mobile operating systems.
This isn’t going to happen the way we think, at least not anytime soon. There’s probably not going to be an iOS-powered MacBook in the next couple of years, and the iPad Pro 2 won’t be running OS X. Neither of those devices will obviate the other, either. What’s going to happen instead—in fact, what’s already happening—is that everything will just blur together. Names won’t matter, really; all your stuff will exist everywhere, and you’ll interact with it in whatever way feels comfortable.
Mac OS X, iOS, watchOS and tvOS may all (perhaps, one day) share many of the same internals that we may thus not be willing to call them different operating systems. They may all work well together, but individually, the user-interaction will remain different and the branding will remain separate.
There was a time, only a few years ago, when OS X updates were fraught with should-I-or-shouldn’t-I peril, along with a real price tag. Those days are long gone. Should you update to El Capitan? Unreservedly yes—I’ve found it to be stable, it’s free, it’ll download and install itself on your Mac with nearly no intervention, and it’ll bring with it improved security, speed, and functionality.
"What I mean is, we’re working this out. Time will tell. We’ve been going three months. For me to sit here and go, Here are 10 reasons why Apple needs Beats 1 would be to suggest that we have the answers. I don’t have the answers. We’re making it up as we’re going along. I hope there’s a place for it, I feel right now there is, it’s absolutely working right now, but this is a work in progress and overtime we’ll find out why Apple Music needs Beats 1. From my point of view, if you ask me what I want to achieve and why I’m director of Beats 1 and what I’m trying to achieve in tandem with Apple Music, it’s for the good of music. It’s to focus entirely on music, about trying to get great music out there to an audience that is hungry for it."
Whether you're loving the service or not, there's good chance you may have forgotten that you entered your bank details when you signed up, ready for the paid subscription to start of 30 September.
Here's how to stop the automatic monthly payments. Only if you want to of course.
On Tuesday, Mr. Cook reiterated that equality was something that Apple would “continue to evangelize” when he spoke at BoxWorks.
Mr. Cook said Apple was also focused on finding ways to improve the public education system and protect the environment. He told the crowd that businesses should work to help the environment and said Apple’s data centers in the United States are 100 percent powered by renewable energy. Outside the country, it’s about 90 percent.
"If you look at the last 12 months, (enterprise sales for Apple were) $25 billion," Cook said in a one-on-one interview conducted by Box CEO Aaron Levie on Tuesday here. "This is not a hobby. This is a real business." (That $25 billion is about 14% of Apple's revenue over the last year.)
"We don't believe in having one operating system for PC and mobile," Cook said Tuesday during a fireside chat with Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, a company that provides cloud storage for businesses. Box is hosting its BoxWorks conference this week in downtown San Francisco. "We think it subtracts from both, and you don't get the best experience from either. We're very much focused on two."
“Apple and Microsoft can partner on more things than we can compete on, and that is what the customer wants…Office on the Mac is a force,” Cook told the audience. “Partnering with Microsoft is great for our customers and that’s why we do it.”
Cook’s comments underscore how much Apple has changed over the years that he has been leading it, and also how the company is playing by a different rulebook when it comes to enterprise.
“It was really the iPad and the iPhone that dismantled the traditional IT infrastructure,” Levie told Re/code. Before that, businesses had locked-down corporate infrastructures limited largely to Windows PCs. Without smartphones and tablets, cloud services are a lot less of a big deal.
“If you don’t have mobility, the cloud is really just an efficiency play,” Levie said.
The Office 2016 suite of apps appear to have some issues with El Capitan that causes them to crash at random times. What's worse is there does't appear to be a workaround to achieve a stable experience, essentially rendering the suite (and your Mac should you rely on it for productivity tools) useless.
The new smartphone application SPARE makes all those Seamless orders, bar tabs and brunches go to a good cause by rounding up your dine-out bills to the nearest dollar to support local hunger relief efforts.
The free app explores the scientific merits of numerous arguments that have been put forth against the idea of global warming. It examines evidence that has led an overwhelming majority of climate scientists to conclude that the Earth's mean temperature is rising over time, and that it's largely due to human activities. Structured as a series of arguments and discussions or rebuttals, the Skeptical Science references numerous studies and presents wide-ranging evidence to support this conclusion.
“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” Good advice for a bad day at the office, perhaps? Jane Austen’s tetchy words to her sister Cassandra are among many quotable lines that seem just as applicable to the modern world as to the society Austen inhabited more than two hundred years ago.
Tracking the number of deaths caused by US drone strikes in countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia? There’s an app for that. Or rather, there was – until Apple removed it from its app store.
A petition has been set up urging technology giant Apple to make their iOS and Mac OS X operating systems available in Icelandic.
“Getting an Icelandic translation of iOS and Mac OS X would be an important first step in making Icelandic a more workable language for talking about technology,” explains the driving force behind the petition, Max Naylor, in a recent Facebook post.
TIL the apple developer portal doesn’t work with ghostery turned on. It relies on Adobe analytics to work correctly. pic.twitter.com/lILl2lJRrA
— p in love (@patr1ck) September 30, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple is blowing that up a bit today by expanding on its privacy page and presenting its policies in clear language, with extensive supporting data. Whether it’s government information requests (94% of that is trying to find stolen iPhones, and only 6% is law enforcement seeking personal information) or how consumer-facing features like iMessage, Apple Pay, Health and HomeKit are set up to protect user information; the sense is one of confidence in its stance.
[...]
This is the template for all other tech companies when it comes to informing users about their privacy. Not a page of dense jargon, and not a page of cutesy simplified language that doesn’t actually communicate the nuance of the thing. Instead, it’s a true product. A product whose aims are to inform and educate, just as Apple says its other products do.
It may be heretical (but it wouldn’t be my first heresy) to suggest that we in journalism schools should be the ones to start this process of fixing advertising. And no, I don’t mean we do that by teaching integrated mass marketing communications and other such abominations of the craft and the language — not advertising as story-telling, certainly not fucking “brand journalism.”
No, I mean that we in journalism schools should be the ones to stand up for quality and to convene the discussion of setting standards for what it means to truly serve our communities, not merely feed them messages, ours or advertisers’. It is our job to reconsider and reinvent the very business model of journalism and its support. For who else will do it? Advertisers and their agencies will not. Desperate-unto-dying media companies will not. Technology companies could — but beware, for then we’d only be ceding more of what we used to do to them.
No, if journalists are not going to stand up for serving the public with honest and quality, who will?
Wi-Fi Assist switches your iPhone to using your cellular data plan if you happen to be in a spot where Wi-Fi coverage is poor. This sounds great in theory, but if you're not on an unlimited data plan then all this extra pressure on your metered data plan could result in a nasty shock when you get your next bill.
First thing I turned off after I installed iOS 9.
As with the original app, Bartender 2 allows you to hide menu bar items in a small drawer, letting you easily access them while reducing clutter at the top of your Mac. But Bartender 2 has also features some new capabilities.
FolderGlance lets you preview files directly from the contextual menus, as well as move, copy and make aliases of selected files at locations you browse to.
Apple today released a 7.0.1 update for Xcode, and according to the release notes, the new version of the software include fixes for bugs related to App Thinning.
In practice, this means that if your app opens and writes to a file, Apple will ensure that you’re using a published API to do that. It will make sure that your app behaves as expected with regards to that file. But if you choose to put client information into that file without encrypting it, that’s really not Apple’s concern — nor should it be, if you ask me. That is business-level security and must be applied by the developer.
So from Apple’s perspective, the XcodeGhost malware was simply a deliberate feature of the infected apps. They’d been signed by their developers, so they contained that tamper-evident seal. The apps behaved as documented.
It would be nice to tell you that sport coding is riveting to watch. And it would be equally nice to dish on the charms of the sport’s current superstar programming god. The reality of the situation, however, is that sport coding does not offer much in the way of high drama or charismatic personalities. Still, sport coding has gone relatively unnoticed for too long. It’s a form of competition that rewards natural talent, perseverance, and teamwork. And, even more crucial for life in 2015, being a good sport coder is a surefire way for an 18-year-old to get noticed by the thousands of companies looking to rain money down on talented software developers.
Under that contract, Apple agreed to provide iPads to L.A. Unified while Pearson provided curriculum on the devices as a subcontractor. As a result, the settlement was with Apple, even though the dispute concerned the Pearson product. Under the agreement, Apple will pay the district $4.2 million.
Sure, Apple is a scary, world-dominating corporation that cruised on its reputation for cool until it had pulled us all under its spell and established sweatshops all over the world. But this font is harmless. Compared to, say, Papyrus or Brush Script, San Francisco is really fine.
I present a 9 iPhone comparison from all iPhone versions taken with Camera+ including: the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, and the new iPhone 6s, in a variety of real-life situations to test each iPhone camera’s capabilities.
More of this everywhere please. pic.twitter.com/HgYMdu3VQQ
— Marc Clancy (@clangaz) September 28, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple just announced that it has sold 13 million iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus devices over its first weekend. It’s a new record for the company as it sold 10 million units last year, and 9 million units in 2013.
Sure, your screen is a little dimmer, the CPU is cranked down a bit, and your apps don’t update as regularly in the background, but I didn’t mind these things at all. It still felt like an iPhone, and I was just as able to get work done quickly in this mode.
I do wonder how much I can approximate a constant turning on of Low Power Mode just by silencing notifications, disabling background refreshes, and turning off animations. Seems like the only thing missing at that point is the throttling of the CPU.
Apple, once again, has taken a fairly straightforward technology and created something so much better than what others have done before with the same technology. It’s not just the bits, it’s how you use them. And, more importantly, how you present them.
If you appreciate its attention to typographic detail, and if you want a text editor that gets out of the way, then it might be for you.
I use a free and open-source utility called Self Control to block access to social media, shopping sites, news and RSS feeds for appropriate amounts of time, and my productivity skyrockets. I’d advise setting it for two hours, and seeing what you can accomplish.
A potential bug discovered in Apple's latest iOS 9 release appears to be impacting certain apps running on iPhone 6s that tap into compass and gyroscope data, in some cases affecting key assets that render some features unusable.
Their goal, they said, was to use sub-vocal communication “in spacesuits, in noisy places like airport towers to capture air-traffic controller commands, or even in traditional voice-recognition programs to increase accuracy.” Maybe talking to your computer eventually won’t involve talking out loud at all.
Genuinely stunned France has adopted the word "wifi" rather than "le signal librement accessible sans l'utilisation de fils" or some shit.
— The Web of Evil (@webofevil) September 27, 2015Thanks for reading.
I have started to narrate my use of the phone when I am around my kids. “I’m emailing your teacher back,” I tell them, or, “I’m now sending that text you asked me to send about that sleepover,” in the hopes that I can defang the device’s bad reputation, its inherent whiff of self-absorption.
My husband thinks no amount of narration will change the way our kids feel about the phone. The problem, he says, is that whenever I grab it, they know that I am also holding a portal, as magical as the one in Narnia’s wardrobe and with the same potential to transport me to another world or to infinite worlds. I am always milliseconds away from news of a horrific mass stampede near Mecca or images of great medieval art or a Twitter dissection of the pope’s visit. How far am I going, they might reasonably worry, and how soon will I be back? Perhaps they sense how vast the reach of the device is and how little they know of what that vastness contains; at any moment, the size of the gap between them and me is unknowable.
With 3D Touch, The Apple devices ask us to touch them with a little more intent, to move past the glass and into something deeper behind the surface. This is an important change in how we use our phones and one sure to be successful. Of all of the other improvements in these new phones, 3D Touch is the most compelling and it is the one so subtle that Apple itself didn’t really talk it up during the keynote or briefings. “By the way,” they seemed to say. “You can now stick your finger through the phone. No big deal.”
When you press hard on the Zoom Controller, you’ll notice that the entire screen zooms in, then zooms out when you release pressure. A setting called Zoom Region can restrict the zoomed-in area to a small, movable window if you prefer.
Switching between apps and tabs is now noticeably faster than before. Even better, web pages won't have to reload nearly every time you switch tabs because the 6S has enough memory to keep tabs ready and waiting for you.
Apple could potentially employ 18,000 workers in North San Jose after its purchase of the Charcot Avenue land and a previous purchase of 40 acres of land that is approved for 2.8 million square feet of offices, enough room for 14,000 employees. The Charcot site contains a building and vacant land on a parcel that eventually could be built out to 965,000 square feet, or enough space for 4,000 employees.
New high-end cars are among the most sophisticated machines on the planet, containing 100 million or more lines of code. Compare that with about 60 million lines of code in all of Facebook or 50 million in the Large Hadron Collider.
The sophistication of new cars brings numerous benefits — forward-collision warning systems and automatic emergency braking that keep drivers safer are just two examples. But with new technology comes new risks — and new opportunities for malevolence.
Technologists now believe that new generations of chips will come more slowly, perhaps every two and a half to three years. And by the middle of the next decade, they fear, there could be a reckoning, when the laws of physics dictate that transistors, by then composed of just a handful of molecules, will not function reliably. Then Moore’s Law will come to an end, unless a new technological breakthrough occurs.
The meat company is using a dater's preference for bacon to measure compatibility. And that's it. There are no questions about politics, if or when you want kids, or how you feel about the institution of marriage. Instead, you let other daters on the app know if you like turkey or pork bacon, how crispy you like your bacon, and if you're a bacon splitter, taker or giver.
What is the worst Apple app? No, not iTunes. Not even iTunes for Windows. Not even QuickTime for Windows.
My nomination for the worst Apple app is the Mac App Store. This app is almost always unresponsive and slow, the user-interface is non-standard and non-Mac-like, progress bars are either inaccurate or simply refuse to show up, and I dread using this app everytime I update Xcode.
"This object has been temporarily removed." pic.twitter.com/12ljCD5Tnu
— Steven Lubar (@lubar) September 26, 2015Thanks for reading.
Speaking solely for myself: I don’t want to just make people want things. My covering New iPhone Day as a cultural event would be a step away from my goals.
It is possible that iPhone Upgrade Program approvals have been experiencing problems due to the high volume of traffic today in Apple Stores, but in the meantime some customers with good credit may be forced to pay upfront or walk away empty handed.
Now, if you absolutely must have a new iPhone 6 S the moment it hits stores today but can’t stomach the thought of actually waiting in line for it, there is no shortage of services that can help out. You can hire a TaskRabbit. You can try that new service Enjoy if you have AT&T and live in the Bay Area or New York. And you can always find someone on Craigslist do your dirty work.
These tactics are strictly for small-timers. Kevin, a wily sort from Tacoma, is not a small-timer.
There are two time-tested strategies to change the world with technology. One is to build something that some people love but most people think is a toy; the other is to be hyperambitious and start an electric car company or a rocket company.
These days, technology is more often talked about as a way to create personalized, individual experiences, but Robles-Anderson thinks that’s only part of the story. Communal ritual is always a part of technology: Early computers came into group spaces, like families and offices. (Mad Men understood this dynamic: the computer as an event weathered together.) Powerpoint presentations gather people to look at giant screens. Even using an iPhone to tune out the human beings around you requires being part of a larger group.
And Apple, more than any other technology company, has been able to access both these experiences, the individual and the collective. “They feel iconic, like an emblem of the personal,” says Robles-Anderson. “And yet it's a cult. Right? It's so obviously a cult.”
As God is my witness, this will be my last day having 18 pages of old apps I never use.
— Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) September 26, 2015Thanks for reading.
Users looking to take advantage of iOS 9 App Thinning, a suite of optimization technologies created to reduce the size of app installs, will have to wait, as Apple announced unavailability of a key component due to an iCloud bug.
The inserted code could have been far worse but still highly limited, due to how Apple sandboxes each app and the restrictions on information access.
But the phone stayed off for the next two weeks. She gave up hope of recovering it and switched to an old flip phone for a while. Soon afterwards, she moved to Canada, got another smartphone, and started a new job. The whole matter drifted almost entirely from her mind.
Then, in August, she got another email. Find My iPhone had located the device again: It was in Sana’a, Yemen. That’s when the pictures began appearing in her iCloud account.
With Photoshop Elements 14, Adobe introduces tools for removing camera shake and haze from still images. Like other Elements features, fine adjustments are possible for a custom look.
It's a product of the company's Garage idea incubator, and focused on helping people coordinate meetings on the go. Users sign up with their Office 365 or other email account, and can then set up an event invitation with a few taps that includes information about the meeting along with some suggested times that invitees can get together. Invite can then reserve all of the possible event times on an organizer's schedule, to help prevent double booking.
The interface also supports 3D touch — for example you can press lightly on a thumbnail to "peek" at the image, or press harder to "pop" into the editing mode. There are also various shortcuts accessible from the home screen icon.
The company has added in-app purchases to its iOS apps that allow you to subscribe directly from the Netflix app on your iPhone or iPad, taking after other streaming services such as HBO Now, Spotify, and Hulu, all of which already supported in-app subscription.
Perhaps the biggest functional feature addition is an automatic release feature that lets developers specify a date and time they want their app to be published to the App Store after it passes review. Pricing and availability options are also enhanced with easier control over promotional price and regional rollout settings.
There is money to be made blocking ads and, as it turns out, allowing ads to evade ad blockers.
Eyeo GmbH, the company behind popular desktop ad-blocking tool Adblock Plus, now accepts payment from around 70 companies in exchange for letting their ads through its filter. Eyeo stipulates that they must comply with its “acceptable ads” policy, meaning their ads aren’t too disruptive or intrusive to users. In total, ads from some 700 companies meet the acceptable ads policy, an Eyeo spokesman said.
An Obama administration working group has explored four possible approaches tech companies might use that would allow law enforcement to unlock encrypted communications — access that some tech firms say their systems are not set up to provide.
The group concluded that the solutions were “technically feasible,” but all had drawbacks as well.
I told the EMT I was attempting autoerotic asphyxiation because it was less embarrassing than telling him I was 46 & couldn't tie a necktie.
— Uncle Duke (@UncleDuke1969) September 23, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple has released its first update to iOS 9, which brings along with it a number of fixes for various issues.
Apple has yet to address the bypass, though tests showed today's iOS 9.0.1 update and iOS 9.1 beta versions do not contain a fix.
The keyboard app market is booming, with new ideas about text input popping up everywhere. Most are attempting to solve the typing experience, like Swype, or make predictive and corrective text better, like SwiftKey. A few let you speak in Lil’ Wayne lyrics or flirt in pre-populated pickup lines. Some exist only to make your keyboard look like a rainbow’s vomit. But a few are trying to take the three rows we’ve been using since time immemorial, and make something more of them.
That's because Microsoft defines a 10.1 inch cutoff. Anything below 10.1 inches is a "true mobile device" and as such qualifies for free access to the core editing capabilities. But above that threshold and it's not a "true mobile device" any longer, it's something else entirely, and it will need an Office 365 subscription as a result.
Microsoft will support all Windows versions of Office 2016, even those that explicitly target consumers, for 10 years, or twice as long as it will Office 2016 for Mac.
Just Press Record has a minimal interface with a big red microphone button in the middle of the screen. Tap it to record, tap it again when you're done.
The interface for creating the plots and characters is easy to use. And, testing out all of the sound and music effects is cool because they really can add a lot to your story. The voices do sound a little robotic, but it is still a terrific app for opening that door in your mind that is full of ideas.
The app provides a journey through thousands of stars, comets, and constellations.
Simply put, it’s a tool that offers real-time messaging and chatting through the use of a Wiki-like product.
If you write technical documentation for or blog about Apple products, you’ve probably pondered phrasing, capitalization, etc.. If you’re not familiar with it already, Apple publishes and updates a style guide that’s complete and useful for any kind of Apple-related writing. I’ve broken plenty of rules over my career, but I’ve been internalizing as many of these as I can, especially for software documentation.
It’s a pity that casinos have better scrutiny of their software than the code running our voting machines, cars and many other vital objects, including medical devices and even our infrastructure. As computation spreads in society, our regulatory systems need to be funded appropriately and updated in their methods so that keeping our air clean and our elections honest is not a worse gamble than a slot machine.
I suddenly realise that how I evaluate typefaces is completely wrong for the modern age “@kupfers: @NickSherman pic.twitter.com/mAYgG8wK7Q”
— Sophie Sampson (@UltraCobalt) September 23, 2015Thanks for reading.
Bringing in human experts is a clever way for Apple to differentiate itself. Despite having pioneered the digital distribution and storage of music, it now finds itself lagging behind streaming services such as Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, and Tidal. None of these emphasize curation by human experts as much as Apple Music does. And while the algorithms that all these companies use for recommending songs have improved greatly in recent years, there’s no real musical understanding or appreciation going on. It shows. The algorithms employ statistical techniques to parse listener data, making an educated guess as to what you might like. There is still no algorithm that can account for human taste.
Let me repeat: an app that accurately states politicians’ publicly held positions on reproductive rights and sex education is considered “mean-spirited” and “defamatory”.
Security researchers have both good and bad news about the recently reported outbreak of XcodeGhost apps infecting Apple's App Store. The bad: The infection was bigger than previously reported and dates back to April. The good: Affected apps are more akin to adware than security-invading malware.
"In the US it only needs 25 minutes to download," Schiller told Sina, admitting that in China getting Xcode "may take three times as long." He told the Chinese publication that, to quell this problem, Apple would be providing an official source for developers in the People's Republic to download Xcode domestically.
Apple has provided developers with a command line tool for validating that their version of Xcode is not infected. Apple also has recommended that developers install a clean copy of Xcode downloaded directly from Apple’s Developer Portal (via the Mac App Store) before submitting a new app or app update to the App Store.
New-number iPhones (4, 5, 6) are about showing off Apple’s design prowess. The S models are about showing off Apple’s engineering prowess. Storage capacities and battery life are unchanged from last year’s iPhones. Everything else — the materials it’s made from, the performance of its custom CPU/GPU, the quality of the cameras, the smoothness of the user interface — is noticeably, tangibly improved.
You might wonder, why not just shoot a video? The short answer is that there will be tiny moments in life where you would never have guessed you wanted to shoot a video, and now Live Photos has a chance to capture them.
[...]
There is a short learning curve for Live Photos. If you move your camera immediately before or after taking the photo, the movement will show up in the animated photo. Several of my Live Photos were ruined because I put the phone down too quickly after taking the picture. Apple said it planned to modify the feature in a software update so that it did not capture those quick movements.
Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.
Apple has started sending emails to customers who may be affected by shipping delays caused by Pope Francis' visit to the United States, letting them know that they may not be able to receive their iPhone 6s and 6s pre-orders on launch day.
A good way to boost and fine-tune your Mac’s audio output for music and movies.
Apple, of course, makes its money not from ads but rather from hardware and paid content. But even if Apple’s motives are more self-interested than simply helping its fan base enjoy commercial-free content, the company is tapping into a deep vein of buyer’s remorse we consumers share over a Faustian bargain made long ago with ad-supported media.
The ubiquity of voice-controlled assistants changes the way we interact with them. When Siri and other voice systems were new, they seemed gimmicky. Nobody quite knew what to do with them, and interactions veered toward the awkward. But the more assistants there are, and the more you use them, the more natural they feel — and that means the more you’ll use them, feeding the cycle.
Peter Steinhauer has spent more than two decades in Asia, photographing everything from Hong Kong’s brightly shrouded skyscrapers to bustling markets in Indonesia and beyond. But when he and his family moved to Singapore a few years ago, he was stumped by what to shoot—until he saw the massive, candy-colored apartment buildings.
I've just deleted all my music from iTunes library, so that Apple Music doesn't match them onto my iCloud's music library, so that Apple Music will not be so buggy.
And it seems to work: so far, adding music and playlists to My Music works, and Apple Music is a much more pleasant experience for me. I now listen only to music from Apple's catalog, and I don't listen to my purchased music anymore.
And I realized this experience is so complete-opposite from Steve Jobs' iPod days.
The perverse joy of Apple Watch telling me I filled the Activity ring while I'm eating ice cream on the couch.
— Jeff Carlson (@jeffcarlson) September 23, 2015Thanks for reading.
The story of the iPhone 6s is the same as the 5s, or the 4s before it. It is a slightly better iPhone—that must be what the S stands for. And like its “S” predecessors, it doesn’t address all complaints. That’s what the iPhone 7 is for—right, Apple?
I expected the new iPhones to deliver faster components—the “s” models usually do. What I didn’t expect was the depth of everything else the iPhone delivered.
Quick Actions, 3D Touch, faster Touch ID, 4K video, better photos, Live Photos—these are all things that are going to make the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus even better for me as a user.
The new iPhone 6S, which goes on sale Friday with its larger cousin, the 6S Plus, doesn’t have scores of big changes when compared to last year’s iPhone 6 series. In fact, the new model looks just like its predecessor, as is typical for iPhones in their every-other-year “S” model cycle.
But it does have a small set of new capabilities that I consider fundamental, core improvements. These are things that improve the quality of the phone while generally making a fluid, powerful product even better, and faster and easier to navigate and use.
The update requires iOS 9 and can be downloaded over-the-air through the Apple Watch app on the iPhone by going to General --> Software Update.
Almost everything that's new has been hinted at before, including photo and time-lapse clock faces, glimpsing backwards and forwards in time, responding to mail, adding more friends, and locking down activation. The rest has felt inevitable, like direct networking, workouts on lock screen, moving third-party app logic from the phone and onto the watch, and allowing them to present custom complications all their own.
I picked up my Apple Watch with watchOS 2 from Apple in the days following the September 9 keynote presentation in San Francisco. I hadn’t installed any of the watch betas, so I was really looking forward to giving the new operating system a try.
In case you’re wondering why I hadn’t installed any of the watch beta updates, it’s because the watch is too important to me—I didn’t want to take a chance of not being able to track my fitness goals. With that said, let’s start with what’s new in health and fitness in watchOS 2.
The Apple Watch and the iPhone may be two devices that go better together, but Apple's wearable is still powerful in its own right. If you leave your iPhone at home, here's what the Watch can do on its own.
Buried on the Apple support site, there’s a page walking new Apple Watch owners through the social features of the wearable.
Until today, nobody noticed a tiny little joke buried on the friend screen demonstration: a rick roll.
It’s often useful to be able to search against hidden characters in documents you receive from elsewhere, where you need to remove extra line returns, tabs, spaces, or other oddities that would be time-consuming to hunt and fix by hand.
However, there is a non-obvious workaround in Pages 5 to find those critters, and a second alternative if it’s really bothering you.
Though the new release looks generally the same as the last version, it's designed for sharing and collaboration in a way that Office 2013 really wasn't. In particular, Office 2016 introduces real-time co-authoring (a feature already available in the web version of Office), along with the ability to attach OneDrive files to emails in Outlook.
It came as quite a surprise to me that view controllers are considered bad by many developers and that they have been coming up with some rather intersting solutions to make them more “manageable”.
To me, this is an indication that many developers have lost the perspective on what should and what should not be in a view controller. For some reason there is a misconception going around that everything belongs in the view controller.
Madness!
So is music discovery the future and driving force behind so many music startups for any real reason, or is it just an organizing principle everyone seems to agree on? “Serving you stuff you already know and like” doesn’t sound all that great, and certainly sounds like a downer in future focused startup circles. But if “discovery,” which so many people have sunk so many resources into mastering, isn’t the future…what is?
So let’s stop complaining and build the future we want to live in. Or go through this again in ten years with the next-generation of shitty web ads.
After two years of operation, Oyster, the e-book subscription venture offering unlimited access to a million titles for $9.95 a month, is shutting down operations and most of its staff is leaving to join Google. The company will wind down operations over the next few months.
What could go wrong? @SwiftOnSecurity pic.twitter.com/lHtr6plz0s
— Nick Kocharhook (@k9) September 22, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple confirmed on Sunday that a tool used by software developers for the company’s devices was copied and modified by hackers to put bad code into apps available on the App Store.
The fake developer code “was posted by untrusted sources,” said Christine Monaghan, an Apple spokeswoman. “To protect our customers, we’ve removed the apps from the App Store that we know have been created with this counterfeit software.”
That means that China’s internet speed, and access to foreign websites, is so slow that developers at some of the wealthiest internet companies are resorting to sketchy, unverified channels in order to download XCode quickly and do their jobs.
Whether you like it or not and whether science can catch up, we have entered the touchscreen era and there’s no turning back. “It is impractical to never expose kids to screens. To discourage all screen use is almost a way of ‘parent shaming,’” Kirkorian says. “It’s much more empowering to give parents information on what sorts of screen media are most valuable and let parents decide for themselves, instead of just saying, ‘Don’t use it at all.’”
“The first advice I give parents is, ‘Don’t feel guilty,’” Kirkorian says. “Do your best to choose something that seems age-appropriate, well-designed, and educationally valuable. As long as it is used in moderation, you’re fine.”
No doubt some of you are about to write in and tell me how much technology can help with the running of a restaurant. Well, save your fingers. I’m sure it is very useful in the matter of internet reservations and table turning (they spin so fast these days, it’s a wonder any chef still bothers to make a pudding). But it really shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with that moment when, queasy with excitement and longing and the slight fear that a mistake has been made, you give a maître d’ your name, and he smiles in recognition, and in an instant all is well.
Apple has confirmed launch details for the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus — unsurprisingly the new phones go on sale Friday at 8 AM. Apple says that customer response to the iPhone 6s has been “incredibly positive” although the company is yet to release concrete preorder figures.
Apple also announced that iOS 9 has the fastest rate of adoption of any previous iOS release, with 50% of devices already using iOS 9, which was released last Wednesday.
It has also been updated with iCloud support, OS X document Auto Save and Versions, and is now 64 bit and sandboxed.
Aiming to help people cut through all of the political noise, Sidewire, a political news analysis platform, is launching today on iOS, just in time for tonight’s second Republican presidential debate.
We as designers and journalists appreciate the need to pivot and iterate (to borrow much-abused Silicon Valley terms) when it comes to producing, evaluating, and presenting stories to the public, but the key factor that ensures they are edited in the right way is transparency. If they are to stay true to their encouraging statement about wanting to “show [users] their world in innovative ways, and let them interact with it like never before,” then they need to clarify what the constraints around that innovation are. If that means adding a new clause that apps cannot be produced about a single story, then let that be included in the guidelines and prompt a spirited debate about exactly why that has to be the case.
As much as Defense Department officials say they want better access to commercial technology, the way the Pentagon functions often makes this impossible. The military has spent decades configuring itself to work with defense contractors to build complicated systems that take years to produce, like fighter jets and aircraft carriers. With its cumbersome rules and processes, the Department of Defense is not set up to race alongside small, agile companies.
The Pentagon is beginning to realize it must operate differently. Some of the most advanced work in computing, big data, cybersecurity, energy, robotics, and space — all areas the military draws on — is being done by tech companies, not traditional defense contractors. Last year, the Pentagon kicked off a large-scale effort called the Defense Innovation Initiative. In April, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter traveled to Palo Alto to announce that the department was establishing an office in Silicon Valley.
Though the wild elephant had never been a resident at DSWT, he knew elephants who had. He had mated with two former orphans who were raised at DSWT's Ithumba Reintegration Centre, who now lead their own wild herd. In 2011, he fathered babies with them, whom DSWT named Mwende and Yetu.
And DSWT is certain he knew this group of humans meant help.
Personally, I love the new San Francisco system font in iOS9, and I don’t see what anyone is complaining about. pic.twitter.com/BTszYyvLi3
— Tophr 3.0 (@mugwumpian) September 19, 2015Thanks for reading.
While the old store — filled with T-shirt racks, shelves of souvenirs and primary colors at every turn — looked like a gift shop, the new store sports a sleeker, more modern look that feels much more like Apple's other retail stores. Carefully arranged displays of Beats headphones, iPhone cases and Apple Watch bands line the walls while the center of the store is dedicated to display cases of the Apple Watch.
The souvenirs have changed too. While previously you could buy everything from keychains to baby onesies to baseball caps to rain jackets, the store now features only a handful of items: a few T-shirts, ceramic mugs, reusable water bottles, notebooks and blank cards.
Gone are the brightly colored tchotchkes, keychains and many shirts with cheeky sayings (e.g "I visited the Apple Campus. But that's all I'm allowed to say.")
But Apple resisted that powerful pull from the past and filled the store instead with what it is today -- a media and technology powerhouse that also knows how to roll out the welcome mat to guests.
I walked through my house again, but this time, I took out my iPhone, opened the Watch app, and continuously adjusted the Alert Volume to create an audible “alert ping” from the Watch. And after a few steps in my garage, I heard it and saw it laying next the compost bin.
I found my Apple Watch. Whew.
Extra RAM and a better color gamut help make up for year-old guts.
With photos, you’ll need to browse through your new camera roll to see if everything came over. That’s because Google Photos, Carousel from Dropbox, or other cloud-enabled photo apps will sometimes delete pictures from your device in order to save space.
I doubt this ambiguity in quotation marks will cause the wailing and gnashing of teeth that the iOS 7 & 8 Shift key did, because few people bother with the quote mark popups, but it’s a similar issue. Because the iOS keyboard relies on visual cues, those cues must be strong enough to be seen at a glance. I like the look of San Francisco’s opening and closing quotation marks, but they don’t provide strong cues.
Google, Apple and Microsoft all have agents that want to be your personal assistant. But how well Google Now, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana can predict your needs depends on how much you want to share, how wedded to particular platforms you want to be and, in some cases, how much you actively want to help make those predictions happen.
Casio released a calculator and Amazon released a tablet within 24 hours of each other this week. That alone is unremarkable. One costs $220, the other costs $50. That, too, wouldn’t raise many eyebrows, until you realize which is which.
— Nick Turner (@SFNick) September 19, 2015
Thanks for reading.
As much as we clamor for a calmer, sleeker news reading experience, it’s not clear that's what most people really want. That is, they may actually prefer to get their news sprinkled across a social feed, so that it comes packaged with entertainment, interaction, and a soupcon of persona drama. It’s easy to forget that print newspapers, stodgy as their reputation has become, were pioneers in this regard, nestling their investigative journalism alongside gossip columns and funny pages. If Apple news fails to reshape the industry, as similar apps have failed before it, it might not be a failure of execution. It might be that the concept of the ideal news app is fundamentally flawed.
In addition to several high-profile publications that have signed on for the service, [...] at least one has decided to offer exclusive early access to select content through the app.
Among the changes, the new Apple company store will for the first time sell Apple devices including the iPhone, iPad, Macs, and Apple Watch. The store is also re-opening with a new collection of Apple-branded merchandise including clothing, mugs, and other collectibles that are only available at the company store.
On Friday, Apple gave its employees a sneak preview of the newly redesigned company store at its headquarters in Cupertino, California. The store opens to the public on Saturday.
FiftyThree could have launched its new iPhone app three years ago and quickly amassed millions of users. But the New York-based company decided to take the scenic, more thoughtful route. Instead of shrinking down Paper—the sketching app chosen by Apple as its iPad App of the Year in 2012—and cramming it onto the iPhone, they reinvented it entirely. That process, as you might imagine, posed no shortage of challenges amidst what CEO and cofounder Georg Petschnigg says were the "thousands of decisions" that needed to be made. No wonder it took so damn long.
Nearly two dozen malicious pieces of software managed to get hosted on the App Store, and subsequently downloaded by Chinese users. This is because attackers found an unorthodox route to exploit: they targeted some versions of the software used by developers to makes apps for iOS and OS X in the first place.
Apple Pay, Apple Inc.’s mobile-payment service, has taken an important step into the Chinese market, according to official media and people familiar with the matter, by registering an entity in the Shanghai free-trade zone.
I don’t know if I recommend that you live a Low Power Mode life, but turning it on early on a day when I knew my battery would be pushed to the limit made me feel more comfortable. And yes, the phone lasted all day with juice to spare.
Color Uncovered is a free interactive iPad app that explores phenomena related to color and our perception of it. Its content includes both essays and multimedia exercises. It's both fun and informative, and is likely to reveal some surprising characteristics of color.
Startups are piggybacking on text messaging to launch services.
Cook wrote in a message on the company's intranet site that the Macbook and iPhone maker will make a "substantial donation" to relief agencies supporting the migrants and will match employee donations to the cause by 2-to-1.
The Cupertino, California-based company is also offering customers the option to donate to the Red Cross through its App Store and iTunes Store.
Ever since Susan Kare’s 8-bit designs graced the first Macintosh screens in 1984, icon design, like digital typography, has been an important if unglamorous niche in the software business. The 2008 debut of Apple’s App Store created “a sea change in our industry,” says Gedeon Maheux, co-founder of Iconfactory, a large design studio in Greensboro, N.C., that does work for big brands such as Windows and Twitter. “It gave us job security.”
The real web is not that which is defined by the W3C as a standard, but that which is implemented in a consistent manner across WebKit, Blink, Trident, and Gecko. The secret to the web’s wonderful success is that it’s a (nearly) universal meta-platform; that which is not implemented on a major platform, like, say, iOS, is by definition not universal.
And after witnessing the success of the app Arment concluded that the damage to ad-supported content that would have been affected by the ad blocker was too much.
2009: I'm not sure I need an iPhone. I have a laptop.
2015: I'm not sure I need a laptop. I have an iPhone.
— Neil Cybart (@neilcybart) September 18, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple executives have discussed their plans for an “autonomous vehicle” with officials at California’s department of motor vehicles (DMV), the Guardian has learnt.
According to documents obtained by the Guardian, Mike Maletic, a senior legal counsel at Apple, had an hour-long meeting on 17 August with the department’s self-driving car experts Bernard Soriano, DMV deputy director, and Stephanie Dougherty, chief of strategic planning, who are co-sponsors of California’s autonomous vehicle regulation project, and Brian Soublet, the department’s deputy director and chief counsel.
So why should the owners and sellers of the networks even have vast chains of stores? Why should they sell phones and tablets and subtly or otherwise steer customers to certain models? Why should they be able to dictate certain hardware and software features (like bloatware apps for carrier services) to weaker or more pliable manufacturers (pretty much every manufacturer not named Apple)?
Why, in an era when networks are well understood and most components standardized, should handset makers be required to undergo onerous “certification” processes that allow carriers to demand changes to the design of their devices if they want to use them on the network? One small-company American tech CEO told me the other day that it will cost him more to clear “certification” processes at the four big U.S. carriers than to build and sell the first major production run of a new handset he’s planning to launch.
Using virtualization software, the same technology that powers much of so-called “cloud computing,” it’s possible for you to protect your system even as you open attachments that might be sketchy, visit websites that you’re not too sure about — porn sites, torrent sites, pirated TV and sports sites — or test out software downloaded from random websites. You can also use this technology to ensure that your anonymous online activity remains anonymous, safeguarding the privacy protections offered by Tor by ensuring that absolutely all internet traffic gets routed through it — even if your software, like Tor Browser or Pidgin, gets hacked specifically to bypass Tor.
“This case . . . presents issues of surpassing importance to the United States economy,” the company argues in papers filed with the high court Wednesday. “Dynamic, disruptive entry into new or stagnant markets—the lifeblood of American economic growth—often requires the very type of” conduct that Apple engaged in, the company argues, and which U.S. District Judge Denise Cote of Manhattan found to be illegal in July 2013.
A U.S. appeals court on Thursday said Apple should have been awarded an injunction barring Samsung from selling products that infringe its patents, handing Apple another victory in its ongoing smartphone fight with its biggest rival. [...] The case was sent back to a federal district court in San Jose, California, to reconsider the injunction.
News attempts to do too much, in areas of historical weakness for Apple, and as a result the end product just doesn't come close to the standard we expect from the company. That's a pity because there are a little gems hidden in News, buried by mediocrity, that deserve attention. Apple News Format in particular makes articles an absolute pleasure to read thanks to their rapid loading times and gorgeous designs. News is salvageable, and I hope we see either big improvements to the algorithms or a change in focus. But as it stands today, News is yet another built-in app that many millions will hide in a nondescript folder tucked away on one of their several Home screens.
How much of a performance hit can you expect when you enable Low Power Mode? According to Geekbench 3 tests I've done, about 40 percent. This means that the iPhone 6's A8 processor runs at a speed that's something between that of the iPhone 5's A6 chip and A7 chip that was found in the iPhone 5s.
In real terms this performance drop is not as noticeable as you might think. Sure, the more performance intensive the task you're doing, the bigger the hit will be, but for general stuff such as messaging, browsing the web, calling people and such, the effect is minimal.
I have often said that the iPad hardware matters only insofar as it enables you to have an excellent experience of software. Tablets and smartphones are as close as we can practically get to a pure software experience. This is one of the reasons why iPhone and iPad hardware is firstly so minimalist and secondly hasn't changed much in all the years they have been sold. What matters about the iPad is that it makes the software fast, smooth, and powerful.
We have seen many more changes in iPad software than we have in the hardware. We started with iOS 3.2 – a version before even multitasking arrived on iOS – and we are now looking at iOS 9. So what does iOS 9 bring for education?
With a content blocker enabled, I followed a link to a story on CNET.com. Here’s what I saw.
Although the company's signature display tables are in place, the shop also has wooden product shelves that more closely resemble a fashion outlet or bookstore, photos obtained by AppleInsider show. Beats headphones, for example, are hung on wooden knobs.
The mere knowledge that Apple has a team of several hundred people working on car designs changed the conversation this week at the Frankfurt International Motor Show. Along with Google, Apple has focused the minds of auto executives on the challenge posed by new technologies that have the potential to disrupt traditional auto industry hierarchies.
This year, “connectivity” has supplanted “horsepower” or “torque” as the prevailing buzzword in Frankfurt. The talk is of self-driving cars, battery-powered cars and information technology designed to link cars with data networks to make driving safer and more efficient.
Preservation of old games involves more than just an extra patch. The journey from dusty unplayable relic to polished, cross-platform installer is a minefield of technical and legal obstacles. The team at Good Old Games remain the industry leaders in the restoration of classic PC games, tasked with reverse engineering code written more than 20 years ago, unraveling knotty licensing issues left behind by defunct development studios, and battling lethargy on the part of skeptical publishers. It’s a thrilling and, at times, gruelling process, but – as the GOG team will testify – it never fails to surprise.
A man stung dozens of times by bees, mathematicians who wanted to know whether a man could physically be able to sire 600 sons, and chemists who unboiled an egg were honoured on Thursday night with one of science’s most storied awards, the Ig Nobel prize.
Essentially, you’re filling up your gas tank before the “E” light comes on. You’ll still probably encounter a bit of an afternoon slump, but it may not be nearly as debilitating.
Apple iOS Ad-Blocking Explained
pic.twitter.com/9ckgUvhSHP
— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) September 17, 2015LMAO is Nilay serious with this? Let the whole screenshot sink in. pic.twitter.com/qoEG5UOUm1
— Nate Boateng (@nateboateng) September 17, 2015Thanks for reading.
Although there has been much public fretting about tech companies supplanting newspapers, TV networks and websites as the primary distributer of news content, those worries ignore the reality that news organizations simply can’t keep pace with Silicon Valley in terms of technological innovation, said Simon Owens, a content and social media marketing consultant.
“Think of it this way: If The New York Times struck a deal with CVS to have its print edition sold at CVS, you wouldn’t see a bunch of hand-wringing about how its handing over the keys to CVS,” Owens said in a message. “So why are there so many dire warnings about it handing over the keys to Facebook, especially when there are dozens of other major distribution channels — like Flipboard and now this Apple News app?”
And always remember to put one version on the open Web.
This is some absolutely phenomenal exposure for the .NEWS domain extension. Every article shared from Apple News, no matter what publication it comes from, will be delivered with a .NEWS domain attached to it.
Mark Dowd, the security researcher who discovered the bug and privately reported it to Apple, told Ars that the vulnerability has been mitigated in iOS 9, which Apple released Wednesday. But he went on to say that the underlying bug still hasn't been fixed. As he demonstrated in the following video, the bug allows attackers who briefly have physical access to a vulnerable iPhone or who are within Bluetooth range of it, to install an app that the device will trust without prompting the user with a warning dialog.
Most iOS updates have been focused primarily on features that work on the iPhone, or equally across the iPhone and iPad. It only makes sense: The iPhone is vastly more popular than the iPad.
But a side-effect of this reasonable business decision is the sense that the iPad has stagnated. After an initial burst of enthusiasm by both iPad buyers and iOS developers, the iPad has just sort of… sat there.
With iPad sales flagging, Apple has finally brought a bunch of iPad-only features to iOS 9, focusing mostly on accessing multiple apps and making better use of keyboards (of both the off-screen and on-screen variety.)
After two years of visual and functional changes, is iOS 9 a calm moment of introspection or a hazardous leap toward new technologies?
Can it be both?
Absent the radical and the revolutionary, then, iOS 9 has to deliver on the promise not of more but of better. After the giant leaps, it has to stick the landing. So, does it?
To block ads and trackers more effectively, Peace relies on a database maintained by Ghostery, which already maintains a successful ad blocker for Safari on Mac. According to developer Marco Arment, this allows Peace to block more trackers and experience fewer compatibility issues thanks to "a reasonably sized blacklist of about 2,000 entries."
Rather than sync everything over the cloud, Apple uses a pretty clever strategy to transfer everything from your Android phone to iPhone. The iPhone will automatically set up a private Wi-Fi network, request a security code from the user, and then migrate all the data and "put it in the right places."
Yeah. It’s a poor attempt at making an Android app look like an iOS app. If you’re being generous, you might think Apple did this to make you more comfortable about moving to iOS. You might even say they wanted it to look bad, because they want the amazing experience to be on iOS, not Android. Maybe. It’s certainly one way to look at it.
In the grand tradition of QuickTime for Windows and iTunes for Windows.
'Move to iOS', which first appeared on the store on September 16 to coincide with the launch of iOS9, appears to have become a battleground for fanboys of both persuasions, with most of the hundreds of comments on the app completely off topic.
“I’m going to first start on this iPhone, and it’s not my phone, but it is an iPhone,” said Nadella, smiling, as he walked to the podium to show Microsoft’s email app Outlook on mobile.
“It’s a pretty unique iPhone. In fact, I’d like to call it the ‘iPhone Pro,’ because it’s got all of the Microsoft software and applications on it,” he quipped, apparently referencing Apple’s introduction of the iPad Pro last week.
3DTechtronics asked Apple SVP Phil Schiller about this issue in an email. Schiller responded and says it’s not a problem: “screen overlays that follow our guidelines will continue to work with 3D Touch”.
The web will always be playing catch-up with native apps for user experience, but the web will always be ahead as a distributed, open publishing platform. And that is such an important feature, it should be available on as many devices as possible.
Cook’s interview was, say what else you will about it, not fluff. It was funny, at points, but it was, more than anything else, serious. It had a distinct whiff of humanism in it—one that has been showing up in other Colbert interviews, as well. Which might indicate, just a little bit, what The Late Show is going to become as it settles into itself. Because when you hear a guest uttering the phrase “human rights”—multiple times!—on a late-night comedy show, that says as much about the show as it does about the guest.
With such technology widely available, it was inevitable that artificial intelligence for children would arrive, too, and it is doing so most prominently in the pink, perky form of Mattel’s Hello Barbie. Produced in collaboration with ToyTalk, a San Francisco-based company specializing in artificial intelligence, the doll is scheduled to be released in November with the intention of hitting the lucrative $6 billion holiday toy market.
For adults, this new wave of everyday A.I. is nowhere near sophisticated enough to fool us into seeing machines as fully alive. That is, they do not come close to passing the ‘‘Turing test,’’ the threshold proposed in 1950 by the British computer scientist Alan Turing, who pointed out that imitating human intelligence well enough to fool a human interlocutor was as good a definition of ‘‘intelligence’’ as any. But things are different with children, because children are different. Especially with the very young, ‘‘it is very hard for them to distinguish what is real from what is not real,’’ says Doris Bergen, a professor of educational psychology at Miami University in Ohio who studies play.
it took me a while, but I finally installed #iOS9. Looks pretty promising, I think pic.twitter.com/yKXz4eheLG
— blue trashcurl [22] (@_Ninji) September 16, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple is scheduled to release iOS 9, its latest operating system for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch today. It is a free update, and anyone with an iPhone 4S or newer will be able to upgrade.
What’s different?
iOS 7 and 8 made big changes, and those changes could make the early releases of those operating systems frustrating to use. iOS 7 didn't settle down until version 7.1, and iOS 8 didn't feel quite right until 8.3. iOS 9 doesn't feel like it needs a major bugfix release before we can recommend it without hesitation for every device that supports it (and we should know, we tested it on most of them).
The worst thing we can say about the new release is that its biggest, best new contributions—the things that make the iPad feel more like its own device and less like a big iPad—are only available to a sliver of existing devices. Slide Over and Picture-in-Picture need an iPad from 2013 or later, and the truly transformative Split View mode needs a cutting-edge model. The rest of the operating system is about spit-and-polish, taking existing features (Siri, Spotlight, Maps) and extending them in logical ways.
Apple promises an extra hour of battery life after the update. In our grueling, far-from-typical battery test, which cycles through a series of websites with brightness set to 65%, the iPhone 6 with iOS 9 lasted 40 extra minutes. Those savings come from tweaks Apple has made to better manage the power efficiency of its own apps, including Safari.
Additional savings are promised for when you aren’t using the phone nonstop. Now, when the iPhone is face down on the table (or even in your pocket), the screen won’t illuminate when notifications arrive.
iOS 9 takes it a step further, integrating suggestions from Siri and opening up to third-party developers including their results. It makes for a much richer experience, and more is to come as apps are updated.
One of Apple's headlining features in iOS 9 is the brand-new Notes app. Instead of offering a straightforward, no-frills note-taking experience where only text entry is allowed, as has long been the case, iOS 9's Notes app is capable of storing nearly any type of content.
While many consumers will likely gravitate toward AdBlock Plus because of their familiarity with the brand’s name and reputation, there will be a good handful of new apps on the horizon as well, which are also worth a look. Here are a few we’ve tried.
This change of heart can be found in the App Programming Guide for tvOS. In the guide, Apple notes that while users can connect game controllers to their Apple TV, all games must also support the included Siri Remote.
True, there’s not a lot of usable physical buttons on the Apple TV remote, and game controllers just work better for certain games and genres, but developers only need to support the remote.
Now, this probably works better of iOS devices because those are mostly single-user devices. However, the TV is centralized and consumed by multiple individuals.
It’s decisions like this and the game controller decision (which is a fascinating case of stealth documentation changes) that tell me Apple just doesn’t care to really enable high-quality gaming on tvOS.
“I have to admit, I feel little naked,” Cook confessed, as he stared at a huge projection on the ceiling, made to look like a stained glass dome decorated with pictures of Colbert’s face.
“You’re supposed to think of the audience as naked,” Colbert retorted. “Check your settings.”
“I think that some people will never buy a computer,” Cook says. “Because I think now we’re at the point where the iPad does what some people want to do with their PCs.” Cook is quick to point out, however, that this doesn’t foreshadow the end of the Mac. “I think there are other people — like myself — that will continue to buy a Mac and that it will continue to be a part of the digital solution for us,” he adds. “I see the Mac being a key part of Apple for the long term and I see growth in the Mac for the long term.”
Now at the Upper East Side #applestore I think this guy is following me. pic.twitter.com/6ipde8CFdC
— Eddy Cue (@cue) September 15, 2015I was tasked with getting rid of two reasonably capable laptops, though now starting to show their age: the Dell XPS 13 (non-touch version), sporting the capable but soon-to-be-replaced Windows 8.1, and the original MacBook Air. For both, the process was surprisingly easy — provided you follow a few simple steps.
The tip Michael found pointed out that the problem could be eliminated in Safari with a particular setting. Just open Safari > Preferences > Advanced and deselect “Never use font sizes smaller than.” It’s quite striking — just toggling that checkbox while that page is open reformats it completely.
With the new Notification Center widget, it's possible to add twelve of your favorite Launch Center Pro actions for quick and easy access. You can do things like call a specific person, add an event to a favorite calendar app, get directions home, scan a QR code, send a group text, and more directly from the Notification Center.
“Simplicity, URLs, and reach” — those are exactly the things the web community should focus on. Native apps can’t out-web the web, and web apps should embrace that.
Apple has started a new big project in its web services division, according to The Information. The report claims Apple has decided to rewrite its cloud services to all fall under one single technology stack using open-source technologies. This will combine Apple’s services like iCloud, Siri, iTunes and more into a unified backend platform.
I've been a lead developer for 2 years. It has been quite a ride and there were a lot of things I was unprepared for. I've always been a software engineer, mostly involved with the actual code. People tell me I have a very natural way of leading, which is probably why I was asked for the job. However, I never before considered what it takes to lead an entire team of engineers. I wish I had more preparation beforehand. So to give you, the reader, a head start, these are the topics I was unprepared for, so you can hopefully be a better leader than I was. Mind you, I didn't fail on all aspects, but most caught up with in me at one point in time.
That Monday I strutted into the Verge office with my resuscitated phone like a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, parading my very own freak of science. A whole day! At the bottom of a lake! My colleagues asked the inevitable question: Did you put it in rice? I did, I said. Of course, they said, that’s the trick, works every time.
But two weeks later, my phone became sluggish, unresponsive. Then, one evening, it stopped receiving a signal entirely, the word "Searching…" permanently tattooed in the upper left corner of the screen. I brought it to my carrier, where a lady tried this and that, starting and restarting the device ad infinitum. After 45 minutes, she turned to me, visibly frustrated. "Sir," she asked me, with a streak of suspicion in her voice, "did you get this phone wet?"
Siri is on a bad-relationship kick. pic.twitter.com/QC3yrDr8wc
— Dan Frakes (@DanFrakes) September 16, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple has announced the grand reopening of its Company Store at its One Infinite Loop headquarters in Cupertino, California will take place on Saturday, September 19 at 10 AM Pacific. The store has been closed for renovations since June 15.
Where do you find the find the photo-app launching preference? Not in Photos or iPhoto, as you’d expect! Instead, launch Applications > Image Capture, a very useful utility that can work with iOS devices, inserted SD cards, attached cameras, and networked scanners.
Sofa does two things: it helps you discover new movies to watch, and it lets you keep a list of movies you want to watch. Despite its rather sparse feature list, Sofa is well worth your time. One of the reasons why is because Sofa's discover section is populated by hand-curated collections of movies. But Sofa also looks great and, because it isn't burdened with dozens of features, the app is simple and delightful to use.
However fraught it may be, Zappos’s experiment with holacracy is just the latest sign that information technology is allowing the emergence of a new form of organization.
But if you look carefully at the series of announcements that Apple has made over the last four months, it’s clear that Apple aims to become the de-facto standard within corporate IT. This more clearly articulated focus on the enterprise started with investor calls in April, grew with the news at WWDC back in June, and increased momentum, most recently, with the “Hey Siri” event in August. When you connect all the dots, you see a clear and present focus on business.
Siri’s previous behavior trained me to dictate my notes in a certain way, and now I have to ditch those habits and retrain myself for absolutely no reason.
Plenty of companies are just happy to collaborate with Apple — as providers of apps, for instance — and compete with each other. It is in Apple’s interests to cultivate this network just as an old-style manufacturer would its competing suppliers. But Apple and Microsoft’s banter could look like a snub to companies that do not just want a seat at the same table but aim to throw their own, better party. Their enemy’s frenemy is almost certainly not their friend.
non-autumn seasons are design flaws
— Ethan Marcotte (@beep) September 14, 2015Thanks for reading.
"Customer response to iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus has been extremely positive and preorders this weekend were very strong around the world," the company said in a statement. "We are on pace to beat last year's 10 million unit first-weekend record when the new iPhones go on sale Sept. 25."
The price tag that Apple would have to pay at this point would be high, because the TV world that Apple is dealing with now is stronger than the music industry was when Apple needed songs for iTunes and the iPod.
“The record companies were facing what was obviously a mortal threat with illegal file sharing,” Mr. Wieser said. “You could argue that Steve Jobs didn’t let a good crisis go to waste and he cut some very good deals.”
By contrast, Mr. Wieser says that viewers in about three million of the country’s 110 million homes watch television shows via broadband only. “At that pace you can understand why there’s no sense of urgency” to work with Apple, he said.
Apple development tool Xcode seemingly confirms the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus each have 2GB of RAM, while the iPad Pro has 4GB of RAM, as discovered by iOS developer Hamza Sood.
I’m assuming, if you are on the Internet and reading kind of a nerdy blog, that you know what Unicode is. At the very least, you have a very general understanding of it — maybe “it’s what gives us emoji”.
That’s about as far as most people’s understanding extends, in my experience, even among programmers. And that’s a tragedy, because Unicode has a lot of… ah, depth to it. Not to say that Unicode is a terrible disaster — more that human language is a terrible disaster, and anything with the lofty goals of representing all of it is going to have some wrinkles.
So here is a collection of curiosities I’ve encountered in dealing with Unicode that you generally only find out about through experience. Enjoy.
The reason why creation wasn’t a major thing on iPads until now was not just because of lack of apps but because of lack of underlying sensors which didn’t have accuracy.
The iPad Pro is a device that is begging for great third-party software from both large companies like Adobe and Apple, as well as the smaller guys like Gus at Flying Meat. A larger screen, keyboard case, and a Pencil aren’t going to solve those problems. You can’t have a Pro tablet without pro apps to go with it. There are a few great iPad apps out there, but most of them feel like minimum viable products at best.
Guitar solo faces make so much more sense when the guitars are replaced with slugs... pic.twitter.com/WWTFZ9AMFC
— Matt Bloom (@MattBloomFilms) September 13, 2015Thanks for reading.
It’s 11:30 p.m. and you’re walking home alone from the library. You’ve heard that some areas are unsafe. You think about texting a roommate to let her know that you’re on your way back, but decide not to because it really isn’t that far of a walk. Besides, this wouldn’t exactly be of help if you ran into trouble. Instead, you just hope that no one will bother you.
Now however, Companion, a free app developed by five University of Michigan students, gives that friend you reached out to the ability to actively participate in ensuring your safety.
Meanwhile, this means Apple will be selling both refurbished models from one and two years ago and also (as it does today) newly manufactured instances of those older models. How will that work? How will the margins compare? Will it cost $260 to make an iPhone 6S in a year (maybe)? Then, how and where will Apple sell these? One obvious answer is that they'll go to emerging markets - to India, Latin America and, yes China. But how big will this be - how many people will take it up? How will Apple explain the difference?
When you're in motion, your leptin levels may fall, and the researchers said this could "send a hunger signal to the brain's pleasure center to generate the rewarding effects of running."
I'll take "elegant metaphors for death" for $500, Alex. pic.twitter.com/S8g35oF8Uj
— Kashana (@kashanacauley) September 12, 2015Thanks for reading.
“In no case is the device recording what the user says or sending that information to Apple before the feature is triggered,” says Apple.
Instead, audio from the microphone is continuously compared against the model, or pattern, of your personal way of saying ‘Hey Siri’ that you recorded during setup of the feature. Hey Siri requires a match to both the ‘general’ Hey Siri model (how your iPhone thinks the words sound) and the ‘personalized’ model of how you say it. This is to prevent other people’s voices from triggering your phone’s Hey Siri feature by accident.
Similar in vein to the way Apple aimed its Touch ID feature to work better and better the more you unlocked an iPhone using the fingerprint scanning sensor, it seems the set-up process will guide users into stating words or phrases to better acclimate Siri with each iPhone owner.
More restaurant owners are starting to swap old, clunky and often costly IT systems — and the waiter’s pencil and notepad — for iPads and mobile apps to save money in the long run and differentiate themselves in the short. But, if these shiny gadgets don’t have a smooth runway to connect them all together, the pursuit of simplicity through digitization and automation can turn out to be rife with complexity.
Mickalow confesses he’s no tech whiz. So, for the second Test Kitchen, which opened in mid-August, he hired MacMedics, a Toronto consultancy, to steer data traffic on separate and predictable routes, reduce the frequency of congestion, and prioritize money-making meal orders on the network above all else. So far, it has worked.
Apple’s program isn’t as cheap as similar offers from some carriers (it also includes Apple’s extended warranty plan and phones are sold unlocked). But it does something more important: It converts its users from “carrier customers” to “Apple customers.”
After putting the desktop web in their rear view mirror, apps now reign supreme as the top media channel in the United States, even without the help of the mobile browser. For the first time ever, time spent inside mobile applications by the average US consumer has exceeded that of TV.
If you’re using the audio port now to stream sound and want to do so in the future with a new Apple TV, what choices do you have? It turns out, quite a few.
Embedded in your phone’s Health app, the feature called Medical ID, allows you to store medical information such as your blood type, allergies and any medication you may be on.
In addition to your medical info, you can also store emergency contact numbers, which can be accessed and contacted from your phone even when it’s locked.
While Apple hasn’t detailed the changes publicly, the company is planning what appears to be a major, undocumented overhaul of its AirPlay protocol with iOS 9 that should make the framework for streaming video and audio content between devices a much smoother experience for both users and developers. It is, however, breaking many screen mirroring apps in the process and forcing developers to scramble to implement workarounds ahead of the launch of iOS 9 on Wednesday and the new Apple TV in the coming weeks.
The iPad Pro isn't so much about the iPad Pro today as it is about what it and iOS will become by 2020: Apple's vision for the future of personal computing.
"During an audit of our 2013 operations, a difference in interpretation of a tax rule resulted in a balance due, which we paid with interest," said Josh Rosenstock, a spokesman for Apple. "We pay all the taxes we owe wherever we do business and we will continue working closely with the Ministry of Finance."
Carolyn Leighton, Founder and CEO of Women in Technology International, told BBC Trending that although it was unlikely that anything malicious was intended, the photo subject was "a poor choice."
"It just triggers this feeling that so many people have," says Leighton. "It's just like when these companies put men in front of the camera instead of women. People are out of touch with the fact that women are equal partners in the field."
"Siri, put Apple CEO Tim Cook on my calendar for Tuesday, Sept. 15. Oh, and come up with some questions to ask him." pic.twitter.com/mXutum0Bp6
— Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) September 12, 2015Thanks for reading.
It appears that when Apple ships iOS 9.1, iPhone users will have access to a key symbol of human communication. In a beta posted yesterday, Apple greatly expanded the number of supported emoji, including multiple new hand gestures. Of course, there’s one gesture that all have been waiting for, and it looks like we’ll be getting it at long last.
Most people find it quite easy to fully extend their thumbs and index fingers while the rest of their fingers remain curled in—that’s why the thumb’s up and pointing emoji don’t strike me as unrealistic. But try independently extending your middle finger as far out as your pointer finger can go—chances are you can’t do it.
The keyboard itself feels pretty good, given how thin it is and how little movement there is when you press a key. I was able to type a few sample paragraphs without much trouble.
You can ask your friends and family for advice, but for an unbiased opinion from someone outside of your circle, try asking on Flotsm instead. This new app lets you get answers to the difficult questions as well as the lighthearted ones, anonymously.
Over the last several years both Microsoft and Adobe have altered their business models away from packaged software towards subscription pricing; while their users may have grumbled, they also had no choice given their dependence on the two software giants’ products. And, it’s that new model that justifies the expense of developing iPad apps and explains why it is Apple’s old nemeses who are doing by far the most interesting work on the iPad. Unfortunately, this isn’t a model that is readily replicable for the sort of development shops that Apple needs to invest significant time and resources in creating must-have iPad apps: what customer is going to sign up for a recurring payment for an app that doesn’t even have a service component and that the customer hasn’t even tried?
Right now, it'll probably take someone who's a bit more committed to going all in — iOS has its limitations, and you'll want to know how to get around them — but Apple seems to be setting the iPad Pro up as a tablet that could one day replace your laptop (yes, that's the Surface's slogan). My guess is that day isn't here yet for most people, but Apple just took its first real step toward it.
For years, U.S. wireless carriers have been trying to exit the business of subsidizing phones. Now Apple’s latest move may be too much of a good thing—and could force carriers to lower plan prices even further.
The lack of a browser on the Apple Watch and Apple TV isn't exactly shocking — neither the wrist nor the television screen provides an ideal browsing environment — but the failure to include them is a bit remarkable nonetheless.
This near term benefit will surely help their balance sheet in their next earnings call but comes at the cost of the day-to-day experience of some of their customers.
Scientists at several universities told me they now have evidence, to the likely delight of far-flung grandparents everywhere, that infants can also tell the difference between, say, a broadcast of Mister Rogers and a video call with their actual grandfather. The ability to discern between video broadcast and video-based chat from infancy, which researchers have only recently confirmed, could have a profound effect on our understanding of how the human brain develops—and specifically, how technologies can play a role in shaping abstract concepts early on.
When do we get Xcode for iPad Pro?
— John Gruber (@gruber) September 10, 2015Thanks for reading.
The taptic feedback feels great. Apple calls the two levels “peek” and “pop”. They definitely feel different. Peek is like the half-press on a camera shutter to auto-focus, and pop is the full-press to take a picture. Pop feels stronger. And, for 3D touch UI elements that only have one level, you feel the pop right away, giving you haptic feedback that you need not try pressing harder, because you’re already all the way in. The taptic engine also serves as the vibrator for notifications, and I suspect that’s going to be a big improvement over the rinky-dink vibrator in every iPhone since the iPhone 4.
Get ready to master iCloud. There is no persistent local storage for apps on Apple TV. This means that every app developed for the new Apple TV must be able to store data in iCloud and retrieve it in a way that provides a great customer experience. Plan your app’s full lifetime from launch, to pause, to resume, to shut-down.
You must be wondering how it feels to see a concept you worked so very hard on end up as a native feature in an Apple product. Honestly, it doesn’t feel that bad, besides from not being a part of the actual implementation, we really feel that capturing a memory like this feels very natural and that’s what matters most.
What’s driving the iPhone’s escape from the trap of commodity hardware is that it is more than a hardware device. Instead, an iPhone is a tightly integrated mix of hardware, great software, and several pretty good services rolled into a single gadget.
Paper for iPhone includes nearly all of the features that users have come to appreciate from the iPad version. Images, text notes, lists, and sketches are all combined into the same space, which means you can quickly capture any idea that may come into your mind. There are a variety of photo features in the app, as well, including the ability to take, annotate, and spotlight images.
Aware now that something wasn't right, he tapped the watch and swiped to bring up the Heart Rate Glance app. It showed 50 beats a minute. He tapped it again – 150 beats a minute! Not good. He opened Cardio, the heart rate app on his iPhone, and got the same result. Then to the Health app on the iPhone, where the health and fitness data from the watch is displayed on a dashboard. It showed irregularity, with spiking of between 120 and 150 beats a minute.
It was a great day- thanks @OneRepublic, our employees & our many customers around the world who watched. pic.twitter.com/F15RgjFsO8
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) September 10, 2015Thanks for reading.
After months of speculation, the iPad Pro is finally real. And it’s big. The iPad Pro has a 12.9-inch display with a 2732×2048-pixel resolution. That’s 5.6 million pixels across the massive screen, and even more than a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display has. But the display isn’t the only makes the iPad Pro like a laptop. It’ll have a keyboard and stylus, too.
And the crazy thing is, it sort of works. This 1.57-pound, 6.9mm-thick device is a little clunky, sure, but it’s entirely possible to hold in one hand. It’s sturdy and handsome, with speakers on all four corners and the same rounded-rectangle feel as its smaller brethren. It’s just enormous. I can’t say that enough.
This $99, all-white stylus felt light in the hand when I used it to scribble in Notes and draw on a picture in Apple's native Mail app. It also felt fast, unlike some styluses that suffer from latency issues. But again, I didn't use it for an extended period of time.
The new Apple TV was constructed on a foundation encompassing powerful hardware, a modern operating system, a new user experience with deep Siri integration, tools for developers, and most importantly, an App Store.
As for performance, it's unsurprisingly great in the limited demos running here. The App Store isn't live yet and is showing a dummy screen, but the games are running fast and smooth, and video apps are of course streaming flawlessly.
Only consumers in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the UK and the U.S. will receive the Siri Remote.
Apple executives demonstrated most of the anticipated new features of the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, including an upgraded, 12-megapixel camera and a new capability called 3D Touch. It can sense how hard a user is pressing a button, allowing for easier access to different menus and information. It also gives users “tactile feedback” when they touch their screens. Pressure-sensitive touch screens are already available on the Apple Watch and the new MacBook.
Ive is proud of 3D Touch because it improves the experience of owning an iPhone, but he’s also proud of what it says about Apple. He can’t think of another company that would have put so many resources into such a seemingly subtle, yet potentially profound, change.
“Why would we spend this many years working on 3D Touch when you can do some of these things with a button? Well it’s, it’s just such a fluid connection with your content,” says Ive, a little dreamily. “And not everything is binary, is it?”
Apple today announced the iPhone Upgrade Program, a new initiative that will let consumers buy new, unlocked iPhones from the company and move up to the new flagship model every year.
As has been the case with new versions of OS X for several years now, El Capitan will be a free upgrade for existing Mac OS users.
Apple said that wasn’t possible, because its iMessage service was encrypted.
But, the thing is, there is actually a very high likelihood that, technologically, iMessage could be wiretapped, because it does not allow users to verify encryption keys when writing or receiving messages.
These questions should be discussed in a public forum with public participation before any such system is built out, and not as a result of secret court decisions and under a gag order. We applaud Apple’s resolve in standing firm, and we strongly urge the government to bring this debate out in the open where it belongs.
The continued existence of Mac user groups is an anachronism in a world where Apple customers today can almost instantaneously get tech support online and at Apple Stores. Only a few hundred user groups remain, down from several thousand at their peak in the early to mid-1990s. But they continue as a testament to loyalty and fellowship, qualities that seem quaint in a fast-moving world that sometimes favors online interaction over face-to-face encounters.
It is surprising that one last gap remains in the middle of this stack of system exclusivity: Apple licenses the instruction set architecture for its mobile devices from ARM.
It's only 15 seconds of music, featuring a delicate jingle of banjo and guitar topped with a honeyed song in the dialect of Bassa. Yet it's 15 seconds that changed everything for Blick Bassy, the Cameroonian musician whose song "Kiki" was chosen for Apple's iPhone 6 advertising campaign, airing globally in June.
Pockets matter because they’re personal. What we wear at our waists is at least as intimate as what we wear on our wrists, and what we’ve worn there over the centuries tells us a lot about who we are, how we’ve changed, and how we’ve stayed the same. We’re greedy; we’re vain; we’re hungry; we’re late. We want to start fires and listen to a thousand songs.
When you act like you belong so everybody just goes with it pic.twitter.com/PCQX3Nigtz
— Mark Agee (@MarkAgee) September 8, 2015Thanks for reading.
In an investigation involving guns and drugs, the Justice Department obtained a court order this summer demanding that Apple turn over, in real time, text messages between suspects using iPhones.
Apple’s response: Its iMessage system was encrypted and the company could not comply.
Government officials had warned for months that this type of standoff was inevitable as technology companies like Apple and Google embraced tougher encryption. The case, coming after several others in which similar requests were rebuffed, prompted some senior Justice Department and F.B.I. officials to advocate taking Apple to court, several current and former law enforcement officials said.
What follows is tried-and-tested pragmatic advice to keep your Mac happily and gainfully employed for many years to come.
Hider 2 doesn’t just make your files invisible, but actually copies them to its your vault and deletes them as if you'd performed an "Empty Trash" action. When you toggle an item’s switch to Visible, the MacPaw app copies the item back to its original location. That's an innovative idea, but it does mean that hiding-encrypting/unhiding-uncrypting large files can take some time.
“I just really fell in love with programming, the whole creative process,” he said. “I had to design the whole app, I worked really hard on getting the look of it to be professional and simple in operation. Being on the edge of technology is the place to be.
But all these efforts to paint Jobs as a hero or a villain miss a larger truth: He can be both and still be worthy of acclaim... You don’t have to be an “Apploonian” to appreciate that he has an authentic claim on changing the world during this last generation.
“I think human-computer interaction designs have had as much impact as Moore’s Law in bringing the web and mobile devices to the world,” said Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Conference idea: TEDIUM. It features some of the most boring Medium contributors delivering TED-style talks. About algorithms and big data.
— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) September 7, 2015Thanks for reading.
More than half the apps met some of the criteria for aerobic exercise, 90 percent for some strength/resistance, but many fell short in flexibility. In all, two-thirds did not meet any flexibility criteria, the researchers wrote in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
The final result, when the scientists combined those three scores to come up with a total quality score: Only one app -- the Sworkit Lite Personal Workout Trainer -- met more than half the criteria from the guidelines.
SF summer gradient pic.twitter.com/Vy3K9pqPs8
— Burrito Justice (@burritojustice) September 7, 2015Siri is more limiting than AppleScript, because it can only carry out tasks that Apple’s engineers have predicted that I will want to perform. But it’s also much easier than opening up Script Editor, scrutinizing a scripting dictionary, spending 10 years learning AppleScript, and then writing and running a script.
Sure, round is a tad nicer looking when compared to square and we all know that if Apple built a round smartwatch it would be beautiful, but the problem is about information and glanceable data. In 5-10 years, are we really going to be using watches to tell time? Will that be even 1/4 of the reason we wear them? It’s hard to say, but again, I look at the iPhone and ask myself “How often do I make phone calls?”
"I find penguins at present the only comfort in life… one can’t be angry when one looks at a penguin" - John Ruskin pic.twitter.com/T0WjqwEQ
— Marcus Chown (@marcuschown) September 7, 2015Thanks for reading.
Apple is indeed installing huge 15-foot Apple logos in the auditorium's ornate window arches.
This will be an exciting week as Apple introduces new everything.
I wish Apple allowed unlimited apps in a folder, and I wish Apple showed badged apps in Notification Center — having said that, this is clearly a much cleaner, prettier, and faster way to organize and access apps on your iPhone.
Teachers often spend hours preparing classroom lesson plans to reinforce the material students are required to learn, and many share their best materials with colleagues. Founded in 2006, TeachersPayTeachers speeds up this lesson-plan prep work by monetizing exchanges between teachers and enabling them to make faster connections with farther-flung colleagues.
Hitting rock bottom, Kodak style. pic.twitter.com/NSZEY82W9z
— Vlad Savov (@vladsavov) September 5, 2015Thanks for reading.
In observance of this most hallowed of days, we've compiled 18 of our favorite recipes. From breakfast to dessert, main courses to sides, you can celebrate. All. Day. Long.
For International Bacon Day, we bring you the best ways to celebrate - from bacon-flavoured toothpaste to bacon desserts
It's easy. Here's how.
In fact, apart from certain security-related updates that would be good to get sooner rather than later, I think waiting a decent amount of time before upgrading makes a ton of sense. Immediate upgrades are for those of us whose business revolves around the latest details — we’re the penguins diving off the ice floe first so the rest of you can jump in without worrying about leopard seals. Wait a bit after a major upgrade, and for a minor update or two to address bugs that became obvious only after widespread public release.
Mobile app publishers have begun to play fast and loose with their release notes, which is the area where they’re supposed to communicate the changes shipping with the most recent app update to the end users. This inattention to detail is a disservice to users, who no longer have the benefit of understanding what the updated app will now do — or not do — as the case may be.
Without details, users can’t make an informed decision about whether they want to install that update at all.
First, let’s look at the bottom of BB-8. It’s a sphere that can roll. So, how do you make a sphere roll without pushing it? This one isn’t so difficult. All you need is a moveable mass inside the sphere.
Yep, his little robotic head may connect to his body with magnets, but it also uses little wheels to move around his body—wheels that very, very quickly get clogged up with dirt, hair, and all sorts of unpleasantness.
That's why it really bums me out that The Man In the Machine makes little attempt to portray someone who was, by most accounts, a complex, iconic, but all-too-flawed man who, over the course of his career, could be both inventor and thief, monk and businessman, brat and sage, tyrant and beloved leader, and managed to use those conflicting traits to both change the world and create the most valuable, influential, and admired company on the planet. Instead, The Man In the Machine is focused largely on the thesis that Jobs was always and only a jerk, that people who enjoy Apple products and admire Jobs are idiots and cult members, and that the computer revolution that was born of Jobs' vision must inevitably contain the same ugly darkness Gibney feels is Jobs' defining trait, despite any evidence to the contrary.
But for all of the complaints, CarPlay is still miles better than the interface on many cars, including the one on this otherwise very cool Corvette Stingray. It provides a simpler and safer way to access the services you want from your phone while driving, and you don’t have to learn a completely new interface just to do that.
Dutch artist Richard Vijgen designed Architecture of Radio, an iPad app that lets users explore the "infosphere" - a term used to describe an environment that is populated by informational entities like wireless and wired networks, as well as other electronic signals.
Samsung made a nice looking watch. But the reason it looks nice to us is the same reason cars that looked like horse-drawn coaches probably looked nice to people in the late 1800s. It’s just what we’re used to. It’s time to rethink that.
Do you ever hate how you look in photos taken by other people? That’s because other people have no clue how to make you look good. But you can very easily learn how.
YouTube should put the ad inside the "skip this ad in 'x' seconds" box because that's the only thing I'm paying attention to.
— SeoulBrother (@SeoulBrother) September 4, 2015Thanks for reading. And have a wonderful International Bacon Day.
There was a time when I felt like I knew my way around pretty much every non-game SDK available on iOS. Now I often find myself stumbling across frameworks that are completely foreign to me, which is both kind of exciting but also extremely daunting.
Start a business because it addresses the problem you want to solve and produces the product you want to build. Figure out how you’ll make your first dollar. Then determine how to make the first million. Eventually, you may grow to a billion-dollar company, but it’s OK if you end up as one of the 99.995 percent. There is a whole lot of room for success between a billion and dead.
The film first debuted at SXSW in March and met a bit of controversy thanks to its depiction of Jobs as a merciless force, with less time spent on his greater contributions to Apple and his impact on the world. Subsequently, Apple senior executive Eddie Cue called the film "an inaccurate and mean-spirited view of my friend" and "not a reflection of the Steve I knew."
The transformative impact Steve Jobs has had on culture and society has become an article of faith since his much-mourned death in 2011. The secular canonization of Mr. Jobs, the mastermind behind Apple, is the starting point for “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine,” Alex Gibney’s trenchant new documentary, which asks with sincere curiosity: What’s the fuss about? And more to the point: What’s wrong with this picture?
It’s great that a set like this is available digitally, both for download (it’s a lot easier than ripping 81 CDs), and for streaming. However, both Apple and other streaming services need to think of a better way to offer these sets for streaming.
“There’s a lot of work going into making the product better. Our focus is on editorial and playlists, and obviously we have teams all around the world working on that, but we’re also adding features and cleaning up certain things,” Oliver Schusser, vice president, iTunes International, told the Guardian.
In this week’s column, I look at a grab bag of questions. Readers have asked how to check or uncheck all the songs in their iTunes library. Will Apple Music music ever disappear? Why can’t they enter a year for their audiobooks in iTunes? And how can they keep their daughter from spending too much money on the iTunes Store?
At $150, the miniature BB-8, complete with magnetically-attached head and gyroscopic drive system, is one of the most expensive products to launch as part of today's massive Star Wars merchandising blitz dubbed "Force Friday." However, in marketing the "toy" as a premium device with iPhone and iPad control capabilities, Sphero nabbed coveted Apple Store shelf space.
NetNewsWire, once the RSS reader of choice for many a Mac user, has made its return with NetNewsWire 4. It includes a new interface for OS X Yosemite, bookmarking for articles, and critically missing from previous versions, its own sync service. There's also a version of NetNewsWire 4 for iPhone now as well.
The ability to pair an Android watch with an Apple phone is conceptually interesting but functionally, it's a lose-lose proposition. Android Wear watches can't do most of the things they can do when paired with Android phones, and your iPhone can't be extended through an Android watch the way it can with the Apple Watch. It's an experiment that may yield results one day, but that day isn't today.
I’m not convinced launching a Twitter account signals a sea change, but Apple just added an official App Store feed aimed at “the future of gaming, straight from [its] Games Editors.”
When the world’s largest publishers struck e-book distribution deals with Amazon.com Inc. over the past several months, they seemed to get what they wanted: the right to set the prices of their titles and avoid the steep discounts the online retail giant often applies.
But in the early going, that strategy doesn’t appear to be paying off. Three big publishers that signed new pacts with Amazon— Lagardere SCA’s Hachette Book Group, News Corp’s HarperCollins Publishers and CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster—reported declining e-book revenue in their latest reporting periods.
The city’s copious slopes are no mystery, but where do the steepest of them lie? Let’s take a look.
When optimistic jr devs realize computers are awful and no programming language is best pic.twitter.com/SIrIg06FR9
— Oscar Godson (@oscargodson) September 3, 2015Thanks for reading.
So please Apple, I’m begging you: give us a way to switch between internal speakers and headphones in OS X. Pretty please? It’s a simple option that could be added to the Sound preference pane; it can’t be that difficult. Slip it into the next beta for OS X 10.11 El Capitan, put it in a point release, or at least expose the API to developers so they can fix it.
Alternatively, let’s say for argument’s sake that there is no way OS X could override the headphone port sensor switch. In that case, Apple, I beg you again: get rid of that stupid switch in future Macs. Make it a software function. On my last non-Mac computer, a home-built Windows PC, I could swap between headphones and speakers in the sound card settings. Come on, Apple, Microsoft Windows and a guy who built a cheap computer on a kitchen table has you beat here! That should be sufficiently embarrassing.
The point is, I’ve always enjoyed technology. You name it: it’s a joy to solve a problem with software or scripting or a web service or a cleverly applied bit of hardware. But in the past few months I’ve been reminded that sometimes it’s a good idea to realize that just because you can use clever new technology to solve a problem, it may not be the best solution available.
“The business model is good,” said Conde Nast president Bob Sauerberg, whose company will offer up six titles when News launches: Vanity Fair, Wired, GQ, Epicurious, Teen Vogue and Conde Nast Traveler. Sauerberg says he has signed up four advertisers — Burberry, Ford, Campbell Soup and Reynolds — for the launch, via a sponsorship model — that is, they’ll pay Conde a flat fee, regardless of how many people view their stuff on the app.
If you’re an Excel user who doesn’t rely on macros, and doesn’t need to customize your menus and commands, Excel 2016 has a lot going for it. The new interface is pleasant, the cross-platform features are a welcome addition, the performance is very good, and the Mac-specific features make Excel feel as native as any other Mac app.
I’ve been very happy with Parallels Desktop 11 since installing it on my iMac, and still find it to be the best virtual machine environment for me. It’s fast, it’s not a resource hog (at least on my iMac), and it’s actually quite inexpensive considering what it does.
Okay, if you do any audio or video editing, this is clearly for you. Tell your boss, your accountant or just yourself that you're going to do lots and lots of video editing.
While Apple generally distances itself from social media on a corporate level, the company's CEO Tim Cook and many of its flagship services, including the App Store, Apple Music and Beats1, take a more active and meaningful approach to the medium. The pervasive strength of Apple's brand means it can break rules other marketers must follow on Twitter, Facebook and other networks without consequence.
Here’s another reason not to jailbreak your iPhone.
A U.S. judge on Wednesday granted final approval to a $415 million settlement that ends a high profile lawsuit in which workers accused Apple, Google and two other Silicon Valley companies of conspiring to hold down salaries.
And if you're writing headlines, please stop using vague terms like "safe" or "secure". The role of a headline isn't, no matter what tabloids might suggest, to convince people to read an article; the role of a headline is to help readers decide if they want to read the article, and imprecision serves no purpose there.
Add “boredom detector” to the seemingly endless list of things your smartphone can do. A group of researchers say they’ve developed an algorithm that can suss this out by looking at your mobile activity, considering factors like the time since you last had a call or text, the time of day, and how intensely you’re using the phone.
we get it, you smoke weed pic.twitter.com/IcXf47lhn8
— fiona (@fioroco) September 2, 2015Thanks for reading.
Customers at Eatsa in the Financial District will order from an iPad, sending the order to the kitchen. When the meal is ready, it appears in a small glass compartment. The food is prepared by real people, but the patrons never have to see them.
The restaurant is the first project of Keenwawa, a new venture-backed Silicon Valley startup that wants to disrupt fast food by making it healthy, affordable and accessible. Cofounded by Tim Young, Scott Drummond and David Freedburg, the key to Keenwawa's big dreams is quinoa.
Quinoa, pronounced ‘keen-wa’ is a great wheat-free alternative to starchy grains. There are two types: red and creamy white. Both types are slightly bitter when cooked and open up to release little white curls (like a tail) as they soften.
Grown in South America (Peru, Chile and Bolivia) for thousands of years, quinoa formed the staple diet of the Incas and their descendants. In recent years, foodies in the UK and the US have heralded it as a superior alternative to bulgur wheat, couscous and rice. Though it often occupies a similar role to these grains in dishes, quinoa is actually in the same family as beets, chard and spinach.
Genieo acquires this access by very briefly displaying a message asking for permission to open the Safari extensions and then automatically clicking the accompanying OK button before a user has time to respond or possibly even notice what's taking place. With that, Genieo installs an extension known as Leperdvil.
Its publisher, Mixi, appears to have run afoul of the fact that it distributes items to users outside of Apple's ecosystem via special codes which users can input into the game. These items are thus outside of Apple's ability to collect profits on them.
Tinybop founder Raul Gutierrez was frustrated. Compared to the Apple II computers he grew up programming on, the iPhones in his kids' hands were unknowable black boxes: silicon sandwiches of wafer-thin components that may as well work by magic, for all a kid can play with them.
Tinybop's latest app, The Everything Machine, aims to change all that. The second part in their Diguital Toys series of apps, The Everything Machine turns all the components and sensors in an iPhone or iPad into Lego-like bricks of programming logic, allowing kids to program anything they can imagine: from a simple flash light app to a face-detecting fart machine.
An Apple spokeswoman confirmed to BuzzFeed News that Android Wear won’t integrate with HealthKit, Apple’s platform for developers of health and fitness apps. She also said that decision was entirely Google’s.
Google also confirmed that Android Wear–gathered fitness data would bypass HealthKit. “That said, Android Wear on iOS absolutely supports the mass majority of Wear features we see our Android users using and loving,” a company spokeswoman said in an email.
Now Amazon gets to boast that it has something Netflix doesn’t have: The ability to let users download some TV shows and movies to their phones and tablets so they can watch them later, without an Internet connection.
Amazon has already offered that feature for a couple of years, but only for its own Fire tablets. Now it’s making a big leap forward by offering the capability for iPhones, iPads and Android devices.
At first glance, it seemed exceedingly bland to me; the longer I look at it and a new font that's related, the more I think they made a series of good choices. It's still bland, but it's a well-thought-out bland that makes sense for their company.
Putting off a work or school assignment in order to play videogames or water the plants might seem like nothing more serious than poor time-management.
But researchers say chronic procrastination is an emotional strategy for dealing with stress, and it can lead to significant issues in relationships, jobs, finances and health.
I wonder what people who type "ur" and "ppl" do with all the time they save.
— BangsRBetterThnBotox (@Taryn_) September 2, 2015Thanks for reading.
Android Wear for iOS is not as tightly integrated with the platform as Apple's own watch, but its functionality, including notification support, is comparable to the capabilities of existing popular iOS-connected wearable devices, such as the Pebble Time, Fitbit Surge and Meta M1.
There’s little interaction with the notifications, too. They can be viewed and dismissed, but you can’t, say, get an alert for a tweet and respond using the watch. Instead, you’d have to pull out your iPhone for that.
You're unable to reply to an iMessage from the watch itself… For Hangouts, you can see messages that you have received right on the Android Wear watch face but you can't reply… You are able to answer or ignore the [phone] call from the watch, but you will need to use the handset itself to talk.
The most important camera company of any era is the one that entices the average consumer to take more photos. Leica might have “invented” the 35mm camera, but their audience was and is niche. The digital camera might have been an unavoidable technological shift, but the real explosion in the number of photos taken is almost certainly attributable to the iPhone and the apps that it supports.
The ambitious new DxO One takes stunning 20.2-megapixel pictures from a device that’s half the size of a deck of cards. The secret: It’s a pro-level image sensor and bright lens that plugs onto the base of an iPhone, which serves as the viewfinder and central command.
Cinemagraph is a hybrid media form that combines the quality of a photograph with moving video. It has elements that don't move (the photograph) and elements that do move (the video).
Sources indicate the Cupertino, Calif., colossus has held preliminary conversations in recent weeks with executives in Hollywood to suss out their interest in spearheading efforts to produce entertainment content.
The two Silicon Valley stalwarts will work together to ensure that iOS devices work more efficiently on Cisco-powered networks, including deeper integration with Cisco's industry standard voice and video communications products. Corporate users might be able to use their iPhone or the Cisco handset on their desk interchangeably, for example.
Admittedly, mobile devices tempt us to rack up more screen time than a slots player with an oxygen tank and a Bally’s card. But in calling this bad habit an addiction, we are both exaggerating the problem and trivializing the burden of substance abuse.
Death is very much on my mind these days. Two person whose work I admire has just died. I'm reading (or, if you insist, listening to the audiobook) 100 Days of Happiness by Fausto Brizzi. And I've just listened to RadioLab's interview with Dr Oliver Sacks.
Real world Monument Valley. http://t.co/G1QfS3denU pic.twitter.com/gd1ClW1OuO
— martinpi (@martinpi) September 1, 2015Thanks for reading.