A pensioner is suing Apple because he claims staff “wiped away his life” when they tried to repair an iPhone. Deric White, 68, wants £5,000 compensation for the loss of precious snaps from his honeymoon plus 15 years of contacts.
Looking at it this way gives us three different setups to talk through: flat on table/desk/lap, propped at an angle on a table/desk/lap, and held in your hands. For the sake of brevity I am just going to talk about these placements in the sense of a desk, but know that I mean any flat surface you sit or stand working at. And for the sake of further brevity you can assume the iPad Pro works the same in your lap, with much less comfort overall. So if say the iPad works great flat on a desk, it would just be OK in your lap like that.
I went out with my best friend and commiserated about exactly how much our jobs sucked and how we should totally go out on our own.
Then I woke up hungover. And then I got laser focused on getting out on my own. I blocked out time in my schedule. I committed to it. I gave myself a year but managed to do it in just 10 months.
In the ‘gig’ or ‘sharing’ economy, say the experts, we will do lots of different jobs as technology releases us from the nine to five. But it may also bring anxiety, insecurity and low wages.
Building digital libraries in Ghana with Worldreader.
“The main strategy for growing audience is to publish more, better stories,” Thompson said. “The most encouraging thing we found is that the stories we’re prouder of, the stories we put more effort into, attract more readers.”
I am a little disappointed that Microsoft has named its first laptop the Surface Book.
Of course, if Apple named its Mac laptop the MacBook, and Google named its Chrome laptop the Chromebook, Microsoft has to name its laptop the Surface Book. (WinBook is already taken.)
But, when you place the two product names side-by-side: Surface Pro and Surface Book, I do imagine the Pro is the laptop while the Book is the tablet. Which is totally opposite. (Yes, I know both are laptops and tablets, but the Pro is more tablet than laptop while the Book is more laptop than tablet.)
If you are familiar with the stories of how Apple named the Macintosh or the iMac, you'll know that naming things is hard. Which is why I am only a little disappointed. After all, Microsoft was never famous for giving great names to its products.
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When Microsoft is ready to announce their touchscreen all-in-one desktop computer, I hope the computer will not be called the iSurface.
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Thanks for reading.
On top of Siri’s ever-widening vocabulary, blind users say the new iPhone 6s’ “3D-Touch” feature can dramatically speed the hassle of navigating through apps in Apple’s new iOS 9 mobile operating system.
“For the blind market, iOS absolutely dominates — there’s no comparison,” says Winston Chen, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Voice Dream Reader, a popular mobile app available in in both iOS and Android versions that reads written text aloud.
Business professionals on the hunt for a capable image-editing platform possessing a small footprint that doesn't break the bank should check out Pixelmator.
Of course, if you’re somewhat well-versed in classical music, you’ll know what’s coming already. If not, you need to understand that Fugue Machine isn’t trying to propel your musical output back in time by several centuries; instead, it’s all about taking advantage of (very) tried and tested techniques, to help you create mesmerising, hypnotic music.
I often hear VCs say that they don’t back products, they back platforms. I find that logic backwards and in many ways dangerous for founders. Platforms can provide a durable competitive advantage, and it’s easy to understand why startups would want to create one. But great platforms are nearly always born from companies first creating great products with narrow, but compelling use cases.
Founders have a hard time accepting this advice, because they hear that VCs only want to back businesses with unicorn potential. They have difficulty imagining that a niche point solution could fit the bill. So they dream up a story of how their startup could become a platform and lose focus on the problem they’re solving.
There are plenty of potential downsides to becoming an Apple supplier. First, Apple has a habit of using its weight as bargaining leverage, and often negotiates substantial volume discounts that inevitably put a pressure on the supplier's margins. Even if the supplier grows its relationship with Apple, it then faces customer concentration risk. If Apple finds a better supplier, or if the component becomes commoditized, or decides to change technologies, among other potential switching reasons, that initial supplier might have a lot to lose even if times were good for a couple of years.
My house guest is not happy. This may be because my three-year-old is looping purple plastic necklaces around his neck while ordering him to dance. Or possibly due to the baby hurling toys at his head.
I know he is not happy because a high-tech tablet stuck to his chest informs me of his discontent, listing a string of emotions he is currently feeling – confused, insecure, irritated. Not to mention the fact that he has just grunted.
Welcome to the world of 21st century household robots. For the humanoid standing uncomfortably in the middle of my living room is Pepper, the world’s first robot with a “heart”.
Not too bad! Any black hole that humanity might ever create is very unlikely to harm anyone who doesn’t try to eat it.
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Thanks for reading.
The reason for the current failure is that the corporate tax is based on a fiction, the idea that one can establish the profits earned by each multinational subsidiary by subsidiary. But this fiction is no longer tenable today, because multinational groups, advised by great auditing and consulting firms, are in practice free to move their profits wherever they want, which is usually wherever it is taxed the least; and large countries have themselves mostly given up taxing the profits booked outside of their territory.
Retailers' deals on iPads, Watches and other Apple products indicate this could be a strong holiday start for Apple — even though Apple refrained from offering any of its own discounts.
The mall aims to be the premier public space in our society, and indeed, it is the destination of choice for many when it comes to socializing. But there are signs it has overdone its welcome—that we have seen through its pretenses and false claims—and as the New York Times reported not long ago, many malls are dying. The mall is no public space at all, but wholly private. Many Americans were rudely reminded of this when, in the build-up to the war in Iraq last decade, several malls evicted patrons sporting antiwar T-shirts; they invoked their status as private property, and were not obliged to tolerate free speech at all. The mall does not want to serve as a public space—it just wants us to shop. But increasingly, that message is too indelicate for our ears. We want more from our public spaces—or our would-be public spaces, I should say.
One common complaint about iTunes is that it does things that you don’t want it to do. For example, when you view music by artist, iTunes applies album artwork to the Artists list, but you don’t get to choose which album gets picked. I discuss how to resolve this. I also look at how you can fast-forward and rewind a track in iTunes, and I examine a question about re-ripping music from CDs that were ripped a long time ago.
The reality is that the world in which we live isn’t perfect, and things go wrong. Servers take time to respond. And your customers won’t always use your product the way in which you intended. So, as a product designer, you’ve got to take these realities into account. That’s why every screen you’ll design for your product can have up to five states.
Amazon appears to have confirmed to engineer Dan Bostonweeks that it is developing a tvOS app for Prime Video that could launch before the end of 2015. "Hopefully, within a few weeks span, you will be able to see the Amazon Instant Video app feature on your Apple TV," the company purportedly said in an email.
The Reserve Bank has been urged to examine potential anti-competitive behaviour in the emerging card-free payments market amid claims the banks have frozen out newcomer Apple Pay.
Labor's spokesman on digital innovation, Ed Husic, has written to the RBA and the Australian Bankers' Association, raising his concern that Australians are being "denied choices" in digital payments.
When it’s hundreds of thousands of children including their names, genders and birthdates, that’s off the charts. When it includes their parents as well—along with their home addresses—and you can link the two and emphatically say “Here is 9-year-old Mary, I know where she lives and I have other personally identifiable information about her parents (including their password and security question),” I start to run out of superlatives to even describe how bad that is.
This is the background on how this little device and other online assets created by VTech requested deeply personal info from parents about their families which they then lost in a massive data breach.
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Thanks for reading.
The reason I want to upgrade my phone so often isn’t so much because I’m a nerd or I need it for my job. It’s because my iPhone is the “remote control” of my life. My phone is an indispensable tool, and I want the best tool.
The iPhone 6s fits the bill. It’s the best, most accessible remote control yet.
Part of the reason I wanted to write this post is that it is a drama that has mainly played out in subtweets and disparate blog posts (and, no doubt, numerous Slack channels that most of us aren’t privy to). So there’s been understandable frustration from some people that they are being asked to make consequential calls on issues as sensitive as someone’s gender or their trustworthiness with scant information to go on.
So primarily I want this post to be an explainer of what we know so far. This is by no means comprehensive - the saga gets ever more complicated the more you delve into it and I’m largely relying on piecing together the same fragments of information as everyone else.
The Architecture of Radio app shows users a 360-degree augmented reality view of the all of the wireless networks around them using their GPS location.
Thankfully, a great Safari extension takes care of that problem for me. It’s called NoMoreiTunes, and it does exactly what the name implies.
With 1 million tons ofl food waste and compostable material dumped into landfills annually in Massachusetts, several smartphone apps are available to help consumers and businesses move toward waste-free holiday cooking.
Would you watch paint dry for several hours? If you work for the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), you might not have much choice in the matter. As a protest against problems he sees within the organisation, British filmmaker and journalist Charlie Lyne has launched a Kickstarter to send the BBFC a film he’s made called Paint Drying. It does what it says on the tin: the film is a single, unbroken shot lasting several hours (its length is determined by the amount of money raised) of white paint slowly drying on a brick wall. Once Lyne has paid the fee, the board are obliged to watch it.
The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
I have only read three of the one hundred selected by New York Times. Looks like I need to find a longer way to commute.
(If you are curious, the three books are "Fates and Furies", "A Little Life", and "Purity." If you ask me, I do recommend these three books -- although "A Little Life" may be a little too graphical and explicit and sad. Don't gift "A Little Life" for Christmas, unless you really know the person you are gifting to.)
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Thanks for reading. Happy winter reading.
Apple uploaded a new holiday commercial today (just ahead of Thanksgiving in the United States) featuring soul singer Andra Day and Stevie Wonder playing Wonder's 1967 classic 'Someday at Christmas'.
In China today, it is commonplace to pay for food delivery, taxis, restaurant meals, movie tickets and much more with a mobile phone. For would-be disrupters in the U.S. and elsewhere, this provides a road map of sorts for how the industry is likely to evolve, as well as where potential potholes lie.
China UnionPay Co. and Apple Inc. have reached a preliminary agreement to introduce Apple Pay in China through UnionPay’s point-of-sales network, people familiar with the matter said.
While I still believe gendered, and personal, attacks on anybody for their opinions is fully unwarranted, it has become increasingly clear to me I have misplaced my trust in this person. That misplaced trust was something this person appears to have been depending on and I regret this very much.
The new feature in question is the much requested month view. But Timepage’s month view is no ordinary month view. It’s actually a heatmap of your schedule that lets you see at a glance when you’re busy and when you’re free, with busier days indicated with stronger colors.
If you want a sleek, attractive case that doubles the life of your iPhone 6 or iPhone 6s, the Mophie Juice Pack Air is a great option. It doubles the battery life of your device, and looks good while doing so. That said, the Boostcase remains our Editors' Choice for its detchable design, allowing you to ditch the battery when you don't need it.
The company's new SDK for tvOS apps lets developers lean on Facebook for the login process; users can go to facebook.com/devices on their phone or computer and enter a verification code to log in instantly.
It was launched in February 2012 with modest ambitions to give young people a small cheap programmable device - and has become Britain's most successful homegrown computer. Now Raspberry Pi is getting smaller and cheaper.
25 isn't on Pandora because Adele specifically wanted it there. It's on Pandora because Adele and her label don't have a say. Spotify, Apple Music, and other music streaming services that let you choose exactly which songs you want to hear all operate through direct deals with record labels. Those deals give artists and labels the ability to withhold specific songs and albums when they choose to, which is why you see major names like Adele and Taylor Swift withholding albums to boost physical sales or for use as a bargaining chip. Pandora, on the other hand, doesn't have a deal with labels. It relies on a law governing "non-interactive" streaming services — basically, anything akin to a traditional radio broadcast — which allows it to stream any song with a US copyright so long as it pays a federally established fee.
Mozilla, based in Mountain View, California, ditched the global Google deal at the end of last year, moving instead to regional deals with other search engine companies, notably Yahoo in the United States, Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia.
Now, Mozilla gets no revenue at all from Google, even though Google is still the default search engine for Firefox users in Europe, said Denelle Dixon-Thayer, Mozilla's chief business and legal officer.
Ronald Reagan in 1987 was technically the first president to use the word "pardon" about a turkey, but it was really just a way to deflect questions about the Iran-Contra scandal and whether he would pardon key players involved — Oliver North and John Poindexter. The bird, "Charlie," was already headed for a petting zoo, but after Sam Donaldson of ABC News pressed Reagan on whether he'd pardon North and Poindexter, Reagan responded, "If they'd given me a different answer on Charlie and his future, I would have pardoned him."
Two years later, George H.W. Bush formalized the turkey pardoning ceremony, giving birth to the modern-day tradition.
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Thank you for reading, and may everyone be blessed.
It’s pretty hard to put eight months of your life in a single blog post, but I’ll try to outline the most interesting and crucial facts behind how Readdle created our first Mac app and how it became a #1 top paid on Mac App Store globally.
I had a hard time initially doing anything with the iPad Pro. It took me five days from that Wednesday to acclimate to the device, during which I was heavily rotating between it and my iPad Air 2. After the weekend, I decided to take the new iPad for its first full week of class.
I’m registered for four classes this semester, each with its own content distribution system and rules for submitting assignments: Intro to Astronomy, Intro to Linguistics, fifth-semester Arabic, and Linear Algebra.
Apple has told us it intends making Swift 2.0 open source “later this year”, a move some developers are calling “monumental”, a “huge milestone in the evolution of the programming industry.”
But Sean Stephens wants to take Swift further still. He wants to take it into the massive computer data centers that drive our mobile apps and websites across the Internet. This week, Stephens and his new company,PerfectlySoft, released aversion of Swift that runs not just on the iPhone and other personal devices, but on the computer servers that deliver data and services to these devices.
In the last days of the store, daily life at the store got pretty intense. Longtime customers were bereft. We tried to comfort them, explaining how our owner had ensured that our whole collection would soon be available at the public library — for free, even! It didn't help much. Almost to a one, they had the same reply: "But you won't be there to help us."
I know that some of you won’t be happy about this, as a few have been gently reminding me to do this, but with where the Mac content blockers current reside, there’s really no contest — Ghostery is easily the best of the lot.
The new version brings support for iOS 9 Split View, support for the new iPad Pro and 3D Touch capability on the iPhone 6s, amongst a number of feature improvements.
The latest versions of Dropbox and Adobe Acrobat Reader will make it easier to work with PDFs in Dropbox, offering editing, saving and syncing capabilities within both apps. Users can annotate and comment on PDFs stored in Dropbox from their iPhone or iPad.
Comprehensive and powerful note taking app gets updated.
Specifically independent, cult and classic magazine titles — so not the garish mass market fare you’ll find rammed in your eyeline at the supermarket checkout screaming about celebrities and cellulite. Readbug bills its aggregated digitized magazine content as alternative/aspirational stuff, read by “creative and curious” types. And Hammett says it’s deliberately “handpicking and curating” the titles it wants to repackage and distribute on its platform in order to establish its own editorial voice — as well it must to stand a chance of pulling eyeballs in an era of free info overload.
Beamer, a favorite of the MacStories team, is a Mac app that allows you to easily stream video (in almost any format) to your Apple TV via AirPlay. In Beamer 3, streaming support has expanded beyond AirPlay and it can now stream to Google Chromecast.
The precision-controlled immersion circulator was unveiled this morning by the Seattle startup ChefSteps. Dubbed “Joule,” after the measure of heat energy, the device heats water to precise temperatures to cook meat and other food evenly over extended periods of time — using the increasingly popular cooking technique known as sous vide. The device is controlled by a companion smartphone recipe app for iPhone and Android.
The short answer is, recording podcasts on iOS today is not as easy as editing them. It can be done, but only with a number of workarounds that aren’t necessary on the Mac, which has a more mature sound system that can handle playing and recording multiple audio streams in multiple apps simultaneously.
IBM is the third company this year to make available proprietary machine-learning technology under an open-source license. Facebook Inc. in February, released portions of its Torch software, while Alphabet Inc.’s Google division earlier this month open-sourced parts of its TensorFlow system.
TechCrunch has confirmed that Apple has snapped up Faceshift, a startup based in Zurich that has developed technology to create animated avatars and other figures that capture a person’s facial expressions in real time.
The question "is iPad Pro a laptop replacement" is a lousy question, in my humble opinion. Do you answer "no" because there are certainly specific tasks that you can't do on an iPad that you can do on a laptop like a MacBook or a Surface Book? Or do you answer "yes" because there are certainly specific people that can throw away their laptops just because they can perform all their tasks on an iPad just as efficiently?
Better questions are "can a journalist use an iPad Pro rather than a laptop" and "how many laptops will be still be sold in 5 or 10 years' time". Unfortunately, of course, these aren't sexy questions.
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Thanks for reading.
“These are very exciting numbers for us. When we prepared the IRB (Institutional Review Board) proposal, we thought we could recruit a couple hundred users. But in the end we got thousands of users. So that’s really thrilling,” Dr. Wang said.
By the mid-90s, a server computer equipped with multiple DEC Alpha CPUs could manage a gigaflop. A couple of years later in 1999, the Power Mac G4 finally brought Apple’s hardware into gigaflop territory.
But what has happened since? Turns out that the one-gigaflop computer isn’t a relic of history. Instead Apple has released several iterations of computers roughly in this same performance range, but with constantly shrinking physical volume.
If you are someone who loves your iPad and just wants more of it, this is the iPad for you. If you’re someone who dreams of one day having a device that’s got the screen of a Retina laptop but the portability of an iPad, stop dreaming.
As for most of us, the question is not whether we can do our jobs on the iPad Pro, but whether we want to. The answer depends more on what your needs and expectations are than on the iPad Pro itself.
The work Apple has done to get the hardware and software in harmony to the point where this all works so flawlessly is astounding to me. The results I am able to achieve are just fantastic.
Square is rolling out new mobile payment readers to 100 local businesses around the country, allowing such merchants to accept chip cards, and most notably, Apple Pay. The move is a big deal for Square, which only last week went public. But it also adds momentum to Apple’s efforts to spread Apple Pay more broadly.
Apple Inc. plans to launch its new Apple Pay electronic-payment service in China by early February, according to people familiar with its discussions, potentially bringing it to a vibrant but fiercely competitive market for digital money.
The Cupertino, Calif., company has struck deals recently with China’s big four state-run banks, the people said. The deals will allow potential Apple Pay users to link the service with their local bank accounts.
The app bears a striking resemblance to the WordPress.com website, though that should probably come as little surprise, and offers all of the same functionality. Those wishing to simply post new content to a WordPress.com website, a self-hosted WordPress blog or a WordPress VIP site can do just that using the new app. As for more complex things such as settings, comments, notifications and other day-to-day running of a blog, they can also get done here, but will require Jetpack plugin installed on self-hosted blogs in order to make use of those features.
Commander One adds welcome utility the Finder could only dream of and manages to handle most core tasks quite well, but could use further UI refinement and a few bug fixes, particularly with the built-in FTP Manager in the Pro version.
Now whenever someone sends you a phone number, address, or date, you can tap that information to automatically start a call, bring up a map, or create a new calendar event, respectively.
Taiwan’s technology companies mostly remain mired in PC hardware, while those in other countries such as China have moved into Internet services, birthing juggernauts such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.
Do I want Xcode on an iPad? Sure I do.
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Okay, I've given some thought to this Xcode-on-iPad thing, and I have a different opinion now.
See, the programming languages that many of us dabble with, be it Swift or Objective C, PHP or Perl, are mostly heavily text-based. Sure, a keyboard to type words and paranthesis and semi-colons is not foreign in the iPad world. But, if one is to fully embrace the iOS world, there should be a re-think of what is programming, in my humble opinion.
The Interface-Builder portion of Xcode is a good start. However, it seems to me except for the addition of the confusing-to-me auto-layout stuff, it didn't really attracted too much attention from Apple in recent years. Perhaps Apple is secretly working on something to replace the Interface-Builder, just like how it was secretly working on Swift for quite a while. I know I do want to see something extra-ordinary coming from Apple to tackle the Xcode-on-iPad problem.
(Someday, I shall read up more about Hypercard, something I've not used before.)
The Mac started out needing Lisa for creating Mac apps. I hope the Mac doesn't just hang around in Cupertino just because Xcode-on-Mac is needed to create iOS apps.
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Thanks for reading.
As our biggest manufacturers and traders and investors succeed in China, they also come to depend on China for future profits — which brings them increasingly under the sway of a Chinese state that holds the power to cut those profits off. What if the master capitalists and corporate bosses who have so cowed us here at home are themselves being cowed in Beijing? What if the extreme economic interdependence between the United States and China is not actually carrying our values into a backward and benighted realm, but accomplishing precisely the opposite — granting the Chinese Politburo ever-increasing leverage over America’s economic and political life?
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University hope to help those with the neurological condition by collecting information about their seizures through their watches, specifically their Apple Watches.
"Physicians often ask patients to record their seizures, but that can be hard, especially when a patient loses consciousness," said Dr. Gregory Krauss, a professor of neurology in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who is working on the program, named EpiWatch.
"EpiWatch collects data that help researchers better understand epilepsy, while helping patients keep a more complete history of their seizures," he said.
A homeless man has turned his life around after teaching himself to make music - by practicing his skills in the Apple store.
If you wake the Apple TV with the silver remote, and don’t touch the Siri remote until after you get to a password entry screen, you’ll get the grid.
So in time for Christmas and the season that keeps on gifting, mega toy store Toys R Us, with the help of Ogilvy & Mather Singapore are launching a local mobile app Tasks For Toys. This app lets kids get rewarded with toys only after they complete a set of predetermined tasks made by their parents — because nothing in life comes free and easy, and they best learn early.
I’ve built a web application to help me stay on top of my depression. Every day I track a number of indicators — when I get up, how much work I do, whether I see friends, a variety of good and bad habits, etc. Using this data, if there is a suggestion that I am acting destructively my inner circle of family and friends is alerted so they can help me re-find my way.
Autumn is much redder in North America and east Asia than it is in northern Europe, and this can’t be explained by temperature differences alone. These areas also have a greater proportion of ancient tree lineages surviving: trees have gone extinct at a higher rate in Europe compared with those other areas. Is it possible that the red-leaved trees of North America and east Asia are still carrying with them an anti-herbivore device that evolved in the presence of leaf-eating animals which have long since gone extinct themselves?
I can confirm that I've used an Apple device for work from the very start of the day to a very late evening, and I didn't have to charge the device at all. Full-day battery life indeed.
(No, it's not the iPad Pro.)
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Thanks for reading.
At around 9:00 at night, the temperature in Magelang finally drops to a more hospitable 28°C from the 37° or so that it’s been hovering at. My girlfriend and I are in Magelang for this leg of the trip and we’ve stopped at a warung for dinner — think of a small trailer that can be pulled behind a bicycle serving ridiculously tasty food. This warung is known for several noodle dishes, but we’ve asked for mie godog — literally, “boiled noodles”. The broth from this cart is made with candlenut and it’s cooking overtop some hot coals in a wok with spring onions, garlic, some mustard greens, and the aforementioned egg noodles. Every few seconds, someone on a scooter or motorbike putters past, inches from the trio of younger men sitting and smoking on the stoop of the karaoke bar next door.
I’ve taken a couple of Live Photos of the scene and play them back, and I realize that it’s captured the sights and sounds well enough that I’ll be able to show my friends and parents back in Canada, but something’s missing: the smell of this place. It’s a distinct blend of engine fumes, clove cigarette smoke, burning wood, and this incredible food. This, to me, says worlds about the immediacy of place of Live Photos, as well as the limitations that they have. They are a welcome step closer to better capturing a moment in time, but the technology isn’t quite good enough yet for this moment.
I’ve been using an iPhone 6S since launch day — “Space Grey”, 128 GB, non-Plus — and I’ve read all the reviews that matter. But when I boarded a plane on October 24 from Calgary to Surabaya, I was unprepared for the way that this product would impact my travels, and how my travelling would impact my understanding of mobile technology.
Keyboards are gross. How can they not be? Most of us spend hours every day on them, transferring all sorts of good stuff back and forth from our hands to the keys. So, while looking closely at my keyboard recently, I got to wondering just what types of bacteria and other microorganisms were growing on it. Thus began an experiment to find out.
Over the past few years, I've gotten a lot better at managing what's on my phone so that I never hit the 16GB mark — in large part thanks to some helpful new apps. It's a bit of a hassle, but it's worth it if you want to save $50-$100 or so when buying your next phone. Here are six key things to do to keep your storage down.
If you want Siri to help you with your history, it seems you should talk to her in the present tense!
So, once again, Silicon Valley is behind the curve in Washington, and it will be harder to close the distance this time.
Even as some playwrights embrace the integration of digital communication into stage scenes as a new form of naturalism, other theater people worry that their art form will be affected by communication that values brevity over elegance and, increasingly, images over words.
I've finally unsubscribed from the This American Life podcast. Not because I don't enjoy the show. Not because I don't like any of the topics they've chosen. Not even because they ran the episode with made-up stories about Apple factories.
But simply because the podcast feed mixes up new episodes with reruns.
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Thanks for reading.
The Apple TV’s processor and storage are sufficient for deep gaming experiences, but the Siri Remote is either a limitation or a creative challenge, depending on where you sit. Between the Siri Remote’s buttons, motion control, and iOS integration, developers have a lot of possibilities, but it’s uncertain whether the investment in creating new interface paradigms would be worthwhile.
The Apple Pencil is more than just a drawing utensil — it can work as a full-fledged, system-wide stylus with the iPad Pro. But there are also certain tasks that just aren't possible with Apple's new accessory. Here's a breakdown of what it can and cannot do.
Who would have thought a simple flick of the wrist would be a killer app? Still, there is so much more potential for Apple Watch’s gesture-based UX — and the coming months will surely bring many more third-party apps that will begin to take full advantage of it.
Mr. Nelson says a person who might be facing a traumatic event — even death — would sense that something was wrong and would be able to hit a panic button.
So if you’re looking to start building a smart home – and you’re an iPhone user – the Ecobee3 is definitely recommended. Siri support is a natural addition to a smart thermostat, and its something that should eventually pay for itself. That’s not a bad deal at all.
Sidefari essentially acts as an on-demand Safari View Controller built into an app that does nothing else, and that's been made available for Split View. In its simplicity, I find Sidefari to be an ingenious idea for an app that uses a built-in technology to work around a limitation of Apple's multitasking design in iOS 9.
In this post, I'll look at the subtle differences you might face when shifting your development environment from Ubuntu to OS X, or vice versa.
Personal Pickup is available for most in-stock Apple products. To check availability, select your item on the Apple website and then select the ‘Available for pickup: Check availability’ option. You’ll be prompted to enter your postcode to search for nearby stores, and can then see which ones show the product as ‘Available today.’
Whenever I think about selfies, I think about the women who came before. I think about the ones who never got to use front-facing cameras, that technological ease and excess that we have so quickly taken for granted.
Anyone could plug anything at all in the SEO keyword part of the URL, and, as long as the other elements weren’t changed, the link would work—no hacking, coding, or other skills required.
Isn't it good news that we are still building our internet by assuming people are going to be good?
In a woman’s presence, men eat 93% more pizza, according to researchers at Cornell University.
And 86% more salad.
I've spend quite a bit of time just sitting there and thinking of what I should name my new library that I am creating for a personal project...
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Thanks for reading.
After a slew of complaints from users, Apple has acknowledged an iPad Pro issue in which the screen goes black for no apparent reason, usually after charging.
In a note on its support site, Apple suggested a temporary fix: The good old force restart.
Apple Music head Jimmy Iovine has apologized for remarks made during a interview on Thursday in which he suggested finding music is difficult for “some women.”
“We created Apple Music to make finding the right music easier for everyone — men and women, young and old,” Iovine told BuzzFeed News. “Our new ad focuses on women, which is why I answered the way I did, but of course the same applies equally for men. I could have chosen my words better, and I apologize.”
In addition to my Twitter client1, Nuzzel is the other Twitter-based app I use every day, whenever I have a moment to check the news. With version 2.0, launching today for iOS, Android, and the web, the team at Nuzzel is hoping to expand the scope and utility of the service beyond Twitter and tweets from the timeline, with new ways to provide content to logged out users and discover articles inside the app.
If you have an old Mac sitting around, you can make use of it by turning it into the simplest DIY VPN around, perfect for browsing safely on public Wi-Fi or grab files from your home computer on-the-go.
Creating a vacuum entails deliberately leaving a gap in an organization. Rather than filling the gap by identifying a specific person or group of people to fill it, a leader can point out the gap, and then see what happens. The benefit of this approach is that it allows people to work in areas where they are passionate.
Some people are reportedly stealing the Apple Pencil accessory that launched alongside the iPad Pro, according to various reports across the web. [...] In order to successfully demo the Pencil, the unit has to be un-tethered. Anyone could pick it up and, as some people have done, steal it.
Despite the new tablet’s processing power and capabilities, it’s still running on mobile software — and developers aren’t totally convinced the economic incentives exist in the App Store for iOS. In short, they feel they wouldn’t be able to charge users the amounts they normally would for a version of their software that runs on a desktop.
CIOs and tech pros may wish Apple took a more traditional approach to IT support, but the fact is the company has reason to maintain a degree of separation — and it may never truly embrace enterprise.
Prior to the integration of in-flight Wi-Fi, most airline passengers passed their time at 30,000 feet completely disconnected from the world below them — but these days, that’s a highly uncommon occurrence. For instance, while writing this article on a short-haul United flight with broken Wi-Fi, I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been rendered email-less for even a couple of hours. Since this service has become so important in our lives — everywhere we go — I’d like to offer a closer look at in-flight Wi-Fi and how it actually works.
I've decided to remove all battery percentage displays from all my little Apple devices. If my computer or my phone runs out of battery, I'll just sit around and enjoy the scenery and nobody can contact me and if I am about to die, I can't call for an ambulance.
Less stressful that way, I think.
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Thanks for reading.
It’s now 2015. It’s time to take iOS seriously as a pro tool and do what you do best. Don’t give us 30 apps that each do one thing. Give us one app that does 30 things. We don’t need you to be Instagram. We need you to be Adobe.
No doubt, we’ve got a long way to go. We need to clean up the old apps from an era where creativity was limited to a single app and saved to your camera roll. We need to better organize and merchandise the new apps. And we need to support even more mobile workflows that would typically take you more time (and more training) to complete on desktop. Thanks for the feedback, and for inspiring us to make more progress to enable the future of mobile creativity.
Microsoft is completely overhauling its Bing for iPhone app today. While most search queries occur within the browser or Spotlight feature of iOS, Microsoft is betting on people downloading a powerful separate app to search the web without Google. That’s a stretch, but after using the app for the past few days I can certainly see its appeal.
The STEP app promises to “update you with important safety and security announcements” for the country or city you are visiting. Additionally, the app makes it possible for an embassy or consulate to contact you in the event of an emergency provided you’ve registered with details of your trip.
This app connects musicians with musicians, offering ways to communicate, share skills through video, and find others nearby.
The company on Wednesday is making a boatload of announcements, all dedicated to providing a development environment that serves any developer working on any application -- and on any device or platform.
Will today’s Cocoa today be the new Carbon after WWDC 2016? I think Carbon is a good analogy for a new transition Apple has in store for developers on their platforms.
Currently, the service is limited solely to American Express card users in both Australia and Canada. Apple is in talks to expand the service to more banks and cardholders in the future.
More broadly, the fact remains that business is difficult — it was difficult before the Internet, and it’s difficult now — but the nature of the difficulty has changed. Distribution used to be the hardest thing, but now that distribution is free the time and money saved must instead be invested in getting even closer to customers and more finely attuned to exactly why they are spending their money on you.
“If you cause stress to an animal that's probably not a good thing,” says Jill Goldman, a certified animal behaviorist in southern California. “If you do it for laughs it makes me question your humanity.”
Still learning, still surviving.
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Thanks for reading.
I think there’s a potential to confuse the role of the Pencil with the role of your finger in iOS, and I actually think it’s very clear the Pencil is for making marks, and the finger is a fundamental point of interface for everything within the operating system. And those are two very different activities with two very different goals.
So we are very clear in our own minds that this will absolutely not replace the finger as a point of interface. But it is, and I don’t think anybody would argue, a far better tool than your finger when your focus becomes exclusively making marks.
If you're interested in thorough, in-depth testing of phone and tablet displays, it's hard to beat Raymond Soniera and DisplayMate. He has just run Apple's new iPad Pro through the wringer, and he came away impressed by its color, contrast, performance in ambient light, and power efficiency. It's an improvement on the year-old iPad Air 2's display in most respects, but if you want the most accurate tablet display there is and don't care about size, it's still hard to beat the screen in the newly improved iPad Mini 4.
Apple’s new official dock for Apple Watch, the Apple Watch Magnetic Charging Dock, is now available to buy in some Apple Stores around the world. This particular image is from the Berlin store in Germany. The product does not yet appear to be available online but is on stock shelves at Apple retail stores, perhaps slightly earlier than officially planned.
In what could be a move to push the first-party HomeKit connected home protocol, Apple has seemingly stopped online sales of incompatible devices made by Kwikset and Belkin, as well as the original August Smart Lock.
Apple in a note to developers on Tuesday apologized for last week's Mac App Store app signing issue that rendered certain applications inoperable, explaining server-side fixes and offering app makers instructions on how to patch affected software.
If you've been using iWork '13 or '14, expect iWork '15 to be pretty much the same with some refinements here and there. As before, Keynote is by far the best of the three iWork applications. Numbers is fine for limited-scale projects, trading better layout and ease of use against the raw power that its competitors bring to the table. But I can't recommend Pages in good conscience. It has tons of potential, but in its current state, it's just a mess of unfortunate user interface choices and bugs/omissions. And as evidenced by another year of updates, Apple doesn't seem to be interested in cleaning it up.
Whether it is the ability to put multiple PDF documents into tabs, easily merge multiple PDF documents, or effortlessly handle even the largest PDF documents, PDF Expert offers a handful of features that will quickly become indispensable.
The app will group all of your photos from an event, letting you send them all with just a swipe.
At the time, Pocket Zoo was also very unique: new things get news. Even though Pocket Zoo was very niche — for children and animal lovers — it was still unique and new. Today, there are millions of apps out there, so it’s more difficult to be unique and new. Don’t get discouraged. There will always be room for more good apps. There are also lots of new ideas out there, and there are lots of new ways of doing old things.
Apple has expanded Postmates same-day delivery to Manhattan for most products ordered through the Apple Online Store and Apple Store app. The service is available for Mac, iPad, iPod, Apple TV, Apple Watch, Beats products, cables, accessories and many other items in stock at local Apple Stores for a $19 flat rate fee.
Apple is running several commercials for the new fourth generation Apple TV, demonstrating various games and video streaming services on the television device.
Crossy Road, Asphalt 8, Disney Infinity 3.0 Edition: Star Wars, HBO NOW, and Netflix.
Apple on Tuesday posted two new profiles to its "iPad in Education" subsite as part of an ongoing campaign to promote the tablet's uses in arts and science classrooms.
So to better answer Justin Williams’s question: it can be masochism to work from only an iPad, but it is increasingly just becoming a very smart decision for a great many people. It will always be a nuts decision for a particular group of people, but each update to iOS will only make that grouping of people smaller and smaller.
Knowing that I ran 8 miles at a certain pace in September has no bearing on my training in the future, necessarily, even if I decide to run another half marathon. But for the time being I’m holding onto the app, because even though I ran the race, I have the medal and the photos to prove it, having my work leading up to it is important, and I’m not ready to delete it yet.
I am feeling sadness today - a sadness cloud that have permeated into every bone and every tissues inside me so deeply that nothing is visible on the outside. I can blame this on the novel (A Little Life) that I've just finished reading yesterday where the characters are still very much alive in my head. I can claim this is 'just' a mid-life crisis-wannabe sadness, and will pass eventually through the healing powers of the passing of or the running out of, time.
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Thanks for reading.
At the start of the millennium, Apple famously set out to upend the music business by dragging it into the digital realm. The iTunes store provided an easy way of finding and buying music, and iTunes provided an elegant way of managing it. By 2008, Apple was the biggest music vendor in the US. But with its recent shift toward streaming media, Apple risks losing its most music-obsessed users: the collectors.
Most of iTunes’ latest enhancements exist solely to promote the recommendation-driven Apple Music, app downloads, and iCloud. Users interested only in iTunes’ media management features—people with terabytes of MP3s who want a solid app to catalog and organize their libraries—feel abandoned as Apple moves away from local file storage in favor of cloud-based services. These music fans (rechristened “power users” in the most recent lingo) are looking for alternatives to Apple’s market-dominating media management software, and yearn for a time when listening to music didn’t require being quite so connected.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect users to learn new skills over time before they can get the most out of an app or piece of hardware. It’s just that, Jeez…five years ago I couldn’t have imagined myself deciding that an Android phone has a prettier, easier-to-use interface than an iPhone.
My experience with directing live productions isn’t exhaustive, but I enjoy doing it whenever I get a chance. From high school in 2004 all the way through working on Coachella’s livestream this summer, the workflow has always been very similar: a director with a big bank of screens & buttons guides a crew of camera operators and picks his or her favorite shots out of the bunch. For as long as I can remember, these shoots have been very expensive and have demanded a lot of gear.
A month ago, I was contacted by my friends at Jukebox the Ghost. They were looking for a live streaming solution for their upcoming halloween shows. I gave them quotes for a full-fledged live show ($20,000+), and a laptop with a built-in camera running a YouTube feed ($0). Neither of these options worked for anybody. We needed good sound and at least a couple camera options to keep the feed engaging. After a rejection of the $20,000 option, I came across a solution that wouldn’t break the bank.
Channel-surfing is something of a lost art. In the streaming era, you no longer need to wile away countless hours and brain cells cycling through hundreds of TV stations, but I can’t be the only person who misses the serendipity of stumbling upon something you wouldn’t actively choose to watch, but somehow find yourself unable to turn off. A terrible movie that you still wouldn’t mind rewatching at 3 am. Comically inept infomercials. The bizarre juxtapositions of the trash-cultural bazaar, hurtling toward you through a cathode-ray tube.
Periscope’s Apple TV app, released on October 30, is in some ways a bold vision of the future of media. In an instant, anyone can beam a transmission to TVs across the globe, from their phone, for free; in homes, anyone can let those transmissions come in randomly, finding nostalgia in the experience—call it feed-surfing (if you must). Unlike the mobile app, the Apple TV version operates only in Couch Mode, which doesn’t let you follow specific accounts or comment in real-time. Indeed, other than a launch screen that shows rows of feeds in different cities, it offers very little control over what you watch. Its algorithm simply pushes what it determines to be the most desirable feed. When a broadcast ends, it loads another. You can skip ahead to the next feed, but you can’t rewind or fast-forward or pause—and if you want to post comments, you must fire up your mobile app. The result is an oddly compelling combination: all the rough intimacy of social media, with the passivity of a late-night basic-cable binge.
Rajiv Kumar, MD, a pediatric endocrinologist at Stanford Children's Health and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford, can access the teenager's blood-sugar readings quickly, without his mom having to crunch numbers or schedule a clinic appointment. And it's all because of a new health-care platform from Apple.
Imagine this for a second. You sit down Friday morning and power up your computer. For you, there’s nothing unusual about this Friday. You open your browser. You might not know about CoolPreviews, or even the concept of plugins or extensions. You don’t have to use, or even know about Google. You might not know what browser you use — or what a browser is. As a matter of fact, you might not even be using your browser; perhaps it has been minimized and sits unobtrusively in the toolbar at the bottom of your screen. Perhaps you’re just checking your mail or warming up for today’s first round of Solitaire.
It doesn’t matter what you do. Ten seconds later, coming from your computer’s speakers — do you know how to change their volume? do you even know your computer has speakers? — you hear this.
It’s the siren of an invisible Pac-Man game having infiltrated your computer in the most unusual manner.
On repeat.
"The two companies have a strong position in the digital offering of audiobooks in Germany. Therefore, we feel compelled to examine the agreement between these two competitors in the audiobooks in more detail," cartel office chief Andreas Mundt said in the statement.
The purchase price is $75 million, and the acquisition includes technology and intellectual property. The announcement says "many employees" from Rdio will be offered the chance to work at Pandora, implying that at least some will be out of work. Rdio's CEO, however, will not be making a move to join Pandora's ranks.
Share on Facebook (441) Tweet (391) Share (2) Pin Language is a wonderful, masterfully evolving beast and we're all just puppets bending to its many whims. Dictionaries aren't safe from the power of a linguistic whim either, and so maybe that's why Oxford Dictionaries has chosen an emoji as its 2015 word of the year. It's the crying-from-laughter / crying-from-happiness emoji — officially known as the Face with Tears of Joy emoji.
I've just finished reading "A Little Life" by Hanya Yanagihara, and I definitely have a lot of mixed feelings about the book, about the characters, about life, and about all the peaks and all the troughs. If you think you can swallow the sadness -- as well as the many explicit horrible details -- I do recommend this book.
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At the time we started our technical implementation—almost a year ago—iBeacon was new and it presented a good option for us. We’re following agile methodology and in a project where iteration is the norm, you don’t want a ton of technical overhead; a lightweight location aware system using beacons made sense. We could implement location aware inexpensively, see how it would work for the app, and change it (to something else) or dump it if it didn’t work for our needs.
In trying to install beacons throughout our building we’ve faced many challenges. While the solution remains lightweight and flexible, there’s a lot of overhead to deal with. In a larger organization, you might throw money at this problem—there are plenty of third party management systems for beacons—or, even, staff time to help develop those solutions internally. In our case, we’ve devoted some resources to coding internal tools needed, but we’ve also spent a lot of staff time (…my own) installing without the use of third party tools. This is just how we roll over here; if we can possibly avoid coding, we’re going to do it. If we can sneaker-net a problem, we’re going to go that route before throwing a lot of money or code at it, especially in the early days when we need to determine if the technology is a workable solution. Here’s our iBeacon install story…
Starting in January, solar energy developer Sunseap Group will provide Apple with 100 percent renewable electricity from its portfolio of solar energy systems built atop more than 800 buildings in Singapore. The deal will make Apple the first company in Singapore to run exclusively on renewable energy and marks a significant step in its bid to power 100 percent of its facilities and operations worldwide with clean fuel.
“We have more than 900 incredible employees working in our Singapore contact center and are thrilled to begin hiring the team that will open our first Apple Store in Singapore — an incredible international city and shopping destination,” Ahrendts said in a statement sent to TechCrunch. “We can’t wait to deliver the service, education and entertainment that is loved by Apple customers around the world.”
Imagine being no longer able to focus on the printed word, to never again be able to lose yourself in a good book. That was the sad reality that faced by many of the patients of Dr. Howard Kaplan, an ophthalmologist who specializes in diseases of the retina, including macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.
Until, that is, Kaplan developed an application for the Apple iPad that allows patients suffering from low vision due to retinal diseases to rediscover the joy of being lost in a book.
Dragon for Mac 5 is clearly the superior product. Its accuracy and performance make it a pleasure to use -- at least some of the time. Plus, Nuance is heading in right direction with Dragon for Mac 5.
A doctor friend once told me the best thing I could do for my health was to turn off my cellphone. But that was before smartphone makers began building health and safety features into their phones. Here are five healthful tricks your phone can do.
The Starter Kit is well priced and has everything you need—besides a smartphone or tablet—to enjoy the action, and it really shows the benefits of an app-enabled toy. But tread carefully with the expansions: many only seem to diminish the fun at great expense.
Shopping. Lifestyle. Education. These are some of the categories that you can browse when searching for something new on Apple’s App Store. But two artists and a gallerist want to add one more category to the mix: Art. +ArtApp—created by Paulina Bebecka, Seth Indigo Carnes and Serkan Ozkaya—is a petition and website that hopes to add the Art category to the App Store.
According to American Express, the service is set to launch this Tuesday, November 17, 2015. Customer service representatives we spoke with confirmed the date over the phone numerous times.
For one thing, the pyramids are structures of outstanding archaeological importance. Indeed, they are so significant – from their complex designs to the hieroglyphs and artifacts found inside them – that any suggestion of breaking into internal tunnels or chambers forcibly would be seen as inappropriate and irresponsible.
I live in Singapore, and I am excited to hear Apple opening its first store in Singapore. It makes perfect sense for Apple to open its first store on Orchard Road. The unfortunate thing is just that I live on the opposite end of Singapore, so I can't wait for Apple to open its second store.
(Not that Singapore is that big of an island, though.)
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An interest in the substance and art of things, rather than just the way they are consumed, may provide a clue as to why Apple - and Cook - continue to reign supreme in the world of our personal devices.
It's why his new iPad Pro is pitched as much to artists, photographers and graphic professionals as it is to ordinary laptop users. It's why the company's biggest advertising campaigns lately have centred around real photos taken with iPhones.
And it's why many of the company's new services - from Healthkit to Homekit to Apple Pay - are being backed up with massive investment budgets around content and accessibility.
Ireland fears that any order from Europe to claim billions in back-tax from Apple will scare off other multinationals enjoying equally questionable tax schemes.
There could even be an exodus. Apple fears the end of super-lucrative loopholes left wide open by Ireland's generous revenue commissioners. He might be forced to look elsewhere. Cook came to Cork to reassure us - a trifle unconvincingly - that Apple was embedded, whatever the tax consequences of an unpalatable order from Europe.
I’m fine with the fact that I will always be a “Mac person.” I build software for a living, so I am someone who will likely always need all that OS X affords me to do my job. It’s for people like my brother, who just dropped nearly $2,000 on that new MacBook just for his online coursework, that I want to see something like an iPad Pro succeed — and become what technology is for the majority of people.
With all the legacy software out there, the lack of financial incentive to rebuild it for a new platform, and iOS’s current limitations, I am hesitant to say that is going to happen anytime soon.
Onelink, which comes with an unreplaceable 10-year battery, is linked via Bluetooth or WiFi to a home's internet connection. The connection allows the user to receive and dismiss alarms, and be notified of the type and location of danger via their iPhone or iPad.
It’s now possible to hold Tulsa’s remarkably rich architectural history, along with every piece of public art that adorns the Tulsa cityscape, in the palm of one’s hand.
Notify gets a solid A on ease of use and for setting up the app. [...] The pre-populated content sources are made for generic mass consumption. Facebook has built in smarter notifications (or so they seem at this moment), and it wouldn’t surprise me if that leads to more constant engagement. In other words, Notify checks all the boxes and is ready for the majority of Facebook’s customer base.
Apple Music’s arrival put a dent in download revenue — off 8 percent in the quarter.
Smartphones, tablets and e-readers should have an automatic "bedtime mode" that stops them disrupting people's sleep, says a leading doctor.
Prof Paul Gringras argued the setting should filter out the blue light that delays the body clock and keeps people awake later into the evening.
It seems inevitable Apple will be sherlocking something like f.lux.
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And now I am entering bedtime mode. My thoughts and prayers are with you. Thanks for reading.
According to the email, “store leadership teams around the world, starting in Australia, will be refreshing their training on inclusion and customer engagement.” It is unclear if any disciplinary measures were taken against the manager involved in the incident, but multiple sources familiar with the situation say the employee hasn’t been at the store since.
The old MAS certificate used SHA-1 (secure hash algorithm 1) cryptography. Before it expired, Apple issued a new certificate, but one using SHA-2 (secure hash algorithm 2). This was supposed to be transparent, but once the old certificate expired, some people began experiencing problems.
Typeeto is a clever little piece of OS X software that allows existing Mac keyboards to be used with iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android smartphones or tablets, Apple TV, or most any device capable of pairing over Bluetooth, including game consoles. No special software is required on the receiving end—simply pair with your Mac, and Typeeto recognizes and adds these gadgets to the list of available devices.
This is the iOS multitrack editor that I’ve been waiting for. Ferrite has all the features that have made my podcast editing workflow so efficient: Strip Silence, compression, noise gate, ripple delete, quick selection of all following clips. It’s all there. And it’s all built inside an attractive interface that’s a pleasure to use. It’s like Ferrite read my mind.
With the help of early users he gathered a terabyte of raw sound data to help build an algorithm that could detect the difference between movement and other sounds, like breathing or snoring.
A number of mobile app developers and industry observers recently noticed a significant change in the way the Apple App Store’s search algorithms are returning results. Developers say that, following a series of shifts that took place beginning on November 3, app search results now appear to be more intelligent and far more relevant – especially among the top results – than in previous months.
When Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp expressed frustration with his company’s performance on Apple News last week, his complaints apparently were just the tip of the iceberg. Other publishing execs are unhappy about everything from the traffic they’re getting from the two-month-old news aggregation app to the user experience to the data Apple’s giving them.
Privacy advocates are warning federal authorities of a new threat that uses inaudible, high-frequency sounds to surreptitiously track a person's online behavior across a range of devices, including phones, TVs, tablets, and computers.
The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.
Futurist, surrealist, abstract artist: those are not customary descriptions of Walt Disney, yet they all fit. People who insist on pigeonholing him as a purveyor of bland family entertainment haven’t bothered to watch his movies closely, especially his work in the 1940s. Fantasia alone should silence nay-sayers who only see Disney as a commercial populist; 75 years after its debut on 13 November 1940, it remains one of the most astonishing films ever to come from Hollywood.
The era of 24-hour news brings traumatic events directly into everyone's lives. Here's how that can affect people, especially children, and some strategies for coping.
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The Mac App Store is supposed to make things easier, but it’s also a single point of failure. Not only is it neglected, but sometimes even the existing functionality stops working.
The larger issue, of course, is that neither Apple nor Google detected the suspicious behavior on their own when deciding whether to admit the app. And if a rogue app can obtain login credentials for Instagram, it's conceivable other apps can get passwords for much more sensitive services as well.
I'm probably not smart enough, but I don't see any good solutions to vett for these kinds of apps.
Marco has indeed accelerated the race to the bottom, and he comes bearing a well made app that is difficult not to feel satisfied with as a user when faced with other apps that charge up-front. Why should I pay for an app when this developer has made it seem unnecessary? The patronage-only model is so new, and very experimental, but has that stopped others from replicating it? No, and this is because they are being forced into adopting it in order to hold onto their existing customers, and hopefully bring some new ones on as well.
Overcast may have been the impetus, but I see it as more canary than cause. [...] Individual developers don’t make the rules; they can only respond to them, trying different ideas in the hope of finding something that works.
Pretty soon, Apple may have to add another line to the App Store description: "Contains In-App Nagging".
Simple, playful and gorgeously designed, the iPad app is intended to encourage users to think about time in different ways. As they’ve done previously with apps on color and sound, the designers have come up with some creative approach vectors to exploring our perception of time passing.
Users of OneNote Online and OneNote for iOS can now record audio into a note straight from the web and mobile app. It's an extension of similar capabilities already available on OneNote for Mac and OneNote for Windows.
Microsoft has released a new app for OS X for creating timelapse videos. Hyperlapse Pro works with most video cameras, from GoPros to drones, and helps you build a smooth, stable video experience.
This can be accessed even while the phone is locked by clicking on the emergency options, and it can display things like name, date of birth (DOB), emergency contacts, medical conditions, and even blood type! It can be managed by clicking on the little "Health" app that comes default on the iPhone.
The new solution is designed to help secure business class communications by integrating Exchange, SharePoint, Office 365 and OneDrive for Business within the email app.
You can use the app like a standard music service, searching for artists and playing individual songs or albums. It has licensed the same pool of roughly 30 million audio tracks you would find on its competitors. But the service is also optimized to present a vast collection of additional options — from live concert footage to karaoke tracks with embedded lyrics to instructional videos on how to play that bass line — which don’t exist on any other music streaming service.
It's been almost exactly 4 years since iTunes Match was introduced, and the service still has issues syncing metadata. I discuss this problem in this week's column, and I also explain how to customize the graphics that display in iTunes' Playlist view. And I present The Essential iTunes Keyboard Shortcut™, which every iTunes user should know.
In many ways, Xcode on iPad Pro would be the ultimate mobile developer platform. It would lead to better iPad apps, built by engineers who can now live and breathe iPad, and young people who already do. It won’t happen overnight. But you’ll slowly see more apps build toward universality, rather than being chained to a portrait iPhone.
In a blog post sharing the development, the developers behind the app said that Apple contacted them to say that the app violated Apple’s Developer Program Agreement. While the app was unofficially supported on iOS 9 as a sideloaded app and not an official App Store app, Flux did use Xcode signing to work properly on iPhones and iPads.
So if you’re wondering why Apple hasn’t replied to your bug report, it’s probably because there are a few hundred thousand—or more—bug reports ahead of yours in the queue.
According to a support document shared on the Beats Music website, all subscriptions will be cancelled on that date, with users being asked to migrate to Apple Music.
The 14 listings, put up Friday, are for roles such as "business manager", "store leader", "expert" and "creative". Most of them appear to emphasise English-language skills, but being multilingual is a plus for store managers, to cater to the other languages spoken here.
This holiday season, Campbell Soup is testing a variety of chicken soup that only contains 20 ingredients instead of the standard 30. The new recipe will be featured in a “Star Wars”-themed soup and will help close “the gap between the kitchen and our plants,” according to Denise M. Morrison, chief executive of Campbell.
No MSG. And no celery nor onions too.
You probably learned to tie your shoes in kindergarten. As with so many things, this is where the trouble started. (Why did we stop taking midday naps, again?) Whether you do the "loop swoop and pull" or the "bunny ears," you probably end up having to bend over on the sidewalk to retie your shoes more than you'd like. I haven't had shoelaces come undone in years, and it's because of one knot.
I've never learnt how to tie a tie either.
We've had so much hope for the Mac App Store when it first appeared, but then it's disappointment after disappointment all these months.
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Mac users faced trouble with their apps overnight after the security certificate Apple uses to prevent piracy expired late on Wednesday.
Applications downloaded from the Mac App Store were temporarily unavailable from 10pm UK time, when a security certificate expired, five years after its creation, with no replacement immediately available.
You may need to log in to iCloud, or you may need to re-download apps.
The week I've spent using the iPad Pro more than 15 hours a day has been enough to show me how I can work better on this device than any other iPad model. Those who have been reading MacStories for the past few years know that I take my iPads veryseriously, and that I've gone through an interesting evolution in terms of preferences,projects, and responsibilities. The iPad Pro sacrifices some of the portability of the Air 2 without being a deal-breaker for me, and in return it offers a canvas of opportunities for my favorite apps.
And the best part is – while many will argue that the iPad Pro further blurs the line between laptop and tablet, this device is still very much an iPad at its core. It's a bit heavier and it's bigger, but I can pick it up, walk with it around the house, take it with me in the car, and read articles in bed. iOS 9 is able to express its full potential on the iPad Pro's large screen, with features such as Picture in Picture, Split View, and the Shortcut Bar having more room to coexist with the rest of the system.
Software-wise, support for the Smart Keyboard needs to get even smarter — but I’d be shocked if it doesn’t. For me, the iPad Pro marks the turning point where iPads are no longer merely lightweight (both physically and conceptually) alternatives to MacBooks for use in simple scenarios, to where MacBooks will now start being seen as heavyweight alternatives to iPads for complex scenarios.
Adobe Capture CC is a welcome consolidation of four excellent mobile apps that make it easy to grab creative inspiration and design assets no matter where you happen to be at the time and sync them between all of your connected devices.
The social network rolled out a new app called “Notify” on Wednesday specifically to send you mobile notifications from publishers you care about, like BuzzFeed or CNN or The Weather Channel. Details about Notify have been leaking to the press for months, and as with other news apps (or Twitter!), users are asked to follow publishers or “stations” which will then push content throughout the day to their phone’s lock screens.
Well, it is primarily aimed at Mozilla users — one’s choice of browser tends to be a long-term and territorial one — with support for Firefox accounts, which enables existing Mozilla loyalists to bring their saved bookmarks, browsing history, tabs and passwords to mobile. However, Mozilla is hoping that features like search prediction, its ‘visual’ tab management system, and incognito browsing will lure others, too.
iTunes and the iOS Music app both offer Up Next, a way to queue up music you want to listen to. They work in very similar ways, allowing you to add music to the Up Next queue, change the order of tracks in the queue, and remove specific songs from Up Next. Let’s take a look at how to use Up Next in iTunes and the iOS Music app.
For the most part, and I don’t mean to be overly critical, there are better ways to pass your time than with most tvOS App Store offerings. This weekend, I decided to put together a small game. More specifically, I wanted to create a game that highlighted a few key design points.
Along with three different iPhone screen sizes and features specific to each generation of its iconic smartphone, Apple now offers different size tablets, a smartwatch with its own software, a streaming-media player that supports apps, and nearly a dozen Macintosh computer models. Starting this week, the Cupertino, California-based company adds a third tablet size with the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which uses a stylus and a detachable keyboard, to its product offerings. The lineup is a big change from the Jobs days, when Apple offered a much more streamlined group of devices and stuck with a standard iPhone screen size for the first five generations of the smartphone.
Apple Inc. is in discussions with U.S. banks to develop a payment service that would let users zap money to one another from their phones rather than relying on cash or checks, according to people familiar with the matter.
The move would put the tech giant in competition with an increasing number of Silicon Valley firms trying to persuade Americans to ditch their wallets in favor of digital options.
Google has launched a new tool called About me that lets you see, edit, and remove the personal information that the company’s services show to other users. Google confirmed to VentureBeat that the feature started rolling out to users this week.
I guess both the iPad Pro and the Apple TV have potentials, but are both not quite there yet. Does this sound right?
(Yes, this is a poor attempt to try to convince myself not to gave in to the lust and make a purchase this Christmas.)
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Thanks for reading.
A video showing a group of African students being asked to leave an Apple store at Highpoint shopping centre in Melbourne on Tuesday has caused widespread outrage on social media amid claims of blatant racism.
[...]
A spokeswoman from Apple said it was looking into the situation but said Apple was committed to cultural diversity and inclusion.
Once upon a time, Apple was known for designing easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products. It was a champion of the graphical user interface, where it is always possible to discover what actions are possible, clearly see how to select that action, receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action, and to have the power to reverse that action—to undo it—if the result is not what was intended.
No more. Now, although the products are indeed even more beautiful than before, that beauty has come at a great price. Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist.
The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple’s well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles. True, Apple’s design guidelines for developers for both iOS and the Mac OS X still pay token homage to the principles, but, inside Apple, many of the principles are no longer practiced at all. Apple has lost its way, driven by concern for style and appearance at the expense of understandability and usage.
The iPad Pro is now available to pre-order on Apple’s website. People who pre-order today will receive their iPad Pro on Friday November 13. If they opt for free delivery instead, the iPad should make its way to your door on Monday November 16.
Look. I get it. There are completely valid arguments for why statements like Tim Cook’s ‘end of the PC’ quote yesterday could be considered marketing hype or delusion. But there is a bigger issue. I am absolutely fed up with tech bloggers and technical writers assuming that all people use computers the way they do. There is no longer just the ‘truck’ of the desktop and laptop and the ‘car’ of the phone. There are gradations of tone in between, and the iPad Pro absolutely, 100% could be the central computing device for a home. Many days, I run TechCrunch from my phone. On those days, the ‘traditional’ computers in my household lie dormant, completely. If you think this is an edge case, you are blinding yourself to the way the world has changed.
Apple did an impressive job making iPad Pro a device that everyone can use—everyone. Pros and novices will both get great use from iPad Pro, but developers are going to help make this a device that can get things done like no iPad has to date.
Even with a bigger screen and new accessories, the iPad still feels like a “sometimes computer.” I can take it with me on vacation instead of a MacBook and do pretty much everything I want, and I can even get quite a bit of work done on one (the majority of this review was written on an iPad Pro, usually while also chatting in Slack or Messages or firing off e-mails). But what really does it in for me are the many small ways in which the iPad Pro is not quite a traditional computer and iOS is not quite OS X.
You can get a lot more done with iPad apps than with the paltry selection of tablet / touch-first apps available for the Surface. But, because Apple hasn’t made a great keyboard, the iPad Pro isn’t a complete replacement for a great laptop like the MacBook Air — even for a tablet guy like me.
The iPad Pro will no doubt make a lot of Apple users happy, especially if they use it for graphics. But I won’t be buying one, and I don’t recommend that average users do so either.
Mr Mossberg also finds the iPad Pro too big and too heavy as a tablet.
I enjoyed putting the big screen to use while immersing myself in a movie. And the sound, with four speakers in each corner, is excellent.
While I like the iPad Pro and can see it reinvigorate iPad sales to a degree, its overall impact remains to be seen. After all, the biggest of the iPads also carries the biggest cost, and that’s before you might want to spring for pricey accessories. It’s not for everyone.
Just hours after Apple opened the iPad Pro preorder floodgates, Logitech unveiled its first accessories for the jumbo-sized tablet, including the Create Backlit Keyboard Case, a folio-style protector with full-size keyboard, Smart Connector support and more.
No, of course that screenshot doesn’t show the actual engraving (my name and contact info). But if Apple allowed a whole paragraph, I don’t think you could do better than to lie and claim that this $1000 device is in fact a Golden Ticket to a personal meeting with a fabulous and unambiguously-beloved Hollywood celebrity.
If you're an OS X user who rebuffs iOS smartphones in favor of Android yet also invests wholeheartedly in the iTunes and Apple Music ecosystem, Apple has finally strung together a working solution for your smartphone of choice. Tuesday saw the launch of Apple Music for Android, fulfilling the promise Apple made during June's WWDC reveal of the subscription-based app.
As people download and dissect it, they’ll doubtless be looking at how Apple builds on Android, what features are ported over from iOS and what Apple’s pan-operating-system Music philosophy looks like in the mobile age. In advance of the launch, I spoke with Apple’s SVP of Internet Software and Services, Eddy Cue, about exactly those things.
[...]
“It’s a full native app, so it will look and feel like an Android app. The menus will look like Android, you know the little hamburger they use on the top. It’ll definitely feel very much like an Android app,” says Cue.
Marques published a video showing how the malware works, but he didn't specify how a user would actually get infected, which is usually a much harder task than developing the malware.
Patrick Wardle, an OS X security expert with Synack, said it is likely that if users encounter Mac ransomware, they would have to be tricked into running it, a kind of technique known as social engineering.
According to a Peppersoft developer who goes by the Twitter handle David L-R, "Who Viewed Your Profile — InstaAgent" was a nefarious username and password harvesting tool masquerading as an app for monitoring Instagram profile visitors. Digging into the app's code revealed sensitive account information being sent unencrypted to a remote server, instagram.zunamedia.com, and in some cases used to log in and post unauthorized photos to users' Instagram feeds. David L-R notes the remote server is not connected to Instagram's official network.
On the iPhone and iPad version, you can play two trial songs for free or pay $50 via In-App Purchase to unlock the full game with 38 additional songs. However, on Apple TV, the game is completely non-functional without the controller accessory. You have to buy the controller for the game to work at all. Incidentally, you can buy the full game and controller on Amazon as a $99 bundle, for both iOS and tvOS.
[...]
We have reached out to Apple for comment but one possible explanation is that the Guitar Hero game accessory is not technically an ‘MFI game controller’. It is a completely custom peripheral that only works with the Guitar Hero game. This may be a bit of a loophole that allows Activision to require the peripheral as it doesn’t technically fall under the ‘no MFI controller exclusive games’ requirement … because it isn’t an MFI controller.
Boomerang's trick is to turn a short video into a back-and-forth loop for an amusing effect. The app doesn't try to create its own new social video network or require others to have the app. Instead it relies on existing hugely popular social networks. Like Hyperlapse, Boomerang is pretty much a one-trick video-effect pony, but ponies are fun and everyone wants one.
Now, the app is capable of showing more streams, as well as replays. Live streams are denoted by red dots, while blue dots represent replays from the last 24 hours.
Roemmele, a well-known entrepreneur, consultant and researcher in the world of digital payments, has created Pay Finders, an iPhone app that shows people which businesses around them accept the mobile payments service. The app is not the first app of its kind, but Roemmele hopes it will be the most accurate by combining crowd-sourced data from Apple Pay enthusiasts with data from industry companies and other sources.
The defining aspect, and first thing you will notice, of this app is it does away with the traditional method of tracking your eating habits by counting calories. Not only does this play a major role in inspiring the name of the app itself, but it also lowers the barrier to entry by negating the need to complicate the progress of the user with numbers that can be both intimidating, and off-putting.
In addition to raising the number of active testers, Apple doubled beta periods to 60 days, giving members ample time to work out kinks before their invitation expires. Developers encountered difficulties with the previous trial period limitation, saying 30 days is sometimes not a sufficient window for full app evaluations.
Want to develop an app for the newly released Apple TV? Of course you do. Not sure how to get started? Apple is touring the globe for “Apple TV Tech Talks” which promise to get you rocking. You have to register by November 13th, though…so hop to it.
Apple is to hire an additional 1,000 staff in Ireland, the government said on Wednesday, as the iPhone maker bids to boost its presence in the country where it declares much of its overseas profit for tax purposes.
Why is it that I know so many things can be done faster, and easier with Siri, but yet I never use Siri for these things unless I am in my car and alone?
In order to gain the full benefit of Siri, I have to be willing to talk out loud to an inanimate object. And, as it turns out, that’s a problem for me.
Me too.
As they turn high-tech, libraries need to protect patrons’ information.
If I can time-travel back to the past, I'll probably not going to kill Hitler. Too much work -- and I don't know how to do it.
Maybe I will tell my younger self to buy Apple stock back in the mid 90s. Or, if I have time to do some research before departing for the past, I will find out what lottery numbers my younger self should buy. Maybe. I'll be extra careful not to mess up, so that I can still meet my wife, and see my daughter.
But what I do know: if I figured out a way to go back to the past, I'll never move forward to the future anymore. It's probably all downhill anyway.
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Thanks for reading.
Apple aired a new commercial for the iPad Pro, with a focus on the Retina display, iOS 9 Split View multitasking, and drawing with Apple Pencil on the new device.
I don't see the keyboard being shown in this first advertisement; this might be intentional, to stop the first impression being compared to Microsoft's Surface.
“Well, we didn’t really do a stylus, we did a Pencil. The traditional stylus is fat, it has really bad latency so you’re sketching here and it’s filling the line in somewhere behind. You can’t sketch with something like that, you need something that mimics the look and feel of the pencil itself or you’re not going to replace it. We’re not trying to replace finger touch, we’re complementing it with the Pencil.”
[...]
So, will the Pencil change how the company develops apps? “There are apps that we do which lend themselves to this kind of precision. We’re developing a format where you have to touch on a very particular part of the screen and it becomes much easier with a Pencil.”
Oh, and, by the way, Tim Cook is designing a car with an iPad Pro.
Cook hints that Apple may have more plans for the health sphere, in a revelation which will intrigue Wall Street, but he doesn’t want the watch itself to become a regulated, government-licensed health product. “We don’t want to put the watch through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) process. I wouldn’t mind putting something adjacent to the watch through it, but not the watch, because it would hold us back from innovating too much, the cycles are too long. But you can begin to envision other things that might be adjacent to it -- maybe an app, maybe something else.”
Questioning a key element of the draft investigatory powers bill, which places a new legal obligation on companies to assist in these operations to bypass encryption, Tim Cook insisted that companies had to be able to encrypt in order to protect people.
Speaking during a visit to the UK, he said that halting or weakening encryption would hurt “the good people” rather than those who want to do bad things, who “know where to go”.
This seems to be a minor update, likely containing bug fixes and performance improvements.
The new version of 1Password is the first version to officially support 1Password for Teams. Introduced by AgileBits just last week, 1Password for Teams is the edition of the popular password management service that’s designed specially for teammates, like us here at AppAdvice.
Day One is well designed and full of thoughtful details. While being jam-packed with clever features, Day One doesn’t overwhelm. And because it’s so versatile, you could use it for just about anything — certainly more than a humble journal.
Swift Publisher 4 keeps the desktop publishing spirit alive with inexpensive Mac software for designing just about anything that can be printed on paper.
With the new visual search tool, tapping a photo while browsing Pinterest, tapping the search tool button in the corner of the photo, and then highlighting the object you're interested in will cause the app to search Pinterest's product database to find similar items.
Quiver is a nifty startup that is trying to bring the augmented reality experience to coloring. Users download and print content from the Quiver site, fill it with any colors they fancy, and then hover the Quiver app over it to watch their drawings come to life.
Apple fails to specify what critical issues were patched in the latest Xcode iteration, saying only that they applied to Interface Builder, debugging and UI testing, all essential development tools.
Heading into the future, Ahrendts said Apple is currently halfway done with merging its retail locations with its online operations. Furthermore, China is still a huge market of interest for the company. Ahrendts noted that by 2025, twenty of the world’s top cities will be in China, hence why Apple is investing so much into the country.
Each previous generation first gained scale and capability by creating a whole new market, and then, some time later, reached the point that it could take share from the previous generation. PCs were sold just as PCs for a decade or more before they could kill workstations and take over data centres. Does mobile do the same? Does mobile kill PCs, and if so how? Or will you always need a PC to do 'real work'?
The smartphone is increasingly becoming our principal identity. Besides holding photos social networks, emails, and phone numbers it’s also becoming a mobile wallet, capable of buying things just as easily as a credit or debit card, and access to a bank account via an app. So why hasn’t the smartphone taken the next step, and replaced the physical passport?
Low-end phone-based virtual reality systems don’t deliver a flawless experience, as the newspaper found out this weekend.
But it isn’t likely for Apple to have any involvement with the company since everything points to it being backed by the Chinese technology company LeTV.
I think my flu is almost -- touch wood -- out of my system. Still a bit of sniffing, a bit of headache. But probably (because I never understand my own body) the sore throat is gone.
I think I did pass on the flu to quite a few colleauges at work on that first day though. Sorry.
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Thanks for reading.
Apple has announced that the iPad Pro will go on sale in 40 countries on Wednesday, November 11th. The ‘epic’ 12.9 inch device will also be available in Apple Retail Stores later in the week. [...] The iPad Pro will be available to buy in 40 countries, including the US, UK, Canada, China and Japan.
None of these examples are the result of laziness or incompetence. The people involved sincerely thought they were doing the right thing – but they were betrayed by their culture. They got the right raw data about technology and markets but, unbeknownst to them, their emotional taste buds pre-processed the information and passed a distorted picture to their consciousness, leading to bad decisions made in good faith.
A group of execs can easily be lured into thinking they have the money, people, technology, and time for an ambitious, transformative project, only to be subtly undercut by their culture, by an unstated, unseen reality distortion field.
Company executives rarely visit the European Parliament or Commission. Apple spends a fraction of what its biggest rivals do on lobbying. It doesn’t throws parties for politicians and Eurocrats; its biggest event in Brussels was this summer’s opening of a flagship retail store. It only recently hired a top lawyer and got swankier digs.
At all signs of political trouble in the last few years, Apple caved and changed its ways, shunning the confrontational approach with European regulators taken by Microsoft, Uber and Google, all three with limited success.
Soon Apple will find out if its different political strokes work any better.
Most people are simply upset that the cable broke sooner than they thought it should.
Guess the two products.
“It was a large amount of work,” Runkeeper cofounder and CEO Jason Jacobs said via e-mail. “It involved a complete rewrite of our watchOS 1 app. We had to figure out the communication between the watch collecting data and the iPhone collecting data, and how to handle discreprancies.”
Computer science may be critical to careers of the future, but kids today don’t much care about it. For the most part, they still need convincing that coding is cool.
A new partnership between Code.org and Lucasfilm should help.
I don’t want to reboot my laptop -- ever. The current uptime on my MacBook Air is 54 days, and 54 days ago, I was pissed when I had to reboot it. We are long past the days when Windows needed to be rebooted every few hours due to leaking apps, overtasked hardware, crap drivers, and other horrors of the era. It’s possible to travel across the globe with a laptop and never even think to reboot. This is what maintaining a workspace is all about. We should be striving to maintain that level of stability and consistency, not pushing out updates that constantly require disruption.
So many things I want, so little things I need.
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Thanks for reading.
The ruling by a San Francisco federal judge Saturday releases the company from having to compensate as many 12,400 former and current employees from 52 stores throughout the state a few dollars a day for time spent over a six-year period having their bags and Apple devices searched at meal breaks and after their shifts.
In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.
There’s no shortage of ways to organise recipes you find around the web, but they come and go so quickly it’s nice to see a new one. Chef’s Hat is a bookmarking and snipping tool that saves recipes you find around the web so they’re easy to find — and cook — later.
CalECPA protects digital information held by companies, including the content of emails and cloud documents, location information and metadata. The state’s electronic privacy law also means that data on consumers’ computers and mobile devices have the same protection from government snooping as paper files.
The U.S. National Security Agency, seeking to rebut accusations that it hoards information about vulnerabilities in computer software, thereby leaving U.S. companies open to cyber attacks, said last week that it tells U.S. technology firms about the most serious flaws it finds more than 90 percent of the time.
The re-assurances may be misleading, because the NSA often uses the vulnerabilities to make its own cyber-attacks first, according to current and former U.S. government officials. Only then does NSA disclose them to technology vendors so that they can fix the problems and ship updated programs to customers, the officials said.
I missed my favorites. No, this is not about Twitter changing favorites to likes. This is about Apple removing the favorite contacts at the top of the app-switching page in iOS.
Yes, I know there is a list of contacts in Spotlight search -- but that list mixes up favorites with recent contacts. I hate that. I hate that Apple is constantly reminding me of having to interact with other humans that aren't my favorites on my precious precious pocket computer. :-)
So, I bought Launch Center Pro just to keep my favorite contacts. I think I can sleep happier tonight.
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Thanks for reading.
In a thank you to photographers whose pictures were used as part of Apple's "Shot on iPhone 6" ad campaign, the company is sending out special coffee table books containing a page-by-page collection of selected works and their respective installations around the world.
A nice gesture from Apple indeed, while there are other media companies that don't even bother to give proper credits.
Apps in both Google Play and the Apple App Store frequently send users' highly personal information to third parties, often with little or no notice, according to recently published research that studied 110 apps.
As the inclusion of these apps demostrates, the section can be used to track down not only products, but also deals, coupons, and auctions.
Just in time for Black Friday.
This tool allows you to encrypt your text and only your recipient has the key to unlock your message.
I'm not sure how good this is, but it is worth examining third-party solutions if you don't even trust Apple.
For teenagers, babysitting is often the first thing that comes to mind when brainstorming ways to earn a little extra spending money. But digitally savvy adolescents will not be surprised to find they have extra competition these days.
Plex — the all-in-one, network agnostic media sharing server — has come to the new Apple TV via the tvOS App Store. Though the set-up process is a little com-Plex (snicker), this is a great solution for streaming your own media to just about any device you own.
It took about five weeks of evening and weekend work to get SketchParty TV ready for the new Apple TV. My first submission was rejected pretty quickly for the same reason many others have been: the reviewers at Apple are really good about testing all the scenarios for Menu button presses on the Siri Remote. It was a non-trivial change to do some additional state tracking, and I ended up pulling an all-nighter four days before the Apple TV App Store was going to go live. But I got it in on time!
Swift's String type takes an unusual approach to strings. Many other languages pick one canonical representation for strings and leave you to fend for yourself if you want anything else. Often they simply give up on important questions like "what exactly is a character?" and pick something which is easy to work with in code but which sugar-coats the inherently difficult problems encountered in string processing. Swift doesn't sugar-coat it, but instead shows you the reality of what's going on. This can be difficult, but it's no more difficult than it needs to be.
This week, another old-media powerhouse signaled that it gets this is how TV’s future will go down. Disney chairman and chief executive Bob Iger said yesterday that the company, which owns ABC and sports behemoth ESPN, is looking at apps, too. “We’re also very interested in taking products directly to consumers,” Iger said in a call with investors, adding that Disney is launching an on-demand subscription app, DisneyLife, later this year in the UK.
The gatekeepers get new names... not exactly the future I'm looking for.
The basis to the theory obviously begins around the fact that it’s almost certain that Apple will be entering the car market over the next five years. Apple has never been one to reveal its plans so far away from release and hiding a massive manufacturing plant would be even harder.
This would also explain the lack of known CEO, as pushing an Apple executive to that position would immediately give it away, and it would be highly unlikely Apple would put someone that hasn’t spent time there in that role. Let’s not also forget that Faraday seemed to have plucked its funding in an extremely short time.
Here is a new poem about someone who is sick of corporate PowerPoint presentations and stock photography. pic.twitter.com/7Z19FP1ciO
— Brian Bilston (@brian_bilston) November 6, 2015~
Thanks for reading.
Not too long ago, news broke about a malicious version of Xcode dubbed XcodeGhost that had been surreptitiously injecting malicious code into iOS developers’ apps. Apple responded by pulling infected apps from the App Store and posting a FAQ. Since the infections were focused in China, and our company follows best practices like downloading Xcode from Apple and keeping GateKeeper enabled, there was a tendency to say this is not an issue that would affect us.That was until we recently submitted an app update to the App Store and within a few minutes received an email rejection.
After a lot of failed guesses, head scratching, and dead ends, we discovered that malicious XcodeGhost code had found its way into our app via a third-party framework.
Country music singer Kenny Chesney is the focus of the latest Apple Music advertisement, which aired last night during the Country Music Association awards on ABC. Taking a glimpse behind the scenes of Chesney's "No Shoes Nation" tour, the ad shows the singer going through a day of preparing for his next concert by creating a "Show Day List" playlist on Apple Music and touting the service's "human element."
Similar to how the iPhone carries a Ax chip designed by Apple but manufactured by companies like Samsung, Google wants to bring its own expertise and consistency to the Android ecosystem. To do that, it would need to convince a company like Qualcomm, which produces some of the top Android smartphone chips today using its own technology, to sacrifice some of its competitive edge.
Day 2 of my flu: sleepy from all that medicine.
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Thanks for reading.
Cyberforensics firm FireEye has monitored the threat posed by XcodeGhost and says the malware has now left the confines of the Chinese market in order to enter into the US enterprise sphere. After monitoring the malware for four weeks, the company says 210 enterprises have been recorded with XcodeGhost-infected apps running inside their networks -- generating over 28,000 attempts to connect to the malware's command-and-control (C&C) servers.
Apple TV’s App Store now has a Categories section, a feature which was missing at launch alongside Top Charts. [...] However, while Categories have now been rolled out to Apple TV, they’re not very extensive. Currently, only “Games” and “Entertainment” are showing.
Browsecurely offers a way out from those web views: as long as you can share a webpage's URL with native extensions, you'll be able to open the selected webpage with Safari View Controller using the Browsecurely action extension.
Specifically, examples for film titles like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and the actor Matthew McConaughey were given as the most different from the way Americans tend to say them. Since the new Apple TV is fueled by an extensive Siri voice search functionality, Apple feared that releasing the feature to a more global audience, who may run into problems and become frustrated, would dilute its overall appeal.
Apple wants the world to know that it’s a serious business technology company. On Wednesday, it tried to underscore that message by trotting out yet another top executive at a business software conference.
Amazon Books—like the surrounding mall—feels like it's predicated on anxiety. Its very existence may be meant as an answer to anxieties within the company about a persistent inability to overcome the question of ‘discovery,’ both for Amazon Publishing titles and in general—the company remains dependent on consumers finding products they’re interested elsewhere and then buying them, presumably at a discount, from Amazon.com. But other anxieties dictated what the store was allowed to become. The store is aggressively inoffensive. It is nice only insofar as it is bland and has good lighting and they let a customer take his pretty chill dog in. The store is the physical incarnation of a monolithic business of immense wealth that is changing the face of literature itself, but from within it is all very boring, very safe, in an upscale grey palette kind of way.
“You might as well ask the iPhone user why they have to eat food three times a day,” Grey laughs. “It is inherent to any device that it uses a lot of energy. Most of us are charging our phones 365 times a year. That’s asking a chemical reaction to be perfect up to 1,000 times in a row. How many things in life go back and forth 1,000 times without deteriorating?”
I'm down with flu. And the medication is making me alternate between sleeping and brain-dead states.
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Thanks for reading.
Keep in mind that we know there have been multiple exploits for all major computer platforms sold quietly for many years now. Spy agencies and even some law enforcement have not-so-secret programs to collect these bugs. This isn’t any different, other than being public, and you shouldn’t expect your iPhone to be any less secure tomorrow than it was last week.
This is a video lineup that is tailored based on your interests. You can personalize this by setting different topics and sources as favorites, giving you your own custom video newsfeed.
We have a smaller, more manageable codebase that has unit tests from the bottom up. Longstanding, subtle issues with the software were exposed and fixed as we built this in a hybrid functional style. We were able to make better algorithmic and structural decisions that led to a much faster and more responsive application.
If you have ever bought anything from the iTunes store you surely have seen it before — at least the first couple of paragraphs if you haven’t bothered to scroll down in the dialog: the iTunes Terms and Conditions to which you have to agree before you can buy anything. It’s not the most gripping prose you’ll ever encounter, but R. Sikoryak has nonetheless found it inspiring enough to have made it into a graphic novel, “iTunes Terms and Conditions: The Unabridged Graphic Adaptation.”
For publishers that have spent big money on mobile apps, the challenge now is not just getting people to download it but getting them to use it — and that’s where the push notification comes in.
Any time I open up a new Apple product box now pic.twitter.com/QMPokGepQo
— Matt Haughey (@mathowie) November 2, 2015~
Thanks for reading.
Banks have warned customers that if they store other people's fingerprints on their iPhones they will be treated as if they have failed to keep their personal details safe.
This means the bank can decline to refund disputed transactions or refuse to help where customers claim they have been victims of fraud.
Over the weekend, somebody claimed the $1 million bounty set by the new startup Zerodium, according to its founder Chaouki Bekrar, a notorious merchant of unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities.
Bekrar declined to identify the team that won the prize, as well as details about the exploits they found. He also declined to say how much he is planning to sell this exploit for.
Justice Campbell noted in his ruling that Ikede wasn’t actually looking at his device. He was talking to it, and not for some polite and distracting chit-chat, but to engage a “navigational system related directly to the safe operation of the vehicle, through a hand-held electronic device.”
What he wasn’t doing, the judge wrote, was “using” a handheld cellular telephone, as handheld cellular telephones were understood to be in 2007.
Plex is a media server for video, TV shows, music and photos. The app is fully featured, with quick access to search, playlists and more from the top bar. It also tracks your currently playing items so you can quickly pick up with a show or film from where you left off.
Although the app is free, be warned that the app will work only if you have a Plex Media Server setup either locally or on a remote network. You need to buy a Plex Pass subscription to access some premium features.
Perhaps the most significant change is the addition of iPad Pro and Apple Pencil integration. Procreate now create images with up to 16,000 x 4000 resolution on Apple’s latest hardware, due to be released later in the month. Existing Apple hardware can also benefit, with the iPad Air 2 now capable of creating 8000×4000 resolution images.
On the surface, Instapaper 7.1 may seem to offer only a few subtle improvements, but these changes collectively add up to an impressive update that takes full advantage of everything iOS 9 has to offer.
Even though we have modern messaging technologies like Apple’s Messages that default to encrypted communications, we still primarily use e-mail, even for sensitive business transactions. If you have several partners that you would like to communicate privately with, then while you can resort to an encrypted collaboration platform, you can also do so via classic e-mail, with only a few steps taken for each person.
Microsoft has announced radical changes to its OneDrive cloud storage service, ending unlimited storage for Office 365 users. Free storage is also being decreased from 15GB to 5GB for all users. The reason for the scaling back of storage comes after Microsoft found that a few customers were using up to 75TB of cloud storage from a single account.
The thing about creating a megahit game in the iPhone/Android era is that there’s no flywheel effect: A megahit gives you resources to market other games, which is nice. But no one has been able to prove that making one megahit lets you make other megahits. Ask Rovio, the people behind Angry Birds.
Here’s an alternate scenario: Apple TV becomes popular, which means Apple starts building up a big database of stuff I’ve asked Siri to find for me. Then Siri gets really smart (not a foregone conclusion) and can start suggesting stuff for me based on what I’ve asked for in the past.
A smartphone app based around users chucking their devices into the air as high as they can has been banned by Apple. [...] The game detects how high users throw their phone before it falls back to earth. According to the game’s creator, his intention was to smash as many phones as possible.
Its color is boldly unnatural. It tastes, approximately, like melted Life Savers, but unlike any recognizable fruit or flavor. There are no noteworthy Mountain Dew copycats or competitors. Mountain Dew exists, largely, in its own realm, separate from other sodas — and other beverages entirely.
And that turns out to be a feature, not a bug.
Just want to end today's edition by saying, I do enjoy a cup of Mountain Dew now and again, and I've never wondered what the heck is in it.
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"Enable indoor positioning within a venue using the Indoor Survey App," reads the description on iTunes. "By dropping 'points' on a map within the Survey App, you indicate your position within the venue as you walk through. As you do so, the Indoor Survey App measures the radio frequency (RF) signal data and combines it with an iPhone's sensor data."
At least one particularly unlucky owner of the new Apple TV has already learned the hard way that a case for the remote, or some extra special care when handling the accessory, is needed. According to a post on Reddit, the Siri Remote for the new Apple TV will break from a mere two-foot drop onto tile.
If you use only Apple products (Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc.), you can probably handle all your syncing chores through iCloud, iTunes, iTunes Connect, etc. However, if you use other devices and online storage platforms, you should check out Eltima’s SyncMate, which allows you to sync just about anything with your Mac (if it’s running Mac OS X 10.8.5 or higher).
Twocanoes Software’s Boot Runner is a popular startup solution for dual-boot Macs in classrooms, labs and enterprise workspace.
One of the most frightening iTunes messages an iPhone, iPad, or iPod user may see when they connect a device to a computer is the “The iPhone (Name) is synced with another iTunes Library on (Computer). Do you want to erase this iPhone and sync with this iTunes Library?” message, which gives you two options, to Cancel, or to “Erase and Sync” – this sounds like you’re about to erase everything on the iPhone or iPod touch completely, right? Well, it doesn’t quite work like that.
The bottom line is this: For the hypothetical Apple Car project to succeed, a necessary (but not sufficient) condition is a culture change of a kind rarely, if ever, achieved by large organizations.
Perhaps the new software culture could arise in a new, separate group, well protected against the corporate lymphocytes always prone to attack what they see foreign objects. But that would break Apple in two separate cultures, and be the beginning of a dangerous process for a company that, today, strives on having a united functional organization.
Apple Pay in Canada has been hotly anticipated ever since its initial U.S. launch in September 2014 -- but Apple dragged its heels on bringing it north of the border. Why the holdup? That contention exists between the tech giant and Canada's big banks over fees has been a prevailing theory -- and that Amex provided a red-tape-free option that allowed Apple to sidestep lenders for the initial launch.
Imagine trying to keep Flo & Eddie v. Sirius XM, Flo & Eddie v. Sirius XM, Flo & Eddie v. Sirius XM, and Flo & Eddie v. Pandora Media separate in your head while writing an explanation of an incredibly arcane quirk of copyright that is looming over internet radio services like an apocalyptic shadowbeast summoned by legal necromancers. Does that sound like a clusterfuck to you? It sounds like one because it actually is one. Now please send me some sympathetic vibes. I will also accept flowers and cards from my bedside.
Amazon’s web services are now worth more than its entire retail operation – and growing three times as fast.
I'm trying a new experiment on my iPhone. I've removed all the apps that I hardly use -- such as apps for streaming radio that I listen in once a blue moon. I've placed all the apps that I will use at least once a day on the first page of the home screen, and classified all the remaining apps into six folders that also exists on that first page of the home screen.
The end result: one single screen of apps.
Let's see how long this last.
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Overall, Apple may have wormed its way into the “affordable luxury” sector – taking its place alongside scotch whisky and nail polish in the pantheon of recession-proof items. In the end, it is not the price tag; it is how the product makes the owner feel.
Creative unit ZiiLabs Inc had sued smartphone giants Samsung and Apple in Texas in March last year, alleging that several ranges of Galaxy phones, tablets, laptops as well as iPhone, iPad and iMac products infringed 10 of its patents.
The dispute with Samsung is ongoing. But Apple has thrown in the towel. As part of the settlement, Apple will obtain a licence for ZiiLabs' patents.
The phone does four things really well inside the vehicle: phone, messaging, media, and navigation. That’s it. So everything else is really better served with taking the embedded systems and making sure that they’re capable of doing that. And, as we’re talking about connected car, the car itself needs to be on the grid and connected. And if you rely solely on the phone, the moment you leave the car with that, the car goes back to being a brick. That doesn’t make sense.
What I would argue is that the balance between the time (and money) spent on the "what" versus the "so what" and "now what" is wrongly calibrated. Consumers of information in this digital age can get the "what" in lots of different places. (There are exceptions, of course. Carol's unique reporting on the Secret Service is one.) How you distinguish yourself, as an individual journalist or as an organization, is to spend more time and more resources on people who readers trust to tell them why something matters and what it means for the future.
I think I've given enough time for the experiment, but I am unhiding both the menu bar and the Dock on my Mac today. A Mac is not a Mac without the menu bar; in fact, the Finder didn't behave well with the menu bar hidden.
And I do like having the Dock around.
On the other hand, I did got used to the scroll bar not being there all the time. Funny how some of my habits stick, while some are easily changed.
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