MyAppleMenu

The Siri-Everywhere Edition Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Siri: Once A Flake, Now Key To Apple’s Future, by Geoffery A. Fowler, Wall Street Journal

“I think we’re going to see [Siri] become more important over time as people go from using Lyft a couple times per week to a couple times per day,” Lyft CTO Chris Lambert told me after Apple’s keynote. The ride-hailing company’s app is one of the first to tap into Siri. When iOS 10 arrives this fall, you’ll be able to say to your iPhone, “Order me a Lyft,” and a ride will just show up, no buttons required.

[...] When iOS 10 comes out, MapMyRun users will be able to just ask Siri to start, pause, resume or end a session. “When you are working out, having to interact with your phone is a barrier,” he said. Trying to tap on a phone while running can make you dizzy—and puts you at risk of running into things.

Apple Opens Up Siri To App Developers, by Ben Popper, The Verge

Apple announced today that it will be opening up Siri to third-party developers through an API, giving outside apps the ability to activate from Siri's voice commands, and potentially endowing Siri with a wide range of new skills and datasets.

Siri Is Coming To The Mac, by Russell Brandom, The Verge

The new desktop version of Siri is stored in the dock alongside the finder and other core Mac apps. From there, Siri is able to search through files on the computer, play locally stored playlists, and perform all the web-based tasks it can on mobile.

iMessage, Now With Drawers

Apple Is Making Messages A Lot More Fun, by Caroline O'Donovan and Alex Kantrowitz, BuzzFeed

The company is giving Messages a complete overhaul, opening it up to app developers who will bring everything from stickers and food ordering to its service. It has also enhanced usability by adding rich links and the capability to play videos from the web right within the app. And it’s bringing a number of fun elements to the app, including full screen effects, handwritten messages, and a feature that will highlight “emojifyable” words and allow you to replace them with emoji.

Apple Launches iMessage Apps So Third-party Devs Can Join Your Convos, by Jordan Crook, TechCrunch

With iMessage Apps, users can simply open up an app drawer from right within the Messages app to interact with others (and apps) at the same time.

This ranges from silly sticker apps like Mickey Mouse gifs to more sophisticated integrations, like paying friends through Messages with Square Pay or collaboratively ordering food from DoorDash.

Apple Pay, On The Web

Apple Pay Is Coming To Websites And It's A Really Big Deal, by Jason Del Rey, Recode

People shopping on a website on a Mac computer who want to use Apple Pay will get a notification on their iPhone to confirm the transaction. Pressing their finger to the phone’s fingerprint sensor will authenticate the transaction on the computer.

Apple Pay To Launch In France, Switzerland And Hong Kong And Head To The Web, by Rian Boden, NFCWorld

Apple Pay is expanding to Switzerland, France and Hong Kong in the “next few months”

Music, Rearranged

Apple Music Gets 'Redesigned From The Ground Up', by Nick Statt, The Verge

The tabs on the bottom of the app are largely the same, but Apple has redesigned each tab interface to make it easier to use. The service now also includes lyrics and a daily curated playlist in the "For You" tab. The social network-style Connect feature appears to be greatly diminished as well.

Hands-on: The All-new Music App In iOS 10, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

The first thing you’ll notice when you open the new Music app is that you’re taken immediately to the “Library” tab of the app, which shows a breakdown of all the music you’ve most recently added and options to view either by playlist, artist, album, song, or downloaded. The edit button next to the very bold “Library” heading allows you filter which category options appear.

Photos Intelligence

Apple Brings Google-style Machine Learning To ‘Photos’, by Bryan Clark, The Next Web

The new algorithm uses advanced computer vision, a group of deep learning techniques that brings facial recognition to the iPhone. Now, you can find all of the most important people, places and things in your life in with automatically sorted albums. It’s essentially facial recognition that works on places and objects as well.

Apple iOS 10 “Memories” Turns Old Photos Into Editable Mini-movies, by Josh Constine, TechCrunch

Using local, on-device facial recognition and AI detection of what’s in your images, it can combine photos and videos into themed mini-movies complete with transitions and a soundtrack.

Apple’s ‘Differential Privacy’ Is About Collecting Your Data—But Not ​Your Data, by Andy Greenberg, Wired

Federighi’s emphasis on differential privacy likely means Apple is actually sending more of your data than ever off of your device to its servers for analysis, just as Google and Facebook and every other data-hungry tech firm does. But Federighi implies that Apple is only transmitting that data in a transformed, differentially private form. In fact, Federighi named three of those transformations: Hashing, a cryptographic function that irreversibly turns data into a unique string of random-looking characters; subsampling, or taking only a portion of the data; and noise injection, adding random data that obscures the real, sensitive personal information.

​Shutterbugs, Rejoice: Apple's iOS 10 Will Shoot Raw Photos, by Stephen Shankland, CNET

Apple's next-gen iOS 10 software adds a new programming interface that will let camera apps retrieve unprocessed raw photo data from the camera hardware, according to Apple developer documentation.

File System For Siracusa

Digging Into The Dev Documentation For APFS, Apple’s New File System, by Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica

For one, APFS supports encryption natively instead of through File Vault. There are three modes of operation: no encryption, single-key encryption, and multi-key encryption with per-key files and another key for sensitive metadata. Both AES-XTS and AES-CBC cypher variants are supported, "depending on hardware." This lets you apply an adaptable amount of encryption depending on what your security needs might be—from "I don’t care" to "I don’t want anyone swiping the disk out of my computer" up to "NO ONE ELSE MUST KNOW MY SECRETS."

macOS, No Ex

Apple Reveals macOS Sierra With Siri, Apple Pay, And Other New Features, by Roman Loyola, Macworld

Don’t call it OS X anymore, and if you do, Siri will probably correct you. Apple unveiled on Monday at its 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference that the Mac operating system is now called macOS, and the next version will feature the Siri vocal interface and digital assistant.

PSA: macOS Sierra Drops Support For Many Macs From 2007, 2008, And 2009, by Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica

Older Macs, mostly models from 2007, 2008, and 2009, won't run this fall's new macOS Sierra.

iOS Redesigns

Apple Overhauls iOS Maps With A New Design, by Jacob Kastrenakes, The Verge

You'll now see much more of the map when you open up the app, being presented with little more than a squat search box to get started. The turn-by-turn navigation view has also been pared down, and Apple is now allowing users to swipe to move the view around while navigation is ongoing.

Apple News Gets Redesign With Simpler Interface, Subscriptions And More, by Husain Sumra, MacRumors

The new Apple News includes a simpler, bolder interface similar to the Apple Music redesign. It also includes new features like subscriptions, breaking news alerts and more.

Apple Announces Home App For iOS 10, by Jacob Kastrenakes, The Verge

Apple has announced an app called Home for iOS 10 that'll be a single destination for controlling smart home products. Home is meant for controlling HomeKit products, which have been rolling out over the past couple years.

iOS 10 Will Let You Uninstall The Apple Apps You Never Use, by Chris Welch, The Verge

User data gets removed along with the apps. (Don't worry: your contacts remain in the Phone app.) If you remove weather, for example, the weather will no longer appear in Notification Center or on your Apple Watch. If you remove Music, you'll lose it inside CarPlay.

watchOS Redo

watchOS 3.0 Promises Faster App Loads, Better Navigation, And More, by Valentina Palladino, Ars Technica

Watch apps now launch instantly instead of taking a few seconds to load. Overall, watchOS 3 is about seven times faster than watchOS 2, which should make all activity on the watch more seamless. The OS update will also allow background app updates, which adds to increased speed and efficiency of the entire system.

Why watchOS 3 Will Be Nimble And Nifty, by Tonya Engst, TidBITS

watchOS 3 will get faster by keeping your favorite apps in memory, and keeping their data refreshed.

Apple Announces 'Breathe' Mindfulness App For Apple Watch, by Tim Hardwick, MacRumors

Breathe is designed to help users alleviate everyday stresses by coaching them through timed breathing sessions.

tvOS Continued

Apple Announces tvOS Improvements Including Dark Mode, Live Tune In, More, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

Single Sign-On is a new feature that allows users to sign-in once and have access to all of their network apps.

In New tvOS, Apple Allows Game Developers To Require MFi Controllers, by Alex Guyot, MacStories

This line does need to be taken with a grain of salt since these are the preliminary release notes for the just-released beta, and therefore the rules could be changed at any time between now and the Fall. But with that said, it is striking that the line would make its way back into the documentation if it weren't going to be there to stay.

Apple Shows Off All-new Apple TV Remote App For iOS, by Zac Hall, 9to5Mac

The Remote app on iOS is being updated with all of the features from the Siri Remote for the fourth-gen Apple TV.

XCode, For New And Old Developers

Apple Releases Xcode 8 For iOS 10, macOS Sierra And More, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

The new IDE features extensions to customize the coding experience as well as runtime alerts, new Memory Debugger and accelerated Interface Builder.

Apple Brings Coding To The iPad With Swift Playground, by AppleInsider

Introduced as a new way for children to learn how to code, Apple will bring its Swift programming language to iPad with Swift Playground, a touch-friendly way for beginners to grasp the basics.

Here Are The iOS & Mac Apps That Won This Year’s Apple Design Awards, by Greg Barbosa, 9to5Mac

Every year Apple celebrates developers and the work they’ve accomplished across the various software platforms at its Apple Design Awards. This year’s 2016 Apple Design Awards showcased apps for iOS, OS X, watchOS, and tvOS. The award ceremony made sure to highlight apps that were localized in multiple languages, and had been built with accessibility in mind.