Just two weeks after not-so-quietly removing the Finder for AirPods app, which helped nervous AirPod owners locate their misplaced Bluetooth audio devices, Apple announced its own official Find My AirPods utility inside the already familiar Find My iPhone app.
The habit I’ve gotten into is taking my case with me everywhere I go wearing AirPods. Whenever I take one or both of them out, I put them into the case. I try never to set them down or put them loose into a pocket. The buds are either in the case, in my ears, or in my fingers.
Well, now Apple’s Night Shift is coming to macOS. It just popped up in the latest 10.12.4 beta of Sierra, which is supposed to land alongside iOS 10.3. It's always a little sad to see an ingenious bit of software from a small upstart be copied by the Apple juggernaut ("Sherlocking," as it's called, due to Apple's notorious creation of Sherlock in response to an existing search product called Watson). Still, I eventually uninstalled F.lux because it was a little buggy, and I found living with a blue screen preferable to having my screen flash between orange and blue on occasion. So maybe I’ll actually use Apple’s implementation.
San Francisco is, of course, the font Apple designed and released to developers back in 2014. San Francisco was first applied to the Apple Watch interface and made its way to macOS and iOS in 2015.
In fact, in many countries, the internet, the very thing that was supposed to smash down the walls of authoritarianism like a sledgehammer of liberty, has been instead been co-opted by those very regimes in order to push their own agendas while crushing dissent and opposition. And with the emergence of conversational AI -- the technology at the heart of services like Google's Allo and Jigsaw or Intel's Hack Harassment initiative -- these governments could have a new tool to further censor their citizens.
My tool of choice was Keyboard Maestro, which I bought to remap a bunch of keystrokes for my weird clicky keyboard. It’s an impossibly powerful utility that, among other things, lets you automate user-interface actions.
TextTool is a powerful text editor with an extensive catalog of built-in text transformations. Developer Craig Pearlman has rewritten the app from the ground up and released it as a new Universal app. With support for URL schemes, JavaScript, and an extension, TextTool’s flexibility has never been greater.
TextTool defies easy categorization. It’s a text editor, but not a place where text lives. You won’t find an archive of past text documents you've created. Instead, TextTool is a temporary place to write, edit, and manipulate text that ends up somewhere else.
Priced at $9.99 per month, Setapp is designed to be an alternative to the Mac App Store. Through the Setapp service, more than 60 apps across a wide range of categories are available to customers. Access to apps is unlimited and includes all updates and in-app purchase content.
The Pokémon Company is today releasing its latest offering for mobile devices with Pokémon Duel, a strategy board game that lets you grow a team of six Pokemon characters and fight against others.
With the release of macOS Sierra and iOS betas on Tuesday, Apple also released a new tool for developers, allowing them to respond to reviews on the Mac and iOS App Stores. But the API goes deeper than just giving developers a process to respond to reviews, it also makes it easier for customers to leave reviews, Apple told me this morning when we talked about the new feature.
One reason developers prompt for reviews even after you’ve already reviewed a previous version of an app is that the average rating for an app gets reset with each update to the app — and a 4 or 5-star average rating can have a big effect on the number of downloads an app gets. From a developer’s perspective, it sucks when you replace a highly-rated version of your app with a minor bug-fix update and your average rating gets erased. It’s a tricky problem to solve, though — sometimes the latest update of an app really does deserve a new average rating, for better or for worse. I asked if this policy was changing, and Apple had nothing to announce — but they did acknowledge that they’re aware that the current policy is what led to the problem of apps badgering users too frequently for reviews.
Following today's reported trades, Cook is left with 979,809 shares of Apple worth about $117.6 million.
Ford has hired its first ever chief brand officer. The automaker poached Musa Tariq from Apple, where he was the head of the company’s global social media and digital marketing efforts for its retail business.
If I do use a pair of AirPods, I'll probably be constantly afraid of losing them. I'm not that worried that the AirPods will drop out of my ears by themselves, because many reviewers have find that to be something not to be worried about. But rather I'm worried that the AirPods will drop out because I bumped into something, or something bumped into me. I commute via trains and buses, and we all know that they are crowded and people are always in a rush and I'm blind. (Not literally.)
And I'm afraid that if the AirPods do drop out of my ears (or my hands when I am handling them), I will not be able to find them on the floor ever again. My eyesights aren't exactly what you'll call good nowadays.
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