I think Apple acquired Workflow with the intention of building their own automation platform on iOS. Like Siri, TestFlight, and Beats Music, I don't think Apple bought Workflow just to abandon it. I believe both Apple and Workflow saw this as the best possible solution to continue growing the app into a more powerful tool for iOS users. Whatever Apple is planning, however, it won't be ready for iOS 11 in June. I'd expect the Workflow app to remain (mostly untouched) on the App Store until Apple offers a replacement – possibly in Spring 2018 or in iOS 12. If and when that replacement becomes available, I expect it to be a complete rewrite of the app with little to no support for legacy workflows.
I also assume that Apple wants their take on iOS automation to be tightly controlled by clear user permissions, and that URL scheme callbacks won't be part of Workflow's future. Unless Apple wants to outright remove third-party app support from Workflow, I suspect the company is building "Workflow as a feature" inside iOS with a framework that developers will be able to integrate with. That "WorkflowKit" framework will enable third-party developers to offer discrete app actions that can be embedded in Workflow and other extension points. WorkflowKit will be based on groundwork laid with iOS 11 this year, and it'll tell a bigger story for Workflow 2.0 as the glue between every iOS app, service, or system feature. I'm guessing, but I'd say that all of this is at least a year away.
Apple this evening has shared three new videos in its ongoing iPad Pro ad series. The new videos highlight user complaints about PCs and offer up a solution to the problems: the iPad Pro. The three new ads highlight the design of the iPad Pro, its battery, its versatility.
The toolkit lets developers connect apps to data stored in the SAP Cloud Platform as well as various services and functions, all governed by business and security rules. It taps into native iOS frameworks, and makes use of Apple's Swift programming language.
Free is not a reason to ignore the alternatives but Apple Notes is this strong and more than free, it's already installed and waiting for you. There are reasons to go to its rivals but Apple Notes has so much going for it that you really should try it out first, if for no other reason that to have a baseline for comparison.
If This Than That, also known as IFTTT, a service that connects to other apps and services in order to help them work together, has added support for two more iOS-specific applets: Calendar and the App Store.
You first select the person you want to text from your Contacts, then write the text you want to send and select the time you want to be reminded to send the text. When that time rolls around, Scheduled sends you a push notification so you can return to the app to send the text.
San Diego start-up Echo has created a new hybrid microscope that switches from upright to inverted in one device, saving life science companies money and space. On Thursday, Echo said it has raised $7.5 million in venture capital to expand its manufacturing and sales operations, as well as develop new products.
Echo’s Revolve microscope also replaces traditional eye pieces with high-resolution tablet computers.
Many of America’s biggest corporations including Apple Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are sticking by their pledges to fight climate change even as President Donald Trump guts his predecessor’s environmental policies.
Companies say their pledges, coordinated by the Obama administration, reflect their push to cut energy costs, head off activist pressure and address a risk to their bottom line in the decades to come.
Apple is planning another shakeup within its retail stores, according to a source who shared the company's plans with MacRumors. At the end of April, Apple plans to eliminate certain retail positions, including Business Manager, Business Events Lead, Events Coordinator, and Events Lead. [...]
Employees who currently hold positions that are being eliminated have been told they can take a lower level (also lower paying in many cases) position or take two months of severance pay. "This comes as a rude awakening to employees who have always felt Apple has had their best interest," said the source.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on Friday denied an application by the Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, National Australia Bank, and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to bargain as a group against Apple and collectively boycott its payment system, Apple Pay. [...]
"The ACCC is not satisfied, on balance, that the likely benefits from the proposed conduct outweigh the likely detriments. We are concerned that the proposed conduct is likely to reduce or distort competition in a number of markets," ACCC chairman Rod Sims said.
The day my sister, Jessica, discovered Comic Sans, her entire world changed. She’s dyslexic and struggled through school until she was finally diagnosed in her early twenties, enabling her to build up a personal set of tools for navigating the written world.
“For me, being able to use Comic Sans is similar to a mobility aid, or a visual aid, or a hearing aid,” she tells me while we’re both visiting our family in Maryland. “I have other ways of writing and reading, but they’re not like they are for someone who’s not dyslexic.”
The irregular shapes of the letters in Comic Sans allow her to focus on the individual parts of words. While many fonts use repeated shapes to create different letters, such as a “p” rotated to made a “q,” Comic Sans uses few repeated shapes, creating distinct letters (although it does have a mirrored “b” and “d”). Comic Sans is one of a few typefaces recommended by influential organizations like the British Dyslexia Association and the Dyslexia Association of Ireland. Using Comic Sans has made it possible for Jessica to complete a rigorous program in marine zoology at Bangor University in Wales.
There are so many things on my table that contain batteries...
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Thanks for reading.
The fact that 100M people are still using older iPads demonstrates that the product provides value. Apple is also confident that users will see the significant improvement between the latest iPads and models from five to seven years ago. As for PC users, Apple thinks the iPad Pro line is capable of handling the vast majority of tasks currently given to laptops. Apple looks at the iPad Pro line, which includes Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard, as a better solution for consumers than even the Mac. This is quite telling as to management's long-term motivation.
While the iPhone has likely reduced the iPad's long-term sales trajectory, the iPad category is being underestimated. Apple thinks that now is the time to become much more aggressive in selling iPad. Fortunately, we will be able to judge Apple's progress by monitoring quarterly iPad sales. With a dramatic price cut, simpler sales pitch, reduced headwind from iPad mini sales, and a differentiated product line, Apple is confident the iPad will return to growth. A growing iPad business will then make it that much easier for Apple to move beyond the Mac and focus on creating a new breed of personal gadgets that make technology more personal.
Apple’s director of artificial intelligence, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, believes that the deep neural networks that have produced spectacular results in recent years could be supercharged in coming years by the addition of memory, attention, and general knowledge.
When Google and Apple are just keeping out porn sites, no one really cares. Even when they're nixing apps that happen to compete with Apple or Google, people mostly shrug. But when they start censoring apps based on their news content, we're in trouble.
Having spent some time using VPNs full time, I need to tell you right now: it sucks. Doesn’t matter what service you use, it’s a lessened experience. The connections are choppy at times, slow at others, and never as fast as your internet connection.
That said, there’s only two VPNs I recommend: Cloak, or Private Internet Access (PIA).
Scrivener, now in version 2, is easily one of the best pieces of software for writers because it was built with their needs in mind. Whether you're pounding out pages of references and endnotes for a nonfiction book or slowly crafting characters to set loose in your next novel, Scrivener provides a place to create, edit, and organize all your work, not just manuscript pages.
Considering how much time, trouble, and money this little app saves travelers, it was beyond forehead-smacking that Expedia killed it off.
Now, FlightTrack was around for eight years. Surely, in that time, something similar has come along? I decided to find out.
iPad users will now get a full version, meaning they'll no longer have to make do without some features. In addition to keeping track of your upcoming client dinners and Little League games, the app's machine learning will help you schedule meetings by suggesting meeting times and locations based on your co-workers' availability. It will also help you set goals and schedule time into your Calendar to help you achieve them.
Professional screenwriters use Final Draft, and you should too if that's your field. It's one of the best apps for writers in general, and it's the app for screenwriters. Only Final Draft has smart auto-suggestion features for formatting your work to industry standards. It compiles lists of characters and scene locations automatically. A Beat Board feature replicates the old notecard-and-corkboard approach to arranging scenes, and a Story Map helps keep the story on target for pacing and script length.
My Reasons for iOS and Mac is a productivity app that collects the things that motivate you and reminds you when working on your habit. It’s a tool that may just help me kick my Diet Pepsi habit – and some of your habits, too.
But seriously, the biggest skill back then was invention, creativity, imagination, whatever you would like to call it; unlike today there was no Google, no Stackoverflow, no open source at your fingertips, rarely even someone to email to ask for help. You were basically programming on an island, and anything you needed to figure out or solve, you had to do it yourself. Sometimes you might go to a library and search books and journals, or maybe you could ask someone at a user group or conference, or if you were lucky someone you knew was a programmer. Generally though no matter what you wanted to do it was on your shoulders to come up with it. Even if someone else in the world was solving some similar problem, you probably had no way to know about it.
What you need today is searching, understanding and evaluation. You have access to the world’s smartest (and sometimes dumbest) people. The chances that something you need hasn’t been done elsewhere is rare and the real skill is in finding it, relating it to what you need, deciding if it is useful or adaptable, and if it is of a decent quality.
“As an instrument for selecting at random, I have found nothing superior to dice,” wrote statistician Francis Galton in an 1890 issue of Nature. “When they are shaken and tossed in a basket, they hurtle so variously against one another and against the ribs of the basket-work that they tumble wildly about, and their positions at the outset afford no perceptible clue to what they will be even after a single good shake and toss.”
How can we generate a uniform sequence of random numbers? The randomness so beautifully and abundantly generated by nature has not always been easy to extract and quantify. The oldest known dice (4-sided) were discovered in a 24th century B.C. tomb in the Middle East. More recently, around 1100 B.C. in China, turtle shells were heated with a poker until they cracked at random, and a fortune teller would interpret the cracks. Centuries after that, I Ching hexagrams for fortunetelling were generated with 49 yarrow stalks laid out on a table and divided several times, with results similar to performing coin tosses.
In recent years, advertisers have increasingly shunned buying ads on individual sites in favor of cheaply targeting groups of people across the web based on their browsing habits, a process known as programmatic advertising — enabling, say, a Gerber ad to show up on a local mother’s blog, or a purse in an online shopping cart to follow a person around the internet for weeks. But as the risks around the far reaches of the web have been cast into stark relief, some advertisers are questioning the value of showing up on hundreds of thousands of unknown sites, and wondering whether millions of appearances actually translate into more sales.
Her new project — which also happens to be her master's thesis for the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU — is a culmination of all her work until now. Previously, she programmed computers to output art. Now, she's letting the computer program her. [...]
The project, which He calls The Best Art, uses a computer to generate art ideas which He will interpret and then execute. The first prompt, generated on March 6, said: “Build three photocopied, type-written pages in opposition to trucks.” So He wrote a series of negative sentences about trucks and printed them out. Next the computer asked her to “Design a toilet paper tube that evokes a bent beech wood,” so she cut up a toilet paper tube so it resembled branches.
Her favorite piece of computer-directed art so far was “Make everyone feel lonely,” which she interpreted as a slideshow of stock images of families set to different computer voices saying, “You are alone. You are alone.”
The single most effective way to protect yourself is to change your passwords. All of them. All the time. Commit to changing your passwords so often that you won’t ever actually do it.
I'm now about 12 hours into the Stephen Fry's audiobook of almost-all Sherlock Holmes stories, and I've found that I am no longer listening to Stephen Fry's narration, but rather, Dr Watson's.
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Thanks for reading.
Hiram calls its initiative “Tech and Trek,” emphasizing that both digital and real-life experiences play a part in learning. “We’re very interested in having the mobile technology used outside the classroom where so much learning takes place,” says Hiram president Lori Varlotta. “Students will be able to capture video and write about their experiences when they’re studying abroad or working on research projects.”
Varlotta says giving everyone—faculty and students—the same device with the same apps will be a learning equalizer. “It’s hard to assign electronic journaling, blogs, or FaceTime when you’re not sure what the students’ various devices are able to handle,” she says. “Now everyone will have access to the same kind of learning resources and training to help them prepare for coursework and take their studies seriously.”
Previously, the infrastructure requirements for Apple Classroom were reasonably high. You needed an MDM server that supported the Apple Education payload and student devices had to be supervised. Essentially, that describes a managed school deployment.
Apple Classroom 2.0 can now work without any of these requirements being met, albeit subject to a range of privacy limitations.
At its most basic, now, anyone can download the Apple Classroom app from the App Store and set up an ad-hoc class. However, the degree of control is limited because of privacy concerns. In Apple's terminology, these ad-hoc classes are called "unmanaged classes" and the MDM-provided classes are called "managed classes".
Hiram joins a handful of higher education institutions in the U.S.—mostly small, private colleges or professional programs at state universities—to adopt the devices in a comprehensive way.
"She's 10. She's not able to walk, read, write," he said. "Very limited with her capabilities, but she's very smart with her iPad."
That inspired her brother, Zach Edlund, a former computer programming student, to create an app she can use with her iPad so she can communicate.
The app allows people to select a picture with how they're feeling then send it as a text message.
There's an argument to be made that it's upsetting to be repeatedly reminded that your government's carried out covert war efforts across the globe that routinely kill more civilians than it cares to admit.
But it's hard to argue that's Metadata+'s sole objective is to horrify you. For one, it doesn't show a drone strike's aftermath. There are no mutilated bodies. Not even destroyed houses or buildings.
Since the beginning, Begley's app has merely aggregated news about U.S. drone strikes in text format. It puts together widely available news reports—many of which are ostensibly available right in Apple's own News app.
This is probably a good sign for users — the fact that Apple isn’t making many changes to the basic security structure of the iPhone likely means that Apple hasn’t uncovered any major flaws in its product. The company puts significant resources into testing its own security and invites outside researchers to do the same through its bug bounty program.
But Apple has rolled out plenty of new features and products in the last few years, and the security whitepaper reflects that. Here are some of the biggest new developments.
Version 3.5 allows you to mark up photos with instructions or comments using built-in annotation tools.
The MLB.com At Bat and NHL iOS applications have been updated today to take advantage of one of the new, but still under-the-radar features available in the just launched version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 10.3: personalized home screen icons. That’s right – you can now replace either of these apps’ default icon to one featuring your favorite team’s logo instead.
Apple has stepped up its efforts to stop developers from promoting the price of their apps in app names and screenshots. For the past month or so Apple’s iTunes Connect service has been blocking submissions to the App Store or Mac App Store when app metadata includes pricing information.
The change could have consequences for those who push free apps in the iOS and macOS stores and are trying to stand out from similar free apps. For years developers have mentioned “free” in apps’ names. Apple has previously discouraged developers from doing so in its developer guide for iTunes Connect and its overview of App Store product pages. Now the company has gone further.
This great power does come with responsibility though. Realtalk: we all feel the need to be "right" often. Especially when it comes to defending work we pour or souls into. I know I do. I want to warn you: the new reply capability is not the place for that. You need to check your "but someone on the internet is wrong!" really hard here. You will not convince people your app's price is worth it via these replies, and in the mean time everyone checking out your app will see you arguing with customers.
To phrase it another way: these are as much replies to existing customers as they are PR statements to future ones.
If you reframe it as “pleasing the end user” vs. “pleasing the programmer,” you’ll reach a more intellectually honest — and a more human — decision.
Now that I at least comprehend the scope of the MagicBand’s technology, I actually feel more comfortable using it. After all, it was the not knowing that creeped me out to begin with. Next time I visit a Disney park, I’ll still be wearing a MagicBand, fully realizing that it’s sending out signals with every step I take.
Still, I wouldn’t say I’m completely at ease. Disney’s vague answers, my MagicBand dissection, and Kamkar’s comments managed to demystify some of the band’s functions for me, but I’m still left feeling torn. What am I giving up in exchange for the convenience of tapping my special bracelet on light-up Mickey logos to gain access to fun rides and experiences? Is it something more than the intel that I bought three hot dogs for lunch or how I spent five minutes posing for pictures with a costumed mouse?
If you thought there's nothing in the time-travelling genre left to surprise you, maybe you want to pick up the book All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai, and be pleasantly surprised. I was.
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Thanks for reading.
When AirPods were first released last December, one of the primary concerns voiced around the internet was that the earbuds would be too easy to lose. Tracking AirPods via the Find My iPhone app seemed like a no-brainer solution, but that option was not available at AirPods' launch. Fortunately, the option to track Apple's wireless earbuds is available with iOS 10.3. [...]
Selecting AirPods then the 'Actions' button will present two options. By tapping the car icon you'll receive navigation options in Maps to take you to the AirPods' location. Tapping the 'Play Sound' button will cause a light dinging sound to emit from the AirPods; gradually this sound grows louder until it reaches max volume. Though the sound cannot get as loud as that of devices with more powerful speaker systems, like the iPhone, it does get loud enough that if you're in the same general area as the missing AirPods, you should be able to find them.
The most obvious of the changes moves the iCloud settings screen from about halfway down to the list to its own prominent position at the top of the stack. There isn’t a ton of stuff here that doesn’t already exist in iOS 10.2.1, but given that the first thing most people do with their iPhones and iPads is sign into their iCloud accounts, it makes sense to move this stuff front-and-center.
Particularly useful is a big “Password & Security” section right at the top of the new screen, which lets you change your iCloud password and set up two-factor authentication. This was available before, it was just buried in a non-obvious place (go to the iCloud settings page, then tap your Apple ID, then tap Password & Security).
[...]
We've been tracking this one for a while now, but iOS 10.3 is ramping up the warnings about old unmaintained (read: 32-bit) apps that may not work in future versions of the software (read: probably iOS 11, which is also likely to drop support for the last of the 32-bit iOS hardware). Dive into Settings, then General, then About, and tap the Applications text and you’ll see a complete list of apps.
As APFS is designed to be low latency, this should also improve read and write speeds on iOS or Mac devices. Apple demonstrated this during WWDC last year with a Mac, showing how APFS saved time on a simple file copy compared to HFS+. Most iPhone and iPad users won’t notice a difference after today’s iOS 10.3 update, but there could be a boost to storage levels for some. Beta testers of iOS 10.3 reported seeing more storage available after the update, primarily due to the way APFS calculates available data.
On Android, Windows, and macOS, the feature is arguably less necessary, since third-party apps like f.lux can fill the gap. Still, it's convenient to have it integrated into the OS itself and officially supported by the companies, if only because it will prevent the feature from breaking when new updates come out.
At first glance, f.lux and Night Shift offer pretty similar options. However, f.lux generally gives deeper customization options.
watchOS 3.2 introduces Theater Mode, which is designed to let Apple Watch owners mute the sound on their device and disable Raise to Wake, preventing the screen from lighting up with arm movement.
The updates today include the ability to open password-protected documents using Touch ID on the new MacBook Pro and iPhones, alongside new editing features for all the applications.
Now an iPad can be used in place of a Siri Remote to control the fourth-generation Apple TV. The iPad app includes full support for Split View, a welcome touch. And thanks to the additional screen real estate, you can move the button panel left and right along the bottom of the screen to keep it in your preferred spot.
They are hands-on labs with grade-level activities that support the standards-based theory learned in the classroom, Dunham said. For instance, fourth-graders are directed toward circuits and magnets while fifth-graders focus on film and editing.
“It makes it real life so it’s not just textbook. Critical thinking sometimes is the last standard we address in the classroom,” she said.
Dunham said an important element of the makerspace is student creativity. Some students, she said, were slow to engage because there are no step-by-step instructions for most activities as there are for classroom assignments.
Version 2 of the app brings a number of new features including the ability to create classes within the app and invite nearby students. That means that it will no longer require a Mobile Device Management setup to configure classes, making it easier for smaller organizations without IT assistance to use the app.
Following last year’s Swift 3.0 release, Apple has officially released Swift 3.1 today with Xcode 8.3. Now that Swift has hit its first major point release in third iteration, the team will be putting their focus onto Swift 4.
Registration for Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, opened today. And for the thousands of developers, engineers, and Apple acolytes hoping to spend $1,600 on a ticket and attend in June, they’ll find a new code of conduct that they’ll have to agree to before they can step foot in the convention.
The new policy, found on the conference’s registration page, goes into some depth about what sorts of behavior will not be tolerated at the conference. “Apple is committed to diversity and to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone,” it states. It also specifically lists what harassment could entail.
First, the company says that the API allows customers to provide App Store ratings and reviews without leaving a developer’s app. [...] Apple also offered more details on support for developers replying to reviews.
In an interview on Friday, Paula Pyers, Apple's senior director of supply chain social responsibility, told BuzzFeed News that 2016 was the company's best year on record in terms of improvements in the supply chain. Apple conducted 705 assessments of its supply chain in 2016 and removed three suppliers for failing to meet its standards on labor and human rights, environmental standards, and health and safety. (Apple conducted 574 such assessments in 2015.) Separately, in 2016 Apple audited and booted from its supply chain 22 smelters of conflict minerals. [...]
“We're going to continue to do what we're doing," Pyers said. "We're going to continue to press for third-party audits. We've already put that message out to our smelter partners earlier this year. We're going to continue running the program we run today. We're going to continue looking beyond audits to incident reports on the ground, and in the case of cobalt, working on the ground level. We'll continue to call for collective action because we truly believe, whether it's regulated or self-regulated, this is the way business should be run, and the way we'll continue to run our business.”
Only one of those violations was for an underage worker, who was “a 15½-year-old” at the time of the discovery. The legal working age in China is 16.
Apple required the supplier that hired the child worker to “continue paying their wages while also providing an educational opportunity” and provide him “safe passage” home.
When the underage worker turns 16, the factory this person worked at will be required to provide a job offer, Apple said.
Ransomware scammers have been exploiting a flaw in Apple's Mobile Safari browser in a campaign to extort fees from uninformed users. The scammers particularly target those who viewed porn or other controversial content. Apple patched the vulnerability on Monday with the release of iOS version 10.3. [...]
Recovering from the pop-up loop was as easy as going into the device settings and clearing the browser cache. This simple fix was possibly lost on some uninformed targets who were too uncomfortable to ask for outside help.
But the Beats X's flat rubber cord is surprisingly comfortable, minus the occasional microphonic "scratch sound" issue when laying against the couch. Two equally-sized battery packs weight the cord to your collarbone, allowing the buds themselves to arc forward of your face into your ears. In a perfect world, of course, those battery packs would be inside the Beats X earbuds themselves and there'd be no cord at all, but this works as an effective in-between while Apple perfects battery miniaturization technology.
The two earbud cords aren't completely symmetrical: The one on the left has a full play/pause/skip/volume remote. It doesn't add any measurable weight to the cord, but it does let you have vastly more control over your music than the tap-controlled AirPods.
If you have trouble coming up with the perfect troll image to share, now you can look to AirDrop Cards for suggestions. The site, created as a hack project by Australia-based Apple accessories company Proper, lets you choose from a selection of premade cards to easily share with unsuspecting strangers.
In the history of keyboards, I have never been as inept as I’ve been with the Touch Bar keyboard. I’ve been finishing this piece for the last hour and I’ve been keeping track of the number of times I’ve accidentally hit a Touch Bar button, and that number is nine. The total number for this article is likely 5x the number.
Developers were the ones who originally raged on the Touch Bar because it contained one of their most frequently used keys – the escape key. The absence of the clear feedback of a physical key press is a violation of perhaps the most important word in my definition we have not explored “efficiency.”
The Touch Bar is gorgeous but is inefficient.
The challenge Apple events face in iOS is the tension between scriptability and security — the kind of hooks that are necessary for scriptability can be used as an attack vector unless the system has been designed carefully to avoid that. The Apple event system on the Mac treads that line by operating at the user level; to avoid being exploited, any iOS approach would likely have to be similar or even more restrictive.
[...]
Since the beginning, iOS has shared a common core with macOS. Over time, the two platforms have traded capabilities — usually new features developed on iOS going “back to the Mac.” In the case of scripting, it would make more sense for Apple to move the Apple event model to iOS, likely in a restricted way, than to come up with something completely new for iOS that would then need to be evangelized to all Mac developers in the other direction.
The question is how closely the iOS system will match up with the Apple events that Mac automation relies on now. If Apple were to start supporting a subset of Apple events in iOS, giving users access in iOS via Workflow and Swift, it would be easy to imagine Workflow coming to the Mac to replace or supplement Automator (Swift is obviously already available for Mac users).
My first feature request for that new team in Apple: Siri for Workflow.
(Or do I want Workflow for Siri?)
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Thanks for reading.
Think about what happens when you talk to Siri or Cortana or Google on a phone: the speech recognition system has to distinguish your “OK Google” (for example) from background noise; it has to react to “OK Google” rather than “OK something else”; and it has to parse your speech to act on the command.
And you already know how to talk.
The Swinburne University team working on an app called GetTalking can't make even that single assumption, because they're trying to solve a different problem. When a baby receives a cochlear implant to take over the work of their malfunctioning inner ear, he or she needs to learn something brand new: how to associate the sounds they can now hear with the sounds their own mouths make.
A Greek software company based in the northwestern town of Ioannina is having a global impact thanks to a new app protecting lone workers. “Lone workers” is the term used to describe employees who work in isolation from others, without close or direct supervision of any sort, human or electronic. They include office cleaners, truck drivers, machine operators, maintenance personnel, postal delivery officers and security guards, among many others, and their numbers are rising worldwide. It is estimated, for example, that in the UK alone, lone workers represent 22 percent of the total workforce, due mainly to new technology that allows distance work, coupled with the rising costs of renting and running an office.
The phenomenon is shaking up the labor market but also creating new needs in the area of worker safety. Lone workers often perform tasks that can become routine, exposing them to more risks than people who work in an environment where there is close oversight and other workers who will notice if something goes wrong. The biggest challenge is that they have no one to turn to for help in the event of an accident or, say, an attack. In some cases, such as train or truck drivers, such incidents put other lives at risk too.
The button-less AirPods are too reliant on Siri or the controls on your phone. If you are all-in with Apple gear, either is a fine option, but the BeatsX has the comfort, long battery life, and convenient charging that give it the edge.
So how did Apple manage to break a record with an album that's also available on Spotify, with only 20 million users compared to Spotify’s 100 million? The answer, according to the Apple Music team, is the power of Beats 1 and OVO Sound Radio.
Nintendo aims to do more with its smartphone games than make money. The Japanese company seeks to bring its games and characters to a wider audience and create synergy with game consoles such as the new Switch.
The problems with the [freemium] model, such as the large amounts of money often required for success, risk undermining the value of Nintendo's characters, which in turn could dent the company's bread-and-butter console-game business. Nintendo's apparent goal with smartphone games is to attract more users even if the company loses out on some profits in the process.
The center pin of the connector - the adapter sense pin - controls a tiny chip that both identifies the charger and controls the status LED. It is part of a complex interaction between the charger and the Mac. Using an Arduino microcontroller, this chip can be accessed and controlled using the 1-Wire protocol. Is this useful? Not really, but hopefully you found it interesting.
The winner of the best calendar app for every user of macOS and iOS is...not included in this showdown. It's not that we're on a peculiar quest to determine which is the second best, though. Instead, it's because the best app for most people is Apple's own Calendar.
In much the same way that Googling any proper noun will bring up its Wikipedia page as one of the first few links, or searching for a product will immediately bring up Amazon, searching for code will lead you to Stack Overflow. Given the amount of code currently being produced — not to mention the libraries of it undergirding essential and nonessential functions of daily life — this means that Stack Overflow is, quietly, one of the most important websites on the planet. Not to mention one of the most popular: Launched in 2008, the site now has an Alexa traffic ranking of 52, making it one of the top 100 sites on the web.
That means that in the semi-collaborative tech industry — where everyone is directly or indirectly building off of the ideas and innovations of one another — whole swaths of coders are being driven, by Google, to the same handful of resources for whichever problem they’re trying to crack. Of the 36,932 developers who responded to the site’s annual survey, fewer than 1 percent said that they had never heard of or used Stack Overflow as a resource. Furthermore, 90 percent of devs “find solutions that solve their coding problems here multiple times a month, and half of them find code snippets they can incorporate directly into their own work.” In other words, Stack Overflow often powers the programs that power… everything else. (It’s worth noting that the site’s own dev survey is not necessarily reflective of the industry as a whole. Case in point, 88.6 percent of respondents were male, which is readily apparent across the site’s many threads.)
This method essentially ruins the Jet Black iPhone 7 involved, making it a rather pricy project, and it destroys the waterproofing seal on the red iPhone.
It's also worth noting that this is a highly complicated process that essentially requires tearing apart two iPhones, melding them together, and hoping nothing goes wrong, something that the average person won't want to attempt.
"It's almost as if Ev Williams wasn't concerned that he was pulling out the rug from underneath publishers who had placed their trust in his vision for the future of journalism," he said.
Medium, which sold publishers on being a home for quality journalism, is now putting the sites it recruited in jeopardy, Miller said.
"I sincerely hope it works out, but at this point there's a lot of uncertainty in the viability of Medium as a platform for independent publishers," he said. "We'd love to stay with them on this journey, but I worry that it will be impossible without significantly damaging our ability to operate our business."
In Moscow this past summer, a woman drifted-off to sleep after playing Pokemon Go on her smartphone. Later that night, she was awoken by a crushing pressure. She opened her eyes and reportedly saw that she was being assaulted by a real-life Pokemon character. Not a person in a Pokemon outfit, an actual Pokemon. Panicking, but unable to speak, she struggled with the creature while her boyfriend slumbered ignorantly beside her. Eventually, she was able to rise, and the Pokemon vanished. After a brief search of her home, the woman proceeded to report the assault the police.
News of the woman’s police report was quickly, and somewhat gleefully, picked up by a variety of international tabloids. It rattled about the internet, and eventually surfaced on my Twitter feed. But my first thought, as an experimental psychologist with a particular focus in anomalous perceptual experiences was, “Well, that could have happened to anybody.” Although it’s impossible to definitively explain this woman’s experience, I nevertheless felt quite confident that this late-night Pokemon assault fit neatly into our existing understanding of sleep. Indeed, given what we now know about this mysterious neuropsychological state – and the strange sensations it can bring – one might arguably describe her experience as ‘normal’.
Now that Apple has bought Workflow, it is time for all app developers to step up and embrace URL schemes and automation.
For example: I want a single Play Stuff workflow, that will either start playing the current audiobook in Audible, the current podcast in the Downcast/Overcast/Pocketcast/Podcast/WhateverCast's queue, or a random playlist in the Music app, depending on my location and the time of day.
For example, I want a single Read Stuff workflow, that will bring me the next article in my Instapaper queue, or, if the queue is empty, my current iBook/Kindle/Kobo e-book.
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Thanks for reading.
The fundamental trouble with biometrics is that they can’t be reset. If the pattern of one of your fingerprints is compromised, that’s fine; you have a few backups. But if they’re all gone—some law-enforcement databases contain images of all ten fingers—getting them replaced isn’t an option. The same goes for eyes, which are used for iris or retina scans, and your face. Unlike a compromised password, these things can’t be changed without unpleasant surgery or mutilation. [...]
To overcome the security risk of static fingerprints, irises, and face shapes, some research has turned to the development of changeable biometrics.
A form of Word macro-based malware has been uncovered that can affect both macOS and Windows users when executed, with the malicious file modifying its attack method depending on which operating system it detects it is being run within. [...]
If macOS is detected, another python script is run which again extracts code from a base64-encoded string, which then downloads and executes a file from a specific URL. The downloaded "meterpreter" file is another python script, again modified from the Metasploit framework, used as a dynamically extensible payload that can run commands provided by a server.
Apple today released a revised version of iTunes 12.6, which appears to eliminate a hidden option that may have accidentally been built into the software release.
Using two-factor authentication should protect you completely. It’s easy to set up, so take a minute and do it now.
When it first launched, Bear was an intriguing alternative to bloated note-taking apps like Evernote and OneNote, but it was still a little too new to dive into. After a couple minor iterations, I’m convinced it’s a worthy alternative for those sick of the bloat of other notes apps and for those who like the take-home simplicity of plain text. Provided you’re in the Apple ecosystem, anyway.
An original battle system that breathes new life into the strategy RPG genre. The Movement system offers an extremely deep and complex combat experience that never goes stale, as there is always new powers and abilities to acquire.
In this article, I'm going to show you some ways you can free up storage on your iOS device, so you have more room to add apps, music, and more. Let's get started!
iOS 10.3 is scheduled to ship in a matter of weeks or months, and it will convert existing volumes to APFS. It’s not trivial to make an app that was accustomed to working with a normalized file system work without one. And since there was no announcement, I doubt most developers have even thought about this. So this is bound to cause lots of bugs.
My perspective on comments comes from two facts: 1) Comments don’t compile. 2) Comments are usually a subdued color in your syntax highlighter. Because they don’t compile and because they fade away from sight, it’s very easy to ignore them as you make changes to the code. If you make changes and don’t update the comments, you end up with a comment that doesn’t accurately reflect the content of code.
Last week, the staff of the Classic, the student newspaper at Flushing's Townsend Harris High School, gathered in a third-floor hallway to discuss a plan of attack for reporting on a decision that could change their school forever. Following allegations that interim principal Rosemarie Jahoda had berated individual teachers, ignored students with disabilities at her previous high school, and bungled the handling of an Islamophobic incident at Townsend Harris, the New York City Department of Education was bringing in candidates who might replace her. The staff of the Classic, which had reported for months on the controversy, had decided to take it upon themselves to meet the contenders.
So, here are the first three workflows I've created in Workflow:
a. Add current song to a playlist
b. Prompt for a song, and play the entire album
c. Play a particular playlist depending on the day of the week.
That last workflow is particularly hairy, because I can't find a switch…case-like action in Workflow, and had to use a whole bunch of if…otherwise actions. Maybe I should go read the documentation, eh?
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Is there no way to download shows from Beats 1 for offline listening?
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Thanks for reading.
We try to make as much noise and create as much context and tell stories for records and artists, within a place where the music is. Imagine Apple Music as a store. We're the front window. We're the thing you see by the counter. We try and put music into a frame that makes you more excited about it, more than just its existence.
You could put the record in a playlist, put it in a library, just let it exist and hopefully we find it. But culture is what the artist wants it to be. They want to create layers of thought, excitement and vision, and tell you how the record was made. They want to share that experience with you. That's what Beats 1 really is designed to do. It was to keep pace with the culture, so that it goes perfectly with the commodity.
It's clear that there's something to the hackers' claims, given that they have some working iCloud account credentials. But it's not truly known exactly how many, or if the sample that was sent was representative of the wider pool or were carefully selected. [...]
We can't be sure that this is something big, but based on our reporting, we can't say that it's nothing.
Those using two-factor authentication or Apple's trusted device system should be protected.
But concerned users should change their Apple iCloud password through this link. Look for the green padlock icon in the address bar and that the web address clearly says "iforgot.apple.com".
The latest batch of files, dramatically named "Dark Matter" (after one of the tools described in the dump), consists of user manuals and other documentation for exploits targeting Apple MacBooks—including malware that leveraged a vulnerability in Apple's Thunderbolt interface uncovered by a researcher two years ago. Named "Sonic Screwdriver" after the ever-useful tool carried by the fictional Dr. Who, the malware was stored on an ordinary Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter. It exploited the Thunderbolt interface to allow anyone with physical access to a MacBook bypass password protection on firmware and install one of a series of Apple-specific CIA "implants."
But Apple mistakenly thought it could add bags of value to it every year to keep us upgrading regularly. All people wanted was a dumb display to save cranking out the laptop. And despite vendors' best efforts to make them slower every year with OS updates, tablets just don't need updating very often at all.
None of this is new at all. Apple used to make one kind of Mac. Then it didn’t. Apple used to make one kind of iPod. Then it didn’t. Not only is this not new, this is literally Apple’s strategy. Enter a market with one product that redefines the experience, then iterate it and continue to expand the lineup to take more profit share.
From a webpage, all you have to do is tap the share button, pick the 1Blocker action extension, and then ‘Hide Page Element.’ 1Blocker reloads the page in the extension with toolbars on the top and bottom of the screen. Find something you want to hide and tap it.
Reminders is our favorite simple list app for iOS, and one of the reasons is that we love using the native Siri integration. Here are some ways that you can use it to add items to your list.
The April 24, 1984, press and exhibitor gathering was late to start and later to finish. Apple executives sat on the kind of metal folding chairs that one would find at a recreation center singles dance. Steve Jobs — hair feathered gloriously — hadn’t quite settled into his permanent turtleneck-and-jeans uniform yet, choosing a bow tie, suspenders and Velcro-strapped Nike high-tops.
But even at this early public launch of the Apple IIc computer, the marketing panache that would infuse countless future Apple events could be seen.
From Maps to Instagram, Uber to Snapchat – the top 10 app developments which have been copied, adopted or simply absorbed into everything else.
For most of the world, the symbol most associated with America isn’t the bald eagle, George Washington or even the stars and stripes—it’s the hamburger and fries. But how much has this simple meal — a ground-beef sandwich with fried potatoes — changed since its glory days of the 1950s? Let’s find out.
I truly wish there's an iPad mini Pro.
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Thanks for reading.
Apple has finalized a deal to acquire Workflow today — a tool that lets you hook together apps and functions within apps in strings of commands to automate tasks. We’ve been tracking this one for a while but were able to confirm just now that the ink on the deal is drying as we speak. [...]
Workflow the app is being acquired, along with the team of Weinstein, Conrad Kramer and Nick Frey. In a somewhat uncommon move for Apple, the app will continue to be made available on the App Store and will be made free later today. [...] Workflow’s existing integrations with apps are extensive and will continue to be updated.
Workflow has been the driving force behind my decision to embrace the iPad as my primary computer. Workflow is a shining example of the power of automation combined with user creativity and its underlying mission has always been clear: to allow anyone to improve how iOS can get things done for them in a better, faster, more flexible way. Workflow is the modern bicycle for the mind. There's nothing else like it.
They could simplify it and incorporate Workflow into the operating system so everybody has a bit more automation but nobody has the vast library of options Workflow currently offers. We certainly aren't going to get the frequent updates once Apple takes the reins. [...]
If, however, Apple absorbs Workflow into the operating system with the intention of bringing real power user tools to iPhone and iPad users, I believe they could go even further than the current third-party version of Workflow. [...] Once (if?) Workflow gets inside the iOS security sandbox and becomes an integrated Apple product, Workflow could become much more powerful.
Apple is reassuring customers that its systems have not been breached while a hacker, or hackers, threaten to remotely wipe hundreds of millions iPhones of all their data, including photos, videos, and messages. [...]
"There have not been any breaches in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud and Apple ID," the spokesperson said. "The alleged list of email addresses and passwords appears to have been obtained from previously compromised third-party services."
When Apple announced on Tuesday that the new 9.7-inch iPad (basically the iPad Air with a better processor and screen) would cost education institutions $299, I thought, “that’s interesting.” Then they told me about the partnership with Logitech and the new $99.95 Logitech Combo case and Keyboard. A custom-built device designed to turn the new iPad into a true ultra-portable. [...]
I’m sure that’s coincidental, but the intention here is clear: Show that the iPad can be just as functional in the classroom as a Chromebook, all it needs is this add-on.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it appears Apple will be upholding its (PRODUCT)RED charitable donations commitment with or without said branding.
Notes on Blindness VR is a free iPad app that creates an immersive experience to help sighted people better understand the experience of blindness. The app is based on the audio diaries of John Hull (1935-2015), a writer and theologian who was completely blind for the last 32 years of his life. It combines eloquent clips from Hull's diaries, sound effects, and visual elements to explore some of the realities he faced while coming to grips with living in a sightless world. Notes on Blindness is an exceptional educational app that earns not only our Editors' Choice, but also a rare 5-star rating.
Taking advantage of Instagram’s new carousel album feature, Swipeable for iOS allows users to easily share panoramic and 360° photos on their Instagram accounts.
Cohen said that a lightbulb went off when he realised that the range of website builders that exist today approach the concept in a very constrained way that is just “not casual enough.”
Nintendo has been criticized by some for making too few levels available for free. Version 2.0 addresses that criticism by letting players unlock courses 1-4 after completing one of Bowser’s challenges. Clear courses 1-4, and new Toad Rally courses are unlocked too.
Fifteen years, 4 personal Macs, and several company Macs later, I am starting to reevaluate my keyboard layout of choice.
Why?
Because programming and accessory availability.
“We’re not just someone who’s here to access the market,” Cook told Caixin. “We’ve created almost 5 million jobs in China. I’m not sure there are too many companies, domestic or foreign, who can say that. … There’s deep roots here. I think very highly of the country and the people in it. We’re here to stay.” [...]
“You want to keep [globalization] going because it’s great. But we must fix this,” Cook said. “I do think there are ways to address it. I don’t think it’s an impossible task. I hope the politicians will put their attention on fixing that problem. … I’m optimistic. We must be. There are so many good things in the world. We just have to make sure we focus on the thing to fix.”
It's not a path that fashion watchmakers would follow — the band pairing is part of the art of the watch, after all. But as much as Apple's design ethos follows that of a fashion house, the company might benefit from adopting a more modular style.
Even with these efforts, the great irony is that the social sector has not fully benefitted from what Silicon Valley does best: Using software to achieve scale and using the data inherent in software solutions to continuously improve services, identify new opportunities and demonstrate impact. That is the big unmet need, and the reality is that the social sector must learn from Silicon Valley’s software prowess if it ever wants to achieve the incredible lasting scale and penetration that the world’s most successful software companies have achieved. Software must eat the social-good world too — but with a focus on maximizing social impact, not profit.
The social sector is long overdue for a software and data revolution characterized by delivering greater social impact to more members of society. The need is especially acute given that so much of what the social sector does is push information around.
You know that little button thing on the top-left corner of iOS which allows one to tap and go back to the previous app? I've accidentally tapped on that button more than I've intentionally tapped on that button.
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I'm finally motivated to download and try out Workflow... Maybe.
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Thanks for reading.
Despite the potential for sales in China — where iPhones are status symbols, and a unique color can make a limited edition release particularly desirable — the red iPhone is not being promoted using the (PRODUCT)RED branding. [...]
That’s not an oversight on the part of Apple or its website team. HIV and AIDs are a tricky subject in China. Aid agencies and media have often warned of China’s “looming” AIDs crisis. Despite making some impressive progress among students and young people, government policies haven’t stopped the rise of the disease among gay men in China, as The Global Post reported in some detail last year.
A hacker or group of hackers is apparently trying to extort Apple over alleged access to a large cache of iCloud and other Apple email accounts. [...]
Now, the hackers are threatening to reset a number of the iCloud accounts and remotely wipe victim's Apple devices on April 7, unless Apple pays the requested amount.
We’ve already begun the next stage. You might call it the quest for the Starship Enterprise computer — the one that you can just talk to when you need information, or to get a task done, to be entertained or to record a moment. It will require perfect conversational ability, sensors of every kind and limitless storage, prodigious, always-learning artificial intelligence, access to almost infinite personal data, and knowledge about nearly everything. These are all huge steps to take, and they will all require massive investment and more than a few failed first attempts.
But every major computer company is pursuing this goal, in one form or another, as are researchers and smaller companies unknown to us yet. So far, we see only the glimmers of this future in things like Siri, Alexa, Cortana and the Google Assistant.
iTunes 12.6 introduces a "Rent once, watch anywhere" feature that lets iTunes users watch iTunes movie rentals across all devices with iOS 10.3 or tvOS 10.2.
What sets Magnet apart from other options is the sheer amount of polish. It doesn't get confused by multiple displays (and in fact supports up to six external displays) and you can customise the keyboard shortcuts to suit your needs. It also supports any combination of window areas.
Pixure is Louis D'hauwe's excellent pixel art studio app for iOS that lets you create retro-styled illustrations. Pixure was already best suited for the iPad's bigger display, but the latest version 2.2 adds PanelKit – a UI framework created by D'hauwe himself to turn traditional iPad popovers into floating panels.
Adding information to contacts is tedious. Too often I find myself switching back and forth between a webpage and the Contacts app typing information into field after field or copying little bits of text and pasting them into those fields. Scratchpad does the monotonous part for you by automatically recognizing all kinds of contact information.
The Kindle iOS app receives an update today that brings a new “Send to Kindle” feature, allowing users to save content from Safari directly to their Kindle library for reading later.
In what developer Shiny Frog described as its largest update yet, note-taking app Bear today received a version 1.1 update featuring new fonts, importing and exporting features, and more.
A developer is warning Adium users to pick a different messaging app because of an exploitable vulnerability in its underlying libpurple version.
Another weekend, a custodian accidentally unplugged a cord on the server, prompting the Times’ main Twitter account to stop tweeting for a weekend.
“I wasn’t at work, so I was like, ‘Whatever, it’s just a side project,'” Harris recalled. “But I came into work and there were several different emails asking who did support for this product, what the contingency plan was. That’s sort of the time when I realized: Oh, I guess this is a product.”
I have never rented movies from iTunes, and I didn't know until today that movie rental is not rent-once-watch-everywhere until today.
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If Apple ever do paid podcasts, I fully expect this to be part of Apple Music. You purchase a podcast episode or a podcast season pass via the iTunes Store and then sync it over to Apple Music via iCloud Music Library -- just like your regular MP3 purchases today.
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Thanks for reading.
The company's new mainstream 9.7-inch tablet, called simply "iPad," includes an Apple A9 SoC (not an A9X), but its most exciting feature is its starting price of $329, $70 less than the previous starting price of the Air 2. The tablet will be available to order starting March 24, and will begin shipping next week.
Now, for that price, it actually appears that you take a step back from the design used for the Air 2 and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro. At 1.03 pounds (469g) and 0.29-inches (7.5mm) thick, the tablet is actually almost identical in size to the original iPad Air, not the Air 2. Hopefully this doesn't also mean that the screen or any other aspect of the tablet is also taking a step backward, but we'll have to wait to get one in our hands to know for sure.
Apple today announced that the iPad mini 4 now offers more capacity for the same price. The 128GB model with Wi-Fi now starts at $399, which was previously the price for the 32GB model with Wi-Fi, which has been discontinued.
Apple is finally bringing iPhone into the (RED) fold a decade after it first started producing special edition, red-clad devices to help promote and fund Product (RED)'s efforts to combat HIV and AIDS. [...]
Choosing to finally do a (RED) iPhone is "a nice recognition of our partnership with the (RED) team in fighting HIV and Aids," said Apple VP of Marketing Greg Joswiak.
Apple today introduced an iPhone SE with larger storage capacities of 32GB and 128GB of storage, doubling the capacity of the 16GB and 64GB models that have been available since the SE was released one year ago today. The prices remain the same at $399 and $499 unlocked.
The company just announced a new Apple-made app called Clips, which borrows features from Snapchat, Instagram, Vine, Prisma, iMovie, and Qwiki (remember that one?), and puts them all into a video-making mobile app that’s completely separate from Apple’s core camera app on iPhone and iPad. [...]
The thing is, Clips still isn’t a social video app, because the videos aren’t hosted in the cloud and blasted out publicly or semi-privately. There are no ads. The videos can be long, they’re stored locally on the phone, and from there, they’re uploaded (in HD) to other third party apps, from Instagram to YouTube to Twitter to Tumblr. You can send through Snapchat and others, too; but you’ll have to save the video locally first. You’re also not messaging through the Clips app.
Among the new bands are 3 new colors for the Sport band, 6 new colors for the Woven Nylon band, and 3 new options for the Classic Buckle which also now sports a new buckle design.
The colors of the new silicone cases are described as Azure, Camellia, and Pebble [...] The leather case options have expanded to include shades of Sapphire, Taupe, and Berry.
Logging an expense in the app is a breeze — press the big ‘Plus’ button in the app, type in the amount, and you’re done.
Screen Commander lets you blank other displays while watching a movie, playing a game, or focusing on some work on a particular screen. You can blank out other screens when they’re not needed and quickly unblank them again on demand.
The highlight of the HDE case is its hinged handle, which makes it easy for small hands to carry and hold the iPad safely — my three-year-old son Harris often holds his like a painter’s palette.
The Healthy Pregnancy Study will use WebMD’s newly redesigned and enhanced Pregnancy app for iPhone; it’s available at the Apple App Store. Incorporation of the Apple ResearchKit software framework will enable survey participants to eConsent, easily and anonymously answer questions, and share connected device data about their pregnancies with researchers for analysis, says Dr. Eric Topol, director of STSI and editor-in-chief of Medscape.
The history of computers is often told as a history of objects, from the abacus to the Babbage engine up through the code-breaking machines of World War II. In fact, it is better understood as a history of ideas, mainly ideas that emerged from mathematical logic, an obscure and cult-like discipline that first developed in the 19th century. Mathematical logic was pioneered by philosopher-mathematicians, most notably George Boole and Gottlob Frege, who were themselves inspired by Leibniz’s dream of a universal “concept language,” and the ancient logical system of Aristotle.
Mathematical logic was initially considered a hopelessly abstract subject with no conceivable applications. As one computer scientist commented: “If, in 1901, a talented and sympathetic outsider had been called upon to survey the sciences and name the branch which would be least fruitful in [the] century ahead, his choice might well have settled upon mathematical logic.” And yet, it would provide the foundation for a field that would have more impact on the modern world than any other.
I am disappointed that we are probably coming to the end of the iPad mini line. I am wondering why Apple didn't release the red iPhone earlier -- like during Chinese New Year where everything red is in fashion. And I'm liking the new watch bands, even though I am still not convinced that I should go buy a watch.
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Thanks for reading.
One of Apple's "wireless devices" recently submitted for approval by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission turns out to have been a door access system, likely for the Apple Park campus opening in April, according to a manual and photos published by the government body on Sunday.
You have an option on every Mac with macOS Sierra installed whether or not you want to use iCloud Desktop and Documents. If not, you can still access those files via iCloud Drive. However, if you turn it on for multiple Macs with Sierra, the same Desktop and Documents folders appear on each Mac.
Its structure and playful nature makes it feel intrinsically mobile, a perfect game to pull out for a few minutes each day to unwind.
Apple is working on several AR products, including digital spectacles that could connect wirelessly to an iPhone and beam content—movies, maps and more—to the wearer. While the glasses are a ways off, AR features could show up in the iPhone sooner.
Australian Prudential Regulation Authority chairman Wayne Byres says there's a ready-made Australian market for the likes of Apple and Google should the US tech giants expand into the financial services industry.
"Financial services ultimately is an industry that's built on trust and if you think about the next generation that's coming through, certainly when I think about my kids, the brands they trust - Apple, Google - it's the technology brands," Mr Byres said on Monday.
"They wouldn't have a clue about the four major banks that we have here ... (and) as far as my kids are concerned, they have accounts with Apple so we're not actually that far away."
Rivera’s taste in that day’s news often dictates what stories are followed and chased by newsrooms across the country. Without writing a word himself, Rivera is shaping tech’s story for the legion of reporters and editors tasked to tell it.
You mean Apple will not be selling me a door-access-system that uses Touch ID or Apple Watch proximity sensor? I'm so disappointed...
Or maybe this is Apple trying out something that will eventually end up on the doors of your iCar.
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Thanks for reading.
An iPad might not seem revolutionary in the internet age, but it’s actually a big step forward for patients to have digital health information at their fingertips. Many doctors, like Cedars Sinai’s Shaun Miller, remember a time even five years ago, when many processes were still paper-based and medical information sat in silos. It took a $35 billion investment from the federal government back in 2009 with the HITECH Act to kick-start the process to digitize health data. Even today, many patients still receive their health data on a USB stick or CD-ROM, making the shift to mobile at some hospitals truly cutting-edge. [...]
For Apple, the $3 trillion health care sector offers a lot of potential for growth for its iPad. The company is likely to restate its commitment to the tablet device as early as next week, with the rumored announcement of the 9.7-Inch “iPad Pro 2.” From an enterprise sales perspective–a priority for the iPhone maker in the wake of recent partnerships with Cisco and IBM–large hospitals and health systems that shift to iOS tend to buy devices in bulk. “We now have hundreds of iPads for patients to use,” says Miller, who uses a compliant iPhone app called Voalte to text with other providers. “As we expand to more wards, it’ll be thousands.”
Tin’s experience highlights a blind spot in the global investment community, which has been eager to throw cash at the next food-delivery or ride-sharing app but tends to shun products by and for women—or else hangs back and lets them twist in the wind for too long. When it comes to menstruation-related products, and technologies catering to women’s health more broadly, Tin said, “there’s still a social taboo.” This squeamishness may come as little surprise, given the demographics of the venture-capital world. A recent study of the top hundred V.C. firms around the world found that just seven per cent of active investing partners are women, and that companies founded by women have received just a tenth of global venture-round funding. Yet the demand is inarguably there. The international market for feminine-hygiene products—physical items like tampons and sanitary pads—is projected to hit forty billion dollars by 2020, according to the market-research firm Global Industry Analysts. For decades, the space has been dominated by consumer-goods giants like Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark, which have had little incentive to develop new technologies. And the barrier to entry for newcomers, no matter how scrappy, is enormous. It took more than a year for Ridhi Tariyal, a Harvard engineer, and her business partner Stephen Gire to find investors willing to stomach their invention—a “smart” tampon dubbed NextGen Jane, capable of testing menstrual blood for warning signs of cancer and reproductive diseases.
Scholars of mass media long ago established the theory that part of a society’s bond comes from the shared experience of consuming the same news. We shape our worldview, our opinions — however different they are from one another — after reading about and watching many of the same things. We gain a sense of community, however false or fleeting.
Even as social media and algorithms started changing all that, there remained media giants like The New York Times that gave millions of readers around the world a unified news experience.
Or at least that’s how it used to be. By midyear, The Times will begin an ambitious new effort to customize the delivery of news online by adjusting a reader’s experience to accommodate individual interests. What readers see when they come to The Times will depend on factors like the specific subjects they are most interested in, where they live or how frequently they come to the site.
Driving the streets of Santa Cruz in a van he outfitted with two washers and dryers, the Scotts Valley resident visits homeless shelters and encampments, offering to help keep what few clothes they have clean. The service he offers, Powers said, is not only a chance to do some good but make a connection.
“It's one thing to wash someone's clothes, even to feed them and help them, but it's another to feed the soul,” he said.
Unlike a traditional filter app where you add after you take the picture, Hipstamatic allows you to pick films, lenses, and flashes and layer them together before the picture is taken.
Hipstamatic is designed to emulate the feeling of using a traditional camera with specialty lenses and films. However, the apps more modern incarnations actually let you change the filters in case you're not a big fan of the result.
Puzzle fiends should have a grand old time picking it up while it lasts.
Technology giant Apple has dodged questions over a report it paid no tax in New Zealand in a decade.
Instead, Apple responded by saying it paid most of its tax in the United States, where the company was based.
China has unique characteristics, in that its mobile payment market is well ahead of the U.S. and local consumers have a greater willingness to change habits, Cook said at a panel discussion at the China Development Forum in Beijing. He added that Apple’s new research and development centers in the country should help the company reach China’s university community.
This revelation came after a friend spotted a battered Boggle box on a shelf in the rental house and asked me to join her in a round. I hadn’t played the physical, letter-dice-and-egg-timer version of the game in a decade, but in my teens I had been a Boggle demon, the terror of my high-school word nerd crowd. Afraid I would demoralize my friend if I unleashed my full word-seeking powers, I resolved to lose the first game. And then she flipped the timer, and I looked down at the letters on the tray, and despaired. I saw F-E-E-N and F-E-A-N; F-E-A-Z-E, F-A-N-T and F-E-N-T; S-P-E-E-R and E-T-H-S.
Were they real words? I had no idea. I had played them countless times in Words With Friends, but couldn’t remember which ones had scored points and which had been rejected, or what any of them meant, if anything. Unlike the tabletop games Boggle and Scrabble, Words With Friends has no penalty for guessing.
Doesn't the sale of Apple products carry Goods & Service Tax (GST) in New Zealand? And, if I am reading that Wikipedia article correctly, even Apple services -- iCloud, Apple Music, etc -- incurs the collectio of GST? I am genuinely confused.
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Given Apple's apparent love of the album covers, I am surprised to find there are screens in iTunes where album covers are not being prominently featured. For example: Library > Genres > * in iTunes for macOS.
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At the rate which we, all over the world, are voting people to destroy civlisation, I will like a newspaper for one, where it only brings me news that I can stomach.
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Thanks for reading.
While he may have always been able to see the special in everyday things, he started taking photos about four years, using an iPhone – first his mothers and now his own – to capture the fine details. The camera is always close at hand, as are the subjects of his work, which can be found in the flower beds outside his family’s Stephenville residence or out the window of the family car.
Other people soon noticed his talents. A kind-hearted soul, Jud would present photos of flowers and butterflies to mother, Dori, who would share the images on Facebook. Julie Crouch, CTFAC executive director, saw his work online and invited Jud to participate in the youth exhibit series.
By default, Apple has a feature that allows all of their iOS devices to be assigned restrictions, so that employees and mostly children cannot access naughty websites and other types of less-desirable content. You can enable these settings by visiting Settings > General > Restrictions on your iPhone or iPad.
Around the beginning of every year I try to break Apple’s restrictions settings for websites. It’s a pretty nerdy thing to do and its not really classified as a “vulnerability” – but it’s a fun challenge and leads to some pretty interesting bugs, so I wanted to talk about a few of them here.
A Square service outage yesterday lasting roughly two hours forced restaurants, coffee shops, and food carts around the country to turn away customers and lose sales, bringing into question whether relying solely on new technology and software to make business transactions is a good idea.
At Pip’s, where Square handles everything from credit card transactions to printing receipts, Snell and employees had to quickly re-think their checkout strategy, writing and processing all orders by hand. “It was a challenge, for sure,” Snell says. “Some of the customers were pretty frustrated obviously.” Patrons who didn’t have cash were turned away with Pip’s apologies and a voucher for a free order of a dozen doughnuts. In the end, the shop lost about $900 in revenue, not including the 60-70 free vouchers, which were worth $6 a piece.
When Apple introduced the iPhone 5s, in 2013, its built-in Touch ID launched the race to invent creative, personalized passcodes. Sure, the old-fashioned password model had worked for decades, but why not opt out of the finger-tap tap-dance of having to remember (and type) a login?
Apple’s Touch ID offered up the fingerprint as a means of authentication, but that was just one early, outward sign of companies’ growing interest in biological data. From voice timbre to body movement patterns to the rhythm of your heartbeat, the human body offers a half-dozen sexier, less hackable ways to key in a passcode.
But whether you like this state of affairs or hate it—whether you’re a member of the coding elite or someone who barely feels competent to futz with the settings on your phone—don’t get used to it. Our machines are starting to speak a different language now, one that even the best coders can’t fully understand.
Over the past several years, the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley have aggressively pursued an approach to computing called machine learning. In traditional programming, an engineer writes explicit, step-by-step instructions for the computer to follow. With machine learning, programmers don’t encode computers with instructions. They train them. If you want to teach a neural network to recognize a cat, for instance, you don’t tell it to look for whiskers, ears, fur, and eyes. You simply show it thousands and thousands of photos of cats, and eventually it works things out. If it keeps misclassifying foxes as cats, you don’t rewrite the code. You just keep coaching it.
The change means that AppleCare+ can now be added to an iPhone as long as the device remains within its standard one-year limited warranty period. This brings AppleCare+ for iPhone in line with AppleCare for Mac and Apple TV, which can also be purchased up to one year after those devices are purchased.
I figured that there is surely an app or two here that you could get some value from if you were to incorporate it into your own workflow.
Here are 10 apps I use on a regular basis to stay focused.
Magnet increases your options for snapping windows into pre-defined positions from just two to over fifteen. Rather than just choosing which side you’d like each window on, you can display a window in several different ways, including in the top right, bottom half, or left third. The value of Magnet is in the flexibility and freedom it enables.
With the future of AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule routers apparently under threat, you may be looking elsewhere for a device to centralise Time Machine backups for all the Macs in your home.
Many third-party network drives come with Time Machine support, but you could press an older Mac into service instead.
With the new update, Motion Stills now lets users customize the displayed frame that appears automatically in the camera roll of the iOS Photos app.
Outfit Compare works as you’d think. It prompts shoppers to share two photos of themselves wearing two different outfits they’re deciding between.
A minute later, you’ll get a response from an Amazon stylist who will tell you which outfit looks better on you. This determination will be made based on a number of factors, Amazon explains, including how the clothes fit, what colors look best on you, how they’re styled, and what’s on trend.
During his speech, Cook said globalization "in general is great for the world," but noted socioeconomic gains may not be evenly distributed within or between countries. Despite globalization's shortcomings, countries should not shy away from such development, he said. [...]
Beyond economics, Cook touched on cybersecurity and user privacy, both highly sensitive subjects in China. Parroting past statements on the matter, Cook said Apple employs end-to-end encryption to protect its customers from nefarious actors. He fell short of taking a stand against Chinese cybersecurity policy that requires companies to furnish authorities with technical assistance in investigations and data gathering operations.
"I just wanna remain transparent, folks out there without a deal need to know they're doing everything right just keep at it," Chance wrote in a series of Tweets after the reveal. "I feel like if I didnt clear it up people would keep trying to discredit all the work we did to make Coloring Book what it became."
Chance also believes that the "streaming wars" can benefit artists, as long as they "remain in control" of the music.
When my pal Scott and I finally released Bumpr last week, it was both a moment of pride and a great relief. As I mentioned in my launch post we had been working on it as a side project for years. It was the first collaboration he and I talked about after we sold our company Mixel way back in 2013. Mixel had been a big effort with big ambitions; we were both very proud of what we had done but its ultimate failure was exhausting. So we picked a tiny project just to get us back in the swing of things quickly. Cut to: four years later.
That’s the nature of side projects, though. Somtimes they come together very quickly, sometimes they trundle along aimlessly for many moons until they die quiet, unnoted deaths, and sometimes they manage to drag themselves across the finish line.
I was curious to know if another email app used paper airplanes to represent drafts before Apple Mail did. I went out Googling and found all manner of representations, usually employing the paper envelope, or another snail-mail related symbol. None of them, except mail, uses a paper airplane.
Starting Thursday, Apple Music launched a new user-driven promotional program on Twitter with the hashtag "#MusicForEveryMinute", promoted by student ambassadors who will be rewarded with an extra three months of free subscription.
In the last few years, and with greater intensity in the last 12 months, people started paying for online content. They are doing so at an accelerating pace, and on a dependable, recurring schedule, often through subscriptions. And they’re paying for everything.
You’ve already heard about the rise of subscription-based media platforms — things like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Spotify and Apple Music. But people are also paying for smaller-audience and less-mainstream-friendly content. They are subscribing to podcasters, comedians, zany YouTube stars, novelists and comic book artists. They are even paying for news.
Why are tech’s biggest players stepping away from this brief after supporting the last one? We don’t know. The companies won’t provide explanations.
One of the more frustrating thing I encounter on Microsoft Windows is the modal nature of modifier keys. Two of the four modifier keys -- Alt and Windows -- switch modes when pressed. Worse still, if I didn't notice that I have accidentally invoked either the menu bar (by pressing Alt) or the Start menu (by pressing Windows key), not only the next few keystrokes be lost to my document, they may even trigger commands. When this hapens, it will usually take me quite a while to figure out what's wrong, and what need to be undone.
(And, yes, in both the macOS and Windows machines that I use daily, I've turned off Caps Lock key.)
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Thanks for reading.
Independent hackers Samuel Groß and Niklas Baumstark landed a partial success and earned $28,000 after targeting Safari with an escalation to root on macOS, which allowed them to scroll a message on a MacBook Pro Touch Bar. [...]
Later in the day, Chaitin Security Research Lab also targeted Safari with an escalation to root on macOS, finding success using a total of six bugs in their exploit chain, including "an info disclosure in Safari, four type confusion bugs in the browser, and a UAF in WindowServer". The combined efforts earned the team $35,000.
"It was a big clunky machine that honestly looked like someone built it in their backyard," a former Apple Genius told me. "There were different 'moulds' that different iPhone models would go into before going in the machine, and it would take around 30 minutes … there was some weird liquid that needed to be placed in the machine that we would have to wear gloves with to fix it. Lots of gas type valves and whatnot. It literally looked like some backyard home job. Not very Apple-like at all."
Jena Thompson Meredith, vice president of business partnerships at The Conservation Fund, says that through Apple’s forest purchases in North Carolina and Maine, the organization has been able to protect 36,000 acres of sustainable forest. In 2016, the group harvested more than 13,000 metric tons of wood between the two forests, she says, though she did not break that number down by state. [...]
She says the collective annual production from the forests in North Carolina and Maine was equivalent to about 30 percent of the virgin fiber used in Apple’s product packaging for 2015.
The most jaw-dropping moment was finding my friendly neighborhood bartender, and learning that I needed to dig out cash. Yes, the most valuable company in the world was running a cash bar. And yes, iPhones offer a fancy way to pay called Apple Pay, but at Apple Music that didn't fly.
Apple's pricing strategy is ultimately about bringing new users into the Apple ecosystem. While the iPhone remains the most effective tool for accomplishing this, Apple wearables will increasingly represent another new user tool at management's disposal. It may be difficult to believe, but AirPods likely represent the first Apple product for more than a few people. Additional value will flow to companies selling multiple wearables products to the same user. As it currently stands, the average Apple user owns more than one Apple product. This trend will only intensify as time goes on when considering Apple Watch and AirPods.
The trickiest aspect of Apple's pricing strategy is running with lower prices while at the same time, becoming more of a luxury brand. In essence, Apple is redefining luxury. While other luxury brands have utilized lower-priced items to serve as brand entry points, Apple is taking the practice to an entirely new level by pricing products below the competition. Apple is making luxury much more accessible with the idea that low-priced gadgets can create an experience just as luxurious as that of premium gadgets. It's going to be difficult for other consumer tech companies to play in this game.
Apple could potentially build a paid podcast subscription system, using Apple’s payment infrastructure and its podcast-playing apps, and open it to all podcast publishers. Listeners would still need to download a specific app—Apple’s app—but they could mix the free podcasts in Apple’s catalog with the ones they’re paying for.
This one feels a whole lot more likely to me. Yes, it means that Apple’s podcast directory would shift from its current emphasis on the open standards of RSS to a hybrid model that also features limited-access content. But if Apple wanted to encourage the commercial growth of the podcast world, it would be entirely within its powers to make it happen.
Apple’s new Apple Park campus is officially set to open next month, and ahead of that, the company has recently updated Apple Maps with satellite imagery of the new campus and a proper description.
Unlike many others, McDonald's app will track a customer's location to ensure that orders are sent to the right restaurant and timed so that food is not left to wilt under heat lamps.
When the customer arrives at the restaurant, the app asks for confirmation and payment before sending orders to the kitchen. "If they don't start your order until you pull in the lot, are you really gaining that much time?" investor Sampson asked. The final version of the app will also ask customers to choose table service, counter or drive-through pickup, or curbside delivery.
When you use a link to a specific email message, it allows you to go straight to that message and bypass the rest of your email. That means you won’t get distracted by what might have appeared in your inbox since you last looked, and you are free to focus on the thing that you need to take action on. It also means you don’t need to search through your archive or dig through project folders to find the exact message.
In September last year the Chromium team said changes were coming to Chrome's handling of background tabs, but they've landed in the stable branch of Chrome a little sooner than expected. Basically, from now on, background tabs will be limited to an average CPU load of just 1 percent on a single core.
With version 1.2 for macOS, Readdle has begun to tackle email organization, which should make Spark a more attractive option for people who like Spark’s approach to email but want a little more control over how their messages are managed.
On a recent Saturday, a squad of Lego robots fitted with markers limped, hopped, and spun dizzily across the table. Some flipped over or trailed broken Lego limbs as they covered butcher paper with ragged squiggles. But the kids who were building and programming these bots weren’t deterred. They made repairs and tweaked their code. A similar persistence was on display at nearby tables where groups of young people created computer games and websites.
The freedom to mess up, repeatedly, is a core appeal of this club known as CoderDojo, a loosely connected global network of coding workshops for kids ages 6 to 18, including this Boston outpost that meets in the borrowed offices of the tech company LogMeIn.
Meltdown is a so-called “eSports” bar, a place where patrons play and watch video games and compete in tournaments.
Acyapan said he and the other owners guessed the mix-up may have been caused by the similarity of the words “eSports” and “escorts.”
“It’s only one letter difference,” he said.
But Samsung said the main goal was to tackle "FoMo," or fear of missing out, reported The Daily Telegraph. The phone allows users to assign a color for up to five contacts, and the screen lights up in that color if they call. When the screen is face down, users can still see the curved edges, so it's possible to tell if a friend is calling even if users are in a situation where it would be rude to check their phone.
It's long been believed that the hack targeted a weakness in iPhone 5c devices, namely that it didn't come with a secure enclave processor, a key part in the phone's full-disk encryption that even Apple wasn't supposed to be able to break.
Apple previously said that the hack would be "short lived." Months later, Apple retired the iPhone 5c in favor of newer iPhones, all of which now come with the secure enclave.
But the Justice Dept. says that the hacking tool may still have some shelf life left.
The serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma for its endorsement by the Oxford University Press style rulebook, is a comma used just before the coordinating conjunction (“and,” or “or,” for example) when three or more terms are listed. You’ll see it in the first sentence of this story—it’s the comma after “milk”—but you won’t find it in the Maine overtime rule at issue in the Oakhurst Dairy case.
I am in the pro-Oxford-comma camp.
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There are many times when I couldn’t figure out how an article ended up in my Instapaper queue.
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Thanks for reading.
Today, we’ll take an insider’s look at an Apple iCloud phishing gang that appears to work quite closely with organized crime rings — within the United States and beyond — to remotely unlock and erase stolen Apple devices.
Victims of iPhone theft can use the Find My iPhone feature to remotely locate, lock or erase their iPhone — just by visiting Apple’s site and entering their iCloud username and password. Likewise, an iPhone thief can use those iCloud credentials to remotely unlock the victim’s stolen iPhone, wipe the device, and resell it. As a result, iPhone thieves often subcontract the theft of those credentials to third-party iCloud phishing services. This story is about one of those services.
Security researchers have discovered the existence of a new trojan dubbed "Proton" being marketed in hacking forums to online criminals, claiming to ship with genuine Apple code-signing signatures that could make it a greater risk to victims.
iPhone forensics expert, security researcher, and former jailbreak community figure Jonathan Zdziarski today announced he has accepted a position with Apple's Security Engineering and Architecture team. He did not reveal his official starting date or responsibilities at the company.
To a photojournalist like Strazzante, the iPhone eliminates another barrier – camera awareness. Ethics dictate a storyteller like Strazzante mustn’t stage moments or request a do-over of something missed. Still, even as a photographer tries to blend into a scene to capture candid interactions, there is still a nagging feeling that the camera’s presence is somehow stunting what would otherwise be natural.
“I don’t like when people are aware they are being photographed and that is something I have always struggled with,” said Strazzante, who has more than 56,000 followers on Instagram. “Throughout my newspaper career, I would have to shoot from the hip, especially with kids. I got tired of kids looking right into the camera.”
Apple simply designed its way around the shortcomings of smartwatches better than everyone else. The company seems to have been conscious of the fact that, like a parked car, the watch will sit inactive most of the time, and so it needed to have an appearance that was appealing even without surfacing a time. Ideally, an appearance that made it look like a cohesive thing that didn’t have a screen at all. That’s part of why the Apple Watch looks the way it does: it’s a sculpted black monolith, whose darkness spills over the edges and either blends into a black metal frame or contrasts nicely with a lighter color.
Press a button and you reach a supportive voice. That’s the pitch made by Happy, a new app launching on March 21. It may seem like the latest in a trend of mental health apps—Talkspace, for example, connects patients with therapists by phone, and PRIORI, designed for bipolar patients, tracks the timing and frequency of calls and texts to predict shifts into mania or depression. But Happy’s goal is simpler—and more radical. Its founders want to help everybody who could use a sympathetic ear. The role “givers” play is less therapist, more bartender-without-the-booze. They are peers, not professionals, and the people who call are not typically mentally ill or in extreme distress.
Suicide takes 44,193 American lives a year, but everyday alienation is a stealthier killer. Loneliness is deadlier than diabetes, a 2015 analysis showed, raising the risk of heart disease, stroke, and cancer. Psychotherapy access, meanwhile, is often limited to those who can afford it, in communities with less stigma around mental illness. Poor and minority communities tend to go untreated. Plenty of people who aren’t ill also need someone to talk to. Happy hopes to reach them, too.
What makes LiquidText unique is how it uses the Pencil not just as a tool for annotations, but also as a tool for gestures.
Google today updated its Chrome browser for iOS devices to version 57, adding a new "Read Later" function for saving articles to a Reading List so they can be viewed at a later time even when an internet connection is unavailable.
The Chrome Read Later function is similar to the "Reading List" feature that's available in the Safari web browser for Macs and iOS devices.
Apple had instructed 16 Russian retailers to hold the prices of its iPhone models and contacted them in the event that any products were being sold at “inappropriate” prices, the FAS said in a statement after a seven-month investigation, adding that it suspected Apple was able to terminate sale agreements with retailers if pricing guidelines were not met. [...]
On Tuesday, a spokesperson said: “We worked closely with FAS during their investigation and are glad to put this matter behind us. We work hard to make the best products and services in the world for our customers and are deeply committed to making sure our resellers are able to compete fairly in the markets where we do business.”
In the brief, the companies argue: "When a warrant seeks email content from a foreign data center, that invasion of privacy occurs outside the United States — in the place where the customers’ private communications are stored, and where they are accessed, and copied for the benefit of law enforcement, without the customer’s consent."
They claim that handing over foreign data "invites" other countries to demand emails from US citizens, stored on US soil, in the same way.
The dozens of women I interviewed for this article love working in tech. They love the problem-solving, the camaraderie, the opportunity for swift advancement and high salaries, the fun of working with the technology itself. They appreciate their many male colleagues who are considerate and supportive. Yet all of them had stories about incidents that, no matter how quick or glancing, chipped away at their sense of belonging and expertise. Indeed, a recent survey called “Elephant in the Valley” found that nearly all of the 200-plus senior women in tech who responded had experienced sexist interactions. (And just as the print version of this article went to press, a former Uber engineer added to the evidence of Silicon Valley’s gender problem when she wrote a blog post detailing what she said was a pattern of sexist behavior at the company.)
As Bethanye Blount’s and Susan Wu’s examples show, succeeding in tech as a woman requires something more treacherous than the old adage about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels. It’s more like doing everything backwards and in heels while some guy is trying to yank at your dress, and another is telling you that a woman can’t dance as well as a man, oh, and could you stop dancing for a moment and bring him something to drink?
Some days, the first thoughts that came into my mind in the morning are: are these what my life has to offer, and is this all that I do with my life...
On some other days, the first thoughts that came into my mind in the morning are: I'm satisfied in what life has to offer and what I have to offer, and I am okay with all these.
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Today, I am happily married for 21 years. Thank you.
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Thanks for reading.
Health data collected entirely from smartphones can be reliable, research from Mount Sinai Hospital claims. The researchers involved found that Apple’s ResearchKit platform and an app for asthma were fairly accurate when compared to existing patient studies.
A key benefit of Apple News is that it pushes readers to The Telegraph’s app through ads. The Telegraph’s own app became free to download last October, but only since last week were app users able to subscribe to its premium content through the app. Bridge wouldn’t share how well the app has been in converting casual readers to subscribers, but early signs are encouraging, he said. Interestingly, the publisher said 65 percent of those who have been driven into The Telegraph app from Apple News are its most engaged app users, returning to the app more than five times in a month. They also index higher on other engagement metrics it measures, like dwell time and number of articles read.
Apple’s list of HomeKit-compatible devices just got a whole lot better. While Apple has offered a list on its website that tracked which devices work with HomeKit, the new version is far more useful. It now sorts products by category instead of brand, and notes whether or not the devices are actually available for purchase or not (along with links to purchase those that are).
It seems Apple is carrying forward a no-Withings policy to its new HomeKit accessories webpage, as Home Plus is nowhere to be found. Only two devices, the D-Link Omna 180 CAM HD and Kidde RemoteLync Camera with RemoteLync bridge, are listed in the "cameras" category.
Withings once enjoyed happy retail alliance with Apple for more than two years, even after Nokia purchased the French accessories firm for $192 million last April. The partnership quickly soured when Nokia filed suit against the iPhone maker for allegedly violating 32 patents. Apple released its own legal hounds and lodged a lawsuit against nine patent holdings firms and Nokia itself, claiming the entities are participating in a licensing conspiracy.
Just over 15 months after Pandora acquired key assets from Rdio, and three months after it announced its plans, the company is ready to launch its full-fledged on-demand music service, Pandora Premium.
For the most part, Pandora Premium is exactly what you would expect it to be: a $10-a-month service with millions of songs that you can listen to at will and save offline whenever you want. There are workout and driving mixes and — of course — a radio feature. But Pandora has worked to separate itself from the rapidly growing pack of streaming services with a slew of personalization features and the least complicated music app to date. The goal is to make a music streaming experience more approachable for many who may not have given Apple Music or Spotify a try.
Pandora bought Rdio in November of 2015, and it was late to the on-demand party even then. The new app looks lovely, and it’ll certainly suit some of Pandora’s existing users. But as industry analyst Bob Lefsetz recently pointed out, “having Pandora and iHeart in the on demand streaming market will increase the overall pool, it will get newbies to dip their toes. But they’re gonna go where everybody else does, Spotify or Apple.” The streaming wars might be over, and Pandora might have missed them.
It’s a cheerful ad filled with teenagers running around and slapping stickers on people, food and objects. It is turning a boring messaging app into a pop culture symbol — are you team blue bubbles or team green bubbles?
The average company follows a method of unintentional egalitarianism, spreading star talent across all of the roles, says Mankins. Companies like Google and Apple, however, follow an intentionally nonegalitarian method. “They select a handful of roles that are business critical, affecting the success of the company’s strategy and execution, and they fill 95% of these roles with A-level quality,” says Mankins. “The rest of the roles have fewer star players.”
What is the difference between these three enigmatic types? A sometimes confusing topic, and to confuse things further Swift 3 has shaken it up by removing implicit bridging between Foundation and native data types. Aagh!
A hacking that would allow someone to add extra steps to the counter on your Fitbit monitor might seem harmless. But researchers say it points to the broader risks that come with technology’s embedding into the nooks of our lives.
On Tuesday, a group of computer security researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of South Carolina will demonstrate that they have found a vulnerability that allows them to take control of or surreptitiously influence devices through the tiny accelerometers that are standard components in consumer products like smartphones, fitness monitors and even automobiles.
The outrage is dumb: Cities don’t function so differently now, by any metric, than they did before the ride-hailing apps debuted five years ago.
But it's also pernicious. It also illustrates how a happy reliance on Uber has blinded a whole group of influential Americans to a real mobility crisis in the U.S. that is getting worse, not better.
Although it's not specified in the AAA research report, those fears may be rooted in a loss of control. The 1012 adults surveyed aren't keen on self-driving cars, but they change their tune when it comes to automated features that assist human drivers and represent the building blocks of autonomous technology.
Later this week, an Antarctic expedition will set off to map the undersea currents that play a critical role in regulating our planet’s climate. To assist them, the scientists will use an autonomous submarine that was famously named Boaty McBoatface by the collective genius of the internet.
In recent years Pi Day has gone from a geeky American eccentricity to a global celebration of maths, and I’m getting my r’s in a day early with two puzzles from the brilliant minds at Brilliant.org. (That’s r for radius, obvs.)
Stephen Fry has started reading (almost) all of the Sherlock Holmes stories to me. In my ears. For the next 62 hours of happy happy commute.
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Thanks for reading.
iOS 10.3 sounds like a minor update, but it actually contains a pretty big change. Apple is using this update to change the file system that iPhones and iPads use from the 30-year-old HFS+ file format to the new Apple File System. [...]
What this means is that when iOS 10.3 is installed, every file stored on the device will be converted from the old format to the new format. And while we can expect that Apple will put a lot of effort into making this conversion process as smooth and painless as possible, upgrading a file system always opens up the possibility that something can go wrong.
Apple has announced that it will start treating cobalt, an important mineral in the making of its devices, mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a conflict mineral amid child labor allegations. Furthermore, the iPhone maker is said to have instructed smelters it uses to stop buying cobalt from artisanal mines that use child labour as the owner of the accused mines, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, continues to investigate the allegations.
And so if Facebook has to leverage all 1.8 billion active users in a ground war, they’re going to do it. And as we’re seeing now, the plan is actually even grander than that. Because Facebook controls not only their core social network, but also Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. They’ve decided to weaponize all of these networks, user experience be damned.
The more you use BusyCal, the more you can so very clearly see the sheer depth of experience that its makers have.
Euclidean Lands, which launches today on iOS, looks like what would happen if you crossed the beautiful, impossible architecture of Monument Valley with the turn-based action of Hitman Go… and then you set the game on a Rubik’s Cube. It’s a seemingly strange combination, but it works, offering an experience that’s somehow relaxing and challenging at the same time.
The metaphor is easy to understand, but hard to remember in regular life. If you catch yourself burning with envy or resentment, think like the bronze medalist, not the silver. Change your focus.
Instead of comparing up to the next-higher situation, compare down to the next-lower.
There’s a politics to who gets funded and who gets left behind, who collapses under the weight of the broken health care system and who’s temporarily buoyed. And as Congress weighs a potential repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, it’s essential to think through what crowdfunding can’t fix — and how even the best of intentions can perpetuate devastating, systemic inequalities.
Objectifs’ director Yuni Hadi said platforms such as iTunes could help broaden the audience base for Singapore films, especially for independent projects that want to find exhibition beyond the festival circuit and generally receive limited theatrical release. "Independent filmmakers are still learning about the rules of digital distribution and understanding contracts and technical deliverables. We have to participate in order to get to the next step of where we want to take Singapore cinema," she said.
You should always backup your computers -- MacBooks, iPhones, Apple Watches -- before applying upgrades from Apple.
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Dear Apple Music on my iPhone: you were just playing this song one minute ago, and when you were done playing this song, I just tapped on the same song, hoping to hear the song again, and, wtf do you mean "This media may be corrupted" and refuses me?
The solar flares must be real strong today...
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It may not be a good idea to watch Santa Clarita Diet while having breakfast...
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Thanks for reading.
Tim Cook always makes an appearance with the teen scholarship winners at WWDC. When Royzen met him, he was both star struck and inspired, he says. "I felt so much appreciation. This is the man who makes my work possible. I asked him to sign my iPhone. I look at the signature to push myself harder as a developer and even as a human."
But it was an interaction with Federighi that really influenced him. The head of software spent a few minutes talking to Royzen about his work and some of Apple's new dev tools.
The result is Royzen's latest app called Ryde, which will helps you manage your daily commute so you always arrive on time. Royzen built it because he noticed that some days it took him longer to get to school than other days, he said.
I may have invented the web, but all of you have helped to create what it is today. All the blogs, posts, tweets, photos, videos, applications, web pages and more represent the contributions of millions of you around the world building our online community. All kinds of people have helped, from politicians fighting to keep the web open, standards organisations like W3C enhancing the power, accessibility and security of the technology, and people who have protested in the streets. In the past year, we have seen Nigerians stand up to a social media bill that would have hampered free expression online, popular outcry and protests at regional internet shutdowns in Cameroon and great public support for net neutrality in both India and the European Union.
It has taken all of us to build the web we have, and now it is up to all of us to build the web we want – for everyone.
Pocket Casts' simplicity targets people who have figured out the podcasts to which they want to listen, and who don’t spend a lot of time building playlists and switching between them, or triaging among a lot of episodes of subscribed podcasts to figure out which to listen to.
The strength and weakness of Microsoft's note taking app, OneNote, is that it works best alongside Word and Outlook.
Google did not offer official comment, but two sources close to the company's security staff said there had been no contact. One said there was now concern Wikileaks had duped the public with a PR move of little to no substance, though on Thursday one external Android security expert who'd reviewed the CIA files said it appeared there were multiple vulnerabilities Google would need to address.
"We've seen Julian Assange's statement and have not yet been contacted," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement Friday, originally sent to press on Thursday, the same day Assange claimed Wikileaks would help provide "antidotes" for CIA exploits before publishing them. As of Saturday, Microsoft had not provided any further update, after Forbes' enquiries. Wikileaks had not returned requests for comment.
But what if we decided that what’s good for the Silicon Valley overlords who send their kids to a low-tech Waldorf school is also good for everyone else? Our devices we shall always have with us, but we can choose the terms. We just have to choose together, to embrace temperance and paternalism both. Only a movement can save you from the tyrant in your pocket.
I wonder if Amazon somehow knew I was watching "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" on my iPhone, and just when I was about to finish watching the series, the Kindle store popped up with a discounted "box set" of the two Douglas Adam's books.
(I enjoyed the BBC/Netflix series, but not as much as I would liked.)
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A few years ago, backstage at a conference, I spotted a blind woman using her phone. The phone was speaking everything her finger touched on the screen, allowing her to tear through her apps. My jaw hit the floor. After years of practice, she had cranked the voice’s speed so high, I couldn’t understand a word it was saying.
And here’s the kicker: She could do all of this with the screen turned off. Her phone’s battery lasted forever.
Ever since that day, I’ve been like a kid at a magic show. I’ve wanted to know how it’s done. I’ve wanted an inside look at how the blind could navigate a phone that’s basically a slab of featureless glass.
Many of the algorithms being developed will improve our lives—helping us to make better decisions about our personal relationships, work lives, and health by alerting us to signals we are not yet aware of. The problem comes when others have access to this data, too, and make decisions about us based on them, potentially without our knowledge.
Taking a photo or video in public isn’t illegal, nor is taking one with a person’s permission. It’s also not illegal to upload the file or store it in the cloud. Applying optical character recognition, facial recognition, or a super-resolution algorithm isn’t illegal, either. There’s simply no place for us to hide anymore.
Intel Security has released a tool that allows users to check if their computer’s low-level system firmware has been modified and contains unauthorised code.
The release comes after CIA documents leaked Tuesday revealed that the agency has developed Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) rootkits for Apple’s Macbooks. A rootkit is a malicious program that runs with high privileges, typically in the kernel, and hides the existence of other malicious components and activities.
Each of these three alternatives to Apple’s Podcast app has its strengths, and unlike some app categories, in which many apps produce similar results, you can examine the differences to figure out which appeals most to you.
For some people, Castro lacking any silence-slicing option is a non-starter. While I love that feature in Overcast, the podcast app I used the longest, Castro 2’s triage feature won me over and I cope with a few extra seconds here and there.
Because each of these apps is made by independent developers, teams that range from one person to a handful, your suggestions for features to add are more likely to be taken seriously, and each new release from these companies reference the most-asked-for changes and additions that their users want.
Overcast 3 is the final icing on a cake that’s been perfected over three years. All of the tiny flaws coupled with the inability to create a simple queue have been reworked. Improvements at this point are only about massaging the app rather than achieving a new apotheosis.
Food Genie cuts the unnecessary back-and-forth by offering random suggestions based on criteria set by the user. Through location data, restaurant identification and a spinning wheel of food, your next set of weekend dinner plans can be a lot less stressful.
Beverley P is stuck in a maze. She's spent the last 50 years toiling away near its entrance. Starving, thirsty and exhausted, Beverley ekes out a desperate, endless existence, alone and without hope. If she were able to talk, she might whisper: "kill me".
Regina F. managed to make it past Checkpoint 1, and is currently circling Checkpoint 2. 47 years after she began her journey through the maze, there is a sliver of hope that she may find the exit. But she still has a long way to go; there are five checkpoints in total. Miserable, exhausted and desperate for a drink, Regina soldiers on. Maybe, in another 50 years, she'll have reached the half-way point.
Is this the most evil RollerCoaster Tycoon creation ever? Probably.
At their height, Secret and similarly anonymous apps like Yik Yak and Whisper were hailed as the future of social media — an antidote to the real-name controversies on Facebook and the highly polished, hyper-curated look of Instagram. Anonymous apps harkened back to the bare-bones message boards that brought early internet culture to life, but reinvented them for the social network age. Yet despite a collective $200 million in funding, anonymity has remained a kind of kryptonite for social apps. The reason is simple: An online social network serves one purpose, to connect people. Without names attached, people’s words become either mean — or meaningless.
I’m sure there are plenty of videos that have gone viral faster, but given that my Twitter feed is a mix of journalists, tech analysts, and NBA folks, there seemed to be a special resonance to a video of a father in South Korea commenting on the removal of once-President Park Geun-hye, only to be interrupted on live TV by his kids breaking into his home office.
If I might say so myself, I am uniquely qualified to break this video down: I’ve been on TV from a home office, I have children, and, crucially, I am a man (who like Robert E Kelly, our protagonist, lives in Asia). As you will see, that is the key to understanding how this went down.
Apple, meanwhile, introduced MAC address randomization in iOS 8, only to break it in iOS 10. While the researchers were evaluating devices last year, Apple launched iOS 10 and changed its network probe broadcasts to include a distinct Information Element (IE), data added to Wi-Fi management frames to extend the Wi-Fi protocol.
"Inexplicably the addition of an Apple vendor-specific IE was added to all transmitted probe requests," the paper explains. "This made identification of iOS 10 Apple devices trivial regardless of the use of MAC address randomization."
Cryptographer and professor at John Hopkins University, Matthew Green, chimed in, saying that journalists — or for that matter, anyone who is targeted by a well-resourced attacker — should “use an iOS device exclusively” for handling sensitive communications, pointing to the threat of malicious attachments, such as malware-laced Word files.
“If you routinely download email attachments on a machine, just assume it's cooked/cookable,” he said on the thread to Elder’s question, referring to attachments downloaded on a PC or Mac.
Greene said that hacking an iPhone via a malicious attachment was harder than compromising a Mac or PC this way.
Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, said on Thursday that the anti-secrecy organization would work with Apple, Google and other technology companies to fix flaws that have allowed the C.I.A. to hack into the phones, computers and other devices they produce.
Speaking from London in an online news conference, Mr. Assange accused the C.I.A. of withholding information about the vulnerabilities the agency was exploiting in American technology even after it realized that documents describing the flaws had been leaked weeks ago.
If anything in the WikiLeaks revelations is a bombshell, it is just how strong these encrypted apps appear to be. Since it doesn’t have a means of easy mass surveillance of such apps, the C.I.A. seems to have had to turn its attention to the harder and often high-risk task of breaking into individual devices one by one.
Which brings us to WikiLeaks’ misinformation campaign. An accurate tweet accompanying the cache would have said something like, “If the C.I.A. goes after your specific phone and hacks it, the agency can look at its content.” But that, of course, wouldn’t have caused alarm and defeatism about the prospects of secure conversations.
There’s a handful of basic words and letters that when typed into the URL field will instantly crash Safari on the Mac. Versions of Safari on iPhone and iPad don’t seem to be affected.
Apple's off-site Genius Training program has been replaced by an in-store, self-guided experience using company-provided reference materials, according to a source. The training now involves watching web-based seminars through the Apple Technical Learning Administration System, or ATLAS, another source said.
I went to Cupertino for my training in October 2007. While I am confident that the experience has changed in the intermediate decade, I can say that the two weeks I spent in California were well worth it. [...]
Beyond all of it though, getting to go to Cupertino was a real mark of pride for myself and other Geniuses. It made me feel like I was part of something much bigger, and much more important, than just my local retail store.
Apple today updated its App Store with a major "Celebrating Indie Games" promotion that highlights a huge range of games created by independent developers and small app development companies.
On balance, we rate Things, for Apple devices, and Wunderlist, for practically any platform or device you can imagine, as the best task managers on offer right now, with a curious special mention for Reminders, an Apple freebie.
So what if I told you that you could buy a competing product for less than a tenth the price? Seriously. Don’t expect it to be as good as the AirPods, not by a long shot, but for somewhere between $5 and $20, you can buy a single Bluetooth earbud that does basically what the AirPods do — put a speaker and microphone in your ear without awkward wires.
Plex Cloud lets you connect your account to existing cloud storage services including Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive personal accounts to create an always-on Plex Media Server run from the cloud.
Readdle today updated its popular PDF Expert app for the Mac to version 2.2, overhauling the app and adding new features to make editing and annotating PDFs even easier than before.
The iMessage integration potentially means an end to copy and pasting links into chat windows and/or using Apple’s extensions. Plus, if like me you use Pocket a lot to stash good reads away for a rainy day, a newsletter or other reasons, your sharing of wisdom with others is about to become a whole lot more organized.
Instead of opening a particular app, Bumpr intercepts the link and opens a menu of options for each of the browsers or email clients installed on you Mac depending on whether you click a web or email link.
Developers are no longer able to edit descriptions, update notes or any other metadata for their apps without making a new version, which must be submitted to App Review for approval.
The thing about short hair is it can bring a whole new meaning to the transformative power of statement earrings. But what about cool girls who lean toward a more lo-fi use of accessories? Enter Kristen Stewart. The Personal Shopper actress only recently stepped out with a radical new buzz cut—all the more reason to show off a pair of just-released Apple AirPods, as she demonstrated today in New York when she lent a quietly edgy touch to wearable tech.
What do you get when you combine an iMac with the current Mac Pro to create an iMac Pro?
A computer that looks like an old-fashioned Kodak film roll.
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At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there, a language model is built that tries to predict words sequences.
Then Apple deploys “dictation mode,” its text-to-speech translator, in the new language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error rate in half.
The first is lack of any access to the code itself. [...] The second challenge is that the vulnerabilities described to date may be just the tip of the iceberg. It has been claimed that the 8,761 documents so far released by Wikileaks amounts to just 1% of the material in holds – meaning that a great many additional vulnerabilities exist.
So, should Signal users do anything different in light of the leaks? If you use Signal on an iPhone, Nexus, or Pixel, Weaver recommends looking at your threat model. If you don’t think you’re at risk of the CIA or another government risking a $1.5 million zero-day exploit to access your phone, you can rest easy. But he recommends other Android users toss their phones in the trash. “Most Android phones don’t meet the security requirements of a teenager,” he says. But that’s not exactly a secret. These phones have long been criticized for slow updates and out-of-date software that makes users vulnerable to a whole host of publicized security flaws.
The app includes more than 250 interactive lessons and courses that you can follow along with at home as if your iPad was a private piano instructor.
Despite its flaws, the SanDisk Connect Wireless Stick USB flash drive offers a simple way to transfer or stream files to and from your phone or computer — at a price.
In a statement posted on the Rollout.io website, Rusovsky explained that the central purpose of the service is to allow developers to quickly fix bugs after an app has been released. In response to security concerns, Rusovsky also explains that Rollout is secured from any man-in-the-middle attacks and furthermore allows developers to patch vulnerabilities as they are discovered.
In the back room of every Apple Store in the US is something called an iPhone Calibration Machine. No images of this machine have ever been made public, it is kept under constant video surveillance, and its full functionality is unknown outside of Apple.
I learned about the existence of the calibration machine from two former Apple Geniuses and one current Apple Genius. According to those people, the calibration machine is a microwave-sized device that costs tens of thousands of dollars and has a mechanical arm that can run the iPhone through a battery of tests to make sure it's working properly. More interestingly, the calibration machine can change the settings on the iPhone to allow Apple to replace broken Touch ID buttons, which is impossible outside of Apple.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the next iPhone will have some significant changes. The report notes that the next iPhone will not have a home button and will instead be made of a single piece of glass, a long-rumored and seemingly inconsequential move that is in fact central to an ongoing and hugely important legislative struggle between America's largest company and thousands of independent smartphone repair shops.
Moving the Touch ID fingerprint-reading sensor from the home button into the screen itself will have the side effect of giving Apple a straightforward path to monopolizing screen repair. The move could give Apple unprecedented control over the ownership and repairability of your phone, which means that in the very near future, it's possible that the only company that will be able to do a simple iPhone screen replacement will be Apple itself.
In the statement Apple explains that it is deeply committed to safeguarding the privacy and security of its customers. While it says that “many” of the issues leaked today have already been patched, Apple also says that it will continue to work to address any identified vulnerabilities.
Apple’s iPhone software, according to the documents, was a particular target, including the development of several “zero day” exploits — a term for attacking coding flaws the company wouldn’t have known about.
Though Apple has only 15 percent of the global smartphone market, the intensive C.I.A. effort was likely explained by the “popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites.” [...]
In 2010, the Obama administration promised to disclose newly discovered vulnerabilities to companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft. But the WikiLeaks documents indicate that the agency found security flaws, kept them secret and then used them for surveillance and intelligence gathering.
Finances 2 seeks to bring modernity to an already polished interface of its predecessor, additional features such as multiple accounts and currencies, a better sync engine, as well as bring the power of its bookkeeping features to macOS.
The Lofree’s unique design featuring round, concave buttons, does present a learning curve. Even Lofree admits that it might take of few days until your fingers are used to the experience. I would agree.
It took me nearly a week before I was entirely comfortable with the process. The wait was worth it, however. Thanks to Lofree, I enjoy typing at my desk again.
I’m a writer, after all, and much as I may care about dinky design and clicky keys, I do need to be able to write on any keyboard that’s going to stick around on my desk.
Your fingers may feel differently, however, and even if they don’t I wouldn’t write the Lofree off altogether. Its compact, attractive, wireless design and ability to switch between devices makes it perfect as a keyboard you can leave out on display and use around the house for light tasks.
Apple today has started informing developers that use “hot code push” SDKs that it will soon start rejecting their applications. In a thread on the Apple Developer Forums, developers are reporting that they have started receiving messages from the company explaining that the code must be removed before any further updates will be approved.
In the latest skirmish over privacy in the cellphone age, a federal judge in Chicago has rejected a law enforcement request to force potential targets in an ongoing investigation to provide fingerprints to unlock any iPhones or other Apple devices.
Apple is claimed to have interfered with advertising campaigns cellphone carriers in Australia posted in local Chinese-language media outlets, with a report alleging the iPhone producer did not want to be seen as supporting newspapers critical of the Chinese government.
I have no idea why I've placed some of these products in my Wishlist.
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The Dock has been a core aspect of the Mac experience since the earliest days of Mac OS X. In fact, the Dock actually predates Mac OS X, since it was also prominent in NextSTEP. It displays open applications, offers a quick way to launch favorite apps, and holds shortcuts for documents and folders.
You’ve probably used the Dock so often and for so long that you don’t think about it. I’ll explain everything the Dock does, from the basics to tweaky capabilities that may be new to you.
For his new graphic novel, “Terms and Conditions,” out on Tuesday, Mr. Sikoryak (who often signs his work “R. Sikoryak”) upped the difficulty level for his long-term conceptual project: Instead of abridging a book, he lifted the complete text of Apple’s mind-numbing corporate boilerplate, which users must agree to before accessing iTunes, and mashed it up with art invoking more than a century of comics. Rather than merely drawing in the loose style of another artist, Mr. Sikoryak modeled each page after specific bits of others’ work, mimicking panels from Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s “The Amazing Spider-Man,” Bill Watterson’s “Calvin and Hobbes” and Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” among dozens of others.
The result, Mr. Sikoryak explained, combines his childhood love for Mad magazine spoofs with John Cage’s theories of art and the influence of Art Spiegelman. “I felt that my work was kind of derivative, and I didn’t want to be a second-rate version of what was happening in comics elsewhere,” Mr. Sikoryak said in an interview, recalling his days as an art student at Parsons School of Design in the late 1980s. “The answer to all my issues with unconscious pastiche was to just make it conscious.”
Executives at Kik wanted a system to identify, protect, and offer resources to its most vulnerable users. But it had no way of knowing how to find them, and no system in place for administering care even if it did. Through their investors, Kik was put in touch with a small New York City startup named Koko. The company had created an iPhone app that let users post entries about their stresses, fears, and sorrows. Other users would weigh in with suggestions of how to rethink the problem — a very basic form of cognitive behavioral therapy. It was a peer-to-peer network for a limited form of mental health care, and, according to a clinical trial and beta users, it had shown very positive results. The two teams partnered with a simple goal: find a way to bring the support and care found on Koko to Kik users in need.
But as the two companies talked, a more ambitious idea emerged. What if you could combine the emotional intelligence of Koko’s crowdsourced network with the scale of a massive social network? Was there a way to distribute the mental health resources of Koko more broadly, not just in a single app, but to anywhere people gathered online to socialize and share their feelings? Over the last year the team at Koko has been building a system that would do just that, and in the process, create an empathy layer for the internet.
Authentic HDR is a new mode that rivals competing high-dynamic-range methods. Version 2.7 also includes exporting raw images and a new widget for 3D Touch and the Today view in Notification Center.
Dawn Chorus allows smartphone users to create their own alarms using real recordings of 20 birds native to Western Pennsylvania. Alarms can be customized to combine up to five bird sounds, creating an effect similar to walking through the woods on a pleasant day.
A new iPad app, called Estimate, connects plant professionals with a portable database of photographs of diseased leaves to help determine plant disease severity.
In what was either the sweetest or creepiest news of last week, depending on your point of view, a South Korean technology firm unveiled the app With Me. In short, it’s a way of keeping your loved ones around when the die by turning them into a poor man’s Siri with all the realistic humanity of those freaky stone-eyed characters in The Polar Express.
Apple’s WWDC Scholarships program makes it possible for students and new developers to apply for a chance to attend the conference with most expenses covered. This year WWDC is moving from San Francisco to San Jose, and the WWDC Scholarships program has a new application process as well.
Sport bands for the Apple Watch continue to be a taxable accessory in the United Kingdom, after a tax tribunal ruled the strap should not be exempt from import duty, despite Apple's insistence it is an essential part that allows many of the wearable device's functions to work.
The next day, Steve called Apple’s general counsel to trademark the phrase “Genius Bar.”
Brand, by definition, has a history. You can’t have a brand that has no history, because brand is a memory. That memory builds your brand, it’s more of who you are than a label on a product. The quality of the product, the reputation of the company that produces it, the way in which they implement it in the marketplace, all of that becomes part of their brand. You can’t have a brand without a history. It’s impossible.
I’d suggest that they be more mindful about how they are allowing tech to invade their life. Next, they should cordon it off. I like the idea, for instance, of not answering email after six at night.
In general, I’d say find more time to be in natural environments, to sit face to face with someone in a long conversation without any technology in the room. There should be times of the day where it looks like the 1950s or where you are sitting in a room and you can’t tell what era you are in. You shouldn’t always be looking at screens.
There’s only one little plastic capsule for the battery here; the rest is either other electronics or simple cable. In that light, the BeatsX is a little more impressive — it lasts long enough, but is comfortable throughout.
It shares Simplenote’s "less is more" approach, but still manages to provide a richer array of tools than simple plain text notes.
The headphones come with a Lightning port compatible for iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus devices, and it has a pass-through built-in tiny dongle that houses a separate Lightning port for charging. The sleek dongle blends seamlessly with the earphones, and allows users to charge and listen to music at the same time. It also eliminates the need to carry a special adapter, as the earphones are made keeping in mind current generation iPhone handsets.
The concept of allowing users to invite others to workouts in real time is a novel idea, according to Julie Sylvester, a producer of the annual Sports and FitnessTech Summit, but she's not convinced that peer pressure and competition is the future of home fitness technology. She's noticed a trend toward giving users the ability to log and share.
"It's a matter of being able to have somebody bear witness. And I think that's true across all platforms, not just in fitness. That's why people take pictures of their food" and share them on social media, she said.
The lawsuit claims that "Plaintiffs were subjected to race discrimination while shopping and purchasing Apple, Inc. products at the Apple Store located at 4860 Bethesda Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland 20814 and denied the privileges afforded to White and non-Black/African American customers and shoppers.
Plaintiffs were racially profiled before, during and after the purchase of their Apple products at the location in question, were subjected to unlawful detention by local authorities at the behest of Apple for appearing "suspicious" before, during and after their purchase of Apple Store products, and were subjected to racial profiling in violation of their constitutional rights when the Apple Store employees called 911 to report two suspicious black men at the store and summoned the local police department to the location."
The digital revolution happened regardless of Time Teletext, but nobody is calling it a utopia. And it's unlikely that anything we've made in the shadow of that utopia, from the endless joys and abuses of the iPhone to Twitter's instantaneous news updates, owes anything to teletext. That's not to over-inflate the comparison between teletext and the internet. Teletext's older cousin, videotex, was a more foreshadowing technology. A videotex system like Telidon, Canada's doomed pre-internet web from the late 70s, was "online" whereas teletext was a broadcast signal.
Teletext remains largely forgotten as the history of digital media has become subsumed by the history of the internet. Yet like a fair-weather psychic, teletext did anticipate things to come. Despite the technology's futility in the end, it presaged an array of features and user experiences characteristic of the modern web.
I have a song stuck in my head for the entire day, but I can't decide if the song is "Born This Way" or "Perform This Way."
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McCarley said individuals need to be just as cautious with their phones as they are with their computers. Don’t click on any unknown links.
“I think you have to realize there are security issues with mobile phones,” McCarley said. “This time, it was an iPhone. The next time, it could be some other type of mobile phone.”
In science fiction, the promise or threat of artificial intelligence is tied to humans’ relationship to conscious machines. Whether it’s Terminators or Cylons or servants like the “Star Trek” computer or the Star Wars droids, machines warrant the name AI when they become sentient—or at least self-aware enough to act with expertise, not to mention volition and surprise.
What to make, then, of the explosion of supposed-AI in media, industry, and technology? In some cases, the AI designation might be warranted, even if with some aspiration. Autonomous vehicles, for example, don’t quite measure up to R2D2 (or Hal), but they do deploy a combination of sensors, data, and computation to perform the complex work of driving. But in most cases, the systems making claims to artificial intelligence aren’t sentient, self-aware, volitional, or even surprising. They’re just software.
So after doing all that, and considering asking my Dad (who's an awesome electrical engineer and well versed in RF as he works in radio) to bring over a spectrum analyzer, I finally found a neat utility from Apple, 'Bluetooth Explorer'. This handy app lets you monitor many aspects of Bluetooth connections in real time. This was extremely helpful in finding the culprit.
As an engineer on the project I don’t quite have the full picture when it comes to the high level decision making, financials and business partnerships. But I was involved in the project for a long period of time, longer in fact than any of its co-founders, and gained quite a lot of insight at the engineering, design and product levels.
So I’d like to tell you my version of the story of Firefox OS, from the birth of the Boot to Gecko open source software project as a mailing list post and an empty GitHub repository in 2011, through its commercial launch as the Firefox OS mobile operating system, right up until the “transition” of millions of lines of code to the community in 2016.
Why are readers and publishers alike embracing paid subscriptions for content services over ad-based business models? There are several reasons, but the dismal state of online advertising is a big one.
I need to be super-aware of not letting myself spent the bulk of my time 'managing' my To-do list than actually doing my To=do list.
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Apple said it has temporarily stopped buying cobalt mined by hand in Congo while it continues to deal with problems with child labor and harsh work conditions.
A Washington Post investigation last year detailed abuses in Congo’s artisanal cobalt supply chain, showing how miners — including children — labored in hazardous, even deadly, conditions. Amnesty International and other human rights groups also have alleged problems. Earlier this week, British broadcaster Sky New published an investigation that alleged continued problems in the cobalt supply chain.
Hove Park School has been re-awarded recognition as an Apple Distinguished School for its iPad digital learning scheme.
Each student at the Nevill Road school has an iPad with a number of specialised apps, giving students more creative freedom.
Humans are constantly looking for little cubbies to put their secrets in. You should just accept right now that the Slack leak can and probably will happen, but you shouldn’t let that change the way you use it. Even if you take things to Signal, you will never achieve true vacuum-sealed privacy, because privacy is a system and not a space. It’s a contract, not a stipulation.
Apple released two more short ads on YouTube highlighting features of the iPad Pro. The first, called ‘take better notes’ starts, like similar recent videos, with a tweet: ‘My math notes are a mess since I’m half asleep.’ In response, the narrator explains ‘You know, iPad Pro and Apple Pencil have revolutionized the way we take notes.’
So “Always Embed Swift Standard Libraries” doesn’t always embed them.
There have been reports in recent weeks about Apple looking to kick-start a business in original TV programming.
But the meetings last week — including sit-downs between Apple SVP Eddy Cue and Paramount Pictures and with Sony TV and film units — make it appear as though Apple may be aiming at a bigger deal.
Scientists have been talking about using DNA to store data for years, but the application's been limited so far by high cost and errors in the data. Today, in a study published in Science, researchers announced they've made the process 100 per cent error-free and 60 per cent more efficient compared to previous results—approaching the theoretical maximum for DNA storage.
The internet is a void to pour these thoughts into, without any expectation that they will be noticed or commented upon. It is a record — lasting, but ephemeral — that can be left bobbing on the sea, bumped into and noted by the Blogspot trawlers, and then swiftly forgotten with the rest as our attentions wander. And our indifference does not nullify their existence. They have a weight that the constant conversations happening in other, more fashionable quarters of the internet don’t: They are borne not of the attempt to share information — breaking, just in, updated — that will pass almost immediately into history, but rather of an earnest attempt to do just that: exist. They ask nothing of us, no like, no cartoon heart, no signal boost. They simply exist as lodestars in our noisy void, intimate resting places for our screen-soured eyes. It cannot be said enough: they exist. They do what we all hope to continue doing, and they are reminders that that goal should not be taken lightly.
Over the last three years, Apple’s iPads and Mac notebooks — which accounted for about half of the mobile devices shipped to schools in the United States in 2013 — have steadily lost ground to Chromebooks, inexpensive laptops that run on Google’s Chrome operating system and are produced by Samsung, Acer and other computer makers.
On Tuesday morning, members of the S3 team were debugging the billing system. As part of that, the team needed to take a small number of servers offline. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended,” Amazon said. “The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.”
The subsystems were important. One of them “manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region,” Amazon said. Without it, services that depend on it couldn’t perform basic data retrieval and storage tasks.
With TextWrangler going away, Bare Bones instead points users to their main text editor product BBEdit which now has the same feature set without requiring a license.
But after months of use, I’ve come to love Bear for the way it tackles just the right number of tasks, and accomplishes them in a way that feels effortless. I kept waiting to miss Evernote, but I never have.
Cook gave the introduction for the film, talking about climate change as a whole and initiatives currently in place to combat it. The Apple CEO explained that countries are coming together to push towards a cleaner environment and that there are a lot of reasons for optimism.
Didn't Apple use to ship iPod charging cables that had a 30-pin connector on one end, while having both USB-A and FireWire connectors on the other ends? Maybe the new charging cables that comes with this year's iPhone still have a Lightning connector on one end, but have both USB-A and USB-C connectors on the other end, and maybe this is why this cable is confusing the heck out of all the rumor-mongers?
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I am, in general, satisfied with EverNote. I do want to use this note-taking app on macOS, iOS, and Windows, and EverNote is probably ahead of many competitors in terms of supported platforms. The main problem I have, though, is that user-interface on macOS, iOS and Windows are all different enough that I feel I am not as productive as I want to be.
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Today, I am extra careful when typing in Unix commands at work.
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Apple has “solved” this problem by making it so that Developer ID provisioning profiles generated after 22 February 2017 will be valid for a whopping 18 years, regardless of the expiration date of the associated certificate!
Still, the Uber scandal feels different. It feels like a watershed. For gender-diversity advocates in the tech industry, Ms. Fowler’s allegations, and the public outcry they have ignited, offer a possibility that something new may be in the offing.
What could happen? Something innovative: This could be the start of a deep, long-term and thorough effort to remake a culture that has long sidelined women — not just at Uber but across the tech business, too.
Shortly after he joined the company, in 2012, Foursquare’s president, Steven Rosenblatt, stumbled upon an insight many consumer-technology companies were having around the same time: that the user data it had been scooping up for years, carefully sifted and repackaged, were exceedingly valuable to marketers. “The more I started to get under the hood, the more I was like, ‘I don’t know if you guys have realized it but you’re actually sitting on a tremendous amount of gold,’ ” Rosenblatt said. Ben Horowitz, a co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, who sits on Foursquare’s board, agreed. “I said, ‘I swear to God, there’s ten million dollars a year you can just scrape off the ground,’ ” he recalled.
Prisma says the new store will bring even more originality to user's creations, with the promise of new styles being added to the store every week, and possibly every day further down the line.
There are three types of office lunches: one brought from home, one delivered, and one carried out from a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Until now, the tech startup scene has all but gobbled up consumers of the first two via delivery apps, online-only restaurants, and prepared-meal delivery. But Mary Biggins — who co-founded ClassPass in 2013 — and her co-founder in Mealpal, Katie Ghelli, hope to capture the third with their one-year-old startup.
The easiest way to explain Series is this: It’s Snapchat Stories, except they don’t expire after 24 hours and you can’t swipe down to open a link. Also you can’t do any of the fun things you can do in Stories.
But the signs of a shift to ARM only set the stage for a bigger development: The migration of the most important modern software platforms, Android and iOS, to laptops and other traditional hardware that once defined the old kind of PC.
This is an exciting idea, for sure. But, I believe it won’t matter much until Apple builds an ARM-based laptop running GPS. Here’s why.
The trial judge vacated the large damages award a few months after a Texas federal jury imposed it in February 2015, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said on Wednesday the judge should have ruled Smartflash's patents invalid and set aside the verdict entirely.
Cook also hinted at Apple’s product pipeline by promising Apple will “do more in the pro area.” Cook called out the creative field as especially important to Apple while pushing back against the notion that Apple is too consumer focused now. “Don’t think that something we’ve done or something we’re doing that isn’t visible yet is a signal that our priorities are elsewhere.”
Every previous iteration of my home screen has featured apps without Top Shelf extensions in the top row. But this is a waste of a slot and limits my ability to access the content I’m interested in as quickly as possible. Because of this, I have no interest in placing an application in my top row unless it includes a Top Shelf extension. Developers should take note, if a user thinks so highly of your application that they’re willing to place it in their top row, at least put in the effort to make good use of the Top Shelf area.
The social network has developed algorithms that spot warning signs in users' posts and the comments their friends leave in response.
After confirmation by Facebook's human review team, the company contacts those thought to be at risk of self-harm to suggest ways they can seek help.
In the latest of its new iPad Pro campaign, Apple claims that its computer-not-computer is perfect for doing clandestine business.
The newly revised iCloud System Status site ditches the timeline format. Instead, the site now lists every iCloud service and whether there’s been a recent issue. When there has, you’ll see a hyperlink indicating when the issue was resolved.
On Tuesday, AOL (yes, it’s still around) suddenly announced to users of AOL Instant Messenger (including yours truly) that it would be disabling access to its network through at least one third-party messaging app (Adium) as of March 28.
Nearly three years have passed since Google announced it would offer an end-to-end encryption add-on for Gmail, a potentially massive shift in the privacy options of a piece of software used by more than a billion people. It still hasn’t materialized. And while Google insists its encryption plugin isn’t vaporware, the company’s latest move has left critics with the distinct impression that Gmail’s encrypted future looks cloudy at best—if not altogether evaporated.
Last Friday, Google quietly announced that E2EMail, an extension for Chrome that would seamlessly encrypt and decrypt Gmail messages, was no longer a Google effort. Instead, the company has invited the outside developer community to adopt the project’s open-source code. Google was careful to emphasize in a blog post describing the change that it hasn’t given up work on its email encryption tool. But cryptographers and members of the privacy community see the move as confirmation that Google has officially backburnered a critical privacy and security initiative.
To Omin — who now hadn’t slept in more than 24 hours — the questions seemed opaque and could have multiple answers. While he is a skilled software engineer with more than seven years of experience, Omin later tells me that the questions looked to him like someone with no technical background Googled something like, “Questions to ask a software engineer.”