Apple today started sending out emails to customers who are using older versions of its pro apps to inform them about impending incompatibilities with macOS High Sierra.
"For iOS 11, we chose a new female voice talent with the goal of improving the naturalness, personality, and expressivity of Siri's voice," Apple said. "We evaluated hundreds of candidates before choosing the best one. Then, we recorded over 20 hours of speech and built a new TTS [text-to-speech] voice using the new deep learning based TTS technology."
Dear iPhone: It’s hard to believe we’re still together after 10 years, which is eons in the tech industry.
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Here’s a look back at the last 10 years of why the iPhone still has us in its grip — so much that people keep coming back for more.
If you want to use your iPad for any kind of productivity tasks, the ability to really manage your files is a must. The good news is that, while not as capable as a Mac in this area, there are plenty of file management options for the iPad that provide the functionality that most people will need on their iPads.
If true, AccuWeather is seemingly claiming they embedded Reveal Mobile’s SDK in their app without knowing what it did. I believe them. But that’s a shocking admission of negligence.
Apple on Wednesday rolled out updates to its iCloud-based News Publisher, featuring a number of user interface enhancements and a completely redesigned dashboard.
Are you a designer who hides behind ornament and decoration? who uses one or other element just because it looks trendy? or the other one who strips his work down to its most fundamental features functionally, where each element integrates perfectly in the design and adds value to the user experience?
If you are the first one, you have to know that just because an element looks beautiful to you, that doesn’t mean it looks beautiful to your users, but if you are the second one, you are a minimalist designer.
Seattle has the fourth-fastest-growing freelance economy in the country, which explains why there are almost as many coworking spaces opening up as luxury apartment buildings. Since I'll never be able to afford a luxury apartment, I thought maybe I can at least work at a place where the sink actually drains and the coffee is always fresh. So I checked out some coworking spaces and brought my laptop with me. I didn't tell them I was coming. I wanted to see what these places were like inside, without any PR hoopla.
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I visited five of the bigger coworking spaces in Seattle. Some of the places I visited allowed dogs. One of them had free craft beer on tap. Lots of them offered classes, networking events, and happy hours. Most of them have whiteboards, conference rooms, private phone booths, printing, high speed internet, and mailboxes. Some have extra perks like dog walking, on-site massage therapists, upscale lounges, and coworking visa programs (where members can use coworking spaces in other cities).
Silicon Valley has a lot of self-interested reasons for preferring to maintain a facade that its culture is special, and that its industry is more innovative, virtuous and productive than every other industry. It serves as a great recruiting tool as the region competes for talent with other industries and areas. It allows insiders to maintain outsize control of their companies. And it is a way to prevent regulators from coming in and regulating Silicon Valley to the extent that it might otherwise seek to do.
But it's time to drop the pretense that Silicon Valley deserves special treatment. Facebook and Google are content and advertising companies, digital evolutions of print and television companies that came before them. Amazon's core e-commerce business is just a digital Wal-Mart. Apple's iPhone product cycle, with its annual incremental improvements, has parallels to the personal computer industry in the 1990s or even the Detroit "Big Three" automakers in the 1960s. They deserve the same scrutiny from regulatory and labor watchdogs that their old-economy peers get.
To put it simply: Much of digital technology seems to be, in the words of our YouTube debunker, not in sync. It doesn’t quite track. Twitter emotion doesn’t rise and fall the way human emotions do. Similarly, death, final by definition, is not final in Super Mario 0dyssey. GPS tech is not true to the temperature and texture of physical landscapes. Alexa of Amazon’s Echo sometimes seems bright, sometimes moronic, but of course she’s neither; she’s not even a she, and it’s a constant category error to consider her one.
Living in the flicker of that error—interacting with a bot as if its sentiments were sentiments—is to take up residence in the so-called uncanny valley, home to that repulsion we feel from robots that look a lot, but not exactly, like us, a phenomenon identified nearly 50 years ago by robotics professor Masahiro Mori. When something gets close to looking human but just misses the mark—like that CGI creep in The Polar Express—it induces fear and loathing, the exact opposite of affection.
I am frustrated by the current Control Center on my iPhone, and I can't wait for the new OS.
Oh, and I hope I can afford an iPhone Pro.
Can't wait.
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Thanks for reading.