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The Left-Ear-Right-Ear Edition Saturday, September 9, 2017

Here’s How The iPhone 8 Status Bar Will Accommodate The Notch, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

The left side of the status bar will feature the system clock time, with the right side primary displaying WiFi, cellular signal strength and battery life.

iOS 11 GM Leak Confirms D22 ‘iPhone 8’ Features: Portrait Lighting, True Tone Display, Revised AirPods, More, by Zac Hall, 9to5Mac

We’re also seeing evidence that the OLED iPhone will feature a True Tone Display for white balancing like the iPad Pro lineup. As for the new resolution, we believe we’ll see 1125×2436 based on this firmware.

iPhone 8 To Feature Animoji, Send 3D Animated Emoji Based Off Your Facial Expressions, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

In the iOS 11 code, Animoji are described as ‘custom animated messages that use your voice and reflect your facial expressions’.

Users create them from within the Messages app on an iPhone 8; it appears the feature will be exclusive to the OLED phone as it relies on the face-tracking 3D sensor hardware.

Future Watch

Firmware Points To New Apple Watch Case Finishes: ‘Blush Gold’ Aluminium And ‘Gray’ Ceramic, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

It seems Apple Watch Series 3 will come in a new ‘blush gold’ color for the aluminium Sport watches and a new gray ceramic material for the Apple Watch Edition.

LTE Apple Watch Uses Same Phone Number As iPhone, Some Carriers To Offer Free/cheaper Trial Plans, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

As expected, the LTE Apple Watch will share the same phone number as the connected iPhone.

This means other people will simply call the same number ever and LTE Watch owners will be able to seamlessly talk using their watches.

Future Interface

An Artist Uses An iPhone To Visualize Sounds In AR, by Elizabeth Stinson, Wired

The reality, of course, is slightly more complicated. Lieberman, who runs the School For Poetic Computation in Brooklyn, built his real time sound map using Apple’s ARKit and the coding toolkit OpenFrameworks. Like all apps built with ARKit, Lieberman’s uses SLAM Technology—that's simultaneous localization and mapping—which leverages the phone’s sensors and camera to build a low resolution map of a room’s boundaries and contours.

With this environmental information in hand, Lieberman can capture sound through the phone’s mic, process and visualize it with the app he built, and then map the illustrations to an exact location in the room. You can leave a snap in one corner, a word in another, and watch a trail of sound waves appear exactly where the phone first captured them. Move the phone along the 3-D path, and it’ll work like a scrubber, replaying the audio forwards and backwards in real time. “It plays that chunk of audio that’s closest to where the devices is,” Lieberman says.

Siri Today And In The Future, by David Sparks, MacSparky

I think in the short term, the Amazon approach is easier and gets the ball forward faster. In the long-term, I think the Apple approach could be right if properly executed. If Siri does incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence the way Apple wants it to, it could ultimately end up leapfrogging the syntax driven approach of its competitors.

Surviving Apps

Built To Last, by Jason Snell, Six Colors

Older people like to accuse the modern world of being disposable, as opposed to back in the past, when things were built to last. But most of the software from the 90s is long gone. Surviving this long is extremely rare. It takes a bunch of factors to last as a product.

Your Apps Are Making You Miserable, by Karen Hao, Quartz

It may be common knowledge that spending too much time on social media leads to disappointment with yourself, but according to data from Moment, an iPhone app that tracks app usage, there isn’t a single app that makes you feel good for spending more, rather than less, time on it. Not even Spotify.

Goodbye to Chaos Manor

RIP Jerry Pournelle, The First Author To Write A Novel On A Computer, by Andrew Liptak, The Verge

Science fiction author Jerry Pournelle passed away earlier this week after a sudden illness at the age of 84. He helped popularize the military science fiction genre with novels such as Janissaries and The Mercenary, but is also credited with a major milestone: the first author to write a novel entirely on a computer.

Stuff

How To Resize Images Using Preview In macOS, by Bradley Chambers, The Sweet Setup

On macOS, Preview.app is highly underrated for all it can do. It’s my go-to app for a lot of things — one of them being fast image resizing. Let’s say you have an image that is too big for where you want to use it. Preview can quickly cut it down.

Review: Apps To Help Get Work Done, by Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times

Most of the new technologies being adopted by companies encourage more chatty collaboration, such as Slack, Dropbox’s Paper and Salesforce’s Quip. Co-workers commandeer your day by placing events in your shared calendar and endlessly demand attention with pedantic comments on shared Google documents.

There is, however, an antidote emerging in a new generation of technologies. They aim to make time alone at work an affordable indulgence, even if you are not the boss.

Review: SanDisk's iXpand Base Offers An Expensive But Simple iPhone Backup Solution, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

The idea is to put the iXpand Base on your nightstand, plug it into the wall, and then plug your iPhone into the Lightning port at night. This charges the iPhone and allows it to transfer your photos, videos, and contacts to the Base for the purpose of backing up.

Little Snitch 4 Review: Mac App Excels At Monitoring And Controlling Network Activity, by Glenn Fleishman, Macworld

The Internet is a terrifying place, and Objective Development’s Little Snitch 4 has tried for many years to help keep your Mac locked down by monitoring connections and letting you control inbound and outbound traffic. Version 4 refines and extends this friendly firewall, and if you’ve used it or looked at it in the past, you’ll find it mostly familiar. But the app has significant updates for visualizing connections and improves how it explains what apps are trying to do.

Develop

Apple Updates WWDC App For iOS, Apple TV With Support For Handoff, by AppleInsider

The WWDC app lets developers view sessions from the conference even if they were not able to attend. Those sessions from Apple employees help developers create apps for the iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS platforms.

As Apple Preps Augmented Reality For The Masses, Developers Are Figuring Out How To Make Money, by Ari Levy, CNBC

Apple's big bet is on ARKit, the company's homegrown technology for enabling developers to build AR apps. The software is among the most anticipated features of iOS 11, which is likely to be available this month, and you can expect to see some splashy use cases for the technology at Apple's iPhone event on Sept. 12, in Cupertino.

For game developers, who will surely be some of the earliest adopters of ARKit, a new challenge awaits -- advertising.

Bottom of the Page

I've enjoyed many of Mr Jerry Pournelle's "Chaos Manor" column in Byte magazine. Thank you, and goodbye.

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I hope all the iOS 11 features and gestures that allow one to not use a home button because the home button is not there anymore will also be available to phones that do have a home button.

(Am I making any sense?)

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Nobody is predicting Apple showing off new Podcast and iTunes apps in the upcoming Apple event?

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Thanks for reading.