In my hand, the iPhone X feels very much like the iPhone 8—the glass makes it much easier to grip than the iPhone 6 or 7. This phone is a little bit wider than the 8 (3.5 mm, or .14 inch), and after a day I can already tell that I’m going to need to retrain some muscle memory and readjust my grip. Still, as someone who found the iPhone Plus design simply too wide for my hands (the Plus is 7.2 mm wider than the iPhone X), this phone feels comfortable.
If there’s an ergonomic issue I’m going to have with the iPhone X, it’s the height of the device, not its width. Holding my iPhone 8 in one hand, I can barely reach my thumb up to the top of the screen. But not only is the iPhone X 5mm taller, but the screen extends almost all the way to the top. I can’t keep the bottom of the iPhone X braced with my pinky and use my thumb to tap items high up in the interface. I suppose over time I will either change how I hold the phone in my hand, get used to shimmying my hand up the phone to reach the top, or get used to not one-handing my iPhone as often as I currently do.
I really got a feel for how much the stabilization in the telephoto lens affected my shots when taking pictures of landmarks at night. These shots of the Guardians of the Galaxy tower really highlight the difference in sharpness that you see with a stabilized lens.
The second big way that a stabilized telephoto lens improves your images is in Portrait Mode, especially in anything but bright sunlight. The stabilized lens gives you more confidence to flip it into Portrait Mode in any light that supports the feature. Adding stabilization essentially allows you to shoot all the way down to the low-light cap on the portrait effect itself, which is great.
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As I bummed around the park testing the iPhone X, I found myself defaulting to the 2x mode a lot. This allowed for some great sharp captures inside rides at a zoom that simply weren’t possible before. I’ve gotten lucky a handful of times with phones in the past, but never with a telephoto lens. The train vignettes, Pirates and other rides are so incredibly dark and dramatically lit that they’re a huge stress test for a zoom lens on a phone. The results were very impressive.
Landscape mode on the iPhone X is generally pretty messy: the notch goes from being a somewhat forgettable element in the top status bar to a giant interruption on the side of the screen, and I haven’t seen any apps really solve for it yet. And the home bar at the bottom of the screen often sits over the top of content, forever reminding you that you can swipe to go home and exit the chaos of landscape mode forever.
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The other problem is actually much more interesting: almost all of the early questions about FaceID centered around how it would work in the dark, but it turns out that was exactly backwards. FaceID works great in the dark, because the IR projector is basically a flashlight, and flashlights are easy to see in the dark. But go outside in bright sunlight, which contains a lot of infrared light, or under crappy florescent lights, which interfere with IR, and FaceID starts to get a little inconsistent.
I took a walk outside our NYC office in bright sunlight, and FaceID definitely had issues recognizing my face consistently while I was moving until I went into shade or brought the phone much closer to my face than usual. I also went to the deli across the street, which has a wide variety of lights inside, including a bunch of overhead florescent strips, and FaceID also got significantly more inconsistent.
For unlock and on-device authentication, it's so fast it's almost like it doesn't even exist. Where Touch ID was always unmistakably active — you knew you had to put your finger on the sensor — Face ID seems almost ambient. You look, therefore you've unlocked.
It's not perfect, though. The biggest problem people will have with it is that it requires attention. You really have to look at your phone to unlock it. Not think you're looking at it. Not kind of look at it. Really eye-of-the-tiger look at it. The problem with attention-aware interface is that you absolutely have to be paying attention.
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But seriously, so far, so great. I'm forgetting that Face ID is even there most of the time until I look and see iPhone X is already unlocked. Even with App Store apps like 1Password, Face ID is so fast it makes Touch ID suddenly seem slow and onerous by comparison.
So yeah, some app experiences are a little less than elegant right now. Thankfully, navigating through the iPhone X's interface is generally a breeze. Since there's no home button, cruising through iOS happens with a series of swiping gestures. Slide a finger across a bar at the bottom to switch between running apps, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and hold for a moment (you'll feel a haptic pulse) to display all of your currently running apps, or simply swipe up to go back to the home screen. Despite hitting the reset button on almost a decade of iPhone behavior, Apple has built a version of iOS that handily proves home buttons aren't necessary anymore.
That said, it's not perfect. Using the new app switcher seems just a hair slower than double-tapping the home button, and trying to close an app takes a little more effort than it should. Instead of swiping up on an app window to dismiss it, you have to press and hold the window, then tap a close button on the corner. The move was necessary since the swipe up does something else, but the process now takes an extra, mildly annoying step. The stock iOS keyboard also has a lot of empty space beneath it, and while Apple uses it for buttons that switch layouts and fire up voice dictation, it's pretty ugly.
So far, the biggest drawback to the extra screen space and lack of home button has been third-party app design. Many of my apps haven't been redesigned for the new screen size, so they show up with thick black bars on the top and bottom to mimic the same aspect ratio you'd get on a regular iPhone screen. It looks like a lot of wasted space.
Other apps have been refitted for the iPhone X screen, but have made a bunch of funky design choices. For example, some have large chunks of unused space at the bottom near the home bar. And I saw at least one app that showed the home bar bleeding into the menu icons at the bottom of the screen.
Apple's not totally innocent either. There were a few cases where I saw large chunks of unused space at the bottom of the screen in some of Apple's own in-house apps, such as the iPhone's built-in Mail app, especially when the keyboard popped up.
Simply put: Face ID is really fucking impressive. But that’s because it’s invisible.
You pick up your phone, swipe up, and you’re in. You open your password manager, a little orb swirls, and you’re in.
Android has had a face unlock feature since 2011 and Samsung introduced theirs earlier this year, but neither of those implementations work quite as seamlessly as Apple’s.
For a normal human who isn’t aware of the 30,000 invisible dots being projected on their face or the 3D map of their head encrypted somewhere deep inside their phone, there’s nothing “futuristic” about these interactions. Using Face ID is what life without a passcode — life before we all became paranoid technofreaks — felt like.
With the iPhone X, Apple has had to rethink many of the iOS core gestures. The new device features a brand new design with a taller display, Face ID and no home button.
If you plan on buying a new iPhone X, it’s going to take a while to get used to these new metaphors. So here’s a list of some not-so-obvious features in the iPhone X.
New emojis. Do you need to hear anything else? Apple just released an iOS update. iOS 11.1 is the first feature update for iOS 11. It adds a couple of new things, starting with dozens of new emojis.
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Finally, iOS 11 comes with a bunch of bug fixes and security updates. In particular, it fixes the KRACK vulnerability.
Messaging, Lists, and Notes are the only SiriKit domains that will work with HomePod at launch, but it's likely we'll see more added over time. This means the HomePod will be able to do things like send messages in Telegram, create tasks in Todoist or Things, and create notes in Evernote.
Mrs. Archer said that her daughter can use her iPad to talk about everything she likes and dislikes, but there are still some difficulties in communication.
“She doesn’t use it to say, ‘Hey Tammy, good to see you.’ I don’t know if that will ever come. I hope it will, that she doesn’t always need mom beside her to help her function in society, but we don’t know where she’ll end up at, or how that will work out.”
Image recognition was introduced with iOS 10 in June 2016, when the Photos app was updated with deep learning for object and scene detection. Apple stressed during the keynote, as well as on its website, that all object detection is done completely locally on the device.
In a Medium post, developer Kenny Yin detailed all of the facial expressions and objects the Photos app recognized, which he found through a few lines of code in the framework of macOS Sierra’s Photos app. At the time it was released, the app was capable of recognizing seven different facial expressions, and a total of 4,432 keywords, “brassiere” included.
The reviews definitely gave me confidence about Face ID. I think it will feel weird to use other still-has-a-home-button devices, such as iPads and iPad Pros, after using the iPhone X.
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I am pretty sure I will continue to curse and swear at 'designers' who think that small fonts in gray on gray background are cool, even when reading on the iPhone X.
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By skipping from iPhone 6 to iPhone X, I probably missed the golden era when anybody who mentioned the name Siri will trigger my phone.
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I knew I’d mastered the gestures when I found myself trying to use them on my iPad. Oops. My finger no longer drifts to the home button, but pathetically swipes upwards, to no avail. And now there’s that awkward moment when I expect the iPad to unlock itself when the camera looks at my face.
That’s because on the iPhone X, the Touch ID fingerprint identification is replaced with another big change, Face ID, wherein the characteristics of your face, after a few billion operations by Bionic chips and neural engines, become a physiognomic password. Does it work? Pretty much. It seems reliable at fending off intruders. I have thrust my phone into several people’s faces—though considerably fewer than the million punims that Apple says I’d have to try before a false positive—and it has not fallen for any of them. I even offered up my own head shot to the camera: no go. How it has dealt with my own real-life face is another matter. There have been times when, despite a clear view of my face, the iPhone X has ghosted me. (Apple tells me that perhaps I wasn’t making what the iPhone X considers eye contact. I wouldn’t want it to turn on every time my face was within camera range, would I?)
Eventually I devised a strategy. When waking my iPhone I think of it as De Niro’s mirror in Taxi Driver. You talkin’ to me? Well, I’m the only one here! I then see if the little lock icon on the screen has released its latch. Alternatively, a good way to see when you’ve been recognized is to notice the generic messages on the lock screen saying “you have a notification” from Facebook, Gmail, or wherever. When you and your iPhone X make that turn-on connection, those flesh out with the actual content of the message. (This feature—withholding potentially private alerts until the phone was unlocked—had previously been available as an option but now is the default.) In any case, once I got the hang of it, I found I could dial down the De Niro and get it to unlock more naturally, though I am still mystified that sometimes it goes straight to where I left off and other times asks me to swipe up. And I really liked Apple Pay with iPhone X—having to double-click on the side button and then use Face ID was a clearer way to do transactions.
As a futurist and scenario planner, helping organizations understand the long-term social, economic, and political impacts that accompany disruptive technology, I feel the timing is right for all types of stakeholders in this technology — policy makers, technology producers, consumers and even just the average citizen who might be in the way of the emerging applications — to understand and get ahead of the types of ethical, legal and regulatory issues that will accompany AR applications.
The iPhone has always been a sort of premium product, and if Apple shows that it’s able to unlock demand at an even higher tier and retain it beyond just early adopters, that could add some significant momentum to its business.
You probably don’t think about the clipboard too often. Cut, copy, and paste seem pretty simple, right? But what if you could power up your clipboard and make it work harder for you? What if you could make it a repository for reusable text and images, have it collect most everything you cut or copy, and help you organize those clippings so they’re useful and reusable?
Pastebot from Tapbots does just that, and it maintains a persistent clipboard through restarts and across devices. It also makes creating reusable text a snap. Additionally, Pastebot can take your copied text and push it through formatting filters, converting copied plain text into HTML, Markdown, or any other format you’re smart enough to dream up and create.
Once you get the hang of using Out of Milk, it's one of the better to-do and shopping list apps available. It has plenty of features, keeps track of prices for you, and allows you to enter items by scanning their barcodes. That makes it one of the easiest shopping list apps to use, and being able to create a pantry list of commonly-used things in your kitchen, then transfer those to a shopping list, shows that the developers of Out of Milk really want to up the ante for their competitors.
HQ is a new live mobile trivia game for iOS from the creators of the late short-form video app Vine. Rus Yusupov and fellow co-founder Colin Kroll combined the classic game show elements of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and Jeopardy! with the breakneck speed and scale of mobile gaming and live streaming technology. Each day, at 3PM and 9PM ET, the app comes to life for around 13 minutes. A well-dressed host — either New York-based comedian Scott Rogowsky or British on-air personality Sharon Carpenter — then rattles off 12 multiple choice questions live on camera, while a blisteringly busy live text chat flows at the bottom of the screen.
Looks like I'll be upgrading from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone X. Which means that I've never really experienced the home button that does not actually moves.
But, it also means that soon, not only will I be enjoy the hands-free FaceID as well as home-button-as-a-gesture, I'll also be using Live Picture, 3D Touch, Siri on-demand-without-having-to-plug-in, and Portrait photos on a water-resistant iPhone for the very first time.
Can't wait.
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At the end, my iPhone 3G had a broken home button that required me to press really really hard at just the right angle in order for the button to register. After that experience, I've never trusted the home button ever again.
My current solution in home-button-avoidance is to use the Launcher app which allows me to put a virtual home button in its widget. It does take too much time to go to home screen though: pull down the lock screen from the top of the screen, swipe left-to-right to show the widgets, and then tap on the virtual home button. (The Launcher app will then be launched and quit itself, showing me the home screen.) Yes, all these nonsenses just for me to not click the home button.
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If you were a Mac user back in the good ode days of dot-com, you may not be aware of this: Third Voice. Inline comments for the web.
Can AR be the third voice for the, well, real world?
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Facing criticism from wildlife groups who say its glassy new Chicago store is causing deadly bird strikes, Apple plans to dim the store’s lights Friday night, a company spokesman said, and will continue to do so during the fall migration season.
Members of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, a volunteer group that rescues migrating birds that collide with buildings, have said they’ve found dead birds at the Apple store since it opened Oct. 20. The group blames the store’s exterior glass walls and night lighting. At night, according to experts, birds often become disoriented by city lights, then crash into buildings and fall to the ground.
“The best solution is absolutely to turn off lights where and when possible,” Farnsworth adds. “If we can mitigate our behavior—and this is in the grand sense—so that our actions don’t cause more death, that’s a good thing.”
Apple this weekend is contacting iPhone Upgrade Program customers who stayed up, or woke up, to order an iPhone X early Friday only to find the company's financial partner, Citizens One, was unable to process loan applications.
Not long after pre-orders began yesterday morning, the first iPhone X orders have started shipping to customers. While Apple has yet to update order statues on its website, some customers who purchased the device through their carrier have started receiving shipping notifications.
Many people have deleted the Facebook app from their phone to avoid this mindless habit. “What’s going on in my feed?” they think. Then they scroll, scroll, scroll, get bored and close the app. Repeat this process every 30 minutes. Deleting the app is the best way to take a stance and say that Facebook is a waste of time.
"We can see from the initial response, customer demand is off the charts," said an Apple spokeswoman.
Some customers who pre-ordered the iPhone X when pre-orders went live and initially received shipping estimates of one to two weeks are seeing their orders upgraded to delivery on November 3.
While many customers were able to complete their order quickly enough to receive a delivery date of November 3, the day the device launches, some using the AT&T app to pre-order faced unexpected delays of 10 to 15 minutes or longer.
Apple seems to have an allergy when it comes to putting controls related to syncing anywhere in its apps. Not that surfacing such controls is always a fix, but at worst it has a placebo effect that lets us feel as though we have some measure of control over the problem, rather than simply throwing up our hands and cursing. And it's the least the company can do if the feature isn't going to work seamlessly.
I recently bought a pair of sneakers online after some browsing. I knew exactly what I was getting, having owned the same model and size before; they just weren’t available in any neighborhood stores. The sneakers arrived in a few days, and I was satisfied with them.
Then came the targeted ads.
Most people who have bought every single iPhone released thus far will skip over the iPhone 8, and that’s fine. The iPhone X is shiny and new and exciting… and full of new, untested technology with a $999+ price tag. For anyone upgrading from and iPhone 6 or 6S, the iPhone 8 models are pretty great. They aren’t cutting-edge devices like the iPhone X, but that’s not their role. Instead, they are the fourth design iteration of a familiar, reliable, and successful product line. As powerful as a laptop, with an excellent camera and a shiny, grippable design that’s the best-looking version yet, the iPhone 8 is a solid device so long as you measure it by what it is, not what it isn’t.
Apple has notified third-party iOS developers via its News and Updates website that they can download Xcode 9.0.1 and submit iPhone X apps for review in advance of the new iPhone's release on November 3, 2017.
These are my excuses for pre-ordering the iPhone X:
1) I wanted the Plus model, but hated the large size. The X has a larger screen with a not-so-large body, and that appeals me.
2) It seems that Face ID will be more convenient than Touch ID.
3) No Home Buttons! I love this idea so much that I wish there is a setting available somewhere to activate the new gestures in my iPhone 6.
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Thanks for reading.
Apple’s most advanced iPhone saw its shipping times slip to weeks in the minutes after it first went up for pre-order on Friday morning.
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Less than an hour after launch, models for all four carriers in the United States on Apple’s online store were showing delivery times weeks after the first day the device hits stores, next Friday, November 3.
Despite the price tag, demand is high. The company’s online shop experienced server issues in the minutes immediately following the launch of pre-orders, and the initial allocation of devices, due to arrive on 3 November, had completely sold out by 8:10am in the UK. Less than an hour later, the waiting list had extended to cover the entire first month.
Percentage-wise, this is broadly in line with other iPhone models. An iPhone 8, for example, costs $699 for the 64GB model, and a repair will run you $349. But the actual dollar amount for the iPhone X is large enough that it may give some people pause for thought. Especially given that all-new glass back.
Turns out psychologists have names for this kind of decision, and the hemming and hawing that goes into it.
"It's a classic example of what we call a multi-attribute decision task," says Ben Newell, a cognitive psychologist at the University of New South Wales Sydney and co-author of Straight Choices: The Psychology of Decision Making. It's a fancy term for situations in which you consider multiple options, each with attributes you use to inform your decision. [...]
Martin, who since diagnosing his cancer has undergone a five-and-a-half-hour surgery and radiation treatment, believes the devices can take on new shapes, like a patch that could be sent home with patients. Perhaps before too long a parent might diagnose a kid’s fracture at home.
“To look at this as just an ultrasound device is like looking at an iPhone and saying it’s just a phone,” he says. “If you have a window into the body where anyone can afford it, everyone can use it, and everyone can interpret it, it becomes a heck of a lot more than an ultrasound device.”
Wearables with heart trackers, I now realise, are great for 25-year-old hypochondriacs who can't distinguish joint pain from cardiac arrest. They're even more useful for people who aren't idiots and who have legitimate reason to monitor this type of thing.
Be they smartwatches (think Apple Watch 3) or smartbands (Fitbit Alta HR), wearables are usually sold as fitness trackers. They're promoted as devices to help you get sexy, but in some cases can do something much more impressive: keep you alive.
Most of us just want our technology to work when we need it, and when we have problems with it, we don’t dive into the details of how it runs — we just want it fixed. So it’s natural that we fall for the most convenient suggestions for resolving issues or getting the most life out of our gear. Unfortunately, some of those premises are false, and they can do more harm than good — and may even cost us money.
In an 9 October letter made public this week by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Apple lawyers asked if it could exclude the proposal, from Zevin Asset Management, because similar initiatives haven’t garnered the minimum 6 per cent of shareholder support required for re-submission. The SEC rebuffed a similar request in 2015.
Apple Inc, General Motors Co, Best Buy Co Inc and others have joined a coalition of top companies lobbying the U.S. Congress for young, illegal immigrants to have a path to permanent residency, the group said on Thursday.
While more tech companies generally voice their support in these LGBTQ-friendly cases, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission is a tinder box of particularly volatile social issues, particularly when it comes to interpreting the religious rights secured by the First Amendment.
Apple has quietly released an elegant looking leather sleeve for 12-inch MacBooks that’s blind-embossed with the company’s logo. [...] Apple says the design allows you to charge your laptop while it’s sitting in the case.
Ulysses for iOS received on its biggest updates last week with the launch of Ulysses 12.
Inside, you’ll find image previews, wide-ranging drag and drop support, and a new design emulating iOS 11’s focus on bold headers and typography.
Zipped is a really great app for creating and opening zip files on iOS. While I originally bought it to be able to extract zip files, it’s been really useful in creating zip files as well so I can share through email.
Last year, everyone was waiting for AirPods. This year, iPhone X. These waits are getting to be an annual Apple tradition.
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Apple has been urged to change the way in which iPhone apps are granted access to the phone's camera after a security researcher demonstrated how apps can secretly record photos and videos without the user knowing.
Felix Krause, an Austrian developer who works for Google, built an app that was able to take pictures of its user every second and upload them, without notifying the user. He called it a "privacy loophole that can be abused by iOS apps".
"At one point I had a double adaptor, so I had a coil hooked over my right ear and an audio cable I had to plug into my sound processor," said Ms Sattout, 54 of Concord West.
"So when someone rang me, like a client, it was like, plug this in, plug this in, and by the time I was ready, I had missed the call."
Now, thanks to the first device born out of a collaboration between implant maker Cochlear and tech giant Apple, phone calls and music can be directly streamed from an iPhone straight to the Cochlear implant.
Cochlear worked alongside Apple’s accessibility engineering team to design the integration with iPhone. With this partnership, users will be able to listen to music and podcasts, watch video, make calls, and more through the the Nucleus 7 implant.
The combination of the iPad Pro's capable hardware, awesome screen, Lightroom Mobile, and Affinity Photo really makes for a complete editing solution. While I always enjoy editing, I particularly enjoy the tablet experience, and I've found myself doing more of my work away from my desktop. My iPad is always in my bag anyway, and it's been a real boon to my efficiency to be able to pull it out and knock out a photo or cull a set whenever I have 10 spare minutes I would have otherwise spent daydreaming.
The iPad Pro with Apple's Smart Keyboard in conjunction with a server running ZSH, tmux and neovim makes a fantastic portable development machine that leaves very little to wish for.
Inside, scores of Apple engineers are huddled around, chattering about server loads. A collection of monitors is mounted on the wall, flashing charts, numbers, and graphs. Preorders for Apple's newly announced iPhone 8 are about to begin, and this is the company's "war room" — mission control for a one-night retail operation that brings in more iPhone sales than an entire weekend. Everyone is dressed comfortably for an all-nighter, yellow security bands on their wrists — everyone, that is, except Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of retail. She’s running the show.
At midnight, the war room's server activity chart ticks abruptly from green to red under a flood of incoming iPhone orders. On the wall, blinking red lights begin flashing across a digital world map with a concentrated flurry of activity in China and South Asia. Then a cheer erupts. Someone from the merchandising team made the winning bet on transactions per second. Apple won’t disclose how many orders came through that night (the company hasn’t published actual preorder numbers for the past two years). But it’s a lot.
Ahrendts remains in the trenches until 3 a.m., floating between the groups, making sure everyone is fired up, like a politician on election night. She smiles and shakes hands the whole time.
A Bloomberg report today made claims that Apple had reduced its requirements from suppliers on the accuracy level of Face ID. Apple has issued a statement stating that the report is “completely false” and saying that it expects Face ID to be the new gold standard of facial authentication.
To be clear, I have no idea whether Face ID works as advertised or not. I haven’t used it even once yet. Maybe it stinks, maybe it’s great, maybe it’s somewhere in between. But Bloomberg clearly doesn’t know either, yet they published this story which has a headline and summary — “The company let suppliers reduce accuracy of the phone’s Face ID system to speed up production” — which suggests that Face ID is going to stink because Apple’s suppliers couldn’t get enough good components out the door. If this weren’t merely clickbait, they’d be able to say how well it actually works.
Frankly, I don’t trust anything Bloomberg reports about iPhones any more.
The iPhone X is clearly a very advanced device to produce, especially at the scale customers would like to see. But, while the facial recognition sensors seem to be a primary obstacle to that scale, Apple’s statement refutes the notion that Face ID will be compromised in any way. That doesn’t mean they haven’t taken steps to make production easier; it simply means that the production ramp is doing its job, albeit perhaps within a tighter timeframe.
However, Apple isn’t interested in the types of shows that become hits on HBO or Netflix, like Game of Thrones—at least not yet. The company plans to release the first few projects to everyone with an Apple device, potentially via its TV app, and top executives don’t want kids catching a stray nipple. Every show must be suitable for an Apple Store. Instead of the nudity, raw language, and violence that have become staples of many TV shows on cable or streaming services, Apple wants comedies and emotional dramas with broad appeal, such as the NBC hit This Is Us, and family shows like Amazing Stories. People pitching edgier fare, such as an eight-part program produced by Gravity filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón and starring Casey Affleck, have been told as much.
All this has led many producers to label Apple as conservative and picky. Some potential partners say they walk into Apple’s offices expecting to be blown away by the most successful consumer technology company in the world only to run up against the reality of dealing with a giant, cautious corporation taking its first steps into a new industry.
Apple has hired Jay Hunt - the former controller of BBC One and chief creative officer of Channel Four - to join its video team.
Ms Hunt was responsible for TV shows including Sherlock and Luther at the BBC before helping Channel 4 sign up the Great British Bake Off.
Though ubiquitous, most ordinary people have no idea that embedded systems even exist. The history of computing’s rise from a tool to a way of life is also the history of making the computer more and more visible. Bill Gates aspired to have “a computer on every desk and in every home.” “Intel Inside” stickers made the company’s hidden microcontrollers visible in name, at least. Smartphones trained people to clutch computers, construing them as a part of their very beings. And today, connected devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home are turning computers into members of the family, after a fashion. Everywhere, computers are screaming at you: “Here I am! I am a computer!”
And yet, microwaves are computers too—in part, anyway. As are washing machines, automobiles, and even light switches, sometimes. All these modest, embedded systems have been “hiding the computation” for years now—for decades. Their purpose is to serve other purposes. To help people reheat coffee or flick on porch lights. Sometimes the computer disappears entirely in embedded systems, as in automobiles, and other times it vanishes after setup, as in my Honeywell light switch. Omata might look like an expensive bike computer for well-to-do cyclists, and certainly it is that, in part. But it’s also a harbinger of a return to modesty in computing. It doesn’t hope to change the world, or even to disrupt smartphones for riders. It’s just a thing that might help people enjoy cycling a little more.
The crown is definitely useful for users who do a lot of visual work. We also think those who adopt it will find the dial interface more convenient and accurate than manipulating onscreen UIs with a keyboard or mouse.
Overall, the Logitech Craft Advanced Keyboard with Creative Input Dial is a quality Mac accessory that left us impressed. The main drawbacks are the price, as well as a lack of software support for the input dial, which we hope will be addressed in due time.
Get ready.
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Apple on Tuesday updated its homepage with dynamic graphics and links touting various iPhone X features, like the TrueDepth camera and Face ID, in an effort to advertise the handset ahead of a start to preorders this week.
As of early fall, it was clearer than ever that production problems meant Apple Inc. wouldn’t have enough iPhone Xs in time for the holidays. The challenge was how to make the sophisticated phone—with advanced features such as facial recognition—in large enough numbers.
As Wall Street analysts and fan blogs watched for signs that the company would stumble, Apple came up with a solution: It quietly told suppliers they could reduce the accuracy of the face-recognition technology to make it easier to manufacture, according to people familiar with the situation.
The Bloomberg report via their secret sources is all but saying that Apple will weaken one the key features of iPhone X, Face ID, in order to get production back on cue. That's a claim that Apple will either ignore being made public or go on the offensive to make it known that no such compromise was ever made. This is a very serious charge and with sources being anonymous as usual, it's difficult to know if Bloomberg's sources are engineers, brokerage analysts that are pro Android or people directly involved at Foxconn or in Apple's suppl chain. This isn't just a bad rumor, this is a hit job that says that Apple will compromise iPhone X and deliver a diluted or outright fake feature.
It’s no secret that Apple doesn’t pay much attention to iBooks Author. All you have to do is look at Apple’s own page for it, which brags that it “has been beautifully redesigned for OS X Yosemite.” Welcome to 2014! iBooks and the iBooks Store haven’t fared any better.
So iBooks Author falls into a strange hole where it’s a powerful, unique tool, but its creator seems to have no interest in its survival. How did we get here, and why hasn’t Apple just pulled the plug?
You are unlikely to seriously fuck anything up if you are careful. Taking the screen off isn't the most pleasant thing I've ever done, but I never seriously felt like I was going to actually break anything, and I would much rather give $300 to a small computer company than $900 extra to Apple. Because this took me several hours and there are MANY steps, it is very clear to me that Apple does not want you to do this yourself. Which is exactly why you should.
All computerized equipment comes with embedded software—code that tells the machine what to do and how its components should function together. Without that code, our coffee doesn’t brew, our cars don’t shift gears, and our sewing machines can’t stitch.
When you buy such a machine, the hardware becomes yours. But if you ask manufacturers, they’ll say that the software inside still belongs to them. It’s copyrighted, and most manufacturers don’t want you to touch it, even if the thing is broken. And thanks to a controversial U.S. law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) [PDF], manufacturers are allowed to put digital locks on the code to stop people from meddling with (or even looking at) it. The European Union’s Copyright Directive has similar provisions. Originally, these sorts of laws were designed to prevent pirates from copying movies and music. But, increasingly, manufacturers use them to maintain control of the products they sell to you.
Auckland entrepreneur Fady Mishriki set up PowerbyProxi in 2007, as a spin-out from and University of Auckland, to develop technology to let people charge everyday devices like mobile phones without having to plug them in.
This culture and strategy difference also is manifested in the innovation happening within the brand’s sales and marketing departments. It starts with customer data. You can’t use the iPhone without having an account with Apple, which means that Apple knows a lot about you. In Samsung’s case, it has yielded the customer data benefit to Google, though the benefits of that decision probably outweigh the detriments.
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Apple proved that in order to be the leader in this premium category, a brand must be investing and committing to providing the best shopping and service experience possible.
"I see my role as CEO to prepare as many people as I can to be CEO, and that's what I'm doing. And then the board makes a decision at that point in time," Cook said.
Cook, along with Apple retail boss Angela Ahrendts, spoke to BuzzFeed News from Chicago in an interview published on Oct. 24. While there's no sign that Cook is planning to bow out anytime soon, Ahrendts' management background has long colored her a contender.
When I first started writing this review, the most obvious comparison was to the Roku Ultra, which is so much cheaper that it seemed unfair. But, using the Apple TV 4K more made me realize that the two are very different in reality. While the Roku’s compatibility with different services is superior, it lacks access to the iTunes store, which is actually the best place to get 4K HDR new releases, at least for the moment. The Apple TV 4K also has access to a wide breadth of apps from the App Store, so it offers entertainment beyond things you can watch.
Apple says it will have a limited supply of iPhone X models for walk-in customers on Friday, Nov. 3, at 8 a.m. local time. If supply is as limited as I suspect, you might want to camp out in front of your local store — today!
There are a five steps for iPhone Upgrade Program customers to get their hands on a shiny new iPhone X, and users can use the Apple Store App to complete the iPhone X pre-approval (steps 1-4).
It’s not unusual for Cupertino to buy other companies’ technology in order to bolster its own. But at the time, it was hard to know exactly what Apple planned to do with its haul. It wasn’t until last month, at the company’s annual talent show, that the culmination of years of acquisitions and research began to make sense: Apple was building the iPhone X.
Perhaps the most important feature in the new flagship phone is its face-tracking technology, which allows you to unlock the phone with your face or to lend your expressions to a dozen or so emoji with Animoji. Apple thinks the iPhone X represents the future of mobile tech, and for many, that’s true. But if you trace most of consumer technology’s most impressive accomplishments back to their origins, more often than not, it’ll lead you to a drab research lab full of graduate students. In the case of Animoji, that research happened to have taken place nearly a decade ago at a pair of Europe’s most prestigious technical schools.
Basically the iPhone takes a photo at a slower shutter speed while firing the flash quickly. With the shutter open longer, the background is exposed more making it brighter. And with the flash going off for a shorter amount of time, it's less distracting to those around you. The results are to quote Larry David, "pretty pretty pretty good."
Apple Inc sees its mobile devices as a major platform for artificial intelligence in the future, Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams said on Monday.
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“We think that the frameworks that we’ve got, the ‘neural engines’ we’ve put in the phone, in the watch ... we do view that as a huge piece of the future, we believe these frameworks will allow developers to create apps that will do more and more in this space, so we think the phone is a major platform,” Williams said.
If you do the above calculation, for instance, you'll more often than not end up with a result like 24. That's because the animations that show when you press a button last so long – and you can't press another button until the animation.
Practically, that means that the phone will probably miss out the second add button, when you press it. Because the iPhone calculator doesn't register that press, it thinks that you've written 1 + 23, and gives you the correct result for that answer.
As photography continues to change, so do the tools that creatives use. Many professionals have expressed concern in recent years about a shifting focus away from the desktop as customers flock to mobile devices. Adobe, too, has recognized this shift. “It’s a trend I’m watching,” Hogarty said. “I do think because this [the smartphone] is the capture device, and this is also a great platform for social and sharing communication, that the role of the desktop could diminish, but I think we need to keep investing in all platforms because at the end of the day, I think about my content consumption. I definitely watch less TV on TV, but it hasn’t changed my attitude towards content in general.”
If your photography is a hobby and you don’t shoot hundreds of images a week and you find having to manage the location of your images to be a pain then Lightroom CC may be for you. Also if you rarely use Photoshop if ever and you just want an easier way to edit your images then Lightroom CC is probably what you’ve wanted all along.
I know there are people who will hang onto Lightroom 6 as long as possible, just like there are still Aperture users and I know people who still use Photoshop versions from before Creative Cloud. My view of this is that it may be easier in the short term, but what you’re really building to is a day where you wake up and your tools are broken and you can’t fix them, and now you’re in an emergency migration — and these rarely happen at a time convenient to you. So it’s a lot better to plan for and do these migrations when you can and not wait until you’re forced to. Once a tool is end of life, you need to be working towards moving away from it.
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If you are a Lightroom, um, Lightroom Classic user, just keep using it. And try to get used to the name change. If you do work with your mobile phones, I’d suggest downloading the new Lightroom and trying it out with your mobile photography and see what you think.
I’ve always admired Premiere Elements for its consumerist ease of use and dedication to making extremely complex operations accessible with its guided edits. This version still does that, with a boost of intelligent automation from the updated organizer and social networking oriented guided edits. Various performance issues marred the Action Cam Guided Edit, which could have been more streamlined and fluid. It would be nice to see Elements recognize new and increasingly popular technologies like 360-degree video, which is being targeted to consumers and hobbyists who align with Elements’ own memory maker crowd.
Qoppa Software's PDF Studio 12 is a solid update of its all-in-one PDF editing software for macOS. The latest version adds features including PDF Imposition, Scanning Configuration, Excel to PDF Conversion, Page Resize, and 4K Display Support.
Today, the developer is already delivering its first update with a variety of new features for muffle and mutes, status indicators, automatic scrolling. There are also a good mix of improvements and bug fixes in the latest version.
The software filters web surfing for your child, block apps that access the internet to run, and will also keep track of where your child is with advanced GPS tracking.
Design trends from iOS are found all over the app, from its clean, simple look highlighted by accent colors to its tab-based navigation bar, pervasive use of swipe gestures, and more. These iOS conventions pair with a browsing interface that looks and feels like a social app – if you’ve scrolled Instagram or Twitter before, you won’t have any trouble here. The thoughtful use of these tried and true designs makes Apollo instantly familiar, and thus accessible to any iOS user.
The app's biggest change is that it adds in more social options with Goodreads, a book reviewing community Amazon bought in 2014. The app also has a new design and a way to pin the book you're currently reading.
The new Kindle app still has one glaring omission on the iPhone and iPad: You can't actually buy a book. The only way to buy an e-book from Amazon on an Apple device is to log in to Amazon.com on the Safari web browser.
I wonder if Apple will allow the Mac tema free rein to cannibalize the sale of iPads. My guess is no.
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Thanks for reading.
If you’re not interested in the X — if, for example, you fear it may have some of the kinks that first iterations of Apple products often have before they’re ironed out — the iPhone 8 is a pretty nice step up from the iPhone 7, but definitely not vital. Ditto, I’m sure, for the step from the iPhone 7 Plus to iPhone 8 Plus. Stepping up from the 6S models is another story, I’m sure. More a “tock”-like feeling.
The ‘problem’ components appear to be from other manufacturers so it doesn’t seem from the outside to be Foxconn’s fault. Nevertheless, managing supply and output of the highly-anticipated iPhone X would be an important topic for Williams and Gou’s talks.
Consumer Intelligence Research Partners has examined the retail chain in the United States, and are seeing expectedly soft sales of the iPhone 8, likely in anticipation of the iPhone X. The company notes that the share of total sales make the iPhone 8 family release look more like an "s" model —but this also appears to be by Apple's design.
Bailey announced that the service is launching in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the UAE in the next few days, bringing the total number of countries where it is used up to 20. And she said that 4,000 issuers worldwide now work with the wallet (that is, there are now 4,000 credit and debit card issuers whose cards can now be uploaded to and used via Apple Pay).
While these may not sound like a massive numbers on their own, 20 markets represents a full 70 percent of the world’s card transaction volume. This underscores how Apple is approaching the roll out of its payment service: it is moving first to where the money is.
Over the past two years, after decades of declining deaths on the road, U.S. traffic fatalities surged by 14.4 percent. In 2016 alone, more than 100 people died every day in or near vehicles in America, the first time the country has passed that grim toll in a decade. Regulators, meanwhile, still have no good idea why crash-related deaths are spiking: People are driving longer distances but not tremendously so; total miles were up just 2.2 percent last year. Collectively, we seemed to be speeding and drinking a little more, but not much more than usual. Together, experts say these upticks don’t explain the surge in road deaths.
There are however three big clues, and they don’t rest along the highway. One, as you may have guessed, is the substantial increase in smartphone use by U.S. drivers as they drive. From 2014 to 2016, the share of Americans who owned an iPhone, Android phone, or something comparable rose from 75 percent to 81 percent.
It no longer sells a 256GB iPhone 7, previously the largest capacity, leaving consumers with three options: 32GB, 128GB, or the 256GB iPhone 8.
One of Apple's greatest achievement is the management of supply-chain such that Apple products do not need to sit on a shelf somewhere to wait for customers to purchase eventually.
On the other hand, Apple has never went out of its way to make sure customers do not have to wait before purchasing some desirable piece of hardware. Long lines at stores and long waits -- sometimes for weeks and months -- is not rare.
iPhone X does not break this tradition.
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Paul Zhu, 18, stood in line for 27 hours to be the new store’s first customer. Stopping for selfies with Cook and Ahrendts, Zhu hurried into a building he said “feels like home.”
Through this paradigm shift in my music consumption habits, the one iPod that stayed with me was my trusty 4th Generation iPod shuffle, because it was a perfect fit for fitness and sports activities.
Apple introduced the new feature back in April which is designed to promote music's next generation of artists on Apple Music.
The Tokyo-based company, Emonster, filed the suit on Wednesday in US federal court, saying, “Apple made the conscious decision to try to pilfer the name for itself.” The company’s CEO, Enrique Bonansea, is a US citizen living in Japan.
You either look up a dictionary because you need to quickly check what something means or because you just relish definitions and the history of words. Newly updated LookUp 4.0 aims to satisfy both uses with a redesign that concentrates on speed and gorgeous presentation. Alongside photos or line artwork that every word definition displays, the app now names and defines anything you point your camera at.
If you want an iPhone- or iPad-connected security camera and you're going the HomeKit route, the Circle 2 is easily the best choice at the moment. The only other HomeKit-compatible camera is the D-Link Omna 180 Cam HD, which records solely to microSD and has other drawbacks as well.
The operative words here are "at the moment." The hardware itself is cost-competitive, but its (paid) subscription plans aren't, and it desperately needs a louder speaker. Some form of local storage option would be good for backup purposes.
I will support a movement to simplify the whole HTML-CSS-Javascript mess that is today's web. All this still feels like programming for MS-DOS, and we are all waiting for the Mac Toolbox.
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Terry Gou, the chairman of key iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn Technology Group, and Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams are planning to meet when the latter visits Taiwan later this month, according to two industry sources.
The meeting comes at a time when iPhone X production continues to be plagued by problems with the dot projector, a component in the 3-D sensor module used for facial recognition.
"The way we look at it is building a relationship," Ahrendts said. "It's no different from fashion — don't you go back to someone who's taken really good care of you, who you trust, to make you a better version of yourself?"
She also acknowledged that Apple has told retail employees not to try to upsell customers to the most expensive iPhone model, the upcoming iPhone X (that's a Roman numeral "10," not the letter "x.")
Apple is encouraging participants of its iPhone Upgrade Program to be prepared for the release of the iPhone X, inviting customers to go through a pre-approval process for the upgrade a few days before it ships on October 27.
"Will we see an October keynote event?" Luke asked. "I think we're all Keynoted out for the season! :-)" Federighi replied.
With its huge sheets of laminated glass and an ultra-thin roof of lightweight carbon fiber the store, opening Friday, is simultaneously present and absent, there and not there. From North Michigan Avenue, you look through its glassy membrane and see the river’s blue-green waters and passing tour boats. A plaza of tiered granite steps spills down to the riverfront.
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Even accounting for possible problems, like the glare that invaded a portion of the interior during a preview Thursday, the store is a gem, realizing the vision of the late Chicago architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for buildings that would be reduced to their essence — an architecture of “almost nothing.”
Apple has been working with AT&T to extend and activate cell service for users in Puerto Rico. To improve what is a terrible connectivity situation there, it’s going to enable a provisional band of LTE that has been recently approved, but not activated in the US and Puerto Rico, where it has not been licensed.
Because LTE is not licensed on Band 8, many phones have not yet been equipped for use with it, though some newer radios are able to connect to it and use it. Apple devices from the iPhone 5c and up and running iOS 10 or higher can download a carrier setting and begin using it right away.
Tyke might be just about the simplest app you ever saw. It is also really, really useful. Tyke puts a little icon in your Mac’s menubar, and when you click it, it opens up a text scratchpad. You can jot in a quick note, or paste in some info. And that’s about it.
MacRumors reader Krar decided to email Apple CEO Tim Cook to get an update on the Mac mini and he received a response. Cook said it was "not time to share any details," but he confirmed that the Mac mini will be an important part of the company's product lineup in the future.
"We totally redid the entire plaza, putting stairs on the inside and outside. We’ve never done this before. The pavilion is totally glass, all the way around. From Michigan Avenue, you can see all the way through it to the river. The reason for all the stairs is that we wanted it to be so transparent, it looks like the pavilion becomes one with the plaza. We are the live version of Apple Music, we are the live version of that app store. There are tens of thousands of app developers in Chicago, they now have a place to come and show the city what they’ve done, even help teach the city."
Apple is opening its new flagship store in Chicago on Friday evening. Here are 5 things to look for when you get there.
The hang-up with Apple stems from the company’s rules about subscriptions sold inside apps on its iOS platform. Apple takes a cut of up to 30 percent of subscription revenue from “in app” sales.
And even though Facebook’s plan calls for users to sign up for subscriptions outside of its apps, on publishers’ individual web sites, Apple officials consider that an “in-app” purchase, since the impetus for the transaction kicked off inside Facebook’s app.
The current fracas over subscriptions might frustrate Facebook, but it’s the publishers that increasingly depend on subscriptions as their lifeblood as Facebook and Google soak up most of the digital ad revenue growth that will feel the actual impact of it.
In both Huawei and Apple’s cases, the primary use of their shiny new hardware is just generally making their phones... better. For Huawei that means monitoring how the Mate 10 is used over its lifetime and reallocating resources to keep it from slowing down; for Apple that means powering new features like Face ID and animoji.
Having computing power dedicated to AI tasks is neat, sure, but so are other features of high-end handsets — like dual camera lenses or waterproofing. Boasting about AI chips makes for good marketing now, it won’t be long before it just becomes another component.
Not only has the Apple Watch integrated well into my day-to-day life (I'm loving the deep dive that it allows me to date into data such as my sleep, workouts, and such), but it's also worked flawlessly in that time. In fact, it feels much more solid and reliable than my iPhone 8 does.
Bolstered by Apple’s recent focus on evolving the iPad platform, Ulysses 12 is primarily an iOS release; while the Mac version gains some improvements, it clearly isn’t the centerpiece here. Ulysses on iOS gains drag and drop support, multi-pane editing, streamlined library navigation, and image previews – all of which make an already powerful writing tool even better.
Today's iOS app update introduces a revamped look that Microsoft says offers a simpler, better user experience. It's easier and faster to create reminders using the new interface, and there's a redesigned profile and settings page for managing preferences.
While I like to think I have an interesting life, I know that it's not the case, as much as I'd like it to be. Fortunately, there's always video games that allow me to live the life I've always dreamed of having, because there's so much variety in what I can achieve in a digital medium. When the news of Wheels of Aurelia hit my inbox, I became intrigued because I've always wanted to go on a road trip, but the opportunity has never really come up for me. Now I can kind of live that life thanks to this interactive novel.
The Mac mini has to be an important part of Apple's product lineup. It serves many functions that cannot be performed well by either the iMac, MacBook, or iPad.
But I do expect the price of future Mac minis to be higher than what it is now. Apple is not looking at the Mac mini as the lowest-priced entry point into Apple's ecosystem for new customers. The iPad serves that function now. The Mac mini has to be looking for other purposes in life.
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There is an important reason why Apple is so insistent on that 30% cut; Apple's inflexibility in this matter minimizes loopholes that app makers can exploit. (But then, WeChat.)
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Apple created iTunes for the music industry. The company has also created iBooks for the book-publishing industry. Why isn't Apple creating anything for the newspaper and magazine industry? Seems to me after the Newstand failure, apps do not seem like a good solution, right? Or does Apple has wild ambitions for the Apple News app that it hasn't show us?
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The “Hey Siri” feature allows users to invoke Siri hands-free. A very small speech recognizer runs all the time and listens for just those two words. When it detects “Hey Siri”, the rest of Siri parses the following speech as a command or query. The “Hey Siri” detector uses a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to convert the acoustic pattern of your voice at each instant into a probability distribution over speech sounds. It then uses a temporal integration process to compute a confidence score that the phrase you uttered was “Hey Siri”. If the score is high enough, Siri wakes up. This article takes a look at the underlying technology. It is aimed primarily at readers who know something of machine learning but less about speech recognition.
The technology industry is now a playground for giants. Where 10 or 20 years ago we looked to start-ups as a font of future wonders, today the energy and momentum have shifted almost completely to the big guys. In addition to the many platforms they own already, one or more of the Five are on their way to owning artificial intelligence, voice assistants, virtual and augmented reality, robotics, home automation, and every other cool and crazy thing that will rule tomorrow.
Start-ups are still getting funding and still making breakthroughs. But their victory has never been likely (fewer than 1 percent of start-ups end up as $1 billion companies), and recently their chances of breakout success — and especially of knocking the giants off their perches — have diminished considerably.
Apple's quest to make technology more personal involves using design to remove barriers preventing people from getting the most out of technology. Instead of positioning new products as replacements for older ones, Apple is focused on coming up with alternatives. One way to accomplish this goal is to take complicated tasks and break them down into more granular tasks, which can then be handled by smaller and simpler devices.
I rebooted into macOS Recovery, ran the command and rebooted again. After the restart, my Touch ID information had been wiped from the machine.
Whatever happened to quality family time at the dinner table?
Turns out McDonald’s has been thinking the same thing. The segment of the fast food chain located in Singapore has come up with a genius idea to keep families from being glued to their phones — a campaign called “Phone Off, Fun On”. The restaurant has installed clear lockers where diners can store their devices for the duration of their meal. Families are then free to focus on spending time together while they eat … instead of checking their text messages.
Whether or not people will actually use the lockers to keep their phones has been still up for debate. In an Instagram post, a user shared a photo of the nearly empty 100-locker station at the outlet in Singapore. “Will you ever see 1 phone in da box?” he wrote to caption the picture.
Another customer at the outlet posted a photo and said his family made a genuine attempt to lock their mobiles away in the lockers but "failed within five minutes."
Analysts believe that the government was concerned about the fact that it could not track who was using the new Apple Watch due to the use of an eSIM.
Lightroom is no more. Adobe today announced a new cloud-based Lightroom called Lightroom CC. The current desktop-based app you know as Lightroom is being rebranded as Lightroom Classic CC. Lightroom Classic will be desktop-oriented, while Lightroom CC will be cloud and mobile focused.
Interior decorating can be hard — especially if you've got a small apartment in New York City like me. However, you can make this process much easier with Amikasa, an augmented reality room designing app.
There are so many things in my life that, seems like, require a reboot or two occasionally so that they can work right.
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Some macOS High Sierra users are reporting delays in receiving iMessages on their Macs, while also finding that they are no longer receiving iMessage notifications on their iOS devices and Apple Watches.
That latter fact suggests that the bug may be related to Apple’s plans to offer iCloud sync of messages later this year.
Apple today has updated its iTunes U app for iOS with a notable change. The update, which brings the app to version 3.6, follows precedent set by the most recent release of iTunes and moves iTunes U Collections to the Podcasts app.
Perhaps it’s true that less dirt gets under butterfly switched-keys. But therein lies the problem — when dirt does get in, it cannot get out. A piece of dust is capable of rendering a butterfly switch nonfunctional. They key won't click, and it won’t register whatever command it’s supposed to be typing. It’s effectively dead until someone can either shake loose the debris trapped under it or blow at the upside-down keyboard Nintendo-cartridge style.
General Electric Co. is teaming up with Apple Inc. to develop mobile apps for managing machinery, factories and power plants as the industrial giant steps up efforts to sell software and services.
The Boston-based company on Oct. 26 will publish a toolkit it has built with Apple that helps developers build software for iPhones and iPads that uses its Predix data-collection and analysis tool, Kevin Ichhpurani, the head of sales at GE’s digital division, said in an interview. Apple is making Predix its preferred tool for connected factories.
I was watching someone drawing on an iPad with an Apple pencil, and I was jealous. Not because I don't have an Apple pencil, but that I can't draw.
I don't exepct to be magically able to draw stuff if I do get an Apple pencil. But, I wonder if there are apps that teaches me to draw?
(There has to be, right?)
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Speaking of teach -- I wonder what happened to those music lessons in GarageBand? Maybe I should learn how to play a musical instrument instead.
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Or maybe just learn Swift? That I can manage...
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Thanks for reading.
Apple has told iMore that KRACK has already been fixed in the beta versions of iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, and that AirPort routers and Time Capusules don't appear to be vulnerable too the exploit.
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To be honest, for the next couple of days there aren't a ton of public options available to you. We're not going to tell you how it works or where to find more information on how exactly the attack works. But we can tell you what you can (and should do) to stay as safe as possible.
While Windows and iOS devices are immune to one flavor of the attack, they are susceptible to others. And all major operating systems are vulnerable to at least one form of the KRACK attack. And in an addendum posted today, the researchers noted that things are worse than they appeared at the time the paper was written:
One of the problems with IEEE is that the standards are highly complex and get made via a closed-door process of private meetings. More importantly, even after the fact, they’re hard for ordinary security researchers to access. Go ahead and google for the IETF TLS or IPSec specifications — you’ll find detailed protocol documentation at the top of your Google results. Now go try to Google for the 802.11i standards. I wish you luck.
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The second problem is that the IEEE standards are poorly specified. As the KRACK paper points out, there is no formal description of the 802.11i handshake state machine. This means that implementers have to implement their code using scraps of pseudocode scattered around the standards document. It happens that this pseudocode leads to the broken implementation that enables KRACK. So that’s bad too.
If you own a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display released in Mid 2012 or Early 2013, and your notebook qualifies for battery service, the repair should be free if you are willing to wait for around one month.
"First of all, the iPhone is 10 years old. That is the last decade. The iPad came after that and the Watch came after that. So, I disagree vehemently with that and I think we’ve been incredibly innovative. That doesn’t even take into account the work that has been done on the Mac, iOS and MacOS, from that standpoint where I think we’ve led the market. When you think of the products that we’ve built over time, you own a lot of them. And you just assume that every year was a new product. But it wasn’t. You can’t do revolutionary new products, every two months or six months or whatever. They take time."
Apple published a white paper in September answering many of the same questions, such as how much of your face's image the company actually stores, how long it saves the image and what apps can use Face ID. In its response to Franken, Apple reiterated points it made in the white paper, explicitly pointing out the phone doesn't store or send biometric information.
Apple has considered an expansion into health care clinics, and had talks to buy a start-up called Crossover Health, which works with big employers to build and run on-site medical clinics, according to three sources familiar.
Crossover Health is one of a small number of companies that specialize in working with self-insured employers to provide medical and wellness services on or near to campus. Among its clients are Apple and Facebook.
Twitter was built at the tail end of that era. Their goal was giving everyone a voice. They were so obsessed with giving everyone a voice that they never stopped to wonder what would happen when everyone got one. And they never asked themselves what everyone meant. That’s Twitter’s original sin. Like Oppenheimer, Twitter was so obsessed with splitting the atom they never stopped to think what we’d do with it.
Twitter, which was conceived and built by a room of privileged white boys (some of them my friends!), never considered the possibility that they were building a bomb. To this day, Jack Dorsey doesn’t realize the size of the bomb he’s sitting on. Or if he does, he believes it’s metaphorical. It’s not. He is utterly unprepared for the burden he’s found himself responsible for.
The app allows you to transfer any file wirelessly and remotely between iOS, Android, Mac and PC computers, with “one click”.
A new app aims to automatically scan your iPhone for nudes, moving them to a protected vault in the app and then deleting them from both the camera roll and iCloud.
I may be romanticizing the past, but I seemed to have enjoyed Usenet more than Twitter and Facebook combined.
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An air of unease set into the security circles on Sunday as they prepared for the disclosure of high-severity vulnerabilities in the Wi-Fi Protected Access II protocol that make it possible for attackers to eavesdrop Wi-Fi traffic passing between computers and access points.
The proof-of-concept exploit is called KRACK, short for Key Reinstallation Attacks. The research has been a closely guarded secret for weeks ahead of a coordinated disclosure that's scheduled for 8am Monday, East Coast time. A website disclosing the vulnerability said it affects the core WPA2 protocol itself and is effective against devices running the Android, Linux, Apple, Windows, and OpenBSD operating systems, as well as MediaTek Linksys, and other types of devices. The site warned attackers can exploit it to decrypt a wealth of sensitive data that's normally encrypted by the nearly ubiquitous Wi-Fi encryption protocol.
"This can be abused to steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, photos, and so on. The attack works against all modern protected Wi-Fi networks. Depending on the network configuration, it is also possible to inject and manipulate data. For example, an attacker might be able to inject ransomware or other malware into websites."
The point about racial bias, and whether Apple’s Face ID will reliably and regularly work for users of all races, is particularly poignant since it’s not just an issue of security but one that is so entrenched in our cultural zeitgeist.
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Was Apple’s data base big enough and diverse enough to be truly race inclusive? Soon enough we will know, and there will be much the whole industry will learn to update and hone our practices so that this technology functions just as a convenience — and not necessarily a cultural hot button.
Imagine a world in which we can take a picture of anything and let the algorithms sort it out. Maybe we do that in real time through a lens — be it the phone screen, or some wearable, or something else — or maybe we do it after the fact. When scrolling through a camera roll, maybe we see a picture we took, and with one tap, we see everything we could ever want to know about what’s in that image. It’s like an augmented memory. And it’s all within sight.
What all three phones have though, is Apple's new A11 Bionic chip, which happens to be the most powerful mobile processor on the market right now by far. They also have fast charging, wireless charging, the ability to record 4K video at 60fps, and to record 1080p Slo Mo at 240fps.
Ultimately, the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus are the ones that you'd get if you don't like change. The iPhone X doesn't have a home button anymore, which means that the entire way that you use your phone will be different.
So I’m cool with it. Lean, Agile, Waterfall, whatever, the fact is we need some kind of common ideology to co-operate in large numbers. None of them are evil, so it’s not like you’re picking racism over socialism or something. Whichever one you pick is not going to reflect the reality, but if you expect perfection you will be disappointed. And watch yourself for unspoken or unarticulated collective fictions. Your life is full of them. Like that your opinion is important.
Sharing wired headphones with someone isn't just a kind gesture — it's a personal experience that connects two people through sound, but also in a literal sense.
By far my favorite new feature, however, is BBEdit 12’s capability to work with columnar data. Many people open delimited text files (like CSV or TSV files) in BBEdit to manipulate the data, but selecting or moving columns via grep-based searches is tricky. BBEdit now sports a collection of commands in Edit > Columns that let you cut, copy, clear, and rearrange columns, and Rich Siegel said that he hopes to add additional capabilities in this area in the future.
Retail employees gained access to the feature today and have been asked to install both the iOS 11.1 beta and an additional internal-only beta profile to unlock the Apple Pay Cash feature. According to the retail employee who spoke to MacRumors, Apple is also requiring iCloud accounts to be whitelisted to use Apple Pay Cash.
Today, I'm reminded of Steve Jobs' respond to Zune Social.
(Remember Zune? Remmber Zune's Social?)
Steve Jobs: I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.
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Thanks for reading.
Apple is working to fix a glitch preventing some people from launching GarageBand —the company's simplified music creation tool —after updating to iOS 11, according to an online support document.
Jason Koebler, Motherboard
So let's consider what actually happened here. iPhones that had been repaired and were in perfect working order suddenly stopped working after Apple updated its software. Apple was then able to fix the problem remotely. Apple then put out a warning blaming the parts that were used to do the repair. Poof—phone doesn't work. Poof—phone works again.
In this case, not all phones that used third party parts were affected, and there's no reason to think that, in this case, Apple broke these particular phones on purpose. But there is currently nothing stopping the company from using software to control unauthorized repair: For instance, you cannot replace the home button on an iPhone 7 without Apple's proprietary "Horizon Machine" that re-syncs a new home button with the repaired phone.
“Diversity of thought” has long been a lever used by critics of the concept of D&I work to push back against meaningful diversity efforts. Already this week, some critics of the concept of inclusive diversity work (racists, men who believe they are inherently superior, etc) were pointing at Smith’s comments with an air of smugness — likely not her intended effect.
The thrust of Smith’s email is that she realizes the mistake in using this example, and just how damaging it could be to the perception of Apple’s D&I work.
Add everything up. The chaos of a billion-person platform that competitively dominated media distribution. The known electoral efficacy of Facebook. The wild fake news and misinformation rampaging across the internet generally and Facebook specifically. The Russian info operations. All of these things were known.
And yet no one could quite put it all together: The dominant social network had altered the information and persuasion environment of the election beyond recognition while taking a very big chunk of the estimated $1.4 billion worth of digital advertising purchased during the election. There were hundreds of millions of dollars of dark ads doing their work. Fake news all over the place. Macedonian teens campaigning for Trump. Ragingly partisan media infospheres serving up only the news you wanted to hear. Who could believe anything? What room was there for policy positions when all this stuff was eating up News Feed space? Who the hell knew what was going on?
Space is a topic that has captured the attention and imagination of millions around the world. Given its vastness and mysterious nature, it is common to gaze up at the night sky and wonder how we as humans fit into the cosmic story. Although the realm of space exploration and viewing have typically required expensive and sophisticated hardware such as telescopes, the introduction of mobile apps have made it accessible to nearly anybody with an iPhone. Given these developments, this article discusses the best apps for astronomy enthusiasts that are inexpensive and can be used right from the mobile device.
Apple said it plans a $1 million donation to fire-relief efforts and is also matching employee donations two-for-one. “Our thoughts are with our Bay Area friends & neighbors affected by wildfires,” CEO Tim Cook tweeted Tuesday.
Holmen has secretly been supplying Apple with packaging for products like the iPad for over a decade, according to Swedish news site Dagens Industri (Di).
[...]
"This has been secret for so many years. It's nice to get some cred when he came and greeted us after more than ten years of development work together, " Sjölund reportedly told Di.
In a project called AutoML, Google’s researchers have taught machine-learning software to build machine-learning software. In some instances, what it comes up with is more powerful and efficient than the best systems the researchers themselves can design.
I do a lot of text and data formatting in BBEdit, and one of the great additions in this version is a Columns editing command, that enables quick processing of comma- and tab-delimited text ranges—you can cut, copy, delete, and rearrange columns. You might think that sounds like an esoteric feature, but I’ve probably pasted a tab-delimited text block from BBEdit into Microsoft Excel purely for column management hundreds of times at this point. Now I don’t have to. (Though I’d love it if BBEdit would add support for even more functions on columnar data, like sorting and maybe even styling.)
Back at IDG, I built an AppleScript script that I’d pass around inside a BBEdit package that would take a Markdown file and format in some very particular ways for the quirks of our content-management system and site design. Embedded in that script, as well, were a bunch of text replacements based on our house style—replacing “web site” with “website”, for example. BBEdit 12 includes a feature like that, too—it’s a tool called Canonize that batch searches-and-replaces text strings.
While all the apps I originally highlighted continue to fill this role well, several additional quality apps have launched that bring new things to the table in this young category of apps.
Last month, Apple released iOS 11, required to use all of the new AR apps— and, in effect, made the iPhone the most common AR platform on Earth.
Now the apps themselves are reaching the app store. Plenty of them are games, of course, and that’s great—but I wanted to see if these apps can actually be useful. Software companies have had only 12 weeks to write these apps, so they’re mostly fairly simple. I thought I’d sample the first wave and give you a report.Google's most underrated app finally comes to iPhone](https://www.cultofmac.com/508043/googles-underrated-app-finally-comes-iphone/), by Killian Bell, Cult of Mac
Opinion Rewards is a genuine and incredibly easy way to earn real money. Google sends out more than 3 million surveys every week from companies big and small. You get the chance to answer some of them and you get paid up to $1 a time for your efforts.
“If you have a VC asking you that you should get up and walk out of the room,” said Cook, qualifying himself slightly by saying that at least is what he would do if he were in such a position.
“You should not be attracted to that kind of money,” he added. “Because those people are not for growing you company and helping you — they’re for a quick buck and it’s not worth it.”
[...]
Responding to a question about how to figure out when you should stick at a product or piece of work which appears to be failing and when to scrap everything and start again, Cook pointed to Apple’s failed Cube desktop as an example of a time when, even with a lot of time and effort invested, the company had made a quick decision to kill off a product.
“It was a very important product for us, we put a lot of love into it, we put enormous engineering into it… It was a spectacular failure commercially — from the first day, almost,” he said. “And within three months we withdrew it. We had to look at ourselves in the mirror and say we missed this one.
The central principle to product development at Apple is to build solutions that people at the company “want to use”, said Cook. The argument is that if you want to use it, others will do so too. A second point is to make sure those products are created with care. “I think we sense care in the same way we sense carelessness,” Apple Chief Design Officer, Jony Ive, told the New Yorker.
Fashion shows are particularly ripe for AR intervention, he said: “If you think about a runway show in the fashion world, that's a great application of AR because some of these, you want to see the dress all the way around, you do not want to just see the front.” That kind of experience is all the more important now that runway shows are catering to a wider consumer audience watching online, and not just those seated in the front rows, he added.
[...]
It will also take some time before we’ll be able to scan and identify other women’s coats on our phones. Cook says the company has no plans to build the giant database of clothes, shoes and other goods that would make it possible. But Apple does plan to support companies who might embark on such an endeavour, he said. “We don't have a plan to collect all of these objects, but I know companies who are working on that for their products,” Cook said. “If you think about companies that offer a fair number of shoes, and [if a customer] sees a shoe and goes I want that one, you just want to point and [buy]. That will be a part of the shopping experience of the future, it absolutely will.”
Apple is continuing its relentless march to deal with important iOS 11 bugs with iOS 11.0.3, the third weekly update since iOS 11’s launch. This one fixes problems with audio and haptic feedback on some iPhone 7 and 7 Plus units.
Apple’s already got a subscription-based digital media service up and running, and it’s Apple Music. That’s where its premium video content has gone so far, so it’s fair to ask if Apple’s TV efforts will simply be added to the existing Apple Music subscription. It would certainly be cleaner and easier if Apple kept adding things to Apple Music and continued trying to grow the Apple Music subscriber base.
But I’m skeptical about this, because Apple’s got a stated goal of growing services revenue, and most of its competitors in the video and music spaces offer individual services, not a single combined one.
Apple has finally been granted permission to build its €850M ($1B) European data center in Ireland, more than two-and-a-half years after it was first announced. The decision was made by Ireland’s High Court this morning, after a lengthy planning battle.
The decision was so long delayed that Apple not only had time to complete construction of the Danish data center announced at the same time, but to announce a second one there – raising concerns that the company may have given up on Ireland.
Perhaps the most common use case will be responding to emails late at night and wanting them to send as soon as the next work day kicks off, which the Tomorrow option is perfect for. Thankfully, you can also set a custom date and time. Once you schedule the delivery time, Spark will take care of the rest.
From the Personality screen in Settings, there are now a variety of new voices that can be set for CARROT, including both female and male options. Among these is FRED, the voice used for the original Mac. My personal favorite is JEEVES, whose smug butler tone makes me feel inferior in a way I thought only the original CARROT could.
Movies Anywhere, a free app and website digital locker service, launches tonight at 9 p.m. PT, backed by four top digital retailers and content from Walt Disney (including Pixar, Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm), Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Entertainment — a combined library of more than 7,300 digital movies.
Movies can be redeemed through digital retailers Amazon Video, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu (owned by Walmart). Movies Anywhere is a Disney-owned entity that operates independently with input from an advisory committee with members from each of the participating studios, according to a Disney spokesperson.
Trello was so focused on building its free customer base first and monetizing later; by the time it looked to its paid subscribers, it was too late — they’d already moved on. While that makes Trello a perfect complement to Atlassian’s suite of enterprise productivity tools, it hampered the company from growing further on its own.
Note: Link goes to PDF document.
Forests are a wonderful resource for cleaning air, purifying water, sequestering carbon, and sheltering wildlife. As part of Apple’s commitment to resource conservation, we designed and run a program to address the impact of our use of paper for packaging. The initiative started with a detailed assessment of Apple’s fiber use, which led to a three-part strategy: (1) use paper more efficiently and, where possible, use recycled paper; (2) source virgin fiber responsibly; and (3) protect and create sustainable working forests. The third initiative—though not an obvious course of action at the project’s outset—helped ensure that our efforts to source virgin fiber responsibly do not simply take away from the world’s supply of paper derived from sustainably managed forests, but also grow the supply. We hope this case study offers a model from which others can learn and inspires action to protect working forests and ther resources on which we all rely.
Apple did this in two ways: First, iPhones used to use two stacked plastic trays inside the box, one for the actual iPhone and one for its charger and EarPods. The iPhone 7 packaging only has one tray — and it's made out of a kind of paper, not a plastic.
Apple also simplified how it wraps its headphones. Before, your new white earbuds came wrapped in a plastic case. The case wasn't reusable, though, it was only to get the earbuds to the customer safely.
Now, Apple's headphones come wrapped around a stiff cardboard holder that's been folded and cut to perfectly fit into the iPhone box.
That ethos has slowly found its way into other companies too. “Everybody’s in the service business, they just don’t all know it yet.” says Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad, a company (later purchased by Best Buy) that glamorized computer repair before Apple did. That meant abandoning the commission-based sales model that has long motivated retail employees. Stephens cited Miracle on 34th Street, in which a Macy’s Santa Claus sends a customer to a rival department store to get what she needs. That, he said, was the “atomic birth of the honest service principle.”
This sense—that company employees are trying to help you, not sell you something—is also the ethos at the Genius Bar, whose cultish, proscriptive training manual is legendary for its emphasis on empathy and vibes in the service of sales. When Johnson and I spoke on the phone this week, he imitated the Yogi-like ethic of a modern retail employee: “I’m not here to sell food or sell computers. I’m here to enrich your life.”
Apple is zeroing in on a reboot of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories as one of its first series in its foray into original programming under Jamie Erlicht & Zack Van Amburg, heads of the newly formed worldwide video programming division.
The tech giant is nearing a deal for a remake of the cult Spielberg-produced anthology series, which aired from 1985-87 series on NBC. The project, written by Hannibal and American Gods‘ Bryan Fuller, was originally set up at NBC two years ago. It comes from Spielberg’s Amblin TV and Universal TV, with Amblin TV’s Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey executive producing the reboot alongside Fuller.
This is just the first of what’s sure to be a hail of announcements this fall and winter. This $50 million investment is a drop in the bucket. The Journal earlier reported that Apple’s expected to have $1 billion to spend on original content this year. That’s not much compared to the $7 billion Netflix is expected to spend next year, but a billion dollars buys an awful lot of programming.
But there’s no doubt that new, AR-focused products will come, from someone else if not Apple – the most obvious application of this technology is in glasses. The idea of eyewear that includes computers was undermined quite a little by Google Glass, and the “glassholes” that wore them, but once you start using augmented reality it’s clear that it would work brilliantly if it were strapped to your face.
[...]
“But today I can tell you the technology itself doesn’t exist to do that in a quality way. The display technology required, as well as putting enough stuff around your face – there’s huge challenges with that.
“The field of view, the quality of the display itself, it’s not there yet,” he says. And as with all of its products, Apple will only ship something if it feels it can do it “in a quality way”.
The Supreme Court asked the Trump administration for advice on a consumer lawsuit that accuses Apple Inc. of trying to monopolize the market for iPhone apps so it can charge excessive commissions.
The request to U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco suggests the justices are interested in hearing Apple’s appeal. The company contends consumers can’t press the antitrust lawsuit because the 30 percent commission is levied on the app developers, not the purchasers.
An A&E doctor has designed an app which aims to give mental health patients help on the same day they need it.
Dr Julian Nesbitt has designed the app after finding that thousands of patients try to take their own lives and end up in A&E because they could not access the help they needed fast enough.
After 10 minutes, a New Guard engineer, Jordan raises her hand and asks, “Can we go around the table and introduce ourselves?” It is this moment that makes this meeting memorable.
The silence is deafening. It’s the Old Guard realizing there are strangers in the room. That’s never happened before. It’s the New Guard breathing a mental sigh of relief, “Finally, I am going to figure out who these people are and what they do.”
And, finally, it’s me realizing, “Oh, these people don’t know each other. They’re not a team, yet.”
I did enjoy Amazong Stories, back in the 80s.
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Thanks for reading.
iOS asks the user for their iTunes password for many reasons, the most common ones are recently installed iOS operating system updates, or iOS apps that are stuck during installation.
As a result, users are trained to just enter their Apple ID password whenever iOS prompts you to do so. However, those popups are not only shown on the lock screen, and the home screen, but also inside random apps, e.g. when they want to access iCloud, GameCenter or In-App-Purchases.
This could easily be abused by any app, just by showing an UIAlertController, that looks exactly like the system dialog.
Even users who know a lot about technology have a hard time detecting that those alerts are phishing attacks.
It's a real shame that most owners will never get to experience fast charging. Apple bundled a standard charger and cable with the new iPhone, which means that to make use of fast charging owners will need Apple's crazy-expensive $25 USB-C to Lightning cable, and a Power Delivery compatible charger.
They might know for a fact that “I wish my iPhone charged faster” is low on the list, perhaps because most iPhone users exclusively charge their phones overnight.
iPhone X is increasingly making early appearances as Apple employees routinely carry around the new device and use it openly in public. If it had a less distinctive design, perhaps nobody would have noticed.
Apple is working on a fix for a Reachability bug that prevents the new iOS 11 Cover Screen with Notifications from being accessible from the middle of the iPhone's display, Apple engineering chief Craig Federighi told a MacRumors reader this afternoon.
The Iconfactory said its goal was to deliver a minimal Twitter client, like the original Twitterrific for Mac, but with a feature set that caters to how people use Twitter in 2017, as opposed to 2007.
Only eight months have passed since the crowdfunding campaign began, so some key features are still missing at launch, but The Iconfactory promises they will be added in subsequent updates to the app.
Where Twitterrific for macOS succeeds, however, is by offering a solid set of core functionality on which The Iconfactory can build additional features. The launch-day feature set is sufficient for most users and, I expect more power-user features will come over time. I’ve used the app throughout the Kickstarter beta period and expect to continue using it, though I’m not ready to commit to it full time without the ability to create muffles on my Mac. Still, in a category that hasn’t seen much action on the Mac in recent years, it’s great to see Twitterrific back in the mix.
Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook met Emmanuel Macron in Paris Monday, and according to French officials he didn’t push back against calls by the French president and European allies to change rules in the region to get technology giants to pay more taxes.
[...]
Macron is leading a group of countries -- including Germany, Italy and Spain -- that are seeking a way to plug the European loopholes that allow some companies to minimize taxes by funneling profits to jurisdictions such as Ireland or the Netherlands. Macron’s office said the two didn’t discuss past tax disputes, but Cook accepted that fiscal laws worldwide are shifting toward making companies pay tax where money is actually earned.
The Apple chief executive paid a surprise visit to Eldim, a Normandy-based firm that has tested optical technology used in the facial recognition system inside new top-of-the-range iPhone X smartphones due out next month. [...] “Bravo for your work!”, Cook said on his official Twitter account in French. A picture of him chatting with Eldim employees was also posted.
As if the hardware and software missteps were not enough, public displays of "no confidence" were the final nail in the coffin of the platform. In July 2015, Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella announced that 7,800 employees, primarily from the company's hardware division, were to be laid off, while the near-$8 billion value of the Nokia business was to be written down. Sources close to the matter tell us that these layoffs are the reason for, for example, the lack of CDMA support in Windows Mobile 10: the people with the relevant technical expertise were simply let go.
We've also heard of consequences beyond that; people within the company have told us that Microsoft's tardiness at updating the Surface Pro, for example, was fallout of these hardware layoffs. Microsoft didn't (and perhaps still doesn't) have enough personnel to develop the Xbox One S, Xbox One X, and Surface Studio and revise the Surface Pro and Surface Book at the same time.
In its stronger markets, Windows Phone just about held steady over 2014 before declining sharply in 2015 and 2016. The lack of desirable hardware, the lack of progress in the software, and the lack of management support meant that, instead of building on the successes of 2012 and 2013, Windows on phones was allowed to die.
Microsoft's struggle with mobile will surely go down as another black mark on the firm's track record of coming late to market, of refining its product and of eviscerating the competition through a combination of product, pricing and channel and partner relationships. As the creator of the world's most widely used desktop operating systems and one-time browser king, it was inconceivable that Microsoft would be unable to similarly dominate the mobile market.
Yet, due to a series of missteps, misfortunes and misjudgements, Microsoft left the mobile market, with nothing to show for it but broken partnerships and waning influence in an increasingly mobile-first world.
Using the Apple TV 4K, I can see and appreciate Apple’s vision for a better TV experience. However, the realities of the entertainment business have prevented that vision from being fully realized—the Apple TV 4K might still be a little too far ahead of its time.
Attempted renovation of the overall TV browsing and viewing experience aside, this device still aims to be the best, most advanced TV streaming device on the market. Generally, it succeeds, but its high cost and dependency on other Apple services makes it fall just shy of an unqualified recommendation.
That’s the thing about Apple Watch – it weaves itself so intimately inside your daily experience you begin to use it unconsciously. Just like a watch.
Of all the utilities I couldn’t live without on my Mac, Peter Lewis’s Keyboard Maestro is perhaps the most important. It helps me switch between apps, type frequently used text, open collections of apps for specific tasks, set up my Mac at appropriate times for automated tasks, and a whole host of other things.
The app excels as a way to capture handwritten or typed notes, but one of its greatest strengths is the ability to combine notes with other media, which drag and drop makes easier than ever.
Bobby’s goal is to provide easy insight into the fixed costs in your life. Once you get the app up and running, opening it provides a quick overview of all current subscriptions, sorted by the dates those payments are due. After you plug in your subscriptions, Bobby is a simple, attractive point of reference for seeing exactly where your money’s going. But the task of inputting subscriptions is still important, and Bobby excels at streamlining the process.
Since I’ve lived in my van I’ve never felt the need for a vacation or a change. Instead of following a fixed plan, I get inspired by random ideas: When the waves are great, I go surfing. When it’s chill and fresh, I work. When it’s hot, I go for a swim. When I’m tired, I sleep. When I like a place, I stay. When I meet someone cool, I join them for a while. When my van breaks, I try to get it fixed.
If someone wants you to call him a 'he', you'll oblige, right? If someone wants you to call her a 'she', you'll do that too, right?
If a computer company asks you to write as 'NeXT', will you? If a magazine asks you to write as 'TidBITS', will you?
If a phone company asks you to pronounce as 'Ten', will you, or will you contineu to call it an 'Ex'?
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Thanks for reading.
Apple offers a special version of iTunes, iTunes 12.6.3, which retains the features that were abruptly removed in iTunes 12.7.
Apple positions this build as necessary for some businesses performing internal app deployments but it is available to download by anyone.
It’s unfortunate but if you want to stay within the Apple fold, iCloud is fast become the new hub. In the long term, that’s probably not a bad thing as it means your data, apps and services will follow you around and be device independent. But until ubiquitous, fast, reliable and affordable internet connectivity is available to everyone, there will be some people who simply are unable to keep up with Apple in the new world.
An unfortunate bug in macOS High Sierra stained a bit its generally well-received debut, and from this root-case analysis we can learn what happened exactly and how good software development practices (including testable design and strict code reviews) can help reduce the chance that this kind of problems happen again in the future.
EyeTV boasts many superior individual features, like live TV and more precise scheduling. If you want to fine-tune your recording schedules, or more easily automate your recordings with AppleScript, you may want to go with EyeTV despite its idiosyncrasies and its hefty up-front price.
But for most users, EyeTV's strong suits aren't strong enough to outweigh Plex's good looks and impressive ease of use. EyeTV hasn't seen a major update in years — and likely won't, since it was recently sold to new owner Geniatech, which seems uninterested in investing too heavily in its development. Meanwhile, Plex is already working on bringing live TV (and hopefully commercial skipping) to its Mac app in future versions. Its ability to incorporate music and movies, and especially to stream your content anywhere you go, leaves EyeTV eating its dust.
If you own a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, Parallels Desktop 13 for Mac is a must-have upgrade. That’s because key features of Windows 10 will now appear on the Touch Bar while a VM is running, a feature that works straight away for the Start Menu, Cortana, Desktop, File Explorer, and popular web browsers like Edge, Chrome, and Firefox.
They're not quite as comfortable or top-tier as the QC35s, but if easy connectivity and lengthy battery life matters to you more than having the edge in comfort or industry-leading noise cancellation, they're a solid alternative and more than worth considering.
On some mornings, I wake up and feel that I am ready to go out and help solve problems. These are not profound problems -- I'm definitely not solving problems of world-hunger or world-peace's magnitute. These are just some problems some people have, and I help solve them so that I get to eat and buy an iPhone or two.
And then, on some mornings, I wake up and realize that I am just writing some PHP codes to make sure the number over there tallies with the number over here, and I feel depressed.
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Some iTunes programmer somewhere in Apple Park or Infinite Loop is progressing nicely along the way, streamlining and refactoring the giant beast known as iTunes, when some supervisor comes over and say, hey, our enterprise customers are having some problems with the latest version of iTunes, can you please solve their problems? And this programmer look at the problems, and say, screw it, just retrieve some older version of iTunes from the source control, put in online, and call it a day.
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Thanks for reading.
One interesting tidbit in the video is the wallpaper. This wallpaper is a new dynamic option and is seemingly exclusive to the iPhone X, which makes sense as black will look stunning on the OLED display.
The SE has proven to be the culmination of the most timeless iPhone designs Apple has produced, and it may remain so for a very long time. Its basic design comes directly from the iPhone 5 launched in 2012, which rounded off the iPhone 4’s boxy edges and dropped the glass backing. While smaller and less powerful than its successors, the SE is the ur-machine, the blueprint for a device that has come to define the digital age.
Apple CEO Tim Cook will meet French president Emmanuel Macron on Monday, according to the Élysée Palace's official published agenda. Cook has been invited to the head of state's Paris residence for an afternoon meeting, but the reasons for the visit have not yet been made public.
[...]
France has called for an aggressive overhaul of how tech companies like Apple pay tax across the European Union, and President Macron is one of the leaders behind the tax crackdown, which has a goal of bringing a more unified corporate tax system across the euro states.
Typography is the technique of arranging type for Effective communication and a bit of delight.
There is an AR app out there that solves Sudoku puzzles.
That is not what I want. What I do want is to point the camera to my half-solved Sudoku puzzle (in my paper-based book), and start giving me hints on how to approach the puzzle.
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Actually, come to think of it: why do you need AR to solve Sudoku puzzles?
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Thanks for reading.
Asked what he detests, Ive said “most things.” That’s because he said most things are built in an opportunistic way, either because of cost or a demanding schedule. He said products are very rarely “built for people.”
Ive said the design team was inspired by the “loathing” the team members had for their older, pre-iPhone phones. He said they were “soul destroying.” Ive said that while we don’t always know why we might like something, we can sense when it’s created with care. That relates to everything, from selecting raw materials down to the design process.
Jony says there are two behaviors: being inquisitive and curious and light on your feet. But at the same time, if you’re going to do something new, there’s a reason it hasn’t been done before and you must be determined. He said this change is exhausting but required.
I thought about the interview and realized how many times David Remnick asked Ive a question and invited him to be humble. Ive never bit. He’d meander his way back to discussing the search for perfection, the quest to build things with paramount utility that not only worked well but looked great. And in looking around my world, I realized once again how Jony Ive (along with Steve Jobs and an army of geniuses in Cupertino) has managed to create a series of products that are as ubiquitous as the shoes on our feet. No wonder Ive’s not so eager to be humble. He’s still human, though.
Mac apps such as TextExpander essentially became unqualified for the Mac App Store with the advent of sandboxing, because they require access to system services such as monitoring the user’s keyboard input, in order to provide valuable macro text substitution. If entitlements were transparent across the board, and users were consistently informed about the extent of an application’s capabilities, it would empower users to make more reasonable decisions about the software they run. It would empower them to allow apps like TextExpander that are currently disallowed by the App Store’s sandboxing policies, and it would empower them to reject apps like Uber that are, surprisingly, allowed to capture footage of users’ activity even when running other apps.
Apple on Friday revealed that the company's current general counsel, Bruce Sewell, will be retiring at the end of 2017, to be replaced by Katherine Adams, who was previously a senior VP and general counsel for Honeywell.
Eric Billingsley, director of internet services operations at Apple, was in charge of operating infrastructure for iCloud services, including the iCloud Drive document storage service that competes with services like Dropbox and Microsoft's OneDrive.
A source close to the situation said that Billingsley's old team is reporting to engineering vice president Patrice Gautier.
For all we like to worry about how much of life happens on the internet now, a lot of life happened on AIM. Friendships and relationships started, ended, and often took place mostly in a chat window. It always started the same way: one person waiting for the other's name to pop up on their Buddy List, then trying to wait at least a few seconds before chatting them so as not to seem desperate. Long before group texts, we planned life on AIM.
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Even now, there are features AIM figured out that nobody else has successfully replicated. If someone was trolling you or being offensive on AIM, you had real power: a "warn" button that would actually slow down the internet connection of the person on the other side before eventually cutting them off. It's odd, too, that away messages have disappeared: in a world where we'd all like to be a little less connected, a way to say "I'm here but not really" couldn't be more useful.
AIM showed us how to live online, for good and for ill. We all live our whole lives in text chains and group threads now. We plan every hangout, we send every news article, we proclaim every relationship in the river of text it taught us to sail. Honestly, that river has been a little scary lately. Instant messaging, once a special thrill, now sets the texture of our common life. But AIM taught us how to live online first. So AIM, my old buddy, don’t feel bad if you see us shedding a tear. We know what you have to do. For we’ll see you waving from such great heights—
“Come down now,” we’ll say.
But everything looks perfect from far away.
“Come down now,” but you’ll stay.
If you want Apple W1 features and noise cancellation, this is the only game in town. Some people will also prefer the Beats look as a fashion statement.
Across the U.S., one in 68 children -- or 1.5 percent -- has autism spectrum disorder, according to the CDC. Helping build foundational music knowledge helps this growing population, Van Dam said.
“It’s expressive. You can say something about how you feel,” he said. “It’s giving kids the opportunity to explore what they want to say.”
In addition to bug fixes, Pixelmator 3.7 supports importing HEIF image files. Pixelmator can be opened directly from Apple Photos now too.
A brief message posted to Apple's Developer News and Updates webpage outlines three key resources produced to assist in the creation and marketing of ARKit apps.
But if you’re still using Objective-C, you’re not alone – many other developers still prefer Objective-C to Swift, and with good reasons. I got in touch with some Objective-C developers to ask what’s holding them back, whether they feel Objective-C development has become stigmatized, and more – here’s what they had to say…
New office designs are coming to a workplace near you, with layouts meant to cater to the variety of tasks required of modern white-collar workers. Put another way, it means people don’t sit in just one place.
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The new model eschews the common dogmas of work life: Everybody gets an office, or everyone gets a cubicle, or everybody gets a seat on a workbench. A diversity of spaces, experts say, is more productive, and the new concept is called “activity-based workplace design,” tailoring spaces for the kind of work done.
The company has taken its first swing at the most egregious problems in macOS 10.13 High Sierra, not with the 10.13.1 update that we had expected, but with the “macOS High Sierra 10.13 Supplemental Update.” It’s highly focused, providing fixes for five specific problems.
The number of people affected — those with physical access to a device with an existing APFS container that also has an additional, encrypted APFS container who wouldn't also have the password to that container — is probably tiny. Still, Apple has provided the following instructions for how to roll back even under those circumstances.
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Also note, if you used the same password for your encrypted APFS container as any other accounts (for example, your Mac user account), change those accounts. Better safe than sorry.
Apple has shown off more emoji characters coming to iOS in the future 11.1 update. The characters are part of Unicode 10, which added 56 new emoji; Apple is revealing over 30 of its new designs today in addition to the handful the company put out on World Emoji Day earlier this year.
To improve functionality between Uber’s app and the Apple Watch, Apple allowed Uber to use a powerful tool that could record a user’s iPhone screen, even if Uber’s app was only running in the background, security researchers told Gizmodo. After the researchers discovered the tool, Uber said it is no longer in use and will be removed from the app.
The screen recording capability comes from what’s called an “entitlement”—a bit of code that app developers can use for anything from setting up push notifications to interacting with Apple systems like iCloud or Apple Pay. This particular entitlement, however, isn’t common and would require Apple’s explicit permission to use, the researchers explained. Will Strafach, a security researcher and CEO of Sudo Security Group, said he couldn’t find any other apps with the entitlement live on the App Store.
When a phone is designed to behave in a way other than what the UI suggests, it results in both security and privacy problems. A user has no visual or textual clues to understand the device's behavior, which can result in a loss of trust in operating system designers to faithfully communicate what’s going on. Since users rely on the operating system as the bedrock for most security and privacy decisions, no matter what app or connected device they may be using, this trust is fundamental.
In an attempt to keep you connected to Apple devices and services, iOS 11 compromises users' security. Such a loophole in connectivity can potentially leave users open to new attacks.
Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies.
Rosenstein purchased a new iPhone and instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading any apps.
The Apple Watch Series 3 is noticeably faster than the Series 2 (let alone the original model), making the interface much more responsive and reducing annoying wait times. In a glanceable device like the Apple Watch, there is perhaps no greater sin than forcing the user to stare at a spinning animation while… nothing… happens. That happens a lot less on the Series 3 watch, and the waits (when they appear) are much more brief. Siri also tends to come up faster, though there are still frustrating random pauses where I’m not allowed to talk to Siri. With Apple Watch Series 3, Siri can talk back to you, which is a good addition—the last thing I need to do is stare intently at my wrist for longer than I need to.
Keymand is an iPad app that turn the iPad into an application-specific keyboard for Mac applications like Final Cut Pro. Hardware application-specific keyboards exist, but they aren’t particularly well-suited to tasks beyond the ones for the apps they are designed for. Keymand can work with a wide array of apps, not just production apps that most application-specific keyboards focus on.
We already had project libraries, now you can show assets under the Global Library icon and store and reuse common assets here, such as your intro/outro graphics for each video. This is going to be a real time saver and it will also save some space on your disk.
In 1982, Apple was in its sixth year of existence, and Steve Jobs, Apple’s cofounder and Chairman, was twenty-eight years old. Steve, intuitive and fanatical about great design, realized that the company was in crisis. With the exception of the aging Apple IIe, the company’s products were failing against IBM’s PCs. And they all were ugly, especially the Apple III and soon-to-be-released Apple Lisa. The company’s previous CEO, Michael Scott, had created different “business divisions” for each product line, including accessories such as monitors and memory drives. Each division had its own head of design and developed its product line any way it wanted to. As a result, Apple’s products shared little in the way of a common design language or overall synthesis. In essence, bad design was both the symptom and a contributing cause of Apple’s corporate disease. Steve’s desire to end this disjointed approach gave birth to a strategic design project that would revolutionize Apple’s brand and product lines, change the trajectory of the company’s future, and eventually redefine the way the world thinks about and uses consumer electronics and communication technologies.
The idea for the project was inspired by the work of the Richardson Smith Design Agency (later acquired by Fitch) for Xerox in which the designers collaborated with multiple divisions within Xerox to create a single high-level “design language” that the company could implement throughout its organization. Jerry Manock, the designer of the Apple II and head of design in Apple’s Macintosh division, and Rob Gemmell, head of design in the Apple II division, created a plan in which they would invite global designers to Apple headquarters and, after interviewing all of them, stage a competition between the two top candidates. Apple would choose a final winner and then use that design as the framework for its new design language. No one knew at that time, however, that we were in the process of transforming Apple into a company whose design-based strategy and innovation-over-money approach would make it a global success.
Excerpt from Design Forward: Creative Strategies for Sustainable Change, by Hartmut Esslinger.
watchOS 4.0.1 addresses a serious Wi-Fi bug impacting the performance of the new LTE-enabled Apple Watch Series 3 models.
There are now at least five cases of possible iPhone 8 Plus battery failure, following reports in Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong last week.
Ohio State University today announced that it has worked with Apple to create a comprehensive, university-wide digital learning experience that includes an iOS design laboratory and opportunities for students to learn coding skills.
Called the Digital Flagship University, the initiative will include an effort to integrate learning technology into the entire university experience. Along with the aforementioned iOS design lab, which will be available to faculty, staff, students, and members of the broader community, the university will aim to help students "enhance their career-readiness in the app economy."
Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service — a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from their interactions with users, as well as automate some of the interactions — because the team was (according to a notice on the site) “joining a project that touches the lives of countless people across the world.” TechCrunch has now learned what that project is: the team is joining Apple.
They are becoming a part of the group working on Siri, Apple’s own personal assistant that uses voice-based commands and natural language to answer questions, control your phone and more.
“My English grammar teacher asked, ‘Why isn’t there an app to create automatically-generated sentences and test you for it?'” he said.
Friedlander took that to heart and created one, learning coding mostly on his own. He started with a basic prototype and fine-tuned it into the app he named Grammatica Academy.
Microsoft's main goal with the Edge browser for iPhone and Android users is to make sharing documents easier and help you pick up where you left off when using Windows 10.
Apps currently listed under the Dice subcategory of Games will simply be found under the generic Games category, unless developers choose an alternate subcategory.
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For apps currently listed under the ‘Catalog’ category, Apple will automatically migrate affected apps to the Shopping category on November 6, 2017. Developers are free to choose a more relevant alternative at will.
Don’t use the status bar area to animate rainbow colors shooting out of the notch.
We are all attached to the things that we create. From our relationships, to our work, to trivial things like the way we decorate our home — we don’t like to destroy things that we have put effort into.
That’s why it’s even more important to delete your code.
I want my iPhone-X-style swipe-up-to-go-home gesture on my iPhone 6. Please?
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Thanks for reading.
My take is that those who rely on PDF support in independent apps are probably better off upgrading to High Sierra than remaining on Sierra, since Apple has fixed some bugs. If you have instead stuck with 10.11 El Capitan, you may wish to delay upgrading to High Sierra until you can verify that the apps you rely on for PDF-related features are fully functional in High Sierra.
iOS 11.0.2 also addresses a bug that could cause photos to become hidden and fixes another that could prevent you from opening attachments in encrypted email messages.
While Apple’s embracing of the Qi standard means they will certainly get involved and help drive the standard and the technology forward, for now, Apple runs the risk of having third-party solutions not meet their standards of an accessory that will work with iPhones.
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Open systems/standards are necessary for many things basic to consumer electronics. Things like ports for example. But I’d argue that wireless charging may not be one of them. In a few years, we may look back and the landscape has changed and the Qi standard has improved. But I, for one, would have been entirely content if Apple would have built a proprietary wireless charging solution, and simply made it the best customer experience by controlling all the variables.
Apple’s flaws are usually real but generally exaggerated and people tend to draw the wrong conclusions from them.
“It’s all screen,” says the headline. Yet, astonishingly, the image focuses almost entirely on the only two parts of the phone that are not screen—the visible edge and the notch.
Kind of amazing, actually. Especially for Apple. In the past, it’s been so very good at shining a powerful light on its products’ best features. Here, that light seems so badly aimed.
Google and Samsung are both coming for Apple. But they are more likely to produce a better phone than to replicate the romance, connection, and general awesomeness of Apple's stores. So, every successful firm in the digital age needs to ask: In addition to big, tall walls, where can I build deep moats? That is, old-economy barriers that are expensive and take a long time to dredge (and for competitors to cross). Apple has done this superbly, continually investing in the world's best brand, and in stores.
The predicament Apple faces in entertainment is part of the company's awkward transformation. The revolutions Apple produced in computing with the iPhone and in music listening with iTunes are harder to come by. CEO Tim Cook has been promising for five years a revolution in video entertainment but instead has delivered a series of aimless or failed strategies.
The company absolutely has the cash and cachet to deliver some thrilling TV series and movies, and the world will make a big deal about them. But Apple hasn't yet proved that it's more than just another checkbook for Hollywood, nor has it shown investors that its programming strategy will do much for the bottom line.
Microsoft saw the limits of modularity when new product categories emerged and when new user behaviors were created. They attempted to pivot into being more integrated but those efforts also failed. The efforts continue today with Surface devices, looking forward, will continue with AR/VR and perhaps a pivot of Xbox.
But the long arc of history shows how hard it is to succeed in vertical integration after you build on horizontal foundations. Generations of managers graduated from the modular school of thought, specializing rather than generalizing. Now they are facing an integrated experiential world where progress depends on wrapping the mind around very broad systems problems.
A select group of publishers are testing ad insertions into their Apple News pages using DoubleClick For Publishers, according to a number of publishing executives familiar with the trial. Publishers like Condé Nast, Gannett, Time Inc., CNN and other media partners have been in talks with Apple for months about changing the technology behind the ads in the popular news app. Many publishers already use Google's DoubleClick on their own properties and want the ability to just extend campaigns using their own tech.
"Apple is just starting to do more for monetization," said one digital publishing partner, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We're starting to get excited about it, but can only design and develop ad inventory for Apple News once we have the right pipes in place."
But Apple can be as coldly calculating as it is dazzling. There will be lots of romantic stories about 10 years’ worth of iPhones published in the coming weeks. This is not one of those stories. This is a story about the power dynamics in one of the world’s largest industries.
It’s based in part on court documents filed as part of a dispute over one of the most expensive and, arguably, most important parts of the phone: the wireless modem. The story starts two summers ago, at a conference in Idaho, where a senior Apple executive, probably Cook, and a senior Samsung Electronics Co. executive, most likely Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee, shared a quiet word.
The EC says that Ireland has failed to collect up to €13 billion in taxes from iphone maker Apple — roughly $15 billion in today’s currency, and it is therefore now referring the case to the European Court of Justice. And Luxembourg gave e-commerce giant Amazon (which bases its European HQ there) illegal tax benefits worth €250 million — or $294 million in today’s currency. Both are considered illegal state aid in the eyes of the Commission, and it is demanding that the states recover the money from the two companies in question.
The teddy by itself is the same sort of fluffy companion you likely had as a child, but an augmented reality app for iOS turns the bear into something much more. If you want to play doctor, you can look at Parker's insides to cure a stomach bug or ease a sore throat. You can create magic forests and sea gardens using the AR camera. And importantly you're rewarded for being kind: the more you take care of Parker, the more the bear uses AR to 'transform' the world around you.
Smart home devices are still a morass of different apps and standards, so when I get a chance to consolidate, I jump at it. Thus, this morning’s update to the Philips Hue iOS app and firmware, which lets you configure your Hue switches and sensors from iOS’s own Home app, seemed like a great opportunity to simplify my setup.
But, as it so often turns out, the results were kind of mixed.
Most individuals shoot all of their photos and videos with smartphones, and Adobe realizes this. The convenience of having a camera with you at all times has made it easy to be inundated with content. Without conscious effort, photos and videos get lost in the shuffle, never to be viewed again.
It’s more important than ever before to be able to quickly make creations from your media and share them with friends and family who care. New in Elements Organizer 2018 are tools specifically designed around this goal.
This completely free game (no IAPs no anything) is pretty unforgiving, as were games back in the 80s, so it comes with two difficulty modes: Classic, for those used to dying a lot, and Normal, for those who want to explore the game at their own pace without fearing (spoilers) that they'll meet Barb's fate.
It’s personal to me now, by the way, at age 49: I use the Dynamic Type feature on my iOS devices to bump up the font size. Though I run into layout bugs from time to time, I’m still utterly grateful that the feature exists and that so many developers have adopted it (or done the equivalent in their apps).
Without that feature I’d be an iOS programmer who has a hard time actually using an iPhone. Which would be dumb.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into, which was good. Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. If you rewind even further, I’d spent the better part of the preceding five years helping my oldest son find the resources he needed to become an iOS developer. In the process, I’d learned a little myself, but hadn’t gotten beyond the most rudimentary of projects.
I got to working evenings and weekends in fits and starts studying the iTunes Search API, figuring out a way to bend it to my will, and learning Objective C. By WWDC in 2014, I had a mess of spaghetti code that, to my surprise, worked.
If only there is an Accessibility option in macOS and iOS that changes all gray-text-on-gray-background to black-text-on-white-background.
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Thanks for reading.
When Apple announced iOS 11 last spring, one of the stand-out features was that the company would finally give developers access to the iPhone’s NFC chip. While Apple has used NFC contactless technology to power Apple Pay in the iPhone and Apple Watch for a few years, the hardware had never been available to developers – until now.
Today the MLB announced that the Oakland Athletics are piloting a new NFC ticketing solution which lets fans enter the stadium by tapping their phone (or Apple Watch) to a ticket scanner – just like you’d do to use Apple Pay.
So while the “Silicon” in Silicon Valley has come to be seen as an anachronism, silicon development today means competitive advantage. The only problem is that it takes years, decades even to establish competence. The same duration that it took for the building of Apple as a design-centric business fronted by Jony Ive.
Apple also now needs to be understood along the dimension of of silicon-centric engineering as led by Johny Srouji.
Diners at Hearth, the newly health-conscious, 13-year-old restaurant from James Beard award-winning chef Marco Canora, may have noticed a new addition to their place settings in recent weeks. Next to plates, napkins, and utensils there are now boxes. Some are old cigar boxes, others kitschy Etsy finds — but all of them are big enough to contain a few cell phones, because the boxes are Canora’s solution to what he views as harmful cell phone addiction.
Plugging in an unformatted external drive produces the usual alert, "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer. Initialize... | Ignore | Eject", but clicking Initialize just opens Disk Utility without the disk appearing.
Chalk operates much like a videoconferencing call, connecting the cameras between two remote smartphones. (It’s iOS-only to start.) The only difference is that both use the rear-facing camera, so the person getting help can show the device or software they're confused by, and the other person can draw on it.
Nike+ Run Club version 5.9 brings a new feature called Audio Guided Runs. This feature lets you run with Nike’s coaches and athletes in a series of guided workouts. Each run is paired with a unique playlist and features guidance from the likes of Mo Farah and Kevin Hart.
Microsoft announced today that it's getting out of the online music business. Music purchases in the Windows Store will cease, and the Groove Music Pass subscription service is also ending.
Goodbye MSN Music... Zune Music... Xbox Music... er... Groove Music. If you think Apple's product naming is not that great, you really should check out what's happening over at Windowsland.
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Apple has always shared the kernel of macOS after each major release. This kernel also runs on iOS devices as both macOS and iOS are built on the same foundation. This year, Apple also shared the most recent version of the kernel on GitHub. And you can also find ARM versions of the kernel for the first time.
The Apple TV set would need to connect to and read the signal that’s supplied by the box, or maybe it could simply decode the data straight from the coax cable thus, in effect absorbing the cable box. Good luck with that. Comcast, AT&T and the others would never consent to this arrangement because they would cede control to Apple.
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It’s rumored that Apple intends to release muscular Mac “trucks”, i.e. iMac Pros and, in 2018, a more modular Mac Pro targeted at high-end app and media developers. These products require no-holds-barred power dissipation budgets, which leads one to wonder: Since Ax designs are targeted at low power, small device heat dissipation, would they stand up to the needs of a high-end Mac?
This free app, which does not collect any personal information and has no in-app purchases, will let children interact with cute Pokémon as they explore locations such as a tower, lounge, and outdoor playground – with activities like taking care of Pokémon in Pokémon Grooming, or identifying Pokémon in the night sky in Search the Stars.
I will not be surprised, though, if some future Mac contains both Ax and x86 CPUs to run all sort of apps. Everything will run smoothly with lower power requirement until that 3D/AR/VR rendering software kicks in.
I will also not be surprised if the average cost of a Mac continues to go up.
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I will be surprised if Apple is getting into the television set business.
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Thanks for reading.
In recent years, Apple Inc. has quietly put together a global network of small research and development labs, from the French Alps to New Zealand.
Nothing unusual about that for a company that spends $11 billion a year on R&D. Look a little closer, however, and you'll notice that many of these labs are located near companies with a strong record in mapping, augmented reality and other areas Apple is pushing into. In several cases, these companies lost employees to Apple not long after the iPhone maker came to town. Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller declined to comment.
Apple today has shared a new advertisement for the iPhone 8 Plus touting the new Portrait Lighting feature.
“Part of the battle is teaching yourself you don't need these apps as much as you think you do,” Alter says. And it’s true. I no longer feel like I need the apps, but it’s nice to know I still want them.
Thanks to the Make-A-Wish Foundation and mobile app developer Bottle Rocket, Allis got the chance to live out his dream. He created a game called Planet SCRAM that made it to Apple's App Store.
It’s ideal for anyone armed with an iPad who fancies a spot of digital painting – and a robust, feature-rich, friendly environment in which to do so.
I've updated my Mac to High Sierra. (Hi!) I still miss the Mac OS X welcome video, with the big X. Even though it has been so long since the last one, the X is no longer in the name of the operating system.
Maybe iPhone X will have a welcome video with a big X. :-)
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So far, no surprises in High Sierra for me. That's good.
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Thanks for reading.